Sure, during winter season all the tourists and students came for the toboggans at Perisher Blue and the snowboarding at Thredbo, and the place was hopping, but also the itinerants flocked to find temporary work in Jindabyne. They worked for less money than Kai could accept. There were more people than jobs. Kai became like a migrant worker himself, renting skis and sleds, clothing equipment, selling coffee and cigarettes, pumping gas, and then scuffling for more work after he was let go for a man willing to work for half of Kai’s salary. This winter was more meager than usual. Perhaps there was an economic downturn somewhere. It was like that late-night joke: he couldn’t get a job at a ski resort in the winter.
When Kai was leaving this morning she asked him, what am I going to do today, and he said, do anything you want. Read. Paint.
I don’t paint, she said. So read. I don’t read anymore, she wanted to say. The mind wouldn’t let her, wouldn’t keep still on the words on the pages. So cook something. But the stove was electric and erratic. Nothing she baked ever came out right, though everyone claimed Jindabyne was best for baking because of the high-altitude mountain air. Cakes were lighter, pastries were crisper! As far as Larissa was concerned, it was good for nosebleeds and little else. She either burned the roast or it came out wet. Mejida, their landlady, said she would replace the stove for a fifty-dollar-a-month increase in rent, which was six hundred dollars a year. Every year. They thought about and decided to buy their own oven; and here it was, the replacement oven. Yet Mejida, a friendly Indian woman, newly married, who lived next door, would bring rice pudding with cardamom, sweet samosas, naan, and everything she made tasted delicious. Larissa wanted to blame the oven. I used to bake so much better, she wanted to explain. I used to make brownies, pound cake.
She thought about cleaning the house after she showered and dressed. Except there was nothing to clean. And nothing to clean with. She’d used the last of the Windex last week. She had no new vacuum cleaner bags, and the one that was in the Hoover was so full that every time Larissa turned on the vac, the dust blew wildly out the exhaust vent and made the house smell like old people’s closets.
They had stayed out too late yesterday and her head felt it today, all parched and sore, like there wasn’t even sugar in it, just hops and rye, and maybe cranberry. Perhaps there had been some mixing of the alcoholic liquids; she couldn’t remember. KISS and AC/DC had been on too loud, two bands she never particularly cared for, but at Balcony Bar, girls didn’t choose the music. To fit in with the younger crowd, Larissa dressed in Billabong jeans, tight sweaters and high-heeled cowboy boots she got on sale for thirty dollars, which crushed her feet as though she were a Chinese female, yes, feet bound, but overall feeling pretty lucky not to have been drowned in the river at birth.
It was still early. Larissa didn’t want to look at the clock. She didn’t want to face the actual time, because then she would have to face down all the hours alone until he came home. A gutter child with ceaseless feet, she decided to walk to Caldwell’s. She had to go early, otherwise all the fresh meat would be gone. One way or another she was determined to make Kai dinner this evening. They’d been eating out every night, burgers here, sandwiches there, sometimes nothing but bar food, or the hot snacks their friends Bart and Bianca put out. Bart and Bianca always seemed to have a little more money than Kai and Larissa, though Larissa couldn’t understand why or how.
She didn’t think she was eating enough, judging from the sheer woman in the mirror, unrecognizable even to herself. She had never been able to regain the pounds since the last months in Summit.
The passing days spun into forever, but the things she carried inside were eternal, operated by their own clock, their own intervals. Which is why it was so hard sometimes to tell how much time had elapsed since this event or that, a birthday, a concert, a phone call, a car accident—everything was crash and over. But the thinking about it afterward lasted a lifetime. It was one endless cross-country trek separated by the bridgeless divide between the lifetime before and the lifetime after.
