"Welcome to Snow" by Katie Cortese
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
My brother Simon, who was doing steroids in the hopes of middle-linebacking his way to fame and fortune, got his high-school girlfriend pregnant just before their senior year. The first week of school, Arlene did two pregnancy tests in the third-floor girl’s lav. After both turned up with pink plus signs or blue lines or whatever meant Whoa Nelly, You’re in Trouble, she left the boxes in the trash to feed the rumor mill and spent the rest of the day in the nurse’s office, complaining of a migraine. By November she was living with us, sleeping on a cot in my room.
Before the baby, Arlene was so thin her hipbones showed. Her hair fell blue-black past her shoulders and she was always busy with a ring to twirl or a belt to cinch or an eyelash to dig out of her eye, so when she took the time to talk to you it made you feel important. This was the year my brother kept inviting her over and then leaving suddenly to take care of “the business,” transferring something in a plastic baggie—wisps of green, wisps of white—from his metal tackle box to his pocket and shuffling out the door without a wave.
At those times Arlene was stuck with me. Two years older, she was infinitely cooler than anyone else I knew. We’d hike behind my house—a three-bedroom deal in the shadow of the Bourne Bridge, assaulted by the constant sound of traffic—to where crabgrass met scrub pine. The trash train ran through the woods between us and the Cape Cod Canal. We never went to the scenic bike path. Too many joggers and tourists with strollers, plus the occasional streaker.
Next to Arlene, I was the first to know about the baby. The day she told me, early September something, she was smoking cigarettes and I had a pack of cloves even though Spacey Sputner had claimed at lunch they gave you black lung. Not only had the pack cost ten bucks but I hated Spacey Sputner, who was my only real competition for class valedictorian. That day the bridge above us was quiet in the lull before rush hour.
“Poor Mrs. Ferguson,” Arlene said, one foot tapping a second-growth scrub, startling a light rain of needles. I knew she meant the black-and-white dress our Algebra teacher had worn.
I choked on a lungful of sweet-smelling vapor. “Jesus,” I said. Arlene and I had math together because I was advanced and she was behind. “She was making me seasick.”
When Arlene laughed, my knees hummed and tingled. She had a way of making me forget the loner I normally was. I sent up a prayer that she and Simon would never break up.
The cigarettes were my brother’s. Arlene had dug them out of the fetid dark of his sock-smelling room, because, unlike me, and for reasons unknown, she wasn’t afraid of him. But she didn’t have memories of him as a kid, when he was gentle. Around eighth grade, he’d seen all the other boys poised to fill out like water balloons, and panicked because he had our father’s stringy build. When weights weren’t enough, he started buying pills, then selling some, among other things. Arlene knew about the steroids. She said he used them safely, in cycles. Freshman Bio told me his voice might get high, and he risked liver cancer, but the only surface effects were bowling-ball biceps, a short fuse, and ugly grunts when he lifted in the basement.
The clove made my lips taste sweet and sad like a brown leaf crushed underfoot. Despite Spacey Sputner’s know-it-all claim, I liked them because they were a no-calorie treat. I was set on making my hip-bones push through my school skirt like Arlene’s. While my father was a classic beanpole, my mother was Rubenesque. I took after her, but I figured if my brother could mold himself into muscle and toughness it was possible for me to go the other way. Arlene showed me yoga moves sometimes, downward-dogging with a lit cigarette between her lips.
In the woods, before Arlene’s news shattered the day, I was thinking about Peter Allston, Sacred Heart’s personal Tom Brady, and the car ride home. Simon had driven with Arlene in the front, as usual, but the back seat was shoulder-to-shoulder football players. “Peter has lap space,” Arlene had said, snapping her gum. He’d blushed, but moved his bag so I could sit.
Peter was an okay quarterback, and cute enough, but weirdly shy. He sometimes stuttered. Simon, on the other hand, was the best middle linebacker Sacred Heart had ever seen. Everyone at school called him “Girth.” Despite abysmal grades, he’d been approached by a couple of scouts. The one he liked best was from Ohio State University. I had two more years to perfect my escape plan, which could only involve an academic scholarship. No matter what, I wasn’t getting stuck here like my parents, who’d never lived anywhere else.
