Snowtober
Because the three Plumbs had agreed on the phone the previous evening that they should not drink in front of their brother Leo, they were all—unbeknownst to one another—sitting in separate bars in and around Grand Central, savoring a furtive cocktail before lunch.
It was a strange kind of autumn afternoon. Two days earlier, a nor’easter had roared up the mid-Atlantic coast, colliding with a cold front pushing east from Ohio and an arctic mass dipping down from Canada. The resulting storm had dropped a record-breaking amount of snow in some places, blanketing towns from Pennsylvania to Maine with a freakishly early winter. In the small commuter town thirty miles north of Manhattan where Melody Plumb lived, most of the trees were still shouldering their autumn foliage, and many had been destroyed or damaged by the snow and ice. The streets were littered with fallen limbs, power was still out in some towns, the mayor was talking about canceling Halloween.
In spite of the lingering cold and spotty power outages, Melody’s train ride into Manhattan was uneventful. She was settled in at the lobby bar of the Hyatt Hotel on Forty-Second Street where she knew she wouldn’t run into her brother or sister; she’d suggested the hotel restaurant for lunch instead of their usual gathering spot, Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, and had been mocked by Jack and Beatrice, the Hyatt not landing on their list of venues deemed acceptable by some arcane criteria she had zero interest in decoding. She refused to feel inferior to those two anymore, refused to be diminished because she didn’t share their veneration for everything old Manhattan.
Sitting at a table near the soaring windows on the upper level of the hotel’s massive lobby (which was, she had to admit, completely unwelcoming—too big and gray and modern, some awful kind of sculpture made of steel tubing lurked overhead, she could hear Jack’s and Bea’s pointed ridicule in absentia; she was relieved they weren’t there), Melody ordered the least expensive glass of white wine (twelve dollars, more than she would spend on an entire bottle at home) and hoped the bartender had a generous pour.
The weather had remained unseasonably cold since the storm, but the sun was finally breaking through and the temperatures beginning to rise. The piles of snow at every Midtown crosswalk were rapidly melting into unnavigable puddles of slush and ice. Melody watched a particularly inelegant woman try to leap over the standing water and miss by inches, her bright red ballet flat landing squarely in the water, which had to be frigid, and filthy. Melody would have loved a delicate pair of shoes like those and she would have known better than to wear them on a day like today.
She felt a twinge of anxiety as she thought of her daughters heading uptown and having to navigate the treacherous street corners. She took a sip of her wine (so-so), removed her phone from her pocket, and opened her favorite app, the one Nora called Stalkerville. She hit the “find” button and waited for the map to load and for the dots that represented her sixteen-year-old twins to materialize on the screen.
Melody couldn’t believe the miracle of a handheld device that allowed her to track Nora’s and Louisa’s precise whereabouts as long as they had their phones. And they were teenagers; they always had their phones. As the map started to appear, she felt the familiar panicky palpitations until the tiny, blue pulsating circles and the word Found! popped up at the top of the screen, showing the girls exactly where they were supposed to be, at the SAT tutoring center uptown.
They’d been taking the weekend classes for over a month, and usually Melody tracked their morning progress from her kitchen table, watching the blue dots slowly glide north from Grand Central according to her meticulous directions: From the train station, they should take the Madison Avenue bus to Fifty-Ninth Street where they would disembark and walk west to the tutoring center on Sixty-Third just off Columbus. They were not to walk along the park side, but were supposed to walk on the south side of the street, passing by the parade of uniformed doormen, who would hear them scream for help if they were in trouble. They were strictly forbidden from entering Central Park or deviating from their route. Melody put the fear of God into them every week, filling their heads with stories of girls being snatched or lost, forced into prostitution or murdered and dumped in the river.
“The Upper West Side is not exactly Calcutta,” her husband, Walter, would gently argue. But she got scared. The thought of them wandering the city without her protecting their flank made her heart thud, her palms sweat. They were sweating now. When they’d all disembarked at Grand Central that morning, she hadn’t wanted to let them go. On a Saturday, the terminal was full with tourists checking guidebooks and train schedules and trying to find the Whispering
Gallery. She’d kissed them good-bye and had watched until she could no longer see the backs of their heads—one blond, the other brunette. They didn’t look like visitors; there was nothing tentative about how they moved through the crowd. They looked like they belonged to the city, which filled Melody with dread. She wanted them to belong to her, to stop getting older. They didn’t confide every last thought or desire or worry anymore; she didn’t know their hearts and minds the way she used to. Melody knew that letting them grow and go was the proper order of life. She wanted them to be strong and independent and happy—more than anything she wanted them to be happy—but that she no longer had a fix on their inner workings made her light-headed. If she couldn’t be sure how they were moving through the world, she could at least watch them move through the world, right there in the palm of her hand. She could at least have that.
