Frozen

It was a small story, covered only in the local press, largely ignored by the aggressive festivities of the holiday season:

“Man Found Frozen in Snow Bank”

As children set out on tottering skates, onto frozen ponds and lakes, and cars and SUV’s circled elusive parking spaces at the mall like wolfish predators, the news came and fell like gentle snowflakes.

He had been discovered by accident under the snow that had piled four feet thick after the last storm. The plows had worked tirelessly, moving the snow away from the roads and streets onto the sides where it mounded on the sidewalks. On the sidewalk on the right a narrow path has been cleared and I walk on it, the snow on
either side piled up almost as tall as me.

The cold air stings my cheeks pinches out their glowing, pink color. I brace against the wind that rushes into any openings it can find. The sliver of skin on my forehead, the tip of my nose and my earlobes are under attack.

My snow boots crunch as I stumble on a patch of ice on my way down the hill. I am walking because driving seems dangerous. Despite the efforts of the plows wet hunks of snow and ice lie on the surface waiting for the unwary or for those who don’t have anti-lock brakes.

I can barely hear the cars as they slowly creep up behind me, the low, laboring growl of the gears only apparent up close. Going down that steep hill on Summit is hair-raising even in perfect weather, the road rearing up like the crest of a roller coaster, before plunging down at a steep angle.

Now, with the snow piled up on either side of the road, the sand, grit and chemicals turning the blacktop a brownish-grey, it is quite frightening, the thought of losing control. It’s scary making my way on the sidewalk, not knowing when a vehicle might skid right off the road and into me. I keep glancing behind me just to be sure.

The store is almost empty of people and products. I am already too late at 10 in the morning. After the storm lifted late last night, people had scurried around since early morning, raiding the shelves of bread and butter and eggs and milk. Still there is a small cardboard container of full-fat cream left and one loaf of raisin bread. Oh well! It’s better than nothing. I stand at the register waiting for the gum chewing, silent clerk, to ring up my purchases.

It’s then that I see the headline. Except, it’s not a headline really, more of an afterthought. The heading is just at the crease of the paper, the story below the fold, tantalizingly out of reach, impossible to read from where I stand.

Man found frozen in snow bank.

I buy the newspaper, The Boston Times, just to know something of what is going on in this city I call home. Even though it never quite feels like home. The skies are too grey, the roads too narrow, the snow lies too thick on the ground, the accent disconcertingly different, the literary events in Brookline too distant. Still, it’s where I’ve lived for three years so for lack of another word I call it home.

I had moved here, to Boston, after the divorce. It was quite funny really, clichéd.
A month after our seventh anniversary—talk about an itch—he (I refuse to use his name now) stood by the bedroom window, looking out at the dry Southern California mountains. He was wearing blue boxers. I remember focusing on the color, hazy and indistinct until I put my glasses on.

Injecting a smile into my voice, I looked at his back, worried about this strange funk he’s been in for a few months. “It will pass,” I told myself, “we were meant to be together.” I wanted to reach out and touch him, connect somehow, wanting to make everything right. To caress his shoulder and return to a time before he had left on his trip to Minneapolis. Frozen, cold Minneapolis in winter for a week-long business meeting. Some executive training session, something corporate-sounding like that I don’t really remember the details any more. He had called to say that the trip had got extended for an additional four days. I didn’t question him then, didn’t demand to know why. He has been back for less than a week.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” I ask.

I see his left shoulder shrug, “Yeah.”

I swing my legs off the bed and say what I have said automatically for seven years, something to which he automatically has always responded to for seven years.

“I love you.” I’m sliding my feet into oversized, warm house slippers when I register his silence.

I try to be playful. “So…don’t you?”

“What?” he asks, trying to delay what he wanted to say.

“Love me.”

“Yes, I love you…” his voice trails off leaving his thoughts incomplete. Silence filled with something indefinable swelled between us.

“But?” I prod, working to keep my tone light.

“But…I’m not sure I am in love with you any more.”

“What does that mean? Is there…is there someone else?”

Silence. He shifts uncomfortably and I have my answer.

A year after the divorce, looking for a place as different from Southern California as possible, I arrived in the Boston area, as the newest assistant librarian at the Milton Community Library. It was a demotion. I’d been a junior librarian in Simi Valley but I didn’t care.

Clutching the milk and bread in one hand and the paper (the store was out of bags) in the other I make my way back to the apartment. Walking uphill takes longer and my nose starts dripping, the cold wiggling its way deep inside me.

Panting heavily I open the door to the breezeway of the apartment complex and put the key in the lock of 19A. The contrast between the cold outside and the heat inside makes my glasses fog up instantly. I walk straight into the little, three-legged table in the entry that holds a wooden vase and scrape the skin off my right shin.

Saturdays are the only days now that I drink coffee. No decaf. I brew it carefully, grinding the beans, using cold water, a gold filter. I fill my mug and sit at the dinette table, ready for the newspaper. I do that sometimes, keep myself waiting for small pleasures. A cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee with real cream and sugar, a newspaper with an intriguing story.

The frozen man was a John Doe and no one in the area of Dorchester where he was found could identify him. Of indeterminate age, maybe forty, perhaps fifty.

