Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Read online

  I was an only child. Back home, in Davis, California, our house abutted an overgrown bird sanctuary, where goslings chattered in the spring and teenage boys hid magazines that my mom told me not to look at. I spent much of my childhood outside, mashing eucalyptus leaves into fragrant paste or cracking pomegranates with rocks to eat the sour seeds, a process that could swallow an entire afternoon. My favorite game was to flood an anthill and then stand on it as long as I could, as the ants swarmed up my feet, my ankles, my legs, looking for high ground. There were thousands of them, a black mass. They tickled like crazy. I’d stand still as long as I could bear it, then spray them off with the hose and watch them swim in the resulting puddle, dark specks that barely dented the hard surface of the water.

  Davis was hot. Much of the year baked in a perpetual brown summer, and by the time April rolled around, the sidewalk burned blisters on my bare feet. Each June, as soon as school let out, my mom and I would pack up the station wagon and drive six hours north to Whidbey Island, where my mother’s family lived. My summer days were spent on beaches and in the woods, painting sticks and picking blackberries, catching crabs and eels in tide pools and toting them around in buckets till the tide came in. My mother was happiest on the island. She was a nature lover, a poet; she walked barefoot for miles and fed bald eagles by hand. When she had announced plans to marry my father, her parents sat her down to express their concern. She thought it was because he was Jewish. But no: “Do you really think you can be happy,” they asked, “if you marry a New Yorker?”

  “The thing is,” she’d later say, “they were right.” It wasn’t that the relationship was bad, far from it. My father had a particular sense of humor; he chuckled at his own thoughts, and I often pressed my ear to a wall to hear my mother laughing hysterically, brought to tears by his near-secret language of jokes. But it was true that his lifestyle overlapped very little with hers. He grew up in the Bronx and the Lower East Side; he worked every day of the week, coming home to read me bedtime stories—Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe—before going back to the office until three or four in the morning. Although we sometimes went camping as a family, my father rarely spent time in nature on his own initiative; he’d unroll his chessboard on the campground table, sipping coffee from a thermos and battling invisible opponents. I liked to sit on his lap and watch his quick hands move across the board. He let me hit the timer, which made a satisfying thump.

  It was because of my dad that we lived in California, and my mom never forgot it. When he took the job in Davis, he’d promised her it would only be for two years. Now, where were we—ten, twelve? Every August, as she and I drove back over the California border, she’d start to cry, and then she’d apologize, and then she’d worry aloud about the effect on her daughter of having a mom who cried and apologized. I didn’t think the effect was bad. She was being honest, and her tears made sense to me: she loved land almost as much as people. Anyway, I spent my whole childhood knowing that my real home was still to come. I could like Davis, sure—but I knew better than to love it.

  And then my father was offered a sabbatical. And he took it in Norway, the country of my mother’s roots. And just like that, I had a place to love.

  After the year was over, I remained obsessed with Norway, and with northern latitudes in general. Years ago, it had snowed in Davis, a veil over the grass that dissolved by midmorning, and the whole world had seemed foreign, thrilling: the north was like that, a thousandfold. My mom collected books about Alaska, and I’d go into her office when she wasn’t there and sit cross-legged on the green carpet and flip through the pictures. Black-and-white photos of villages by the sea, the wide velvet of a caribou migration, Samoyeds hauling freight sleds over sea ice. I imagined myself skiing toward the pole, staving off bears with a warning shot. I slept with a stuffed husky named Anna and a stuffed polar bear named Erasmus. I read a dozen children’s books about the Iditarod; as I got older, I moved on to Farley Mowat and Gary Paulsen. Sometimes my dad joined me. I’d started reading my favorite books to him at bedtime, rather than the other way around.

  The temperature was a perfect ten below. The sun was bright, everything was moving well, and the dogs had settled into the rhythm that could take them a hundred or a thousand miles . . .

  “Hold on,” my dad interrupted. He was sitting on a cushion by my bed. “Do you have any idea how cold that is? Ten below zero?”

  “Yeah,” I said

  “No,” he said. “It’s extremely cold. It’s unbelievably cold. It’s much, much colder than anything you’ve experienced. It’s so cold that—” He hesitated. He was delighted. Here was a twofer: a learning experience for his daughter, and an amusing phrase—a perfect ten below—that he could add to his arsenal, to be deployed at opportune moments from here on out, forever. Gee, he’d say, putting on sunscreen at the beach. This is nice, but if only it were a perfect ten below. And if anyone asked him the temperature—

  “It doesn’t sound that cold to me,” I said. “It sounds fine.”

  I was incredibly jealous of Gary Paulsen.

  Somehow, my connection to the north, my belonging there, was as real to me as any part of my fledgling identity. My name was Blair, I was good at drawing, I was meant to be a polar explorer. In fact, I felt that in my heart, I already was a polar explorer, even if nobody else recognized it. My conviction was heightened by the idea that I had come close—had lived in Norway, albeit the urban Southland—and was untempered by the reality that the nearest I’d been to any sort of truly polar experience was the still, fluorescent cavern of an early morning ice rink, where I practiced figure skating—a sport I’d chosen, in part, because it was cold. And until I grew up, I wasn’t sure how I would get closer.

