The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Silent Night: Difference between revisions

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The trick to the past is that its details can be manipulated to serve our

purposes. And sometimes, I got out of the truck and slammed the door and went inside my mother’s house and went to bed. Others, I let myself re- member the way he held me by the throat, the feeling of his fingers on my neck. The things he called me that were far worse than another girl’s name. The way he drove the truck, with one hand, holding me down with the other. The passive way I let him do that, settling into the truck seat, my head pressed against the passenger door handle.

Paul parked his truck behind the Hole in the Wall theater and we had sex. He told me to say I liked it and I did. He didn’t call me Carol again. The only thing I feared was his dragging me into the theater, that the owner would be there waiting for me in his velvet jacket—the threat of the stranger so much more than this boy I felt I knew.

A year later, I saw Carol at a New Year’s party in town—a party in some- one’s parents’ house—my husband’s though I didn’t know it then. The house was a raised ranch, and people milled up and down the carpeted stairs from the subterranean rec room to the living room and kitchen. The place was too warm and filled with smoke and music. Carol saw me and grabbed my arm in surprise.

“Come outside with me,” she said, and the two of us slipped out the steamed-up storm door. It was bitterly cold, the snow sheened with a layer of ice, the houses along the road festooned with colored lights. Carol’s nails were an opalescent pink. She wore a white angora sweater, long and belted, as was the style at the time. From a pocket she pulled a pack of Newport cigarettes and offered me one, and we walked along the slate path to the street and the mailbox. I wore only a blouse, and Carol slipped an arm from her sweater and told me to put my arm through so that we shared it two bodies enclosed within the wool like conjoined twins.

She asked me what I’d been doing, and I told her nothing much, which was true. I’d left the receptionist job and gotten work at a department store selling handbags.

“What about you?” I said.

She told me that last year she’d gotten pregnant and thought Paul would marry her, and he had refused. She’d fallen into a depression and took pills and nearly died.

“I lost the baby,” she said.

I wondered if they were his mother’s pills, if one night while watching television she’d slipped away and stolen them, tucked them into her purse. All of this had happened, I realized, during the short time I’d been dating Paul.

“I’m sorry,” I said, though I wanted to say she was lucky.

“I’m not,” she said. “He cheated on me and I’m glad I found out.”

Overhead the sky was deeply layered with stars—some small and distant,

some brighter. We smoked, and she asked me, “If you could go anywhere in the world right this minute, where would that be?”