In the woods, Arlene dragged and let it whoosh out. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
***
A semi screamed over the bridge above us, erasing all thoughts of Peter and his lap under my thighs, the way the bare skin on my legs had come alive from hip to ankle.
“What are you going to do?” I said. Arlene was Catholic, like my family, so I figured she’d keep it, but I couldn’t see Simon welcoming a newborn. If he could pull up his grades, he was sure to land a spot on some D-1 institution’s elite defensive line next year. I was scared for her, no matter what she decided.
Arlene pinched her cigarette between her fingers, staring at it before grinding it out on the wooden bottom of her clog. It left a black smudge, like a freckle that should be checked for melanoma. I did the same with my clove and we buried our filters in wet leaves.
“What did Simon say?” We walked back, hugging our elbows against the chill. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned Peter. What had happened in the car paled before this new disaster.
“He doesn’t know yet,” she said.
The world acted like teenage pregnancy was no big news. TLC packaged it up to make it seem as entertaining as “The Voice.” But I was walking next to a pregnant teen. Inside her was a new life, blind, curled up like a hibernating gerbil, its beating heart the size of a pencil eraser beneath pinkly translucent skin. She lived with her grandparents and two brothers on Cotuit Road. Their mother had checked out years ago, coming back every three years to visit.
“I freaked you out,” she said, biting at the skin around a fingernail. “I’m sorry.”
When I licked my lips, the clove’s sweetness had gone. “Are you guys getting married?”
“I don’t want you to worry, okay?” she said. Her face stretched tight when she smiled.
***
When we emerged from the woods, Simon was smoking in a plastic patio chair, dragging a sneaker against water-stained concrete.
Arlene sat on his lap so the chair legs splayed out.
He tossed an empty pack of cigarettes at her chest. “You take some of my smokes?”
She looked down at the pack in her lap. I’d seen him swing at my father for changing the channel from ESPN to PBS. Dad had side-stepped and ordered Simon to take a walk and cool off. In the end, that’s what had happened, but I couldn’t forget the shape of Simon’s fist—big around as a coffee can—cutting a swath through the air. Over one missed double-play.
“What’s yours is mine,” she said. My heart hollowed out, waiting for him to dump her, baby and all, to the ground. Instead, he took her bottom lip in both of his. She kissed him back.
Peter Allston had nice lips, full and never chapped. I’d never been kissed and could only imagine what it might feel like, though the car ride today had given me some idea.
I slipped into the house through the slider. My mother was making a chicken pot pie.
“Homework done?” she said. I felt bad because of the announcement in her future. We’d been close when I was young, but had drifted apart. Since I was the good one she left me alone.
“I did it during free,” I said, thinking it was Simon’s grades she should worry over.
In my room, I lay down and closed my eyes until I could feel again Peter’s knees fitting neatly into the space behind my own, the vibrations of the uneven road, the two of us jouncing along together. Faintly, I heard Arlene’s laugh in the back yard and knew she hadn’t told him yet.
***
Pregnant Sacred Heart girls had to trade uniform skirts for track pants. This was supposedly for comfort but doubled as a scarlet letter. My brother’s friends surrounded Arlene like an armed escort when the news got out in mid-September. Boys I knew as The Rickster and Big Dave as well as just plain Peter Allston buffered her from swinging doors, sympathetic teachers with their hands out to cop a feel, frantic freshmen spilling around corners grasping ballpoint pens and compasses like spears.
Peter nodded when I passed him on Arlene duty, but despite being in the same Chemistry class—him in the back, me in the front—we hadn’t talked since that day in the car, weeks before. Still, my body was acutely aware of him whenever we were in the same room. In Chem, I’d look back during a lecture on covalent bonds to see him picking his teeth with a paper clip. At football games I watched him freely from the bleachers. I decided the day in the car had been a fluke, the spark our bodies had struck nothing but an accidental, automatic, biological response.
***
Arlene’s transition into our house began slowly. By the first week of October, she was staying for dinner every night, talking brightly and running her silken ponytail through her hand. After dinner sometimes Simon would drive her home. Others, she’d stay and watch TV, picking at her nails on the love seat, offering fashion advice to the Real Housewives of wherever.
