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

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In the three months since her last sighting, a snowstorm in December, Carol’s cell phone had not been paid, her number given to someone else. Her bank account and credit cards had gone unused. Carol didn’t own a car. On the website broadcasting her disappearance, nothing is listed for “Cloth- ing and Accessories,” which is a terrible injustice. Carol was always fashion- ably dressed, and it saddened me that whatever outfit she had pulled together on that day would always go unnoticed. I imagined her stepping out into the snow the way we often did—with nothing but ourselves and the pull of the unknown. What will happen now? we had thought. We didn’t worry about bodily harm. These were local boys who knew how to drive the town’s winding roads. They gripped the wheel of the car or truck, their sleeves rolled up and their forearms ropy with muscle. All through high school, Paul Ruskin was Carol’s boyfriend, and his family lived in Kenwood in a brick colonial, and she was safe, safe, safe.

The night of my company’s Christmas party I climbed into Paul’s truck and he grinned at me, the grin slightly off. He and Carol had recently bro- ken up. He’d been working at the Mobil station for two years, serving sub- urban women who pulled in and said, “Fill it up, please.” He washed their windshields, hustling around their station wagons with the squeegee, but you could tell he wasn’t suited for the job, that his family expected him to go to college, and in many ways, Carol’s leaving him was just another disap- pointment for his parents, who had spent many nights with her, watching television in the den. I knew I wouldn’t be filling her position. I wasn’t the type at the time, and I sensed that Paul knew it, and understood that maybe this night with me would be his last. Still, I saw he would make the best of things. He leaned over and rubbed his hands up and down my exposed arms.

The night was dark and clear, the sky like it had been pricked with a fork, the sparks of light showing through. We drove through town—the Congre- gational Church strung with lights, the roads black and shining, the houses looking like everyone inside sat in front of their televisions with hot cocoa and bowls of popcorn. At my house my mother perched on the edge of her bed watching her little black and white television, drinking sherry. My sis- ters were out somewhere with their friends in the night, loose and as im- mune to the cold as I was. Back then, people said things like “the wrong side of the tracks,” and that was where we’d moved with my mother when she di- vorced my father, when the house we’d grown up in was sold and only the living room’s love seats fit in the rental—a gray house with slipping clap- boards. The winding lane and the maples and the iron lamp post of our old house no longer protected us, and we were suddenly, like a store with it lights flipped on, open for business. “Here we are!” we said.

Paul Ruskin was one of a string of boys who took me out the year we moved, all after my first boyfriend decided to tell his friends about the things we did together. I saw now that he’d been hurt and rejected when I broke up with him. I was probably cruel, though I cannot remember what I said. I only know I wanted to be away from him, that I wanted to be with someone else. Later, he moved on with his life and married a local girl and had children and discovered cancer in his lungs and died. It struck me now how much he may have truly cared for me—taking me to the motels for sex, try- ing to make it nice in various ways. But no matter how nice I didn’t care for him, and there was nothing to be done about that.

Paul drove I- downtown to the Sheraton, into the depths of the park- ing garage, a place as dank and forlorn as any I’d ever seen. We took the el- evator, and inside, in its mirrored walls, I saw how pale my shoulders were, how my nipples poked against my dress. Paul wore a suit. He kept tugging on his tie.

“We don’t have to stay long,” I said, though a plan for after the party had  

not been shared.

I was happy to have the break from the dull clerical work, and it seemed as if these men were bored, too—distracted and irritated with their wives and children, tearing open packages of Snowballs and Mars bars and down- ing cans of Coke. I can honestly say I never knew what sort of work they did at the company or looked with any interest at the piles of papers on their desks. I never saw them working at anything.

I knew that this play, too, had a nude scene and that the theater owner wasn’t just complimenting my hair. He ran his fingers through the long strands and when I tried to step away he gripped my hair in his fist. In his other hand he held a plastic cup of wine and a cigarette. He was an English professor at a nearby university and had started the theater in the early s. He made me nervous, the way he stared at me, and held my hair, though I behaved as if he didn’t. I thought he was probably dead now, as were most of the people I knew back then. I smiled at him and sipped from my own plastic cup of wine. He wore a velvet jacket, as threadbare as the red carpet in the theater lobby. Outside, the wind blew white paper napkins in the street. I watched them flutter past the front window, waiting for him to release me.

“What if,” I said into Paul’s ear, “it started to snow over the little groups  

of people.”

He sipped from his Seagram’s & Coke, his pinky held out. “Let’s find our  

table.”

Paul put on his clever grin—the one he used as acknowledgement when

someone said how good looking he was. He leaned over and gave me a wet kiss on the cheek, grabbed my empty glass and slipped from the table.

We knew how to get drunk quickly and efficiently, something the dol- drums of our small town fostered. There was no pretending to pace things. There were never any regrets for what we did when we were drunk. I knew Carol and I had that in common. Wherever she was that night, she was doing what I was doing, and maybe more—maybe not the cocaine yet, but she was smoking pot and drinking, and she was a happy, funny, entertaining drunken girl. She may have been at a party of her own, or at the movies, or hanging out with friends in their cars, the cars lined up in the bowling alley parking lot. And maybe she would drink too much and argue with her date and take off into the night, her high heeled boots striking the pavement in that ring- ing way, a pint of blackberry brandy in her coat pocket. We did that, too, often enough—struck out on our own into the darkness, the air burning our lungs, some boy trailing after us in the car. “Get in the car, please,” and then finally slamming on the brakes and chasing us down. We were a danger to ourselves, we needed to be corralled and brought back.

