• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 975 0

Michelin Man; a black Ski-Doo ski hat with an optimistic yellow tassel that smelled as though a month earlier the dog had put on the hat before taking a dip in kerosene. Peter had a point. If we were going outside, then I'd better dress for it. It was dark by now and probably even colder than it had been, and all I had on was what I always wore: khaki pants with too many pleats, which bunched up unattractively when I sat, a pair of running sneakers, and a gray fleece pullover, and they weren't warm enough, even, for tropical Massachusetts. So I put on the clothes Peter gave me, right over my own. It was like adding another layer of skin, and then another. Even Peter was putting on a few extra layers of flannel and then a big hooded parka over the extra layers, and at one point, after all the piling on of clothes was finished, we turned to each other as if to say, Ta-da! There we were, in our beards and flannel, like a couple of girls dressing side by side for our big night out. It was unlikely and sweet, the way only unlikely things can be.

"Ready?" he asked. I was and said so. Peter threw the plunger into the corner of the room and then leaned over the couch. There was a dog curled up there, among the blankets; I assumed it was the same dog that had been howling from its doghouse earlier. Peter had obviously let him inside while I was in the bathroom. You could barely see the dog ― it was, like everything else in the trailer, somewhere between brown and deep red ― but you could hear it sigh happily when Peter placed his hand on its head and left it there for a moment, and this sound filled me with sadness of the worst, self-pitying kind. How was it that this mottled pooch had these most precious things ― the love and affectionate touch of another, a couch to lie on, a place (two places) to call home ― and I did not? Was this what it had come to? Was I lower and less fortunate than a dog? Was there a sadder person in New England, in the history of New England? Would even sad-sack Ethan Frome look at me and feel lucky to at least have his piss-poor land, his failing farm, his drafty house, his shrewish wife, his impossible true love, his barely functional vocabulary? Would even Ethan Frome be glad he wasn't me? Yes, the self-pity was thick in the air; the room was full of it, the way I had been full of pee a few minutes earlier. Maybe that's what the other toilet had been for. It was an interesting idea ― having a place in which to deposit your self-pity ― and it made me feel better, for a second, for having thought it.

Then whoosh, we went out through the cold and the snow and into the van. I can't remember anything about it except that at first it wasn't any warmer inside the van than out. Oh, was it cold! I can't emphasize that enough. It was the kind of cold that makes you insane and single minded, thinking only about how to get warmer, warmer, warmer. The heater was so slow in its heating, and to keep myself from thinking about how cold I was, I concentrated on Peter's directions to turn this way and that, and on the snow in the headlights, swirling and bouncing like molecules, and outside the snow the deep, deep darkness. Remembering it now, I realize it was nice: the world felt small and homey, just me and Peter and the snow and the darkness and the truck and the heat ― because here it finally came, really blasting at us, just in time for me to pull up in front of the Robert Frost Place. The house was your standard old white farmhouse-the sort where you wouldn't be able to keep the hornets out during the summer, or the heat in during the winter-and the only things truly notable about it were that it hadn't been burned down yet, it was ringed by parked cars, and it was lit up like Christmas. Every light in the house must have been on, and even Mr. Frost must have been able to see it from his new and more permanent home in the Great Beyond.

"What's going on here?" I asked.

Peter shrugged, which I took to mean, I don't know.

"Let's go see," I said. Peter shrugged again, which I took to mean, No.

"Why not?" I asked,