The Ice Storm by Rick Moody Page A

that’s not a family you want to be part of.
    â€”Dad.
    They walked in cinnamon slush. They sank deeply into it. The precipitation fell with a relentless uniformity. On nearby communities with less affluent tax bases—Stamford and Norwalk—as well as on New Canaan’s wealthy. The sleet ruined Wendy’s toe socks and her father’s cordovan loafers and at the same time, across town, it ruined the orthopedic shoes of Dan Holmes’s sister, Sarah Joe, one of the special-education kids at Saxe Junior High. Sarah Joe’s heart was all battered and worn, and she seemed to know it. But she managed to trudge along. The kids said that she would sleep with anyone. Wendy wondered if Sarah Joe had any instincts about positions and sex, if she knew about the myth of the vaginal orgasm, or if she felt somehow intuitively that her sexual fumblings were more gratifying with someone she loved. Sarah Joe, laboring up Brushy Ridge Road herself, through the slush, walking up that hill that all the boys careened down in tenth gear.
    Somewhere the popular girls were trapped indoors with their ephemeral crushes, the infatuations they shared with no one. And elsewhere the half-dozen poor boys of New Canaan High, whose fathers would have to go out into the snow and run the plows, watched TV from couches covered in flame-retardant vinyl. The sleet and snow turned the last light a sullen yellow. The sky looked awful, nauseating.
    Wendy wanted to know why conversations failed and how to teach compassion and why people fell out of love and she wanted to know it all by the time she got back to the house. She wanted her father to crusade for less peer pressure in the high school and to oppose the bombing of faraway neutral countries and to support limits on presidential power and to devise a plan whereby each kid under eighteen in New Canaan had to spend one afternoon a week with Dan Holmes’s sister, Sarah Joe, or with that other kid, Will Fuller, whom everybody called faggot . Wendy wanted her father to make restitution for his own confusion and estrangement and drunkenness.
    So when he asked how cold her feet were and then hoisted her into his arms for the last quarter mile, past Silver Meadow, down the embankment, through the thicket of barren trees, across the circle in the driveway, the driveway covered with frosted maple leaves, maple leaves, maple leaves, where a single lonely soccer ball lay buried in a crater of slush, the soccer ball Paul had been kicking around despondently before going into the city—when her father carried her close to his chest in silence, she thought it was fine. She would put off her journey to the Himalayan kingdom of the Inhumans. She would stay with her family for now.

More of same—or worse. That was the weather report. The mercury would retreat into its little bulb. The heavens would open. Elena foresaw glazed and treacherous roads. Ski jackets with fur fringe. Hats with pom-poms. And this wasn’t all bad. Any excuse to avoid the Halfords’ party was a blessing.
    She was in the library. Cross-legged on the sofa. Her home was silent as a library. Reading was a brave spiritual journey for Elena Hood, and little piles of books were for her like the stacks of rubble—the Tibetan prayer walls—that marked the progress of pilgrims. There was a warm force field, an invincibility, around her in the midst of this reading journey, no matter how conventional it was by 1973, no matter how trammeled, shopworn. She cherished the I Ching and the tarot deck, though she told no one in the suburbs; she believed her decisions were mapped by unseen cartographers. She purchased books from the occult and religious studies sections according to their spines, or if she overheard talk about a title, or if it was advertised in Psychology Today .
    In her library, in firelight, she read, in silence. Her hair was frosted blond. Her glasses were thick, but she wore them only for reading.