A DIARY OF WINTER

The cold came in silent as an owl. The fences stared out at the clenched landscape with gaping eyes, unlocked gates, a path already flattened out in anticipation of the coming snow. Outside, the cars rode away on velvet tires, with the passengers lost in the twilight of their thoughts. All the distances had names but we forgot most of them. Each year the rain washes away a layer of memory that leaves the world new, like amnesia. So much frozen air tightens the muscles of our affection and makes us shrink back into our infancy, where we are invalids in our cribs crying for attention. Or, in my case, tied down with gauze restraints with an oxygen tent fixed to my face. The only telephone was in the nursing station far off. And the nurses padded around on crepe-soled shoes like ghosts. I missed my mother and the dinners under the pale overhead light. I missed the diced ham and peas and the white bread we buttered with slender pats of salty butter. I missed the tepid orange juice diluted with tap water and the scrape of our chairs on the linoleum after eating. The other rooms were as dark as the hospital ward when we climbed the stairs to bed.

            Stairs creaked like whispers. The hall leading to the stairs was like a drunk slumped over an empty wine bottle. Nothing stirred but our legs under the coarse sheets and the quilt that had been crocheted by some forgotten relative. A cat moved like a shadow against the bedroom wall and disappeared. A dish of sour milk stood next to the refrigerator. The dry kibble was gone, and the limp carrot end had been dragged to a corner and left there like a faded obituary. We were eager to grow up, to shed the baggy clothes of our childhood, to wander into the bright wilderness of the outside world with its strangers and moody traffic. The harsh red brick of our school loomed over us with its frowning expression. We had turned in our assignments late again and the notes sent home were carefully discarded under the potato peels of the garbage strainer. All the dinner dishes were chipped along a rim or vaguely cracked under the glaze. The coffee mugs in the cupboard were as stained as the teeth of a heavy smoker. The cheap silver plate forks were worn down to their bitter-tasting brass hearts. Reality was muffled like the sound of a radio in the living room, turned down during a run of ads for toothpaste and toilet brushes. Our neighbor had a box of Chesterfield cigarette coupons she was amassing to redeem for an electric fan one day. But she had cancer and would likely give the box to the girl who cleaned her house each week. I used to run errands for her and she would pay me with an all-day bright red sucker that numbed my mouth.

            These are the memories that lie caked like mud at the back of the mind. Nothing could wash them away, not even the first sharp gnawing of cold against our hands and lips. We carried some things in our souls that lay in a permanent fossilized state. Only a smell could loosen them, the tang of a Chinese apple, the burnt sugar haunting the exhaust fan of a bakery, a car suddenly lowering its window and singeing the air with cigarette smoke. A knotty, crippled chestnut tree cast its gaunt shadow below the street light, discarding its dry twigs into the dead grass after a freeze. It was a monument to our loneliness, a sign our mortality would slowly lose its grip and squander our hopes of the future.

            A ward healer would come down our street once a year and would repeat his old slogans over a loud speaker attached to the car roof. Sometimes a huckster would take out his old horse and load up the cart with beets and tomatoes, celery and radishes, and weighed things in his scale for the old women who tied their coins up in a handkerchief. Their faces were anxious as the scale settled on the fraction of a new pound and the old man would charge a higher price.

            Manna never fell from heaven, no matter how much the Polish women prayed. Their mouths were full of run-down dialects. It made the priest lean in to hear what they said in confession, and then he would slide back the partition and require a rosary be recited at the altar rail as penance. Young women, daughters mostly, replaced them in the Women's Sodality and the altar society and bring flowers to put before the tabernacle.

            I admired the taut face of the parish priest, with its clear eyes and repressed smile. He dared not look too long at a woman's face for fear of alarming her. He mostly watched his shoes as he stepped down from the altar and began giving out communion wafers with an altar boy dabbing the rim of the chalice now and then. The priest's black cassock swayed like a palm tree on a lonely beach. His hands were pink from washing too often. His house keeper made him eggs each morning, and he ate two pieces of toast with his coffee. His soul was lying there under his shirt wrinkled with old desires. He woke up at night and stared deep into the ceiling, afraid to part the obscurity that led down a hill into the city. The monsignor could see right down to the drags of his libido. Even the bishop's dog smelled the weakness of his faith as he slept beside him.

            The neighborhood barely moved in the sluggishness of winter. We were left to gaze from the windows at the death of innocence. Hardly anything of the past remained after the yards turned brown. Even now, with wars raging on all sides of us, in eastern Europe, in the sweltering savannahs of Africa, in the shattered olive groves of Lebanon and Gaza, the swath of cold could only embalm the news and leave it in some remote dimension. A woman's voice sliced through the silence like a kitchen knife. She was on the telephone talking to her mother, asking her for her recipe for lasagna. She stood in the mercury-hued light of the window, her fingers making vague gestures as she described her muddled recollection of dinners in some long forgotten house, how the odor of tomatoes wafted down the hall until it was inescapable. She didn't say she cried when she couldn't remember how. much garlic you crushed and dribbled into the bubbling sauce. The phone call was just an excuse to talk to her, even though she had passed away ten years ago.