Talking roosters. Farmers and their dullard sons. Princes and princesses. At some point red eyes almost always appeared at the forest’s edge. Then the beasts would enter the plot.
Nobody was spared.
In a way that was the point, the point of the stories. Jaws would rend the bodies of sinner and virtuous alike, then vanish as quickly as they’d come. Or a single beast would find its way into a home, a village, a life. Someone would open a door to find a muscled presence in the dark, sometimes masquerading in the form of a friend. Was it any wonder, Alexis would remark with a smile, that she had become the person she was? All those Russian tales ended with either a wedding or a mauling. Alexis was always saying that back then when they lived in Alaska, calling up that internal landscape as an answer to the unforgiving one outside.
Alice took it as meaning, don’t try to change me, I have powerful forces on my side.
On the night Alice proposed, the air grew warm and heavy and the snow began to blow sideways across the valley. Alice had never seen anything quite like this before, but Alexis seemed relieved. “This is not a good thing,” Alexis said, and was soon rewarded for her insight when the electricity began to cut in and out.
“Where are the flashlights?” Alice asked. She had no idea.
They moved upward from the basement into the living room and then to the bedroom above that, stepping like children, hands on the walls for extra guidance. “Slow down,” Alice said, or at least she thought she said it. She kept so many of her protests inside back then that it was sometimes hard to tell what spilled over from her head into her voice.
“It’s not where it should be,” Alexis said. She was standing at the back of the walk-in closet, digging in a cardboard box.
Alice remembered the storm with a clarity that alarmed her. Everything would go dark and then, just as Alice thought, ok, that’s it, everything would go bright again, and she’d spot Alexis positioned just a little differently, here, then there, then over there, like a series of photographs. In each one Alexis looked grim and determined, her usual look, her usual attitude, except caught like this she seemed more grim, more determined, more Alexis.
The closet stood in disarray: sweatshirts and scarves and the old sweater she hated, the one she had knitted when knitting still seemed like something she might contribute to the collective household. Alexis was always calling it that with a slight Marxist flair, a man’s sense of macho determination. Sometimes Alice thought of politics as men fighting men in opulent rooms. When the voices grew too loud it would all spill over onto a battlefield. Alexis rifling through the closet meant only that Alice would have to clean it up later.
“Hold on,” Alice said. “Let’s talk.”
“We have more important things to do,” Alexis said.
Because it wasn’t just the night of the storm. It was the night of the proposal, the night when Alice slipped the collar of reality for just a little while.
“You didn’t have to answer so quickly,” Alice said.
“So I should have lied then,” Alexis said. “For what? To spare your feelings?”
She muttered the word feelings the way she usually said shit or fuck or action movie. To be polite, Alice wanted to say, but that word, polite, would have sounded even more ridiculous than feelings. It was so strange how it had happened, as if Alexis speaking the word no had brought about the snow and wind. Although maybe it was Alice’s words that had really done it, the stupidity of asking such a thing of a person like Alexis.
Down they went, as if the photographs were flipping backward, Alice’s fear balanced by a kind of detached amusement. It was sort of fun to see Alexis unprepared, hiding her confusion. Was she afraid too? Alice remembered her once capturing a bat in a dishtowel, holding it up to watch the mouth open and close as if it were begging for food. “It wants to bite me,” Alexis had said, and then she had puckered her lips into a fake kiss.
When the place finally went dark for the last time it was more of a relief than anything else. “Well, that’s it then,” Alice said.
Yes, all the talk of love and commitment had somehow caused this. She had summoned it all, as if those words were a kind of spell. “I’m going outside,” Alexis said from somewhere in front of her. “Follow me.”
They were a long way from true danger yet, but they seemed to be walking casually in that general direction.
Alexis never talked about the other stories, the ones that ended in white instead of red. She seemed only interested in disaster, and she spoke about it as if the blood on the farmhouse floor, the vanished children, all of that was the happy ever after. Of course, danger is here too, right in the room, squatting on the floor beside Alice’s bed, underneath the bed, or deep inside her brain and belly. She is sliding in and out of something a lot like sleep. And she wakes to this thought—the thought that doom is the inevitable happy ending—as if from a perfect, complicated dream. But it’s not a dream, it’s just a question that won’t leave her alone, and for a moment she thinks she’s back in Alaska and the body next to her belongs to Alexis, a shape as lean as a bone with a birthmark like a button in the small of the back.