Space was tight at her grandparents’ place. They had their hands busy with Arlene’s brothers, one in eighth grade and one in sixth, who’d been left, like Arlene, when their mother had climbed onto the back of a boyfriend’s Harley and split. There was never a decision for Arlene to move in with us, but we had plenty of food on our dining-room table, and she liked the chores I despised, singing Joni Mitchell songs over the vacuum in a brave and wild soprano.
More of her stuff appeared in the house every day, a downy white comforter that spent the day behind the couch, a Teddy bear with hot-pink fur, some books, her toothbrush, her Oxford uniform shirts. The week before Halloween, my mother brought up the green cot from the basement and left it in my room.
The first Tuesday in November, the night before the biggest Chem test of the semester, I came home from school to find Arlene on her cot with a washcloth on her eyes and a pink plastic tub on the floor, empty, beneath her. “Not feeling so well?” I said. Just the effort of lifting her head to look at me sent her coughing and sputtering over the tub.
“I’m sorry,” she said, between spasms. I patted her back, sending frantic mental signals to my mother, but no one came.
“It’s fine,” I said, forcing my teeth to unclench. I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t mind dropping everything to care for her, but I really needed to study. It was dark by the time she slept.
So I wouldn’t wake Arlene, I took my book and flash cards to the dining-room table. The flicker of light on the patio brought me to the door and then outside, where my mother sat smoking, encased in a parka lined with fake fur. There was a lit candle on the table, from the hurricane drawer, and a Stieg Larsson book in her hand.
“I don’t understand why she can’t sleep in with Simon,” I said. “What harm could it possibly do now?” My feet on the cold concrete were bare.
“I thought you two were friends,” my mother said.
“We are,” I said. My stomach turned with disloyalty. She was really my best friend, outside of my books. “She just needs, I don’t know, a mother—”
“Maggie,” my mother said, steadying a glass of wine she had balanced on her leg. The cigarette jittered almost imperceptibly in her cold fingers. “This wasn’t in anyone’s plan.”
“Are they getting married?” I said. “Is Simon dragging her to East Boondock State?”
“Until he gets his grades up, he’s not going anywhere,” she said, which wasn’t an answer.
I wanted my mother to act like she cared. She and my father had Simon right after high school, which had put all her plans on hold indefinitely. Once, after too many glasses of wine that I kept sneaking sips of, she told me her greatest dream as a little girl was to join the Navy and sail all around the world. After Simon was born, she took a job as a secretary in a nursing home, for the time being, and worked there still, seventeen years later.
“Aren’t you disappointed?” I asked.
My mother turned a page. Behind her was the dark window of her bedroom, where my father was asleep already. “What’s done is done,” she said, ashing over the concrete.
“I can’t work. Don’t you care about my grades?” A TV from the Parsons’ house blared a rerun of the “Tonight Show” and what I really wanted was to fold myself into a parka, pour my own glass of wine, and study by her candle.
“You’ll do just fine,” my mother said, staring into her glass as if she could read pulverized grape flesh like tea leaves. “You always do.”
A barge moaned by in the canal, and I shivered. If it was me who’d gotten pregnant, I wondered if she would be so calm, take so little responsibility. But I was a careful girl. She thought she didn’t have to worry about me. I stood out there a minute longer, waiting for her to look up at me, or say good night, squeeze my wrist, smile.
***
Simon drove us to school early the next morning to meet a new tutor his coach had found. His hand swallowed my elbow before I could get out. “You have Chem with Allston?”
I froze. The day in the car was months ago now, but what if Peter had said something, and now Simon was pissed? Just last July I’d seen my brother put his fist through the kitchen window because my mother told him to stop sneaking beers. “Yeah,” I said. “So?”
“Give him this,” he said, producing a white envelope from his back pocket. He let go of me then and got out, circling the car to open Arlene’s door. I’d never seen him do that before.
Everyone was early to Chem, their noses close to the formulas as if trying to inhale the mysterious combinations of numbers and letters. I was the only sophomore in the class. Otherwise, it was all juniors and a few seniors who’d skipped it last semester, or had failed out. My brother had managed a C+ last year, but a few of his friends were in it now as seniors. Peter Allston had ear buds in so a faint whine of Incubus clung to him like static electricity.
