First Snow
For Robin Sterns, 1953-1972
I never knew you in a season of green leaves and flowers. When we met it was early gold in New England, and the first frost of September had just touched the last thick grasses of August. Five years in this country, and I had never yet loved a piece of land. I'd come straight from the lush tropical forests of a Caribbean mountain range to the South Side of Chicago, a landscape that hurt my senses, and although Lake Michigan's steely windblown waters sometimes won my grudging admiration, though I stood still to watch the smoggy, prune-colored skies bruise into color at sunset, there was nothing that tempted me to root. That summer I decided to leave before another sooty winter clamped down on the city. At the last minute I got into a small college in the White Mountains of New Hampshire that was within my means and an easy hitchhike from my boyfriend's school in Vermont. All I wanted was out.
Riding the bus north from Boston we swung through the dark, following a thread of lights, stopping to let silent passengers off in front of small town post offices and supermarkets. Untalkative women and men and sleepy children stepped out into the leafy smelling dark and the bus ground back onto I-93, while the land rose in ever sharper granite shadows out of reach of the headlights. You came the other way-- the bus from White River Junction that meets the New York train.
That first night they put us all at the Inn until the dorms were ready. Your tentative knock came just as I was pulling out a nightgown, trying to settle down from the strange thrill of being a thousand miles from home. "Oh, God", I thought, "a debutante. What on earth are we going to talk about?" You looked like a model, and I was horrified to discover that you were one. Tall, thin, a head covered with true-gold hair the exact color of the looted Egyptian treasures at the Oriental Institute, big blue eyes and a touch of Texas in your soft voice. I was fresh from the rallies over Cambodia, fresh from discussing the myth of vaginal orgasm and the politics of housework. I wore old mauve lace and flowered cotton dresses from second hand stores one day, lumberjack shirts and painter's pants the next, my rarely brushed hair hanging in dark tangles around my face. "Oh well," I thought, "It's just for the night."
But in the morning it was a new world. The roads we had barreled down in the dark were lined with the pale yellow and shocking white of thick-standing birch trees whose peeling skin revealed glimpses of smooth touchable pinks and creamy oranges. A glittering frost had spread its net over the landscape, each blade and stalk of grass outlined in winking, shifting flashes of light; acres of sparkling beauty without iron gates and railings, without parking meters or fire hydrants. And just down the road a swift shallow river sang between a bed of brown pebbles and the thinnest possible layer of green translucent ice. Equally new to northern seasons, we were unanimous in our exhilaration.
From first frost to snowfall we were drunk with glory. The college administration made us roommates, and we became inseparable. Neither of us was quite what we had seemed. You had a wild, manic sense of humor, and an iron tang that your easy curls and winsome charm made surprising, while I was much shyer than my stride. I showed you my poems, scratched in green ink into my journal, and you took them to heart, probing them, tasting the words, asking intently after each scrap of meaning. You played me your favorite rock bands with that same intentness..."You see? You hear that? There! That!" until I had satisfied your urgency to share the one beat you loved best.
We filled our room with the litter of the shedding trees, each new magenta or salmon leaf as astonishing as the last. In your long grey coat you walked in the flaming woods for hours, coming back silent, full of autumn, the season neither of us had ever seen before. And you waited for snow. Growing up in Houston, and this last year in Israel, you had never seen it fall. You wanted to be outside when it began, you said, (like girls planning their first embraces), to see the first flakes spinning down and lift your face to the kiss of winter.
Meanwhile we told stories, talking from bed to bed in the dark. I remember your face in the lamplight, soft and hard, telling me about your father's affairs with girls your age, your mother's ambitions for you, your unripened ovaries that let you forget about birth control, all the stupid things men said in order to bed you. Your misfortune in looking like Goldilocks.
I lent you books. You drew me pictures. Our lives began to knit together, like the matted roots of wildflowers, blooming in the narrow openings of the forest. Nights while the stars swung overhead we leaned in slow, delicious free fall toward each other’s arms, knowing we would arrive in our own good time. Apples, berries, nuts, pumpkins, late corn all spilled their abundance from the roadside stands. Around us the trees glowed in the colors of sun-ripe fruit, flickering and bright as faces turned to a hidden fire. But all the time the roots were reaching for a place deeper than the approaching frost, a race against the tilt of the earth's axis.