Except it’s a double mistake, because there’s no body at all. She’s alone in this bed, this room smelling of flowers and sweat and even the apple juice on the nightstand. It all has the pungency of magic, the randy old quality associated with roots and dirt. She swears she can even smell the thirty-year-old wallpaper. Her fingernails and tongue. I’m the body, she thinks. What had she said exactly in that long ago? That they should make it official and tie the knot. Such a silly way to put it. And then the storm had rolled in and the power had gone out. When she woke early the next morning she found the whole north side of the house covered in jagged ice. Through the windows she could see a soft impression of trees and snow and the truck. It appeared as an impressionist painting, a blue shape floating in white. And not just now, but then. This was not a trick of memory.
She could not read the thermometer and she could not open the door when she tried. Even when she braced herself and tugged it wouldn’t budge. She blew out a stream of fog and felt again like the little girl she once was walking through the snow on the way to school back in New England. Except she was an adult and she was worried about the pipes in her house freezing, about herself, and—she realized this with a rush of guilt for not having thought it earlier—about Alexis still sleeping, a faceless mound beneath heavy blankets. For a moment Alice imagined that she might be dead. That seemed the only thing that might stop her from nursing the stove all night, from taking care of things.
On the other side of the house she could see the yard clearly, the swing set left by the last family who had lived here and the tree line beyond that, the long garden beds covered in tarps. Sometimes she and Alexis sat out there on the swings and simply hung suspended while they talked, occasionally nudging the swing into motion with a foot in the dirt. They had done it enough that each one had her own swing, Alice on the left, Alexis to the right. Last week they had sat out there and talked about something, but now she couldn’t remember the nature of the problem or if it had been solved, just that it had been important, was still important. Alice braced her knee against the doorframe and pulled and pulled and finally she was outside and part of the ice-covered countryside. She stood there for a moment breathing hard—she could hear her breath thrumming in her head—and then she reached back inside and grabbed her coat.
Not her coat. The coat Alexis wore when chopping wood and it smelled of a particular mix of birch and sweat that made Alice think of sex, the sex she realized she had been dreaming about in her fitful sleep. She could at least play around with the fake recollection of it as she moved through the cold. That was enough.
Years later and carnality has tiptoed back into her life. The source sits deep in her body, but she finds the deepest pain and frustration in small things—the way her tongue sits stiff in her mouth, her dry hands cracked at the knuckles, and the tedium of her own discomfort. She has been sipping at the dregs of that long-ago moment for hours. If the flashlight was a comfort then so were her lover’s small breasts, the slope of her belly. Alexis is ageless, and even now that small body resists her will.
“There are no American men,” Alexis used say. “Not like in the South. In Uruguay farmers read Borges. Your car mechanic in Uruguay, yes, he likes football, he likes to drink, but he will at least talk to you about Marx while he looks at your tits. In America they are boys.”
Alexis had lived in South America once with a man, a painter and sailor, and she sometimes liked to bring it up as an amusing little story. Her Spanish, she said, had been terrible, and the sun had burned her pale skin. At parties men would ask if they could touch her hair.
But Americans, she’d say, and she’d laugh.
That was part of the seduction when they met—
This talking about men. Alexis presented her experience in South America as a courageous and foolish thing, a kind of depravity, and Alice had no equivalent. She had never been with one. It was as if she had never tasted a boiled hot dog. Alexis would bring up this or that one, most often to disparage, but also to compliment some animal part of them: an appetite for sex bordering on gluttony, a disregard for social codes, an especially memorable part of their anatomy. Was she saying that she would never return to that world or that she might? Those conversations seemed like small threats, like the fairy tales—the same exotic worlds, the same strange beasts.
Instead of saying tie the knot she should have said you are mine.
She remembers shimmying across the changed landscape. By the time she reached the truck her arms were extended airplane-style to keep from falling. The driver’s-side door was sealed shut too. Icicles ran down from the undercarriage to the ground. And the power lines stretching down into the gully. They had been ripped loose. She began to walk up the driveway, but her progress was disheartening. On the road she saw the long line of mailboxes encased by ice. No cars coming either way, but that wasn’t unusual. She stepped into the road and began to make her way. It felt like she had landed on a different planet, that she might encounter anything out here. And what was she doing anyway? After twenty feet she stopped and took off her shoes. It was easier to slide in her stocking feet. She was wearing wool socks so the cold didn’t touch her immediately, and she held a boot in each hand and moved as if skating. Although she had no destination in mind she moved as if she did have one. She even thought, I’ll be there soon, as she reached the intersection with the bullet-spattered stop sign. Once they had almost gone off the road there after an evening of too much wine back in town, but Alexis had reached out from the passenger’s seat at the last second and given the wheel a twist. My hero, Alice thought, remembering the gesture with a mix of irritation and lust. She thought about falling on the long downward slope, but it didn’t happen. Thinking about it seemed to ward it away, one spell against another, and then she was on the main road and yes, she was almost there.