“Did you take one?” I’d asked him, the guardrails cold and snow-topped,  

slipping past.

“Do these lights look blurry to you, too?” he said, gripping the steering  

wheel, leaning forward to squint at the highway.

We laughed. I was never afraid with any of the boys I dated. Nothing bad had ever happened to anyone I knew yet. Bob Ossowski returned to the table with Matt Carpenter from purchasing, and Matt pulled up a chair along- side me. He smelled of bourbon and his eyes lit on me the way they often did at work.

“His father graduated college the same year as me,” Cassandra said, and I saw she wasn’t as pathetic as I’d thought, and her sobriety lent her a cer- tain ruthlessness. Matt was drunk. He’d been drunk the other day at work, too, when we’d all been given silver gift boxes of Canadian Club and he had cracked his open and we’d swallowed it straight from paper cups.

He seemed unsure, flustered. I felt that my bringing Paul to the party had

changed his opinion of me—not the new little receptionist but a woman with a man, his arm thrown over her shoulder. Matt gripped his glass and shook the ice, and the sound reminded me of an afternoon playing Yahtzee with an old friend in middle school, her beagle asleep by the fire, the snow falling beyond the sliding glass doors onto the railings of her back deck. The contrast was disorienting. I didn’t know which scene I fit.

Beneath all the chatter was music—that Bing Crosby holiday fare, the kind even your parents called classic. It lent a strange sort of feeling to the event, as if we’d been caught in a version of a party that had played out in the room for years. At some point servers delivered food and maybe I ate chicken cutlet and mashed potatoes, and maybe Paul kept lighting my cig- arettes and holding my hand, and maybe Matt Carpenter brushed his fingers down my back. I didn’t leave any impression of myself behind that night. If you’d asked Cassandra, she might have remembered me in my peach halter dress, my hair long to my waist. “She was a little girl trying to act like a grown up,” she might have said. “She was with that boy, the one who ate lit cigarettes.”

Paul became the center of attention. Everyone gathered around and watched as he did his party trick. I stood to the side, humiliated, the magi- cian’s assistant handing him lit Marlboros. Matt came up and slipped his hand along my waist and leaned into my hair and sighed, the sort of sound you make when you have taken a bite of something delicious. I didn’t wear a bra. He could have untied the bow at the back of my neck and the dress would have dropped to my waist, exposing my breasts. I suppose if I had suggested this someone might have remembered me, and I would later learn that this was the way you made an impression—offering yourself up, fear- less and bold and without shame.

Paul and I left the Christmas party. It was our second date, and he had- n’t suggested getting a room. The cost of the Sheraton would have been too much for his salary, anyway. I didn’t remember much about the drive home. It was still early, and I awoke in his truck parked in his driveway, the large brick house looming over us. We could see the lights on in the den where his parents still watched television, and I thought he was contemplating bring- ing me inside, settling me on the couch in the place where he always sat with Carol.

“Why are we here?” I said, alarmed. I was drunk enough to feel the need to bolt, to walk fiercely into the night with the cold on my skin and in my lungs. Perhaps sensing this, Paul put the truck into gear and backed out of the driveway and began a circuit around town, looking for people out. This is what we did when the night was over, but not quite. You’d find someone circling the town the way we were, prolonging the inevitable return to our parents’ houses. Maybe someone knew of a party, or a bar where everyone else congregated. We were at in-betweens—too old to hang out at the usual high school places, too young to have our own families and homes. Those of us who’d married young invited other couples over for dinner—awkward evenings that seemed a parody of our parents’ lives. There’d be lobster casse- role and the Doobie Brothers playing on the stereo. There’d be a joint smoked and chit chat that was pointless, really. You already knew who you would sleep with, and the drama and intrigue had been stripped of the night.

“I’m not Carol,” I said, secretly gratified that I might be mistaken for her. He was ashamed for revealing too much.

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.

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.

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?”

We’d walked the length of the road to Folly Farm’s wooden fence, half-

buried in snow.

Carol said she would go back in time. “I want to be little in my bed again,

listening to my parents and their friends and their party downstairs. I want to hear the ice tapping my window during a snowstorm, and the radiators clanking heat through the house.”

“Not hiding from you,” she said.

“Come back inside,” he said. He wore a knit cap, a bomber jacket. When

he spoke, his breath huffed, white and disarmingly tender in the space be- tween us. He turned to me.

“We’ve got our time machine in that horse barn,” Carol said. “We’re going

to disappear and live our lives over again. You’re going to see me one day and think you know me, but I will be someone else—not Carol,” she said.

It surprised me, to see her cry. She yanked her sweater away, and I felt the

cold surround me. I protested, but she wouldn’t listen. Even if I’d told the truth about what happened, I saw she wouldn’t care.

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.

But I knew she was none of those places. She’d been last seen leaving her parents’ house, walking down Gun Hill Road. Her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, couldn’t say the exact time. Her father had been in the base- ment watching the game on television and had fallen asleep. The night she disappeared, the barn at Folly Farm caught fire. The fire department re- sponse was swift, but the freezing temperatures hampered the fire fighters’ efforts, and twenty horses were lost to smoke inhalation. She had nothing to do with the fire—a spark in the wiring caused it to smolder and then rage— but everyone would associate the barn fire and her disappearance the way that people always associate tragedies. “They come in threes.”