his belt, and the pain ceased. He had been eating stupidly of late and had certainly gained weight. He set off for his apartment.
The ceiling paint in the living room was flaking. Really he ought to do something about it. He took a dust mop from a closet and passed it over the floor. The dust collected in feathery little piles, which he gathered up on a piece of cardboard.
Had any of Grace's puppies survived? For a few minutes, he rearranged furniture. He discovered a knucklebone beneath an upholstered chair, where Grace must have stored it. A question formed in his mind as he stooped to pick it up. Was it only her past that had made her afraid? Her puppies lost, cars bearing down on her, endless searching for food, the worm in her heart doing its deadly work. He stared at the bone, scored with her teeth marks.
As if suddenly impelled by a violent push, he went to the telephone. In a notebook written down amid book titles, opera notices, and train schedules to Boston was a list of phone numbers. He had crossed out kitty-cat's name but not her phone number. Still clutching Grace's bone, he dialed it.
On the fifth ring, she answered.
“Hello, Jean,” he said.
He heard her gasp. “So. It's you,” she said.
“It's me,” he agreed.
“And what do you want?” She was breathing rapidly.
“I’d like to see you.”
“What for?”
“Jean. I know how bad it was, the way I spoke to you.”
“You were so-contemptuous!”
“I know. I had no right-”
She broke in. “No one has.”
They fell silent at the same moment. Her breathing had slowed down.
“I haven’t just been hanging around, you know,” she said defiantly.
“I only want to speak to you.”
“You want! You have to think about what other people want once a year!”
“Jean, please…” He dropped the bone on the table.
In a suddenly impetuous rush, she said, “It was so silly what I asked you! I’ll never forget it. I can’t even bear describing it to myself-what happened. All I feel is my own humiliation.”
“We are born into the world and anything can happen,” he said.
“What?”
“Listen. I had a dog. Grace. She got sick. Last night she died at the animal hospital. I guess I wanted to tell someone.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that news,” she said. “But I’m really sorry.” She paused, then went on. “Poor thing,” she said gently, as if speaking to someone standing beside her.
Something painful and thrilling tore at his throat. He held his breath, but still a sob burst from him. Despite its volume, he heard her say, “John? Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes… I don’t know.”
“Oh, John, I can come over this minute. I’ve been running, but I can change clothes in a jiffy. I don’t feel you’re all right.”
The few tears had already dried on his cheeks. They stood in their apartments, hanging on to their telephones, trying to make up their minds if they really wanted to see each other again.
Liza Ward
Snowbound
from The Georgia Review
THE EVENING my mother left, the newscasters were talking about two high-wire circus performers who had plummeted to their deaths, and the storm. Snow was falling heavily all over the Midwest. Travel advisories were in effect.
My father took his feet off the ottoman and set his drink on the end table beside my grandmothers collection of ceramic frogs. He leaned forward, his arms on his knees as we studied the laced pattern of snowflakes on the television screen decorating our section of the map. He got up, went to the window, and put his hands in his pockets. “What time did she leave?” He checked his watch.
“I don’t know,” I said.
My father was convinced my mother had gone on vacation, to visit “somebody-or-other” Reynolds in Kansas City, one of those panty-raid girls. But just that afternoon I’d found a telephone number with a strange area code tucked in the box beside her engagement ring. I knew my mother had secrets, and one of them was that she didn’t plan on coming back.
My father stared out at Van Dorn as if the hooded glaze of streetlights might tell him something. “Well, they didn’t mention a storm in Missouri,” he sighed.
“But the snowflakes were covering it.” I could tell he was worried, and I wanted to show him I was worried too. I took a ruler off the letter desk, opened the French doors, and stepped into the blue glow of the garden. The patio was covered in snow, the table and chairs draped in sheets like a room closed up to keep out the dust. I turned my face upward, feeling the flakes burn my cheeks. It looked as if the sky ended right there above me, over our house. Perhaps it was only my father and I stuck in this white frozen world while everything else stirred with life.
I pressed the ruler into the snow to test how many inches had fallen. When I was a little girl in Chicago, there had been a blizzard the day after my parents’ annual New Year's party. Some of the guests who had passed out in the spare rooms or on couches were trapped, and my mother was making them mimosas. My father and I had closed ourselves in the library to watch the snow. He had pretended to pull a quarter out of my ear, and I had screamed, thinking everything inside me had turned to silver. “Things could be worse,” he’d said. “Some people only produce pennies,” which had made me even more upset. I remember his face looking worried as he sat me down and showed me how he’d done the trick. Then we put on our boots and ventured outside, and my father had plunged a yardstick into the snow. We walked through the hushed city streets hand in hand, making guesses about how much new snow was falling.
“Three inches, Daddy,” I said, stepping back into the living room and closing the door behind me. “Do you think she's all right?”
“Of course. She's probably already in Kansas City.” My father turned off the television and sat back down. “I’ve been thinking.” He drummed his finger on the side of his head. “About getting a new couch. She’d like that, don’t you think?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Oh, yes,” he said, slapping his hand across his thigh. “She definitely would.” Then my father lay down, put one of the old couch cushions over his face, and sighed into the crease of it.
“What are you doing?” I said.
My father didn’t answer.
I went up to my parents’ bedroom and wandered through the dark, running my fingers over the bedspread, the nightstand, the cool glass surface of my mother's vanity table. In the mirror, my faced glowed blue with snow light. I imagined my blond hair turning into icicles, my lips sickly blue, and my mother floating beneath the surface of a frozen pond in a far-off place. I went over to the jewelry box and took out the number.
I moved the telephone off the nightstand and threaded the cord into my mother's dressing room. I turned on the light, closed the door, and crouched in the plastic curtain of my mother's bagged dresses.
I let it ring for a long time.