Alice remembers the clouds above like a great ornament, but of course, that would be a deception of the mind, because the sky would have been dark. She came to this memory seeking a small, warm body and instead she’s moving further into the cold, into the ambition of her remembrance, her imagination. Yes, she took off her shoes. So much easier to just slide your feet. And yes, she laughed for the first time in a long time at the damage the weather had brought. But did she really slide so easily across that glacial surface? I am the first, she remembers thinking.
The window is dark and so is the television. A kind of secret triumph. She feels it even now.
Because what would Alexis have said if she had told her? That such things were not possible? No, not that, although of course anybody would think that. No, Alexis would have sighed as if Alice were trying to upstage her, and then she would have told her own story of someone back in Sortavala who had died from walking in such a storm. In the town where she grew up people always seemed to be dying as a result of their own foolishness. For some reason Alice found this charming. There was a justice to it, a moral neatness, like a glutton dying of starvation, and it was especially pleasing because she did not think the stories applied to either of them.
Up ahead something like burned logs fallen from a truck.
Not logs. Not bats. Birds. She knelt and tried to pick up the first one, but it was frozen to the ground. A raven and its eyes were open within the chrysalis of ice, one of its wings fanned open. Then the next and the next, each one a perfect statue, the same and also entirely unique. Finally, she found one she could tug and free and she held it in two hands. Another dozen or so awaited her further up the road, a trail of them leading into to the main pass where she had to tilt her feet sideways to make it up the hill. She didn’t feel a thing for the ravens. They seemed as much a design as the clouds in the sky. She could feel the sweat pooling in the small of her back. If anything, she grieved for her own dignity as she crouched low and made apelike movements up the hill. Just a few minutes before she had been traveling so effortlessly.
At the hilltop she found another half dozen, some with their wings splayed full open. The storm had hit with such incredible force that it had caught them in full flight. Except that such a thing was impossible, wasn’t it? She did not really know this place she lived in. What was possible and what wasn’t. Alexis would know except she was still asleep. Alice saw this as a fact as solid as the hard shape she cracked free from the ground. Its eyes were so black it made it hard to imagine that it had ever been alive.
Except it did not seem dead either.
She put it in the pocket of her jacket. Alexis’s jacket.
Then she found another one and pried that one loose as well. It did not feel as if she were saving them, not exactly, but it was more than collecting them. She found a third, the largest by far, and freed that one as well.
She went down the other side in the same ape crouch and at the very end of the incline gravity forced her into a spastic run. In a moment she was on the ground and for the first time she truly felt the cold and stillness. She stared up at the sky and thought what the birds must be thinking. It was like a sheet of music she had seen once as a young girl, that beautiful and inscrutable, and then it was gone just like the memory of where she had seen the music and with whom and the song it granted you access to if your fingers knew how to make the right motions on the piano. She did not think about moving for a solid minute and when she did her knee hurt badly enough that she made a sound of protest. Tomorrow Alexis would call her an idiot. No, not that word, but something like it, something well-chosen and unique. Even in that exotic landscape, this place of pure imaginings, she could not conceive what it might be.
Except maybe there wouldn’t be a tomorrow. Over the ridge some of the trees had fallen and taken out still more trees in a vast wave of motion now so absolutely still that it held her like a great painting. Trails of ice moved down the broken power lines to shallows of bluish ice she could see clearly through some mechanism that eluded her. It shouldn’t have been this clear, this indelible. It was just for her. So she moved deeper into it. She had to pass under the largest tree and then over another. She flexed her fingers in a vain attempt to warm them. If she lost one she’d never hear the end of it.
Just the day before it had been autumn. The leaves were preserved in webbing of ice. As she pushed through them they made a soft breaking sound. She emerged again into bright daylight and there it was, the other side. One of the ravens had fallen loose from her pocket and she bent to pick it up, its wings splayed like a fan. She smoothed the feathers, stroked the head. She remembers all of this. She is not creating it. It was hers, is still hers, as much as the warm apple juice and the smell of the sheets.
Inside Ivory Jack’s the men sat at their usual places. Of course, she thought, of course they’d be here. One of them—the one she recognized—slumped at the bar with his face in both hands as if he had been crying. She knew him by the slope of his back and his long mangy hair and the bright orange vest he wore over a heavy work shirt. Once he had said to her, “Excuse me, ma’am,” but his face had worn a look of irritation. Now he seemed almost beautiful.