“Here,” I said, dropping the envelope on his desk. “From my brother.”
“Girth was supposed to give these to me last night, so I had time to look them over,” Peter said. There was an empty seat next to him. Though I usually sat in the front, I took it, watching him slide five thin strips of paper covered in writing out of the envelope. He sorted them on his desk, glancing up to make sure Ms. Clemson still hadn’t arrived. With a roll of tape from his pocket, Peter attached the first strip to his pencil, showing me how if he cupped his hand right it couldn’t be seen. “You probably studied your ass off. Or maybe you don’t need to.”
It was social suicide to admit to liking school. “I couldn’t,” I said. “Arlene was sick.”
“You took care of her?” he said, looking up. “That’s really sweet.” I recited molecular formulas to calm my heart. AuBr, gold bromide; CH3OH, methanol; H2O, good old water.
“Not really,” I said, but Ms. Clemson had come in and my voice was lost in the flurry of last-minute questions.
Though I hadn’t had to ride on a lap since that day two months ago, I thought about it almost daily. That afternoon, the Rickster had been up against the far rear window, running his tongue over his lips for a passing pair of freshman girls. Big Dave’s big laugh had echoed in the Buick. “Imbeciles,” Arlene had said into the mirror, picking lipstick off her teeth. Meanwhile, I sat sideways on Peter’s lap. It was cramped. My head had grazed the roof and I’d had to hold Arlene’s headrest to stay upright.
Peter shifted me around until his knees were under my knees. “You all in?” he said.
I’d looked back at him, over my shoulder. He had two freckles to the right of his mouth and on his chin a tiny forest of honey-colored bristles. “Yeah,” I said, and he’d closed the door.
My shirt billowed loose over my skirt. Peter’s fingers played a lefty piano on the side of his knee, twitching my skirt until my legs prickled into goose bumps. Thigh to ankle, their lengths felt unconnected to me, anecdotal, but crackling with possibility.
We were almost to Dave’s house, our first stop, before Peter’s fingers slid between the bottom of my thigh and the top of his. Slowly, so slowly. I dipped my chin to my right shoulder, looking back at his uptilted face. He stopped, waiting for permission. The other guys were arguing about the greatest running back in the N.F.L., Adrian Peterson or Chris Johnson. They were distracted. Still, it was all-over wrong. My brother was in the car. It was sick, even, but I didn’t want him to stop. I tried to nod, giving my okay, and brushed my forehead against Arlene’s headrest. She must have felt it because her eyes caught on mine in the side mirror.
I didn’t know then she was carrying the burden of those E.P.T. tests. All I knew was Peter’s fingers began moving again, inching in and back until one brushed the pilled elastic at the edge of my underwear. He stopped again, as if I might change my mind, but I only gripped Arlene’s headrest and shifted a little to the right. That underwear was the oldest pair I owned. He didn’t seem to mind.
By then my nerves were high-tension wires, and parts of me were pulsing that had been asleep my whole life. I was still gripping the headrest, eyes closed, holding my breath without meaning to, taken over by the warmth that pooled between us now, and what felt like a delicate gathering of golden fibers drawn to the place Peter’s finger was slowly tracing, when Simon jerked to a stop in front of Big Dave’s house. “Someone let me out of this deathtrap,” Dave said.
I panicked, reaching for the door handle and spilling into the driveway on the verge of something I had only heard about, secondhand, at sleepovers. Peter gasped as I slid off, and followed me into the driveway, turning away from the car, but not before I’d seen the bulge in his jeans. It made me glad to know the warmth had worked both ways.
I waited to be discovered, but all that happened was Big Dave trotted up the path to his house and Peter asked me to grab his backpack. “Think I’ll walk home from here,” he’d called over his shoulder. He took his bag without touching me. “Sorry,” he whispered, jogging away before I could ask if he was sorry he started it, or sorry he didn’t finish. “Our next game is at home,” Peter said now, in class, under buzzing fluorescents. I blinked to see our test was rolling toward us as the students in the front each took a sheet and passed it overhead. I focused on the rustling of paper. “You should come, if you want.”