David still came every other weekend. Whenever he arrived, you whisked yourself out of sight and went to stay with a friend, pushing privacy on us just a little too soon, ruining the tact of your exit with a wry and hilarious wink, your falsetto voice drifting back to us over your shoulder as you waltzed across the empty fields singing "Roooooses, Oh, Roooses and Moooonlight!".
I dream sometimes of catching you as you run, crying Robin, don't go, come back, with your saucy, tea-cup-blue eyes full of maple leaves. Stay here, with your bad dreams from the forced sale of your girlhood to modeling agents who fingered you while your mother took the cash saying that’s the price of glamour. Come back with your hair of Jerusalem gold and your monkey screeches in the dark, and give me time to leave him for you. But you turn, laughing, and wave, and leave me here among the living.
Ten years later and a thousand miles west of the place where I first heard the news, I wake with the same muscle spasm freezing my neck. This grey, blizzard-ridden morning in the Midwest, I can still imagine you as I did all the first winter of your absence, walking toward me through the snow-choked forests, on endless pilgrimage back to me, to life, to the lighted windows of our house. "It took me weeks to get here," you would say, coming in and stamping the snow from your boots, "months, years, it took me ten years to get here, but I had to let you know I was alright. It wasn't me in the car. It was someone else."
Like you, I was asleep when it happened, or I would have felt you tear away. I woke from a deep, dreamless dark to find David bending over me, and your note, "Gone to Maine for the weekend with Mary and Jeff. Back Sunday night. I love you." Then I was in the kitchen, stooping to take the soufflé out of the oven. Sorry I had missed your departure. Looking forward to food. I had the casserole in my hands, just setting it on the counter, when they came in together, the three of them, solemn as storks stepping through the door. “I wanted to tell you because you're her friend,” he said, and I thought Robin, you've been annoying the Dean again. Now he's angry, you and your jokes. But why tell me? “Robin and Jeff were killed,” he said, “in an accident two hours ago in Maine.”
Wait a minute. What? What did you say? Wait a minute. My mind stuttering, trying to catch up with my body, which was already clinging to David and sobbing so hard that when the others ran in, I couldn't even say your name.
Nothing was real, except once I remember Beverly's shocked face in my doorway saying, "Their things are still in their rooms!" It made no sense. That, and the way my mind went in circles, wondering where the hell you were when I needed you because, Robin, something terrible happened, and then remembering, each time with a slightly smaller sickening jolt, that the terrible thing and your absence were the same. On your wall was a postcard with a painting of the Snow Queen, white and bloodless on her silver sleigh, driving away into the blizzard with young Hans, bound by cruel enchantments, clinging to the back. I lay and watched it for hours, waiting for you to come home.
Much later, when she could talk again, Mary told me how it was. You were dozing, your head cushioned against the door. Jeff was driving, and she sat between you. She said the car slid outward into the curve and she turned to Jeff and said “we're going to hit that truck,” and his last words were “I know,” and then she was lying on the road watching the reflection of red flashing lights on the wet tar. They lifted her into an ambulance, and put Jeff beside her. She kept asking where you were, and they'd tell her you were being taken care of, and she would know from their voices, but she kept on asking anyway, over and over. Your body was lying sideways across the edge of the road where it was flung after you flew away. Do you remember? Your head was like a coconut shell the boys throw on the rocks, shattered and leaking.
You were shipped back to Texas, your head bandaged together for burial, your black Gaza dress with the winking mirrors eased onto your body. You were put away into the ground and I never saw you again. Nothing was real.
That night, after they told me, I went outside to breathe, to cross the dark field to our friends, to find one last molecule of you. I couldn't believe your warm mouth would not cross the final gap to mine. But when I stepped off the porch and looked up, the stars were gone. Soft cold feathers brushed against my cheeks. It had come at last. The first snowfall of winter. Huge, slow flakes spinning lazily down like a silent drift of flowers, settling on the dry branches, filling the ruts in the road, covering the last red leaves in a blanket of white, hiding the path and falling endlessly, for heartbreaking months on end, out of the low grey sky.
