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

I think of this now in light of Carol’s disappearance how we’d grown up with the desire to be unencumbered. No one carried a purse to the keg party by the reservoir. You had some bills in the pocket of your jeans and that was for cigarettes if you were low. The boy paid for the alcohol he plied you with, and condoms, and the motel, if he lived at home, too, and wanted to have sex somewhere other than his car. It was considered romantic to get a room something couples did on the night of prom. Even if the room was at the Grantmore on the Berlin Turnpike.

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 Congregational 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 sisters were out somewhere with their friends in the night, loose and as immune 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 divorced 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 clapboards. 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, trying 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.

The elevator opened into the lobby and we followed the little placards to the ballroom. My dress moved along my legs, and Paul put his hand on the small of my back, and I thought we were an attractive couple he was one of the most handsome boys I knew, and that was the reason I’d asked him. He looked like the kind of boy the person I pretended to be would date, and this would impress the people I worked with the office women with their manicured hands and designer bags and dishes of watermelon candies; the men who invited me into their offices and told me to close the door, then leaned back, their chairs squeaking.

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 downing 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.

Bob’s wife’s name was Cassandra. Paul offered to refresh her drink, and she admitted she was a lightweight. Her watered down Tom Collins sweated onto its green napkin. She made conversation the way older adults often did by asking questions, and discovered that she’d graduated from Oberlin the same year as Paul’s father.

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 doldrums 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 ringing 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.

Paul delivered my drink and he slipped me a pill, some sort of pain pill he’d told me earlier in the truck he’d swiped from his mother.

Paul became the center of attention. Everyone gathered around and watched as he did his party trick. I stood to the side, humiliated, the magician’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, fearless and bold and without shame.

A year later, I saw Carol at a New Year’s party in town a party in someone’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.

We’d walked the length of the road to Folly Farm’s wooden fence, half buried in snow.

“Not hiding from you,” she said.

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 beautiful 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 person the one in the peach satin halter dress who imagined the man from work undoing the bow at her neck.

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 basement watching the game on television and had fallen asleep. The night she disappeared, the barn at Folly Farm caught fire. The fire department response 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.”