When she was sure he was going away she looked over her shoulder and saw him walking across the driveway toward the garage.
Catherine dragged the sled up the hill and stood beside the willow. He had moved away her hair and said those words. She felt violated, betrayed.
Brad came over. “What happened to Peter?”
“Nothing. He got cold, I guess.”
“Would you care for company on the downward path to ruin?”
“Not now, Brad. I’ve had it, for a while.”
“Where’s Peter?” asked Bev.
“God, Peter Peter Peter. He just went inside. What’s all the commotion about?”
“Nothing. You’re standing there with his sled.”
“That is not a sled,” said Brad. “It is Peter, bewitched. Let us honor the memory of our late friend, Miss Carlotti, by sharing a ride.”
Catherine handed him the sled and walked through the soft, hanging twigs of the willow into the snowy flatness of the upper yard. Her red galoshes, black-red in the moonlight, sank almost to their furred tops. The black twig-ends of some buried bush stuck up out of the snow; a small withered leaf still clung to one of the twigs, and shook slightly. The sight of the trembling leaf disturbed Catherine, and she looked away. She came to a tall, broad pine that leaned to one side, as if it had begun to fall but had changed its mind. The long lower branches, heavy with clumps of snow, grew close to the ground. A few of the branches had been broken off, leaving an open space.
Catherine bent over and entered the prickly shelter of the tree. The outer parts of the branches were heavy with snow, but toward the trunk the branches showed their bark. She dusted off the bark of a thick branch and sat down, leaning back against the trunk and laying one leg along the branch. Through black and snowy pine-needles she could see the crowd by the willow, the bottom of the sledding path, and the open, dark garage.
It was not possible that Peter Schiller had said those words. It was so impossible that she wondered whether he had said something else, something that sounded like it. She tried to think of something that sounded like it, and began going through the alphabet: above, dove, glove — remembering, at “glove,” that in the ninth grade she had written an awful sonnet just that way, and wondering what had ever happened to that sonnet. Was it in the attic? Maybe he had said “I’m above you” or “A glove for you.” But she knew perfectly well what he had said. And he had walked away. He had said it and walked away. He had no right. And he knew it: he was ashamed. She and Peter Schiller were friends, they had been good friends for more than three years, but if they were good friends it was precisely because there was nothing more to it than that. She had never thought of him in that way. He was sweet, and irritating, and she could almost be herself with him; she liked to tease him about his horrible French pronunciation, and he had once written a limerick beginning “There was a young lady called Cath, Who was better at English than Math.” They were comrades. They hit it off. Catherine knew she had a playfulness about her, even a flirtatiousness, and she needed friends who were playful as well as intelligent. In the auditorium, where members of the National Honor Society were allowed to sit after lunch, she enjoyed a sense of light-heartedness, of pleasurable release from the routines and responsibilities of school, and not everyone rose to the occasion as Peter Schiller sometimes did. The fact was, they got on well together; and that was all. He was not her type. No one was her type. She had ridden down with him on the sled because he had asked her, but she would have ridden down with Brad or Roger or even Bill Newmeyer. They were all friends.
He had moved away her hair and whispered it. She had felt his finger on her ear. Suddenly she realized that he must have removed his glove. He had trapped her on the sled and said it.
Catherine heard a jangle of boot buckles; her stomach tightened, as if she were about to be punched. She wanted to run away, over the snow, into the sky, beyond the moon, but it was only Brad. He looked in at her, bending over and resting his gloved hands, leather and wool, on his knees. Bits of snow clung to his thick orange scarf, and a thread of snow hung from one eyebrow.
“Is anything wrong?”
“No, I’m just sitting here.” She gave a shrug and hugged herself. “I like it here. Did you make it down?”
“I think we went through the tree and came out the other side, but other than that. You’re sure nothing’s wrong?”
“I like watching from here. You have snow on your eyebrow. No, now it’s worse. You have snow on your glove.”
When he left, Catherine felt forlorn. Forlorn! The very word was like a bell. She was sitting alone in a cold tree, and everyone else was laughing, and sledding, and running up and down hills. He had said it, and there was no way he could unsay it. Catherine had vaguely expected to hear those words someday, just as she vaguely expected to hear “Will you marry me?”—she felt it was inevitable, there was no way around it — but they would be uttered by someone she could not even imagine. They had nothing whatever to do with anyone she knew, or with this town, or with this life. When she heard them, she would be somewhere else. She would not even be herself.
He had looked down strangely at her, lying in the snow. Now she would never know what he was thinking. She could never trust him. She wondered whether he had felt that way all of a sudden, or whether he had been feeling that way a long time. Once, in sophomore year, he had drawn a heart in the black wax of her dissecting pan. It had been a frog’s heart, with labels like PULMONARY VEINS and RIGHT AURICLE. He had drawn a feathered arrow going through it.
“Hey, are you all right?”
Catherine started; she had not heard Bev come up.
“Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine. What’s wrong with everybody tonight?”
“You’re sitting in a tree, Cath. Nobody else is sitting in a tree.”
“Well, I believe in Nature. I believe Americans ought to get back to Nature, like the Indians. God, can’t a poor working girl enjoy Nature without everybody having a conniption fit? Slaving in the factory nine to five, six days a week, ten children, my husband drunk every night—”
“Hell, honey, you think you got problems. My husband don’t drink, but I got ten drunk children. Listen, a bunch of us are going inside now, O.K.? I’ve had enough of Mother Nature for one night. Time to catch a little of the Sonia Holmes show. They’ve got Potato Frills, Cath. Suit yourself. I tried.”
Catherine watched them tramp down to the driveway and into the garage. The inner door opened, and she heard shouts and laughter and music: piano chords, not records. Only Roger and Bill Newmeyer stayed outside, sledding hard, over and over again, with a concentration and seriousness that seemed to her beautiful. Someone smoking a cigarette came up from the house — it was George Silko — and joined them for a time, but the spirit of pure, silent concentration had been broken, and soon all three went down to the house. Catherine was alone, in her tree.
She could never go down there, because Peter Schiller was there. He had pinned her to the sled and put those words inside her, and then he had gone back to the house and left her there with the words inside. It was as if — she tried to think how it was — he had suddenly touched her breast. She felt he had delicately wounded her in some way.
A light went on over the garage: the party had spread to the kitchen. Through a sliver of window between translucent curtains she saw someone pass clearly between blur and blur. Down in the playroom someone must have opened a window, for Catherine could hear the out-of-tune piano coming from the front of the house. A voice cried “I can’t find it.” There was a burst of laughter. The window shut.
For a moment she had been drawn into the warm room and the laughter, and now she was banished to her cold tree. She remembered standing at the top of the slope, feeling the moonlight pour into her face. It seemed a long time ago. Catherine felt that something strange was happening, that at any moment the house below might start slowly sliding away over the snow, like a great, silent ship with yellow windows.