Spring was a long time coming that year. I wrote and wrote and wrote, while the snow landed its powdery blows bruise after bruise, and the cold made the roads heave up and the stones crack. Grief and winter gripped my body and opened me, while I sat at my desk without you, sinking my first deep roots into North America. I forced the icy sap to flow in my veins, cold as the rivers that fall from the Presidentials. I listened to the branches breaking under their own frozen weight and refused to break. I watched the sputtering of the northern lights over the empty road of leafless trees, and rose from my bed to fill trackless sheets of paper. I drank with small, hungry wild things at frozen pools, and gnawed the astringent needles of pine for their tangy taste of endurance.
And one day the roots went deep enough. It would be too much to say I forgave the universe your death, but when I bent to look at the blunt elbows of crocuses, shoving their way into the air, and saw the sun calling dry sticks into swollen bud, I called them good. I learned that wild cherries bloom deep in the forest where nobody sees them, that humans don’t matter to the tender sap-filled wood. Twigs swelled like young breasts, and unfurled in a thousand fans of pale green. Never in all my years of tropical profusion had I seen blossom break out of silence like this. Ice cracked from the shore and was swept away on leaping waters.
One night in the middle of our friendship you told me about your trip into the Sinai. Leaping off the bed you showed me how, convinced of miracles, you struck at the rocks with your stick again and again, certain of water. You said you knew exactly how it would taste. You held the stones in your hand, hefting them, measuring their weight, joyfully cracking the stick of your aliveness against their rough sides.
I have outlived you so long now, your ghost could be my daughter. That winter as you walked the starry road away from us I learned perseverance, and this has been my reward. Even here, facing the hard rock of despair that blocks my way, in the most barren places I hear it: the trickling of water, sweet and sharp as the first wild strawberries, that spring after they buried you. It is always with me, coaxing the words from my tongue. Sometimes it breaks my heart with thirst, sometimes it runs into the cup of my palms, the miracle of those who endure, the ice cold water of hope in the desert where you left me, to find my own way home.
For Robin Sterns, 1953-1972
I never knew you in a season of green leaves and flowers. When we met it was early gold in New England, and the first frost of September had just touched the last thick grasses of August. Five years in this country, and I had never yet loved a piece of land. I'd come straight from the lush tropical forests of a Caribbean mountain range to the South Side of Chicago, a landscape that hurt my senses, and although Lake Michigan's steely windblown waters sometimes won my grudging admiration, though I stood still to watch the smoggy, prune-colored skies bruise into color at sunset, there was nothing that tempted me to root. That summer I decided to leave before another sooty winter clamped down on the city. At the last minute I got into a small college in the White Mountains of New Hampshire that was within my means and an easy hitchhike from my boyfriend's school in Vermont. All I wanted was out.
Riding the bus north from Boston we swung through the dark, following a thread of lights, stopping to let silent passengers off in front of small town post offices and supermarkets. Untalkative women and men and sleepy children stepped out into the leafy smelling dark and the bus ground back onto I-93, while the land rose in ever sharper granite shadows out of reach of the headlights. You came the other way-- the bus from White River Junction that meets the New York train.
That first night they put us all at the Inn until the dorms were ready. Your tentative knock came just as I was pulling out a nightgown, trying to settle down from the strange thrill of being a thousand miles from home. "Oh, God", I thought, "a debutante. What on earth are we going to talk about?" You looked like a model, and I was horrified to discover that you were one. Tall, thin, a head covered with true-gold hair the exact color of the looted Egyptian treasures at the Oriental Institute, big blue eyes and a touch of Texas in your soft voice. I was fresh from the rallies over Cambodia, fresh from discussing the myth of vaginal orgasm and the politics of housework. I wore old mauve lace and flowered cotton dresses from second hand stores one day, lumberjack shirts and painter's pants the next, my rarely brushed hair hanging in dark tangles around my face. "Oh well," I thought, "It's just for the night."