Alexis liked to come here and sit at the bar and then, after two beers, slide an arm around Alice’s shoulder and pull her in shoulder to shoulder. A few heads might turn in their direction. She always looked back, made hard eye contact.
Another leaned against the stove. His eyes were open. He seemed ready to say hello, but he stood motionless. In the kitchen—she knew she was an intruder here, but who would stop her—she found the sink full to the brim with ice, a single air bubble beneath the surface, that and eggshells and onion scraps in the drain. Behind her the double doors stood open and snow blew in and out of the place in a tidal motion. She had to slide across the floor to reach the other end of the bar. Three men sat in a row with food and drinks in front of them. The first man held his drink almost to his mouth. The beer ran up the bottleneck and down around his hand. It seemed like a second long-fingered hand was holding his own. She swore she could hear, if not a heartbeat, then something from inside him.
The men reminded her of the ravens and she wanted to touch each one, look into each still life. She did not want to save them—she knew they did not need saving—but to sit with them a while, that seemed a necessary thing. She was moving slower. Her hands were not cold at all and that seemed a bad sign. Her toes too. Why had she come here? To push up close to the man in mid-drink and watch the changing inner world of his iris. She saw it again: a flicker of a foreign idea. His shoulders glistened. His hair fell in icicles.
She moved her face in closer, as if to kiss him, but definitely not to kiss him. She just wanted to see. Touching him with her bare hands would have caused her harm so she moved as close as possible, until she could see a thin white scar running from his eye to his ear, as thin as a pen tip. And then she noticed it continued, interrupted by the left eye, across the bridge of his nose, where it stopped just short of the other eye. She tried to imagine the source of the injury and came up with nothing except for some kind of machine a man like this might use, a heavy cable or sharp something, but she knew it might just as well be a fishing line, a child’s toy. It was most likely not visible unless in a moment like this. Not even a lover might see it, insulated as they were by the dark and the narcissism of attraction.
She thought very quickly of listening to his chest but not out of any kind of concern. She simply wanted to know what it sounded like, or what its silence might sound like, so she bent her head in without touching. She could only hear her own breath, watch the shapes it made against the man’s opened face. His lips were too large and his fingernails were as white as china. She did not feel sorry for him. She did not even like him, really. Normally he would be full of grunting energy, boasts, sardonic humor, but now the best parts of him seemed laid bare: a kind of helplessness usually disguised by the engine of his will. And she did like his hands. Big hands with ugly oversized knuckles. He wore a bracelet but no rings. The top half of his thumb was missing. So different from those other hands.
She found the two rings in the coat pocket, just where Alexis had placed them after the failed offer. They were so cold now that they seemed to belong to him. Silver rings, less than a hundred dollars each. She had thought their cheapness might tip Alexis into saying yes. Trick, she thought, not tip, not convince, their cheapness a mockery of the institution even as they entered it. She coughed and her cough echoed to the far corner and back again. It seemed to rouse something in the eyes of the men, but they did not move. Could they hear her? She thought that yes, maybe they could, and that if they could then she should say something. But what? It seemed important to get her words exactly right. Once Alexis had told one of them, or possibly a man a lot like them, to shut up, and she had pushed back the barstool and sent a drink spilling across the bar. What had that been about again? Alice couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember lots of things Alexis had done, but they remained somehow. She lowered her head a little bit more to the center of his body, the flat of her palm against the ice. She thought she did hear something, a kind of low throb pulsing into her arm. Her hand ached, but she kept it there.
A person discarded so much of it as they went along. She couldn’t remember what Alexis had done for a living in South America, or if her hair had been long or short when they first met, or which summer it was when she ate too much ice cream and grew momentarily chubby, so that at night in bed she called out in mock pain in the dark. She couldn’t see that sleeping face in her mind’s eye or rather, she could, but only long enough to get the most general impression.
Here was another face, this other sleeping figure, and she raised her chin again to take it in. She watched the scar and it seemed to grow into a sharp white thread running right through the staring eye. Shut up, Alexis had said, but the man had laughed quick and sharp like it was all just a bad joke. It was this man. She was sure of it.