“Maybe I’ll try to make it,” I said, smiling wider than I meant to.
The chain reaction he ignited in me then was as irreversible as the one that had taken place in Arlene’s body, even if we didn’t make any sense. Peter was a catch. I was medium pretty. He dreamed of the N.F.L. and my heart thrilled to decipher word problems. I tried to see myself as he did, a short girl with dirty-blond hair. Skirt riding high on pale thighs, bare legs in brown loafers. I could only chalk it up to pheromones and the mystery of human preference that Peter—who would never see the beauty I saw in numbers—only had to smile to set part of me aglow.
Ms. Clemson’s exams had landed on our desks, each white as the foam atop a wave.
“Good luck,” I said, biting my lip, some instinct tilting my head for me.
“Don’t need it,” he said, winking and twirling his doctored pencil between his fingers.
Even though I finished the test before Peter, I checked and rechecked my answers, waiting to leave until he dropped his test in the pile at the front.
“Brutal,” he said in the hallway.
“I’m pretty sure I bombed it,” I lied. The hour had flown by for me in a satisfying blur.
Peter nodded. “Me, too. Which sucks. I really need to pull a C.”
“Good luck with that,” I said, so we could laugh. He was concerned with passing, not excelling. But when I escaped, it wouldn’t be because of my explosive forty-yard passes.
“Maggie,” he said. We were at the top of a set of stairs, me poised to go down. Girls in plaid and boys in khakis parted and rejoined around us. I stepped closer so only the width of my textbook kept us apart. He pushed a crisp piece of paper into the breast pocket of my Oxford shirt, his fingers lingering there a beat longer than necessary. “Tell Girth thanks for me, okay?”
I nodded, then made myself wait until Algebra to pull out the paper with trembling fingers. It was only the envelope that had held the cheats, blank on both sides, but I remembered the pressure of his fingers and knew what it meant all the same.
***
My brother used to have a thing for Star Wars. A secret shelf in his closet still holds all the figures he used to collect, little plastic Boba Fetts and Darth Vaders and frog-faced Jabba the Hutts. Star Wars was the thing my brother did with Dad until he hit high school and football practice and blow jobs I wish I hadn’t heard rumors about in the janitor’s closet. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, the thing he did with my dad was fix stuff in the basement, like the furnace, or a wobbly chair. When they had a project, I brought them down their dinner.
A night in late November, when Arlene had gone to bed early, I took two plates of pork chops and green beans into the sawdust-smelling basement. They had the Patriots on the radio.
“Stellar,” my father said when I wedged his plate on a corner of the workbench. My father looked more like a professor than a plumber with his narrow face and owl-eye glasses. My brother outweighed him by fifty pounds of pure muscle. The neighbors might have circulated some mailman jokes, but pictures of them at twelve made them look like twins.
“Your mother never puts enough salt,” my father said. “Back in a flash.”
In his absence, I took a green bean off my father’s plate. It was al dente, the way I like it.
“Careful, Mags, you’re filling out,” Simon said, jabbing a finger above my belly button.
“It’s a green bean, doofus. It has no calories,” I said, and he laughed. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we’d joked around. Maybe he was gentling for the baby. “Arlene said you got a B on your history test. Looks like you might graduate after all.”
“It’s just one test,” he said, modest for once. He was on one of the beat-up metal stools, the heels of his Nikes balanced on two different rungs. When I picked up another green bean he picked up one of his own. “En garde,” he said and brandished the bean, thrusting until I parried. We’d had light-saber wars in the back yard when we were younger, our battles made dramatic by the whooshing of cars on the bridge above. The current battle ended when he chomped my bean in half. We laughed at the stub between my fingers, and then he plucked that up and ate it, too.
At the home game last Saturday, Arlene and I had sat together, sharing a blanket on the metal bleachers. Peter looked our way once from the field but he didn’t seem to see me in the crowd. I’d wanted to tell Arlene that I thought Peter liked me, but didn’t want to jinx it. Nothing had really happened yet. She’d spoken first, though. “I barely recognize him out there,” she said, and there was no need to ask who she meant. Simon was screaming and beating his chest with fists the size of cantaloupes, hollering into the wind, biceps testing his spandex uniform, veins standing out like tree roots in the reddened flesh of his neck; he was a monster.
