I Am Loved.
He didn’t know it but at that moment he was already a part of her past.
WARMING HOUSE BY JEFF ESTERHOLM 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 002
Showering was useless. He couldn’t dry off. He stood at the open hotel window and the heat and tropical decay, the street sounds—the traffic rumble and horns, the vendors at their kiosks on the square, birds and dogs—all slid in on the damp air. A ceiling fan stirred the soup.
She was asleep, wound up in the white sheets. He didn’t know how she could do it.
He sat in the chair by the window and poured a glass of bourbon from the bottle they had packed. It was like drinking the air.
They were half-way into a two-week Central American road trip—her idea, its source a 1960s Albert Finney-Audrey Hepburn movie about a couple driving through Europe, recalling their past to stop the collapse of their present—and at this mid-point when they would begin working their way north in a few hours, he had been trying to remember her.
One bare shoulder had slipped the sheets and it glowed in the waves of her copper wire hair.
The telephone, a black rotary model of the sort he hadn’t seen since he was a boy, rang on the table at his side of the bed. It would be the wake-up call, but he didn’t bother to answer it. After three rings she reached blindly for the handset and rolled back, the black coil of cord stretched across his vacant pillow. The plumping flesh at either side of her bent elbow glistened and the sheen, particular to her coloring—winter white or summertime pink—no matter what her age was at the time, 14, 25, 49, took him back to a winter in the Midwest, 35 years before.
There were hockey and figure skating rinks behind Pattison Elementary, between the school’s playing fields and the scrubby terrain of a hobo’s jungle where those riders of the Great Northern were said to rest up before continuing on their way. Between the two rinks, which were maintained by the city, the parks department flooding both spaces at the first sign of a freeze and keeping the resulting surfaces clear of snow all winter-long and in summer touching up the boards of the hockey rink with white paint, was the warming house.
He didn’t skate, he didn’t know how to skate, and he had no interest in learning how to skate—Conway, a real hard-nose, had suggested he play hockey because he wouldn’t need to know how, skating was not a skill required in their roughneck, under-the-winter-night-sky version of the game—but at 14, along with many others from the North 21st Street neighborhood who streamed in and out, singly and in groups, the rare twosome, the warming house was the winter locus of teenage efflorescence. Three or four nights a week he would be there, observant, sitting on the bench that ran along three walls, interrupted by only the door and the stoked woodstove, open black galoshes on his feet, the floor nicked and chewed by years of hockey and figure skating blades.
That mid-February night, Conway shuffled in with a girl and neither wore the black skates or the white. He had a record album under his arm, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, his 14-year-old tough kid daffiness jettisoned for some other perceived attitude of cool, his huge green parka hanging open and showing the orange interior. The girl with him in the pea-coat and matching cap, scarf and mittens, the pin of the moment on her lapel, white letters on red: I Am Loved.
It was astonishing, their difference from everyone else and the assurance—Conway and the girl sat together, shoulder to shoulder on the bench, smiles on their faces—that they knew something more than these other kids in the warming house.
He had thought it was her, the girl from algebra, third period, where he was fuddled enough and then she had been added into the mix of formulae and equations, but he wasn’t sure until she pulled off the white-knit cap and her copper-wire hair tumbled down. She looked at him, her cheeks rosy, glistening in the warming house, and he went lightheaded. I Am Loved. Conway didn’t know it but at that moment he was already a part of her past.
“Sí,” she said, “gracias,” then she rolled back to hang up the phone. Seeing him, she smiled and said, “Good morning,” and with the edge of her curved index finger wiped the sweat from her upper lip, as if, after all the preceding years, the hard work had been done and now they could enjoy themselves, finally.
JEFF ESTERHOLM
