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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Silent Night: Difference between revisions
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Somehow, I urged her back to the house, to the party. I found the friends I had arrived with, but they weren’t ready to leave, so I found the boy giving the party, the one who would become my husband, and he and I climbed into his car. We drove into a snowbank that night, and the police came, and I was taken home in a cruiser to my mother, who answered the door in her floral printed robe. “Aren’t you a little old for this sort of behavior?” she said, barring my way inside. | Somehow, I urged her back to the house, to the party. I found the friends I had arrived with, but they weren’t ready to leave, so I found the boy giving the party, the one who would become my husband, and he and I climbed into his car. We drove into a snowbank that night, and the police came, and I was taken home in a cruiser to my mother, who answered the door in her floral printed robe. “Aren’t you a little old for this sort of behavior?” she said, barring my way inside. | ||
Back in high school, we were like cars stalled out on a small back road— waiting for some kind of life to start, as if we needed only to remain still for it to find us. Eventually, you got a job at Travelers or Connecticut General or Aetna, or you married and had children and bought a little house in a suburb and were grateful. Changing diapers and letting out the dog you were happy you had security and a car in the driveway to take to the store for milk. | |||
Carol never wanted anything like that. She took up with an older man who kept her in an apartment downtown, not far from the Sheraton where I had my Christmas party. She didn’t have to work. She only had to be beau- tiful when she was with him—at business dinners and on trips to Napa. I’m not sure what else happened to her then. I was married and had two children I pushed in a double stroller around town—a replica of that scene created for the picture riddle book— sneaking my covert cigarettes. I passed Folly Farm on my walks, the baby throwing out his pacifier into the road, the horses coming to the fence for windfall apples. The smell of manure and hay and mud, the swarm of flies followed me along the fence. I was not myself then. I had become someone else at some indistinct point in my past, assumed a disguise and then grown so used to it I had forgotten the other per- son—the one in the peach satin halter dress who imagined the man from work undoing the bow at her neck. | |||
Though Carol’s parents continued to live in town, and Carol returned to live with them intermittently throughout the years, I rarely saw her. I didn’t know anyone who knew her, so for me her disappearance shouldn’t have made much difference. Still, when the fliers went up in the pharmacy and the Shop Rite and the bike shop, when they flapped on telephone poles on Park Road, I felt, as did all her old high school friends, a terrible loss. The local po- lice station began to receive sightings of Carol in New Britain, in Bridge- port. She was spotted in Vermont, in Lakeland, Florida. | |||