“He just gets hyped up for the games,” I said, wanting to believe that’s all it was.
In the basement, I couldn’t forget her eyes widening as if seeing him for the first time.
“You’re going to have to keep the Hulk away from the baby, you know,” I said. My limbs filled immediately with ice. Simon still pinched his green bean. I wondered if I should be afraid.
He twirled the bean between finger and thumb. There was grease under his nails from the lawn mower he and my father had been reassembling before I’d come down. “Come again?”
His empty hand fisted up against his massive leg. Still holding the bean with the other, he stood, looking down on me from the great height of two years and all the inches he’d grown over me. I think I didn’t understand until then the way I would always be younger than him. Our father started back down the stairs. I heard him whistling over the thumping of his steps.
“You heard me, Girth,” I said, heart rabbiting along. He looked like nobody’s father.
“The kid is not your business. Arlene is not your business, and neither am I.” He still gripped the bean, green and ridiculously erect, between his right index finger and thumb. He stood and swept the stool against his bench press, where it rang out cheerfully and fell unharmed.
“What’s going on?” my father asked, taking the last stairs two at a time.
“Nothing,” Simon said. I saw his face go red as a newborn’s before he sank into a squat.
“Go on up now, Mags,” my father told me quietly, returning the stool to its feet.
“You’re scary,” I told Simon before I went up, tensing for a blow that never came.
***
Simon and I made our peace by Christmas, but I still didn’t trust him around me or the baby-to-be, due on one of those days steeped in incense and tradition between Palm Sunday and Easter. We all stayed in New Year’s Eve, since Arlene couldn’t propel herself out of p.j.s.
“Why don’t you take the bed instead of the cot from now on?” I said, winding down from a sparkling-cider sugar high. It was snowing small, hard flakes that tinked against my bedroom window. I’d grown to like her presence in the dark. It was like having a sister.
“No thanks, Mags,” she’d said. “Maybe when I’m too fat to hoist myself up anymore.”
I wondered if Simon’s drugs did bad things to their baby. I pictured it pink and healthy, made of springy clean flesh except for the tips of its toes, which were stained a moss green. Or maybe the baby was perfect on the outside, but inside, green fingers busily popped brain cells like soap bubbles. It bothered me that Arlene never seemed to worry. Her placid acceptance was too much like my mother’s must have been when Simon’s appearance cancelled her best dreams.
***
We skipped school on Valentine’s Day, Arlene and I. It fell on a Friday anyway. My mother just nodded when I told her I felt sick, and Arlene didn’t have to say anything. She was big, almost eight months gone, and was always putting my hand on her belly to feel the thing move around. I couldn’t believe there was a baby in there. The little kicks felt to me like a bag of rocks set to tumble dry. In the morning, we watched the “Today Show,” “Judge Judy,” “The Price is Right,” and “The Tyra Show,” an episode on teenage girls who were trying to get pregnant.
The panelists were twelve to fifteen, or claimed to be. They wore tube tops and mini-skirts, black mascara and too much gel. The girl on the end was thirteen, and sat with her arms crossed the whole time. “I just want something to love me,” she told Tyra, tossing straw-colored hair over her shoulder. “You don’t know I won’t be a good mom.”
I was in the kitchen making ramen noodles but I could still hear Tyra promising that after the break G.I. Joseph would yell those girls into shape. I-Want-a-Baby Boot Camp would involve sit-ups and mystery meat and a ban on deodorant for a whole weekend.
“What does boot camp have to do with babies?” I said.
Arlene said, “God only knows. Let’s eat outside, I’m burning up.”
We took our soup to the glass table on the back patio. It was freezing, piles of dirty snow pushed up against the house and fresh snow coating the seats of our chairs, but we were wrapped in scarves and hats with bobble tops from when Simon and I were kids. The soup streamed white columns that dispersed against the gray sky. I wasn’t sure if the cold-and-hot combo was good for the baby, but I figured Arlene would know better than I did.
“Grammy cries every time I go over to visit,” Arlene said. “I don’t know why I bother.”