Most certainly homeless. There was no mention of his race. No identification found on him. The theory was that he had a heart attack or simply fell and knocked himself out as the snow was falling. The sidewalks had certainly been slick for weeks. In the dark emptiness of night when the only signs of life were the puffs of smoke from the chimneys and the only vehicles were snow plows and cop cars, he lay cushioned on fresh snow as the fierce storm dumped a white, soft blanket on him. He died where he lay. An autopsy would reveal more.

He had just been found four days ago, a full week after the last storm had passed. Discovered as the snow began to melt under the weak heat of the sun. A passerby had seen the edge of a coat sticking out from the snow and had reached out to tug it free. He was curious. He felt the heft of a body as a human leg came sliding out from under the mound.

I wonder if it’s snowing in Minneapolis. I no longer have a television otherwise I could have watched the meteorologists standing beside their swirling maps and seen the weather in other parts of the country. They don’t study meteors…why call them meteorologists? Anyway. I am restless today. After reading the newspaper I try to find a book from one of the hundreds crammed into shelves throughout the apartment. Nothing holds my interest; none of them jump off the shelf, begging to be read. My thoughts jump back to that morning in Simi Valley.

I find myself wanting to know if he was now married to that woman in Minneapolis, whether he has children. Perhaps he went tobogganing in the fresh snow with a three year old today. She has jet black hair like his and blue…no…no hazel eyes, like that woman. At least I think that is the color of her eyes. I’ve never seen her, not even a picture. You can’t blame me, can you? Who wants to see the photograph of her ex’s new love? This way I can make and re-make her any way I want.

In my imagination, I make and re-make her several times. Sometimes, most times, she is gorgeous, a blue-eyed, blonde, media-perfect. Of course, he had fallen under her spell. Spells can be cast and broken easily. Sometimes she morphs into a brunette with hazel eyes. Breathtaking! At other times she is normal, not beautiful, not ugly just ordinary. Perfectly ordinary. I can be thankful for being rid of a man who prefers ordinary.

The green, red and white fairy lights in the house across from the apartments come on, flooding my kitchen with dancing colors. Where did the time go? It’s already evening. One by one the houses, town-homes and other apartments all come alive. Ten days to Christmas and Boston is determined to enjoy itself.

The doorbell of the apartment next door is rigged to play “Dashing through the snow,” every time it was pressed. This evening I’ve listened to aggravating fragments of the tune four times already. I realize I am not sure how my doorbell sounds.

I walk to the door and leaving it open, step into the hallway, my toes digging into the stiff pile of industrial carpet, and ring the bell. It buzzes like a horde of angry bees. Strange!

I return to the newspaper, reading about the holiday events, the review of The Nutcracker, the ads for last-minute holiday shopping, until it’s time for dinner.

Tomorrow is a working day. I wonder if I should attend the Christmas party this year. Who am I kidding? I’ve not attended a single one since I arrived here.

It’s too much trouble, shopping, finding the right dress, doing my make-up, the unwilling excitement in the pit of my stomach, all for what? To be stuck, sitting in a chair hugging the wall, drinking watered down eggnog while drunken co-workers made fools of themselves?

I’ll stay in, maybe do some baking, fill the apartment with the scents of cooking. Approximate the holidays. Maybe someone would call. Yes, some friend from the past, someone I had lost touch with, would track me down and we would talk.
I would be breezy talk with excitement of living in Boston.

“What a great city,” she would say with a sigh, the sounds of a toddler being chased by an older child in the background. “Sometimes I wish I could just get away you know. Jason, stop chasing Todd. Sorry…these kids. Where was I? Yes, I’m not like you. I can’t just move hundreds…thousands of miles away. That’s so brave. So you.” Her voice would be wistful, longing for the adventure she envies in my life.

I would say, with an undercurrent of blasé sophistication in my voice, “Well, you know, I just had to do it. Live for myself, I mean. I was so done with him. I can’t tell you how wonderful it’s been…the museums, the opera, the symphony, the shopping. Divine.”

I love Ramen noodles. They are so versatile. Sometimes I boil them by themselves. Other times I cut up pieces of hot dog and add a cup of frozen, mixed vegetables. A dash of Tobasco and two of Worcestershire and it is delicious.

Tonight I’m trying the new hot chili flavor.

It seems quiet suddenly and I wonder why. Damn! The furnace must be on the fritz again. Heat has stopped blowing into the apartment and the lull makes the apartment seem incomplete somehow. I call maintenance and the super tells me that it will take three or four hours but it will be fixed tonight. He promises. I leave the dirty bowl, one fork and the small pot I had cooked the noodles in, in the sink. I’ll wash them tomorrow.

My feet feel like ice as I climb into bed. I wait for the old electric blanket to heat, which seems to take longer each time I switch it on. I shuffle my legs, digging into the bedclothes, trying to find my spot. My feet are always the last to get warm.

They’re still stubbornly frozen.

I think about the man found in the snowbank. I wonder if they will ever find out who he was. And if they do will there be a slow enough news day to report it? I rub my feet together, trying to help the electric blanket along, willing my body to warm up. Somehow I know what he must have felt like, that frozen man, deep in the snow, his body turning to ice, the blood freezing in his veins.

As my eyes grow heavy with sleep the heat kicks on, loud in the dense silence.