“I know, I know, I know.”
“How far was it, anyway?”
“An hour and half, but the roads were bad. It’s wicked cold out.”
“I know. Constance isn’t even skiing this morning because of the cold. She’s going out in a little while if it warms up.”
We were staying together in a condo at Sugarbush. Girls’ getaway week. This side expedition was my little research trip to Jack’s ancestral home. I was supposed to get groceries, too, and wine, plenty of wine.
“It was silly to come up here,” I said, understanding it fully for the first time. “I don’t know what I expected to see.”
“Come back and hang out with us,” Amy said. “If you’re around, I won’t feel so much pressure to go ski with Constance.”
“I’ll be back in a while. I just want to poke around.”
She didn’t say anything. My friends, I realized, had become good about not saying too much to their nutty friend who remained obsessed with a man she had met on a train traveling from Paris to Amsterdam. They held their judgment, and their tongues, and I understood that was no easy trick.
“If you’re up there, anyway, you should go to the library and look up his family. Local libraries have a lot of information.”
“Maybe I’ll do that.”
“Don’t kill the whole day there, Heather. It’s not worth it. Come back and be with us.”
“Just a little while,” I said.
“Is this healthy, sweetie?”
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s healthy or not. I have to do it. I’m thinking about calling his parents to see if he’s all right. There’s some other element here, Amy. I swear it.”
Amy didn’t say anything.
“It’s just that…,” I said, trying to think, trying to frame what I wanted to say. “It’s just that if Jack wasn’t true, then I don’t know what else to believe in. I really don’t. Everything feels false.”
“I know, sweetie.”
“If I could be that wrong about something—”
“You weren’t wrong. It was just one of those things. One of those things that didn’t quite work out.”
“I wish I could hate him. That would make it much simpler.”
“Maybe you can hate him in time. There’s always hope.”
She meant it as a joke. She meant it to lighten things up.
We hung up after adding a few things to my theoretical shopping list, then I sat a little longer.
What was I doing here? I wondered as I drank the rest of my coffee. It had been half a year since I had last seen Jack. Now, on a ski vacation with my two best friends, I had decided to leave them for a day so I could explore … what? What was I hoping to find? Even if I did discover something about Jack’s background, that still didn’t tell me where he was today, what he was doing, why he had dropped out of my life, everyone’s life, entirely. Besides, it felt pitiful to be checking up on Jack’s past; I felt like a celebrity stalker, although Jack wasn’t a celebrity, and I wasn’t truly a stalker, I hoped.
I turned off the car and climbed out. The cold hit me like a solid force. The weather report had called for an Arctic depression, and during the night the temperature had fallen through the floor. It was twenty degrees below zero out and overcast. I hustled across the parking lot and pushed into the kitchen store. A little doorbell tinkled above me.
“Cold, isn’t it?” asked a woman wearing a red apron.
She had been arranging tea towels.
“I can’t believe how cold it is,” I said. “It’s bitter.”
“March is supposed to be warmer, but for me it’s always the worst winter month. It promises so much and always fails to deliver.”
“Yes,” I said. “It can do that.”
“Can I help you look for anything?”
“No, just browsing, but thanks.”
What I wanted to ask is: By the way, I met this guy and fell for him, and he used to own the land under these stores, his grandfather did, and now he’s gone and you’re here and can you tell me anything about him? That sounded crazy even to me.
46
The bad drunks, the ones that get you in trouble, are the ones that sneak up on you. If you set out to get drunk, then you go at things with a plan in mind, a pacing that a sneaky drunk slyly slips around. During a sneaky drunk, you start with a drink, maybe in the afternoon, and one thing leads to another, and maybe you haven’t eaten enough, at least not enough for the kind of drinking you are about to engage in, and before long you are drunker than you should be, sloshy, and because you haven’t planned for the drunkenness, it seems like a pleasing surprise, an unexpected guest, and you keep offering more drinks to this visitor, delighted to find yourself in a state of glow when you hadn’t even meant to have more than one.
I found myself drunk in an après-ski bar with five young men from the University of Vermont’s ski team at four o’clock in the afternoon on the last day of our girls’ getaway week. Constance and Amy sat beside me, equally drunk, the merriment of feeling happy and loaded beside a fire with five attentive young men locked deep in the experience.
We talked about eyebrows.
We talked about eyebrows because one of the Vermont boys, Peter, posited the theory that the denseness and thickness of a woman’s eyebrows served as a reliable indicator about the denseness and thickness of a woman’s privates. What denseness and thickness meant in relation to a woman’s vagina was hard to pin down, but it was an afternoon discussion, a drunken debate about the impossibility of eyebrows having anything to do with our anatomy south of the equator. But Peter—who was tall and cute and hopelessly full of himself—insisted it was true.
They all wore Carhartts. They all wore fleeces and silly wool hats. They were like a pack of puppies, and Amy, at her wicked best, liked to play with puppies.
“So you’re saying,” Amy said, getting everyone to define terms for a moment, “is that what hands and feet are to men, indicating size and scope of the male organ, eyebrows are to women? That’s a fascinating theory.”
She pulled out the waistband on her jeans an inch and looked down. Then she looked up at the boys, her eyes wide. The boys laughed hard.
“By god, it’s true!” she declared.
The boys laughed again.
“I just read that there is no correlation between hand size and penis size,” Constance said, ever the scholar. “I read that is a myth.”
“Thank goodness,” one of the puppies said, holding up his hand.
I took his hand and examined it. It was a small hand.
“One more round,” Peter, the ringleader, said to the bartender, Tomas.
We drank beer. Vermont Long Trails. And twice we did shots of Jack Daniel’s. It felt like a couple of rivers joining in my belly.
“What might make sense,” Amy said, “is to think the thickness of a woman’s eyebrows has something to do with her passion. That might make a little sense. Women with thick eyebrows are passionate, more than a woman with thin, delicate eyebrows. That only stands to reason.”
“I have thin eyebrows!” Constance said.