I slurped my noodles one at a time, wiping hot broth off my nose. “She’s still mad?”
“She just keeps saying babies are so expensive, and that I’m in for a hard road.”
Grammy was right, I thought, listening to the traffic on Sandwich Road. Someone next door slammed a car door. My parents were footing her bills now, but how long could that go on?
“What do you think of Peter Allston?” I asked. We’d talked every day in Chemistry for months but so far that was all. Arlene drained her bowl.
“He’s a doofus. But not bad looking,” she said, and winked. Then she struggled to her feet and went inside to put her bowl in the sink. When she got back, my soup was cold.
“I’m dying for a cigarette,” Arlene said, rubbing her mittened hands together. It was freezing. Too cold to be outside. Arlene coughed into a mitten. “Are you hot for Peter Allston?”
“Me and a dozen other hopefuls,” I said, part of me hoping she’d try and stop me. Say, Be careful, don’t turn out like me. Show some fucking feeling, cry a little, tell me she was scared.
Instead she grinned. “Did he feel you up in the car?” Some drops of soup had iced over on the table, so I knew the temperature had dropped suddenly, the way it can in New England, when you least expect it. “I watched you two in the side mirror. The day you sat on his lap.”
“The side mirror,” I said, nodding. It started snowing again. We looked up at each other and grinned, letting flakes crowd our eyelashes. The surface of my soup filled with tiny ripples.
“This is snow, Baby,” Arlene said, mittened hands cupping her belly. It was the first time I’d heard her talk to the kid. She rubbed her middle, looking up, and said: “Welcome to snow.”
***
We finally went inside, because Arlene’s lips turned blue around the edges. G.I. Joseph—bald, gap-toothed—was finishing up the boot camp. We put him on mute so we could watch his eyes bug out and his teeth crash up and down. Arlene pretended to calculate the arc of the spit shooting out of his mouth. That was the sort of problem they dealt with in her physics class.
The girls struggled through modified push-ups and cried, cupping their elbows with tiny, soft hands. “They’re a bunch of rocket scientists,” I said, but Arlene snapped her head up.
“Fucking sad is what they are,” she said. “Tyra should give each of them a dog.”
We laughed for a while until our laughter turned to tears, and maybe that was what we’d both been waiting for. Arlene said, her eyes streaming, “Fucking Dobermans, man. Great fucking Danes.”
We were on the couch and there was no one home but us and she sort of rolled on her side so her head fell into my lap. I combed the snow out of her hair, only it had become a cross between slush and just plain water. Arlene put her face in her hands and barely noticed when I slipped out from under her. When I came back with the hair dryer, she was as still as I’d ever seen her, sobbing with her eyes squinched down into slits. I needed an extension cord from the kitchen before I could switch the hair dryer on. When the hot air hit her face, she opened her eyes.
“It’s my hair that’s wet, you dumbass,” she said, smiling, taking in great gulps of air.
“First things first,” I said, and trained the stream on her cheeks, where tears had paved a twisted jungle of mascara paths, alternating right to left so she wouldn’t get burned.
***
My brother joined me on the patio the first Saturday in April. Arlene was laid up on my bed with fake labor pains. The baby would be here in six days, though nobody knew that yet.
“Can I get one of those?” Simon said, lowering himself into a chair.
I tossed him my pack. It smelled like Christmas because of the cloves, but the buds on the trees were a misty green and spring was true to its name, waiting for the right moment to pounce.
“My tutor says my grades are good enough for O.S.U., barely,” he said. “I’m going to send Arlene money every month out of my student loans.”
“You’re still leaving.” The cloves’ incense smell reminded me that next Sunday was Easter.
He shifted, planting his elbows on his knees. “It was an accident, Mags. They happen.”
I took a shallow drag. He was an accident, too. I wonder what it did to him, knowing that.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that what you want me to say?”
“Not to me,” I said. “Your accident isn’t holding me back. Or you, for that matter.”
“You want me to be punished,” he said, trapping the smoke from his clove in his lungs. It would be dark in there, black, a mine shaft. He shifted in his chair and I was afraid he’d just stand and leave. As a kid, he always dueled as Luke. I was Darth Vader and lost every fight.