But in the morning it was a new world. The roads we had barreled down in the dark were lined with the pale yellow and shocking white of thick-standing birch trees whose peeling skin revealed glimpses of smooth touchable pinks and creamy oranges. A glittering frost had spread its net over the landscape, each blade and stalk of grass outlined in winking, shifting flashes of light; acres of sparkling beauty without iron gates and railings, without parking meters or fire hydrants. And just down the road a swift shallow river sang between a bed of brown pebbles and the thinnest possible layer of green translucent ice. Equally new to northern seasons, we were unanimous in our exhilaration.
From first frost to snowfall we were drunk with glory. The college administration made us roommates, and we became inseparable. Neither of us was quite what we had seemed. You had a wild, manic sense of humor, and an iron tang that your easy curls and winsome charm made surprising, while I was much shyer than my stride. I showed you my poems, scratched in green ink into my journal, and you took them to heart, probing them, tasting the words, asking intently after each scrap of meaning. You played me your favorite rock bands with that same intentness..."You see? You hear that? There! That!" until I had satisfied your urgency to share the one beat you loved best.
We filled our room with the litter of the shedding trees, each new magenta or salmon leaf as astonishing as the last. In your long grey coat you walked in the flaming woods for hours, coming back silent, full of autumn, the season neither of us had ever seen before. And you waited for snow. Growing up in Houston, and this last year in Israel, you had never seen it fall. You wanted to be outside when it began, you said, (like girls planning their first embraces), to see the first flakes spinning down and lift your face to the kiss of winter.
Meanwhile we told stories, talking from bed to bed in the dark. I remember your face in the lamplight, soft and hard, telling me about your father's affairs with girls your age, your mother's ambitions for you, your unripened ovaries that let you forget about birth control, all the stupid things men said in order to bed you. Your misfortune in looking like Goldilocks.
I lent you books. You drew me pictures. Our lives began to knit together, like the matted roots of wildflowers, blooming in the narrow openings of the forest. Nights while the stars swung overhead we leaned in slow, delicious free fall toward each other’s arms, knowing we would arrive in our own good time. Apples, berries, nuts, pumpkins, late corn all spilled their abundance from the roadside stands. Around us the trees glowed in the colors of sun-ripe fruit, flickering and bright as faces turned to a hidden fire. But all the time the roots were reaching for a place deeper than the approaching frost, a race against the tilt of the earth's axis.
David still came every other weekend. Whenever he arrived, you whisked yourself out of sight and went to stay with a friend, pushing privacy on us just a little too soon, ruining the tact of your exit with a wry and hilarious wink, your falsetto voice drifting back to us over your shoulder as you waltzed across the empty fields singing "Roooooses, Oh, Roooses and Moooonlight!".
I dream sometimes of catching you as you run, crying Robin, don't go, come back, with your saucy, tea-cup-blue eyes full of maple leaves. Stay here, with your bad dreams from the forced sale of your girlhood to modeling agents who fingered you while your mother took the cash saying that’s the price of glamour. Come back with your hair of Jerusalem gold and your monkey screeches in the dark, and give me time to leave him for you. But you turn, laughing, and wave, and leave me here among the living.
Ten years later and a thousand miles west of the place where I first heard the news, I wake with the same muscle spasm freezing my neck. This grey, blizzard-ridden morning in the Midwest, I can still imagine you as I did all the first winter of your absence, walking toward me through the snow-choked forests, on endless pilgrimage back to me, to life, to the lighted windows of our house. "It took me weeks to get here," you would say, coming in and stamping the snow from your boots, "months, years, it took me ten years to get here, but I had to let you know I was alright. It wasn't me in the car. It was someone else."
Like you, I was asleep when it happened, or I would have felt you tear away. I woke from a deep, dreamless dark to find David bending over me, and your note, "Gone to Maine for the weekend with Mary and Jeff. Back Sunday night. I love you." Then I was in the kitchen, stooping to take the soufflé out of the oven. Sorry I had missed your departure. Looking forward to food. I had the casserole in my hands, just setting it on the counter, when they came in together, the three of them, solemn as storks stepping through the door. “I wanted to tell you because you're her friend,” he said, and I thought Robin, you've been annoying the Dean again. Now he's angry, you and your jokes. But why tell me? “Robin and Jeff were killed,” he said, “in an accident two hours ago in Maine.”