“Leo’s never paying you back,” Walter had said as she was leaving for the train station. “You’re all dreaming, wasting your time.”
Though Melody feared he was right, she had to believe he wasn’t. They’d borrowed a lot of money to buy their house, a tiny but historic building on one of their town’s most beautiful streets, only to watch the economy collapse and property values sink. The fluctuating interest rate was about to rise on the mortgage they already couldn’t afford. With little equity in the house, they couldn’t refinance. College was approaching and they had next to nothing in the bank; she’d been counting on The Nest.
Out on the street, Melody watched people tug off their gloves and unwind scarves, lift their faces to the sun. She felt a tiny surge of satisfaction knowing that she could spend the entire afternoon indoors if she wanted. The main reason Melody loved the bar at the Hyatt was because she could access it through an underpopulated, nondescript hallway connecting the hotel to Grand Central. When it was time for lunch, she’d return to the terminal through her secret corridor and head downstairs to the Oyster Bar. She would spend hours in New York City and not have to step one sensibly shod foot onto pavement, could entirely avoid breathing the Manhattan air, which she always pictured as rife with gray particulate. During her and Walt’s brief stint living in Upper (upper) Manhattan where the twins were born, she’d waged a ferocious, losing battle with the city’s soot. No matter how many times she wiped the woodwork with a dampened cloth, the flecks of black would reappear, sometimes within hours. Minus any verifiable source, the residue was worrisome to her. It felt like a physical manifestation of the city’s decay, all the teeming masses being worn down to grimy, gray window dust.
She caught sight of another woman across the room holding a wineglass, and it took a moment for her to recognize her own reflection. Her hair was blonder than usual—she’d chosen a lighter shade at the drugstore and hoped the color would soften the elongated nose and strong chin both she and her sister, Beatrice, had inherited from their father’s New England ancestors. Somehow, the strong features that worked in Bea’s favor (Madam X, Leo used to call Bea, after the Sargent portrait) just made Melody look unintentionally dour. She particularly resented her face around Halloween. One year when the girls were little and they were out shopping for costumes, Nora had pointed to an advertisement featuring a witch—not an excessively ugly one, no warts or green face or rotten teeth but still, a witch—standing over a boiling cauldron and had said, “Look! It’s Mommy!”
Melody picked her bar bill up from the table and handed it to the waiter with a credit card. He’s never paying you back, Walt had said. Oh yes he is, thought Melody. There was no way that one night of Leo’s stupidity, his debauchery, was going to ruin her daughters’ future, not when they’d worked so hard, not when she’d pushed them to dream big. They were not going to community college.
Melody looked at the map on her phone again. There was another private reason she loved the blue dots with their animated ripples so much; they reminded her of the very first ultrasound where she and Walt had seen twin heartbeats, two misshapen grayish shadows thumping arrhythmically deep inside her pelvis.
Two for the price of one, the cheerful technician had told them as Walt gripped her hand and they both stared at the screen and then at each other and grinned like the starry naifs they were. She remembered thinking in that moment: It won’t ever get better than this. And in some ways she’d been right, had known even then she would never feel so capable, so stalwart a protector once she pushed those vulnerable, beating hearts out into the world.
The waiter was coming toward her now with a worried look on his face. She sighed and opened her wallet again. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, handing her the Visa she’d hoped had a little more juice on it, “but this was declined.”
“It’s okay,” Melody said, digging out the secret card she’d activated without telling Walt; he would kill her if he knew. Just as he’d kill her if he found out that even though the SAT place in the city was cheaper than the suburban private tutor she’d wanted to hire, it was still twice as much as she’d admitted, which was why she needed the extra card. “I meant to give you this one.” She watched the waiter back at his station as he swiped, both of them holding perfectly still and only exhaling when the machine started spitting out a receipt.
I like our life, Walt had said to her that morning, pulling her close. I like you. Can’t you pretend—just a little—to like me, too? He smiled as he said it, but she knew he sometimes worried. She had relaxed then into his reassuring girth, breathed in his comforting scent—soap and freshly laundered shirt and spearmint gum. She’d closed her eyes and pictured Nora and Louisa, lovely and lithe, clothed in satiny caps and gowns on a leafy quad in a quaint New England town, the morning sun illuminating their eager faces, the future unfurling ahead of them like an undulating bolt of silk. They were so smart and beautiful and honest and kind. She wanted them to have everything—the chances she’d never had, the opportunities she’d promised. I do like you, Walter, she’d mumbled into his shoulder. I like you so much. It’s me I hate.
From The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Copyright 2016 by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