“Yes,” I said. “No. I just worry about her here, without you. Don’t you love her?”
Simon coughed. “I’ll come back weekends. I’ll just be at school.”
“Christmas,” I said. “Easter.”
“You can take over the business,” he said, teasing me. “Make a few extra bucks. The tackle box is all yours.” All those baggies folded over harmless-looking pills, herbs, powder.
“Ha, ha,” I said, wishing I was a boy so I could hit him and he would know I was serious.
“What do you want from me?” he said. “I haven’t done any enhancement for, like, a year. Schools test for that shit. I know I get too angry sometimes, but you act like you hate me now.”
There was so much water in the air I felt like someone had squeegeed a sponge over my head. It was too early for humidity but there it was all the same. With one hand, I swept my heavy hair away from my neck. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. It wouldn’t make sense to take her and a newborn to college, or to marry her quickly before the kid came if that’s not what they wanted. We weren’t living in the Dark Ages. But I still wanted something, some gesture.
“I just want you to do the right thing,” I said.
He came back to the table and reached for another clove, shaking one out for me. “That’s the thing, Mags. There is no right thing, not the way you think there is.” He stayed long enough for me to have a fantasy that college would fix him. He’d come back a Jedi, my hero again.
***
In Chem class Friday, the day Arlene’s baby was born, Peter told me he’d chosen UMass.
“That’s awesome,” I said. “Congrats.”
I still didn’t know if all our flirting was only in my head, but I’d decided to let him sleep with me, if he wanted to, before he left. Just to see what all the fuss was about.
Arlene was five days past her due date and hadn’t been in school all week. Peter rode home in the back, behind Simon and me. “She ready to pop yet?” he asked, grinning at no one in particular. I remember looking at him in the rearview, thinking: he is a sweet, dim, beautiful boy.
We were almost home when my brother’s phone rang. It was Arlene’s grandmother.
“We’re at the hospital,” I heard her say over the cell, voice crisp and urgent. “Hustle in.”
Simon sped the rest of the way. “Get out,” he said, his face stricken as if electrocuted.
“But—” Peter said as Simon peeled away, stranding him. He’d have a long walk home.
“Come in a minute. No one’s here,” I said, my pulse quickening so I could feel it in my wrists. I unlocked the house and gave him a tour that ended in my room.
“Neat,” he said, eyeing my bed until I had counted every wrinkle in the quilt. We stood there, me crossing and uncrossing my arms and Peter scratching at the grain of his jeans.
“Arlene is having her baby now,” I said. If I wanted to propel us into bed it was the wrong thing to say, but to break the tension it was the exact right thing.
“Wanna go for a walk?” he said.
The day was mild, springy, and once we followed the sidewalk into town and escaped the smell of exhaust, Peter reached down and took my hand. We followed the sidewalk past the library and the baseball field behind it. There was a game on. Little boys in purple against little boys in blue. We passed the pharmacy and the pediatric dentist and the bait shop. We passed the graveyard with its markers yellowed by lichen and mold. Peter would find other girls at college. And that was for the best. I think we both knew I wanted to get farther from home than Amherst.
There was a Cumberland Farms on the corner. We went in for ice-cream sandwiches and ate them outside with the curb burning my thighs beneath my school skirt.
Peter licked vanilla off his lips. “I don’t know anything about you,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I’d eaten my ice cream into a circle. “Sometimes I do yoga in the woods.”
He nodded, storing up the information. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s a start.”
When his father came to pick him up, Peter kissed me goodbye just as if it had been a real date. His mouth was sweet with ice cream. My brother’s message on the machine said Arlene had had a baby girl, seven pounds, three ounces, he was holding her in his arms right now. I pictured her alien-headed as an eggplant, black-haired, strong-willed, blue-eyed, although that would change, the way everything would. There was a brief cry in the background, like proof.
Katie Cortese is the author of Make Way for Her and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) and Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories (ELJ Publications, 2015). Her stories and essays have appeared or are slated for such journals as Indiana Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Wigleaf, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere, including the Rose Metal Press anthology, Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. She holds a PhD from Florida State University and an MFA from Arizona State University, and teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University where she serves as the fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review and as Faculty Director of Texas Tech University Press.
