But bugs were the thing that drove us back. Flies as big as raping ducks! we used to say. Mosquitoes with tiger-striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome’s sleigh. Their awfulness and flight obsessed me, concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobiles, or diving like jets, they were sinisterly contrapted; they craved color; they were caught in the saddest animal script there was. Once I whacked Robert’s back, seeing a giant one there, and killed five, all bloody beneath his shirt.
Now we stood at the cold stream’s edge, tossing a stone in and listening for its plonk and plummet. I wanted to say, “Remember the time …” But too often when we compared stories from our childhood, they didn’t match. I would speak of a trip or a meal or a visit from a cousin and of something that had happened during it, and Robert would look at me as if I were speaking of the adventures of some Albanian rock band. So I stayed quiet with him. It is something that people who have been children together can effortlessly do. It is sometimes preferable to the talk, which is also effortless.
We found more stones and tossed them. “A stone can’t drown,” said my brother finally. “It’s already drowned.”
“You been reading poetry?” I smiled at him.
“I’ve just been thinking.”
“A dangerous thing.”
“A little goes a long way.”
“A little’s a dangerous thing. But so is a lot. And so is none.” I paused. “It’s all a minefield.”
“Are you high?” asked my brother.
I almost skipped a stone. It wanted to. I could feel it, the desire of the stone. “If only,” I sighed. I threw a stone way out left past the old fish hatchery, toward the tennis meadow. There was actually an old tennis court on our property, built by the original owners of the house. It had long been broken up with reedy weeds, had reverted almost completely to ad hoc prairie, though if one walked through there were still cracked pieces of concrete underfoot and on opposite sides two old chipped white posts for a net. In my lifetime no one had ever played tennis here. It seemed a ghostly glimpse of an old affluence that once protected the place, a counter to the signs of the old poverty — outhouses and stick pumps — that underlay most of the farms and houses nearby.
I threw another stone. And at that we headed back to the house. New snow fell silently through the sky until an updraft whistled in and caused the flakes to go up, as in a shaken-up snow dome. Robert had worked as a camp counselor for part of the previous summer and now began to sing. “ ‘I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves. I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, and this is how it goes: I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves …’ ” We arrived back home damp and pink looking in the vestibule mirror, though the mirror was petaled with my mother’s reminder Post-its, which made our faces look momentarily like flowers in a kids’ play. My mother had baked a noodle kugel and instead of turkey had made a Christmas brisket, and we all sat down to eat. She brought the hot brisket in on a platter from the kitchen and, standing behind me, swooped it onto the table, barely missing my head. “Duck,” she ordered me as she did this, and I let my head fall to one side.
“What is that?” asked my brother.
I stared at him hopelessly.
“You’re the son of a Jewish mother,” said my dad, “and you don’t recognize brisket?”
“I do recognize brisket,” he said. “But I thought she said it was duck.”
It was our one big family laugh. The brisket itself, made with ketchup and one too many onion soup packets — perhaps my mother had not seen that she’d already put one in — was salty and not her best. We all piled condiments on top — cranberry sauce and a vegan relish we called “cornfield caviar”—then we drank a lot of water the rest of the night.
At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time. When afternoon came, I tried to go for little walks — one should always get out of the house by two p.m., my mother once advised — and I would sometimes take Blot, though once we ran into the garbage truck still trawling the roads. Blot hated the garbage truck, feeling, I think, that the men were taking away things that rightfully belonged to him, if not to all dogs in general. He barked wildly as if he were saying, You bastards, we’re going to find out where you live and come take all your garbage and see how you like that! I was often back by two-thirty, returning to my room until dinner. I would come down, not helping my mother, and find a foaming stew pot, vesuvial and overflowing, because with her bad eyesight she had put baking soda in it instead of cornstarch, or once, I discovered, she had made little salads and put them in the ceramic dog dishes.
“Mom, these are the dog dishes,” I said, pointing out the little dog heads printed on them.
Indignation tensed the muscles of her face, but she said nothing.
Once she shouted up to me and I had to come down and see what was the matter.
“You and your fancy food,” she said. She had taken the sushi I’d brought home on the bus and left it on the counter, then accidentally knocked the wasabi onto the floor. Whereupon Blot had automatically lapped it up and, startled by the sensation, which he construed only as pain and heat, began to howl and tear up and run around the house. He attacked his water dish so urgently that it too fell over, and so I took him outside, where he ate snow — what little there was — and drank from a puddle. It took him an hour to settle down. The remark about fancy food, however, lingered longer. I had once gone out to dinner with my mother and ordered cabernet sauvignon, and instead of objecting that I was underage, she’d said, “Oh, fancy, fancy.”
I read, flopped across my bed in my old room, its pink walls and white trim a comforting peppermint candy womb, as snow at last did begin to pile up outside. Occasionally lightning flashed again in the middle of a blizzard. What planet was this? The sky purpled, and roaring bursts of light seemed briefly to set fire to the snow as if it were the dusty landscape of a moon. Tree branches clawed into the soggy wool of the sky. I remained the nerdy college girl under siege of the weather, my days full of books that were rabbit holes of escape. Christmas music from the radio downstairs, playing through all twelve days of it, wafted up: “Rejoice, rejoice,” sounded like “Read Joyce, read Joyce”—and so I did, getting a head start on my Brit Lit. “Emmanuel …” I made my way through The Critique of Pure Reason. Some days grew so bland and barren, I found myself perusing Horace, though between books I would open up my electric bass, put on the headphones, and make up little riffs for an hour or so, experimenting with the reverb. It always amazed me what a mere four strings could do. I had started with cello when very young, and then descended. Ole Bob sat in the corner, winking, I believed. Playing a guitar was so much less effort. Like a girl taking a pee. One didn’t even have to stand. One could lie on the floor and just go at it with one finger like James Jamerson’s magic claw. One could pretend to be Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report — especially in this weather. Here would be my report! Or Jaco on “Hejira.” Here would be my Hejira! Or Meshell Ndegeocello, whose low voice I could imitate but not well.