One more morning. Snow. Sunny. The mute mountains white with foam stand wrapped in pine-clad crystal trees, in disconsolate willows. In the mirror is Larissa’s pallid face. Everything is as it’s always been. In the afternoon after school Michelangelo will be running around the den with Riot in smaller and smaller circles, trying to get himself so dizzy he’ll fall down—on top of the dog. Emily will be at cello and then volleyball. She will need to be picked up at five. Asher will be at track or band practice. Jared is at work. Larissa stands in front of the mirror in one hallway, in another, her heart grown hollow with gladness, with sorrow, and wonders what it’s like to be dead. Once you got dressed up, shopped for food, enjoyed pleasures big and small.
And then you were dead.
The other things receded with almost no regret. Just the distant clicking of the hoofs of constant horses that carried off the years and the memories in their empty saddles. Carried off things that no longer mattered. Now other things mattered.
What were they?
This was the thing: Larissa knew a little bit about many things, but not a hoot about anything. She wasn’t like Jared, who knew everything about investments and accounting practices and the profit-loss margins of multiconglomerates, and about runs batted in with two outs in late innings with a runner on third and the home team trailing by a run. She wasn’t like Ezra who read prodigiously on varied topics and was thus able to fake deep and expert knowledge even on concrete pavers. No, Larissa knew a little bit about fashion and hair, more about books, still more about theater, modicum about rock music, less about jazz, tiny bit about history, and knew least of all what moved and spurred on human hearts, especially hers.
She thought if only she could understand her father, then other things might become clear. But she never understood him, and so much else in her life remained nothing but a hard floating January cloud. No promise of anything in the air. It wasn’t spring, it wasn’t even the amber heaviness of decomposing fall, it wasn’t the green heat and salt water of summer. It was a bitter clear void of January. Everything felt like neither before nor after. Seasons came and went under the Southern Cross. When was Christmas? The joys of the season had gone for Larissa, the weight of all the resolutions she couldn’t keep was upon her shoulders, no Valentine’s day, no winter break, no planning of a week’s escape somewhere, the Easter Fair, the Food Fair in Dalgety. It was day in and day out of the blue and red Summit swings not moving in the subzero cold.
Except it was July!
She stood for a long time naked in front of the mirror in the subdued and dusky house, all alone, before she finally went and turned on the shower. Afterward she got dressed in old sweats and a hoodie, layered herself up with T-shirts and a Henley, put on a ski hat, a scarf, some gloves (they might have been Kai’s), put on walking shoes, and left the house. She had brushed her hair, but that was all. Her mascara was running out and she didn’t want to spend another six dollars on a new one, not until they knew for sure if Kai could get some steady work. The six dollars she had in her pocket was for dinner tonight if she planned carefully. She would do without thicker blacker lashes as she walked down the mountainside, the frosted dry grass crunching under her feet.
It was colder than she wished, but not as cold as Summit had been, with its icy blizzards. In July, though, Summit was not cold. In July Summit sparkled with green sunlight, and Italian ices were sold at every corner, and she and the kids spent June at the Swim Club looking for lizards in the bushes, and then six weeks in Lillypond, where the mosquito nets were up, and the lake was warm. They were water rats, jumping off the wooden float, chasing dragonflies through the murmur of the swaying reeds, the moonlit fields.
This blue lake was not for swimming in July. The dry crisp-ness in the air hurt her nose, it started to run, felt like it was bleeding. She wiped it with her glove. It was bleeding. She continued down the slope. She really should get it cauterized; in the wintertime, the nose gushed bloo
d twice a day like a clockwork geyser.
Briskly she walked to Caldwell’s with her hands in her pockets and her hat pulled down over her ears, the way Asher had worn it until his thirteenth winter, when he suddenly decided he was rejecting all winter attire for one whole season, for no other reason than he was protesting winter. The advantage was: it had made Emily dress warmer in protest to his protest. Michelangelo didn’t have a choice: his mother dressed him, and besides the little boy didn’t like to be cold.