Wait a minute. What? What did you say? Wait a minute. My mind stuttering, trying to catch up with my body, which was already clinging to David and sobbing so hard that when the others ran in, I couldn't even say your name.
Nothing was real, except once I remember Beverly's shocked face in my doorway saying, "Their things are still in their rooms!" It made no sense. That, and the way my mind went in circles, wondering where the hell you were when I needed you because, Robin, something terrible happened, and then remembering, each time with a slightly smaller sickening jolt, that the terrible thing and your absence were the same. On your wall was a postcard with a painting of the Snow Queen, white and bloodless on her silver sleigh, driving away into the blizzard with young Hans, bound by cruel enchantments, clinging to the back. I lay and watched it for hours, waiting for you to come home.
Much later, when she could talk again, Mary told me how it was. You were dozing, your head cushioned against the door. Jeff was driving, and she sat between you. She said the car slid outward into the curve and she turned to Jeff and said “we're going to hit that truck,” and his last words were “I know,” and then she was lying on the road watching the reflection of red flashing lights on the wet tar. They lifted her into an ambulance, and put Jeff beside her. She kept asking where you were, and they'd tell her you were being taken care of, and she would know from their voices, but she kept on asking anyway, over and over. Your body was lying sideways across the edge of the road where it was flung after you flew away. Do you remember? Your head was like a coconut shell the boys throw on the rocks, shattered and leaking.
You were shipped back to Texas, your head bandaged together for burial, your black Gaza dress with the winking mirrors eased onto your body. You were put away into the ground and I never saw you again. Nothing was real.
That night, after they told me, I went outside to breathe, to cross the dark field to our friends, to find one last molecule of you. I couldn't believe your warm mouth would not cross the final gap to mine. But when I stepped off the porch and looked up, the stars were gone. Soft cold feathers brushed against my cheeks. It had come at last. The first snowfall of winter. Huge, slow flakes spinning lazily down like a silent drift of flowers, settling on the dry branches, filling the ruts in the road, covering the last red leaves in a blanket of white, hiding the path and falling endlessly, for heartbreaking months on end, out of the low grey sky.
Spring was a long time coming that year. I wrote and wrote and wrote, while the snow landed its powdery blows bruise after bruise, and the cold made the roads heave up and the stones crack. Grief and winter gripped my body and opened me, while I sat at my desk without you, sinking my first deep roots into North America. I forced the icy sap to flow in my veins, cold as the rivers that fall from the Presidentials. I listened to the branches breaking under their own frozen weight and refused to break. I watched the sputtering of the northern lights over the empty road of leafless trees, and rose from my bed to fill trackless sheets of paper. I drank with small, hungry wild things at frozen pools, and gnawed the astringent needles of pine for their tangy taste of endurance.
And one day the roots went deep enough. It would be too much to say I forgave the universe your death, but when I bent to look at the blunt elbows of crocuses, shoving their way into the air, and saw the sun calling dry sticks into swollen bud, I called them good. I learned that wild cherries bloom deep in the forest where nobody sees them, that humans don’t matter to the tender sap-filled wood. Twigs swelled like young breasts, and unfurled in a thousand fans of pale green. Never in all my years of tropical profusion had I seen blossom break out of silence like this. Ice cracked from the shore and was swept away on leaping waters.
One night in the middle of our friendship you told me about your trip into the Sinai. Leaping off the bed you showed me how, convinced of miracles, you struck at the rocks with your stick again and again, certain of water. You said you knew exactly how it would taste. You held the stones in your hand, hefting them, measuring their weight, joyfully cracking the stick of your aliveness against their rough sides.
I have outlived you so long now, your ghost could be my daughter. That winter as you walked the starry road away from us I learned perseverance, and this has been my reward. Even here, facing the hard rock of despair that blocks my way, in the most barren places I hear it: the trickling of water, sweet and sharp as the first wild strawberries, that spring after they buried you. It is always with me, coaxing the words from my tongue. Sometimes it breaks my heart with thirst, sometimes it runs into the cup of my palms, the miracle of those who endure, the ice cold water of hope in the desert where you left me, to find my own way home.