“Tossa,” said Mary-Emma, pointing happily at me.
“Did you get a snack?” Sarah asked us both in a high chirpy voice.
“We got some cider with whipped cream in the warm-up hut,” I said.
“Cider with whipped cream?” Sarah looked aghast.
“Oh, was that a bad idea?”
“I’ve just never heard of cider and whipped cream,” said Sarah. “I mean, really, I’m a food person but — cider and whipped cream? My God — what a thing to do to cider!”
“It’s pretty common around here.” I shrugged. I had grown up squirting whipped cream on hot cider; was it a perversion of some sort? Frankly, that wouldn’t have surprised me.
“Dairy with everything, I guess. I’m going to put all my dessert cheeses in the front window at Le Petit Moulin. Lure them in with dairy, then give them … sauteed ground cherry!” This was the light, flighty side of Sarah. “Or perhaps a little sherry,” she added.
Almost always, on good days at least, I was a joiner.
“That should make them merry,” I said, accidentally uttering the name that seemed never uttered in this house except by me.
“Or cause some hari-kari!”
Sarah smiled and bounced Mary-Emma while she spoke: “Very, very, very.” Which again rhymed with the name she clearly hoped to bury. Mary.
“Tossa!” cried Mary-Emma again, leaning toward me.
Sarah looked vaguely troubled. “What perfume are you wearing?” she asked me. “You smell so good.” She set Mary-Emma down, and Mary-Emma came running at me and then at Sarah, in a kind of game, back and forth.
“Perfume?” I was overheated from skating and had not yet taken off my coat; I wasn’t sure she was correctly identifying the odor — if there even was one. Bodily attention of any sort from others I wasn’t used to, and it made me want to run and hide.
“You smell so nice — what is it?” She looked at me hopefully, her eyebrows arced with inquiry. She pushed her hand through her hair. Its brightness seemed to have disappeared, and it seemed now a flat, tannic hue. When she raked her hand through it, I could see that it was thinning; beneath the cat’s-cradle crisscross of her part, she had a kind of comb-over thing going on, elaborate zigzagging layers at the top to hide the scalp bursting through. Age was burning the edge of her hairline, and when her hand flicked through the strands, before they fell back in decoration, her forehead protruded shiny and round as an apple.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Garlic?” I knew people always lied about their perfumes and claimed it was soap, as if it were vanity to attempt more. Actually, I sometimes after showers dabbed on a kind of aromatic oil that Murph had given me for my birthday, a slim bottle called Arabian Princess. In the current world situation it seemed unwise to advertise this, in case I was mistaken for the mascot of Osama bin Laden, though I was pretty sure Murph had simply got it at the food co-op.
“Well, if you find out, let me know.”
“I think it’s from the co-op,” I said.
“Really? Well, I’ll sniff around there then.” Sarah picked Mary-Emma up and nuzzled her. “How was skating?”
“Good,” I said.
“Good!” repeated Mary-Emma.
“See how she’s really chattering and opening up!” said Sarah, giving her a kiss on the head. “She is, after all, two.”
“Good!” cried Mary-Emma again, and then she leaned out of Sarah’s arms to come back to me.
“Oh, you want to go to Tassie, do you?” said Sarah, and she let her go, passing Mary-Emma to me, some maternal hurt scurrying to hide behind her thin-as-a-piano-string smile. “You’ll really have to tell me the name of that perfume you’ve got on, if you remember it,” she said, sighing. “Otherwise, I could be arrested at the co-op for loitering.” Something was wrong — perhaps it was Sarah’s tight mouth: a choking wire that had somehow garroted me. I could not speak. A whole minute of silence passed between us. “Well,” she said finally, “I should let you go.” And she took back Mary-Emma, who began to squirm and fuss.
Classes began in a deep cold spell, a high of one-below for the week. This was more like the winter weather of memory. Cold burst into the room from a mere open kitchen drawer, forks and knives piled like icicles. Our landlord’s generous heat was nothing in the face of this. The stem of the doorknobs on the front door conducted the cold from outside so that even the inside knob froze the hand. Cold air seeped through the slits of the electrical sockets. Clothing pulled from the closet was chilly, and in the basement laundry room of our apartment house clothes that did not dry completely in the dryer emerged white with frost. A glass of water put on the nightstand at night might be ice by morning. One looked out through the window, when one could, through pointed icicles that were like the incisors of a shark; it was as if one were living in the cold, dead mouth of a very mean snowman. Kay, the woman upstairs who had no life, decided as an experiment to throw boiling water off the upstairs back porch. She let us know by paper notice slid under our doors that this would happen at eleven a.m. on Monday, and so the rest of us gathered and watched it hit the air in silence and come down as slow, quiet steam and slush. We’d been told it would turn instantly to pellets midair, but perhaps something in the water — chlorine, or the salts of the water softener — kept it from doing that. On the street, the wind was so bitter, it seemed to bypass cold and become heat. Breathing burned the nostrils. Cars on every block wheezed and gagged and would not start. The combination of the cold weather and dry indoor heating had caused the longer nails on my picking hand to weaken, crack, and break beneath the quick, stabbing the pink hammy skin below, so that my fingers bled and I had to bandage them before I went out.
And then it warmed just enough for a blizzard, followed by another, as if the prairie were in a hiccup. Winds howled in the chimneys and under eaves, knocking ice blocks from the roof. And then when the air was finally still, a stupor descended, induced by accumulated snowdrifts, which were banked against the sides of houses like a comforter thrown over to calm an agitated dog. There was in the air a cold resignation good for reading.
My Intro to Sufism was taught by a self-described “Ottomanist,” which made me think of someone lying back with his feet up on a padded footstool, with a remote, in autumn. He looked charmingly rattled and had his arm in a sling. He was Irish, and he spoke in the airy r’s and staccato of County Brokencanencork, as Murph liked to refer to the entire country of her forebears. “For those of you who are in any way concerned about my teaching the class,” said the professor, “believe me: I know more about this topic than anyone in this department. And for those of you concerned about my teaching while on painkillers for my arm, believe me: I also know more about teaching while high than anyone else in this department.”
I sat next to a tall, handsome brown-skinned boy, who smiled at me and then sent me a note, as if we were in high school. What am I doing in this class? he wrote. I am Brazilian. What are you?
I didn’t know what I was in this particular context. I wrote back on his sheet of paper, I am a quasi Jew. What am I doing here?
I don’t know, he wrote back.
In capital letters I wrote, WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO KILL MYSELF? WOULD A PEN TO THE NECK BE QUICK? Then passed it back.
He read it and beamed, smothering a laugh that brought forth a slight snort. The professor, who was speaking, looked glancingly in our direction and then away. The boy next to me wrote in all capital letters: YOU DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT BE IN THIS CLASS.