Larissa’s head was cracking open. She should’ve taken an aspirin. If she had one, she would’ve. They could afford aspirin in balmy December when they worked non-stop from dawn to dusk. The irony was, she was too busy to get headaches in December. It was the rum! she realized. The fermented sugar cane did something funky to her brain, it always had. Usually she stayed away from it, but yesterday it must have been free, for how else to explain the raging head? No liquor affected Kai, except to make him dance and sing. He drank a lot to dance and be happy, but the next day always got up and went to work. He wasn’t like Che’s Lorenzo.
Larissa hadn’t heard from Che for so long. Whatever had happened to her old friend? She lost count of the summers that were winters and the winters that were summers. Did she have to count them twice? Because that would make Larissa over fifty. She stopped celebrating her birthday on April 4. Her birthday was in spring, not fall. She was born when everything in the world was beginning, not ending; she wasn’t born when the leaves fell off the poplar trees, when it rained and the air got cold. She was born when the days were resurrected by forsythia and daffodils and yellow tulips. She wasn’t born in rain and wind. There were so many degrees of wrong with that, that the first year they were in Jindabyne and April washed over May, Kai said to her, suddenly remembering, did you have a birthday last month and I missed it? Larissa shrugged and said meh, and he consoled her with, you’re forever young to me. That was sweet. She went with that. Ran with it. He didn’t mention it again, and neither did she. His birthday was in January and he loved celebrating it when it was hot and the Alpine daisies were out, and they had resumed their tours and were making money again. They cleaned their Land Cruiser troop carrier, bought new hiking boots, invested in new tents, new fishing lines, summer jackets, flasks, Thermoses. And every twenty-third day of January they went out and got extra-expensive tequila at Balcony Bar and partied till closing time and then came home and partied some more, just the two of them. He was so good. Didn’t agave used for tequila have sugar in it? Weren’t the flowers edible, and had sugar, like rum? So maybe it was the cheap tequila that was cracking her head open this morning.
She clutched her stomach through her jacket pockets as she walked.
She wished she knew how to ski. How did learning that skill pass her by? No surprise that it passed him by, Kai of the Hawaiian volcano beaches, but how did it pass her by, from the New Jersey mountains, where there was a ski lift on every hill? When she was a child she didn’t ski. They lived near the Hudson River and when the town pond froze in Piermont, they ice skated, but there wasn’t much call for ice skating in Jindabyne. After she got married and had kids, skiing was too expensive. By the time the children were older and there was money, there was no time for skiing. No time for skiing, or theater, or a job. No time for much of anything, yet every day was filled to bursting. Here in these summers/winters she had nothing but time.
But not for long. She decided she was going to get a job at Caldwell’s. It wasn’t too far; she could walk it every day. She could make some extra, sorely needed money to put toward the business. They could buy new tents and tune up their safari troopie, repaint the signs, upgrade the microphones and the radio, invest in new disposable cameras for the customers, make sure they had enough money left over for worms, lunch pails, trout lines, drinks, sun hats, for advertising online. They ran a beautiful tour. They designed it themselves, researched it, wrote it. Larissa performed it while Kai drove. Her theater training came in handy. Three times a week she put on a twenty-eight-hour-long performance. They took eight people a hundred and twenty miles into the wilderness, down the Thredbo, through the mountains and the Great Gorge and the Great Dividing Range of the Snowy River, to Tumbarumba. They sat on granite boulders and fished for trout in the Thredbo and the Murray, and for salmon in the streams. They cleaned and cooked their own fish while the wallabies grazed nearby and the wombats hid in the grasses. They bushwalked and talked about the high country wildflowers and poisonous snakes and the music of the Grateful Dead and the Animals; they drank beer, sang “The House of the Rising Sun” by the campfire, accompanied by Kai’s spectacular ukulele, sang “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Angie,” and slept under the everlasting stars in the Australian Alps.
