Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

Every night Alice talks to her sister Pearl (90), who lives in Wisconsin. They do not agree on politics or religion. Pearl watches Fox News and swears by it. Alice watches CNN and is not so sure all that they tell her is the whole truth. Nevertheless, they are the only two remaining from a pack of seven (six girls; one boy), and they are loyal despite their differences. But this week there have been no nightly conversations. Pearl is in the hospital and very weak. She had a heart attack, not her first.

By the time Alice had three children, her youngest sister wasn’t yet married. Pearl longed for kids in her life, and so my mother shared us with her. My young aunt and I had a particular fondness for each other. She lived across town and I got to see her often, but early on in my fifth winter it snowed for many days. North Dakota has few trees to catch the snow, even  fewer back then. The drifts mounted. No visits from Pearl.  Finally it stopped snowing; the temperature plunged. One of those black and starless nights I came down with a bad cold, and I missed her too much to bear it any longer. Unobserved, I lifted the big black telephone receiver from its cradle in the living room and called her to ask if she would come over.

When my mother discovered what I’d done, Pearl had already pulled on long, thick flannel pants under her skirt, wrapped herself up in a woolly coat, mittens, boots, and scarf, added a dashing beret, the totally impractical hat style of the moment, and left her apartment. She wasn’t there to answer when her phone rang to cancel this frivolous expedition of twenty or more freezing blocks of deep snow.

At the time, the only two snowplows in Bismarck didn’t emerge until daylight and didn’t plow every street every day, definitely not our street far out on the town’s edge. No cars ventured onto roads after dark. So Pearl chose the path of least resistance, right down the middle of the street. She headed north. No moon shone in the flat black Dakota sky that lay in wait for another storm to roll in from Canada or Montana. She was young and relished the adventure and the romantic pleasure of it, a journey through black and white with nothing but a heartstring to guide her.

No stars were visible, but windows burned with gold light in that utter darkness; houses must have looked like lanterns, but lanterns set too far back to be helpful, and so I imagine she felt quite alone. She might have spotted a few men and women sitting in armchairs beside tassel-shaded floor lamps and reading newspapers and books, or listening to the radio, and kids doing homework at dining room tables. But all far away. Other worlds.

Snow would have crept over her boot tops and slipped down to soak through her socks. Each numbing step would have left behind a small black oblong hole.

It had to be absolutely silent. No planes overhead certainly. No cars. No voices. And the silence would have opened her mind to thoughts both welcome and unwelcome. For many years after the war, she dwelled on the death of her brother. Lew had been killed at Guadalcanal when he was only nineteen. He was two years younger than Pearl and had always been her closest friend and playmate. Maybe that night she remembered sledding with him down Antelope Hill back in the small town where they’d grown up. Or snowball fights. Or, shrugged off by their older sisters as too little to be of any use, she might have remembered how they’d run along flapping their arms up and down until they forgot all about being the littlest and became two snow geese flying side by side through the mottled winter sky above them.

Possibly she saw Jeremy Ecklund, a war vet, wearing a cap with ear flaps and the usual plaid jacket two sizes too small, hauling the garbage out his side door, followed by his cat Bibi and calling her back inside after he’d clamped the aluminum lid back onto the container–inside where he lived snug and safe, survivor of dangerous battles he never tired of bragging about, inside with his parents and his wife and baby son. And was he so special? No. Jeremy Ecklund, though conscientious about his cat Bibi on a snowy night, owned no claim to special. Not like Lew, modest about his good looks, mischievous, and markedly tender toward the people he loved, especially her. Why couldn’t Lew have a house with gold light pouring out as if from a lantern, and a family and cat?

As she approached the far north end of town the streets narrowed and streetlights, rare to begin with, now disappeared altogether. Houses popped up here and there in the blackness, not in rows but random and facing any old direction, as if carelessly dropped into the drifts. She could have gotten lost. After all, farmers who headed out to the barn in blizzards lost their way back and were found after the storm only yards away from their own front doors. But the blizzard was over. For the moment. Near total darkness, cold, and deep snow comprised the challenge. Her feet felt heavy as bricks by now and the snowdrifts here at the edge of town were steeper and pushed back hard against her march. Still, the occasional corner or tree or home looked familiar enough, and she found her way.

It would have been hard for her to pull the storm door open. First she had to scoop away the tent of snow that leaned against it, then kick what she’d removed down the steps and out of the way. But once inside all the hard work melted away and she slipped out of her coat and laughed when Alice tried to scold her for taking on such a journey.

As for me, I would have run to her, would have smelled the winter night in her long hair and in her sweater as I hugged her. I’d have felt it throbbing in her icy pink fingers, and seen its ache in the redness of her bare legs as she stepped out of the wet flannel pants she’d worn under her skirt. But winter or no winter, she was my best friend and she’d come when I called her. Nothing could keep us apart then, and nothing has ever kept us apart since.

And so Alice and I wait to hear if something finally will.

Pearl at the time of this story

Pearl (L) and Alice (R)

Lew