The more she looked the more she noticed, and the more she noticed the more she wanted to look. It cured nothing—not confusion and not old love—but she wanted to look. The nub of his thumb reminded her of a child’s penis or maybe an eyeless little sea creature. She decided it was beautiful. She decided it was ugly. She was right there, right up against it, and then she was coughing—she is coughing—and she hears the thrum and click of the air conditioner and the name of this place—Page, Arizona, like the thing you read and turn—returns to her. One of the children has refilled her glass and one of the grandchildren has placed a small stuffed dog in the crook of her neck, but that could have been an hour ago. It could have been yesterday. They are all trying their best. Friends, family, even the ex-husbands—they’ve tried to make her comfortable.
Alexis and her stories, they had been right, but not in the way she had presumed. Or even in the way Alice had presumed. They were not warnings. They simply presented a clear choice between two opposites: the mystery of the forest and that other thing: the life Alice has been living since then.
Cold felt worst as the body warmed. Alice stood first on one leg and then the other, tugging at her wet socks, and the pain radiated from her toes into her heels and up her legs. The socks looked like dead animals and she laughed louder than she had in a long time and even that did not bring Alexis up the stairs. To wake her she had to push her own cold body against the other one, the warm one wrapped in blankets in the powerless house.
“Jesus,” Alexis said. “You’re wet.”
“And freezing,” Alice said. It was a boast, but it was also a secret, and it felt good to share it with this person she loved. “Here,” she said. “Let’s do this,” and her hands pulled the other body into a rough tug. She could feel the sharp tailbone against her tummy. Sometimes Alexis seemed like nothing but bones and skin and a stern voice. Even with Alice on top of her holding her body down Alexis spoke directions: just a little bit that way, faster, slower, fingers right there, yes, no, yes. When speaking like this the body lost its wholeness. It became a series of parts, a jigsaw puzzle of breasts and ass, leg and neck. The man had become that too, in a way, first under her scrutiny, and then again as the ice broke apart. The ravens in a row along the bar and maybe the two rings next to them? Or had she never made it out past the tip of the driveway? She is trying to remember it all, to birth it out of this hot bed and body.
She is cold and she’s hot and she’s the muscled thing creeping into the house when everybody is asleep. She’s the one who can’t be trusted despite her constantly saying love, love, love. She is grabbing this small woman and holding her down and why this story right now after all this time? The body is in her arms and she is telling it that everything is okay, that it is safe, but it buzzes with alarm. For a moment she is sure. Her touch is causing it harm. But it’s also a deep solace. After all these years to not be comforted by the thought of her own grown children, but by this woman, always this woman. A woman she had not forgotten about, but at least had reduced to a size she thought appropriate, manageable. The first couple of years after their separation Alice had expected a letter addressed from some faraway place. She had braced herself for it appearing in her mailbox, the unfolding of it, the kind words, the inarguable proof of resiliency. Gradually such a gesture seemed impossible. By then the words would not have harmed her in the safety of her new coupling. It was as if Alexis had said, do what you want with our story, including those last embarrassing moments.
Once when she was fifteen Alice had been caught masturbating. She had simply forgotten to lock her bedroom door. That last sex with Alexis felt like that too: the same shame, the same annoyance at having one’s privacy violated, this time by the squirming body beneath her. “Yes,” it said. “No.”
“Quiet,” Alice told it back.
Their bodies had slowed to an occasional spasm.
“I love you,” it said. Alice could hear the sobbing.
It had been surprising, surprising and disappointing. Alexis had begged in the most ridiculous way. She seemed about to shake apart. And the sounds. The more sounds she made the more resolute Alice grew as she explained why things weren’t working out, how this was best for both of them. Did anybody ever make such sounds before or since? A low keening wail as if up from a deep hole inside herself. Even then she seemed unreachable, as if this were just a performance delivered from a stage. Not all that different from Alice’s ongoing performances in this bed. Who knew dying could be so embarrassing?
“Get up,” Alice told her, with a kind of shocked disgust.
And Alexis did stand up, and wiped the back of her arm across her wet face, and said, “I’m sorry,” the voice a tiny little thing in the dark.
Alice had disregarded that moment, had nudged the memory away because it did not fit inside the frame. Because without that moment—that very real thing—Alexis could fall into myth.
But not myth, not really, because Alexis had moved past that stage onto the next one. She had been mostly forgotten until resurrected by boredom and pain to enter back into her life like the wolf into the plot. A punishment, in a way, a revenge, but also an unexpected gift. It was the wolf that made those stories interesting. Its appearance saved those old Russians from happiness, from the clarity of unforgiving sunshine. “Get up, get up,” Alice had told her lover, but she had been secretly pleased. She feels this pleasure again years later, as if it is a thing to swallow and savor.
She decides to stay in this world a little longer.