Right after Halloween, Larissa would tell her favorite ghost story by the flickering flame, that of the Snowy Mountain River Dam project. To dam the river to divert the water into the driest part of New South Wales, to grow the businesses and the farms and the vineyards, the government created the artificial Lake Jindabyne in the flat valley between the hills, and all would have been fine except the old town of Jindabyne was laid out in the flat of that valley. Can’t dam a river without burying a town or two, and so Jindabyne was buried in its watery grave, and in the heat of the summertime, when the tide is low and the water level drops, you can still see the church steeple rising up out of the lake like a phoenix, like something that will out, no matter how well it’s buried. The myth says there were people in that town, and now they’re in their watery grave, too, and every Halloween their souls rise up from the lake and wander the new city. They buried a real town to make a fake lake, Larissa would say. Does that make you shiver?
And one time, a heavyset, out-of-breath American man said to Larissa, “I have stories of destruction perpetrated on human beings by human beings that would make you shiver. What you’re telling us—it’s just a story. What I have seen with my own eyes is true terror. Wanna hear?” He stared at Larissa too pointedly, too intensely. Now that made her shiver, to the chill of her heart.
And funny enough, that dark night, no one wanted to hear.
The next morning they drove on to the sprawling grape-growing country near Tumbarumba and partook in a tasting tour of the region’s best cool-climate sparkling wine made from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. They took all unmarked trails out, but on the way back to Jindabyne they drove down the almost inaccessibly narrow but paved Alpine Way past Mount Kosciusko, through the snow gum and Alpine ash woodlands, all the new bushies exhausted and exhilarated. Many people said it was the best tour they’d ever been on. Larissa knew what they meant.
The first time she and Kai marked the tour on the dirt roads that ran parallel to the paved highways, she never thought her lungs could breathe so deep, her heart could beat so profoundly, that she could feel so happy. She was giddy with the altitude, with rapture, as she chanted the name of her grandest lover under the stars, his mighty limbs the length of grace. Kai…Kai…There had never been anyone like him in the open country.
After two years, when the birth control pill ran out, she didn’t go to the clinic to get more. Let’s see what happens, they said with an excited shrug. If it’s meant to be, it will be. She wanted to say to him, you know, children are a big responsibility, but didn’t. He had lost one of his. She had lost three of hers. No use dredging up the bottom-dwelling grief.
There was no baby.
They shrugged. Obviously it wasn’t meant to be.
And things had changed in the five seasons they’d been here. Without getting a second vehicle and hiring more people, they reached a ceiling to the money they could make off eight people for a twenty-eight-hour tour. They were busy, but they weren’t growing their profit. Last summer all the money they made went right back into renewing the supplies and repainting the desert-tan Land Cruiser a jungle camo color. It felt like business was drying up, like there was no way out.
Caldwell’s market was before town, on the downhill road overlooking
the lake. They knew her there; Caldwell, the man who owned the store, kept trying to sell her kangaroo tail. “Jimmy, I just want ground beef,” she would say to him. “Got any of that?” Not giving up, Jimmy kept trying to convince her kangaroo soup and stew were just the ticket on a cold winter’s night, and she couldn’t explain that it was July and wasn’t supposed to need winter stew. She kept buying ground beef because she wanted to make a summer barbecue. “Do you have some chicken wings, Jim? I want to marinate them,” she said to him this morning, rubbing her hands together to get warm. Caldwell didn’t have chicken, but he ground up some chuck for her.
“Jim,” she asked tentatively, her palms on his glass counter, “is there any work around here?”
“What kind of work are you lookin’ for, darling?” he said. He was a short man, perpetually in overalls and a plaid shirt. He had told her he was from Scotland, but his wife was Polish, and she made stuffed cabbage sometimes and pierogi that Larissa loved, having never had them before. Such foreign tastes, but good. Every once in a while Anna asked her if she needed a cleaning woman, and Larissa was surprised by that, as in: the Caldwells own a store that’s open seven days a week and is the only provider of fresh produce and packaged foods for miles around. And yet Anna asks if she can clean Larissa’s house, as if Anna is the one who needs the money and not the other way around.
“Oh, no. There’s no work here,” Jimmy Caldwell said. “Our son wants to go to England to college next year. We don’t know what to do. How to explain to your only son that you can’t afford to send him?”