9.

SNOWMAN

I used to live across the street from a triangular park in St. Paul which featured a statue of Nathan Hale, his hands tied behind his back, about to be hung by the British for spying on assignment from General Washington. Every winter, the Parks Department hung strings of hundreds of white Christmas lights from tree to tree, and flooded the park to make a skating rink, and Mr. Hale appeared to be not a martyr for the Revolution, but the Spirit of Christmas Present. Our neighbors made a snowman on a snowbank facing our house and I looked at him as he looked at us and I put him into a story before he got diminished by mild weather.

Once there was a snowman who stood in a park in St. Paul in front of a statue of Nathan Hale. The park was on a quiet street where the streetlights lit up soon after five and Christmas lights flickered in the front windows of the big brick houses. He was tall and had nice strong shoulders. He worried that his head might fall off. It felt unsteady sometimes. And then one day a boy accidentally skied into him and knocked his head off and set it back on his shoulders but at a different angle so instead of looking across the street he was looking at the trunk of a tree and the front yard of a green stucco house where a person who seemed to be made of snow stood perfectly still in the yard. She said good morning. “I was waiting for you to look at me,” she said.

She was beautiful, shining, shimmering.

He was already familiar with the tree, a black walnut named Joanne, who had been nattering at him for months, criticizing his posture, laughing when dogs peed on him. She told him that the end was imminent, that soon he would melt and become part of her and she would grow longer limbs so as to caress Ingvar, the Norway pine who stood next to her. “You are precipitation, baby. The purpose of your life is to give me a big drink of water,” she said. “You’re not the bluebird of happiness, you’re not the spirit of Christmas past, so don’t give yourself airs. You’re nothing but snow. So get over yourself.”

The snowman thought there should be more to life than simply melting. He had plenty of time to think and now, thanks to the boy, he had a fresh perspective. Until now, he’d been looking at the row of lighted houses and thinking how cheerful it would be to live inside a house until Joanne informed him that the houses were heated and he would die in there and so would she—“They chop trees into little pieces to fit them into a house. My daddy went like that. Oh, it looks very pleasant from a distance. But it would kill you. Remember that.” But now he looked at the Snow Queen, who stood fifteen feet away, only a sidewalk between them. It was she who, after Joanne said he was “nothing but snow”—she, the Queen, who whispered, Look up in the sky, that’s where we come from, we’re made of stardust. And when our life on earth is over, we’ll rise up into the sky and become clouds and be even more beautiful than you are now.

“O goddess of East Thirty-eighth Street light, glimmering with evanescent desire and invisible emanations of licorice and languish and cinnamon and sycamore,” he said to the Queen. (His thoughts had been a little disconnected since his head got knocked off.) “O you and thou and we and thee! O there is so much more to this world than we will ever ever know.”

Joanne chortled in her low woody voice. “You just wait.”

•   •   •

Water dripped from the trees sometimes. He noticed kids walking around in shirts and jeans, no jackets. A man walked by who was all excited about a trip to Phoenix to visit his girlfriend LaVonne and yet the snowman could see that in another two days the man would walk into the Phoenix terminal and collapse onto the marble floor and die of a cerebral hemorrhage without ever feeling the warmth of the desert. He told the Snow Queen and she said, “You and I are made of millions of unique crystals and we pick up what’s in the air around us—we can feel what people are thinking sometimes as they walk by.”

“Why did the creator give a brain to someone who can’t walk or even move his head and look around and see the world?”

Joanne said, “Here she comes. Ask her.”

A girl in a pink parka and furry cap came into view and stood at the curb by Nathan Hale, apparently waiting for a ride.

“She and her dad made you a few days before Christmas,” said Joanne.

The snowman didn’t know what a dad was, nor Christmas, for that matter, but he said nothing, not wanting to display his ignorance.

“They made you in their own image,” said the Queen. “Winter is lonely for them and it gives them pleasure to see you here.”

“But I have a brain and the power of speech!” cried the snowman. “What is speech for if not to discuss things and make rational choices?”

Joanne laughed. “You ever hear them talk?? It’s nothing but noise. The rustling of my leaves makes more sense than all their talk. What matters is the sun, and rain, and Ingvar. When he touches the tips of my leaves, he thrills me with happiness.”

Cars passed, their tires whispering on the snowy street, and the girl in the pink parka stood at the curb, texting on her cell phone. When she pressed SEND, it gave the snowman tremors and he could feel her message pass through him.

WHERE R U?????

And then: R U MAD AT ME??

He could feel what she felt, her being alone on a cold day and expecting someone to come who did not come and did not come, and then her fear that she had offended the Great U and was unworthy and would now be punished by abandonment.

R U THERE?

“What can we do?” he cried, and the Queen said, “We can only be here for her and feel what she feels.”

The girl was crying. He could almost taste the salt of her tears.

I LOVE U. PLEASE TEXT ME.

She turned toward the snowman and her face was red and rubbery and tears ran down her cheeks. And then he felt tears on his own face. Sharp rays of sunshine through the branches of Joanne. He was starting to melt.

The girl in pink walked away. She looked at the snowman but said nothing. He heard a door slam. A car rolled up a few minutes later. A boy looked out the window. A girl drove the car and three girls sat in the back, all of them laughing and singing. He turned to the driver and said, “Oh well, never mind,” and the car drove away.

•   •   •

The next day the snowman felt smaller. Small and wet. People walked by whistling and commenting on the nice weather. They were all happy and the snowman felt nauseous.

“You doing okay?” said the Snow Queen.

“My head feels like it’s just about to slide off my shoulders.”

“You look good. And I have a feeling we’re going to get a cold snap.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You have to have faith,” said the Queen.

It was a miserable day. Snow was melting in the street and cars went by and splashed sheets of water onto the snowman and he got smaller and smaller and grayer and sadder.

Joanne was singing.

“Snow’s gotta melt,

Water will flow.

I feel my branches

Starting to grow.”

And then his head slid off his shoulders. He could feel it going and there was nothing he could do. It fell on the ground and there he was looking up at the sky. He watched it get dark and he watched the stars come out. A red light crossed the sky and the stars got brighter and brighter. All he could see was the stars and that was his last look and in the morning he was not there, just a park and green grass, and the girl, who had changed from a pink parka to a blue jacket with a big S, walked by in a hurry to get somewhere.

The author looking authorly in 1990, wearing a three-piece suit and big horn-rims, flashing a warm authorial smile, which now looks faintly smug to me. He was earning good money at the time and felt that he had it all figured out, and if the guy on page 160 had run into this fellow, he would've sneered at him as a sell-out. I contain both of these men and have to endure their bickering on a daily basis.