  Then, in tenth grade, during third-period economics, the school counselor announced over the intercom that she was looking for students to study abroad for a year. At lunchtime I went to her office for paperwork. By the time school let out, I had it all planned. I would go back to Norway. I would find a way to belong. My parents, though skeptical at first, came around to the idea. Norway, they recalled, was a good place for a girl.

  I was a quiet teenager, but I wasn’t shy. I was what local mothers called “a good Davis kid” and my classmates called “sheltered,” a babysitter and honor-roll student who taught Jewish religious school and learn-to-skate classes, who got along well with adults and followed all the rules. In short: a perfect candidate for cultural exchange. Determined to do things right, I studied brochures and booklets with useful tips: When in doubt, ask, “Can I help you with that?” The brochures recommended calling the host parents “Mother” and “Father” in their own language—Mor and Far in Norwegian—and limiting contact with my own family to one phone call a month. I could do that, no problem; if it would help me build a home in Norway, I could do just about anything. Now all I had to do was wait to find out where exactly that home would be.

  In late spring, the phone rang, an east coast number. I answered it in the kitchen. The man on the other end explained that the exchange organization had found me a family. His voice sounded vaguely familiar. I heard my parents pick up the other line.

  “In Kirkenes,” he said. “You probably haven’t heard of it. It’s a very small town, the northernmost town in Europe. It’s very isolated. No sun at all in the winter. It’s, uh, barren.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry,” said the man. “We couldn’t find anything more hospitable.”

  “No, no.” I had found my breath. “That’s—that’ll be really good. That’s great.”

  “It’s—great? Are you sure it’s great?”

  I nodded, then caught myself. “Yeah. Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Blair—” said the man.

  “Hold on,” said my dad from the other line. “Robert?” Somewhere far away, I made out stifled giggles. “Robert,” said my dad, “it’s not working. She wasn’t supposed to like it. Hold on,” he said again. He covered the receiver, said s
omething to my mother. Then he ran into the room. “Honey,” he said, his voice brighter. “April Fool’s!” It was too late to hide my disappointment: I would not get to live in the northernmost town in Europe. My parents took me to dinner to apologize.

  When I finally learned, just after my sixteenth birthday, that I’d been placed with a family in the southeastern town of Lillehammer, just a few hours from Oslo, I was too excited to feel let down. I packed my warmest clothing, including a powder blue parka bought specifically for the trip. I studied maps of the region. I looked at a photo of my host parents—my new Norwegian family, along with their daughters—and practiced in my head. Mor, I thought. Far. As it turned out, they would meet my greeting with uneasy silence, and so I realized almost immediately after arriving in Norway that to use such intimate language was a mistake. But by then I felt too embarrassed to acknowledge my misstep, and so Hilda and Ragnar Selbo would be Mor and Far for the next ten months.

  Lillehammer burst from a lake on a single mountainside, so that all directions hinged on slope: the school downhill and to the right of the ice rink, the ski trails uphill and to the left of the cobblestoned town center. Mor and Far’s red house was uphill and to the right of the church, adjacent to a forest that extended, as I imagined it, into an endless wilderness. As I unpacked in my new bedroom, I tried to shrug off my nervousness. So things had started out a little awkward. So what? Here I was. Maybe it would take a while to get to know each other, but with time, I would become part of the family. I would go to school. I had already decided that I would forsake English for the year, and speak only Norwegian, forcing myself into a language I had never really learned as a child. I would ice-skate and cross-country ski and laugh at inside jokes with my host sisters. Maybe I would even meet a boy.

  But something felt wrong from the first night, when Far sat me down and detailed how he would punish me if I broke his rules, and something clenched in my rib cage even as I nodded along. I would feel that tightness each time I walked through the living room and he watched me pass with an expression not yet familiar to me—I wasn’t used to men appraising my body—and I felt it again weeks or months later when he came up behind me and stroked my ass with his hand. I felt it a thousand times at a thousand moments—from a glance, an expression, a lift of his chin. I felt it when he remarked one evening, after I declined to sit beside him on the couch, “Your parents must be abusive for you to have turned out like this.” Or when he reminded me daily that blood was thicker than water, that I was not his daughter. I felt it when he made that sound like a threat.

  Something felt wrong again and again, and yet I could never say for sure, even to myself, what it was. I was never even confident that it existed. Maybe people did things differently in Norway. Maybe I was misunderstanding his Norwegian.

  The walls in my bedroom had a pebbled texture, one I can still feel if I think about it; often, as I lay awake at night, I’d trace my fingers over the wall. I don’t know why. I developed a lot of habits that year that I couldn’t explain. I kept track of—sensed, pictured—where everyone was in the house at any time: Mor boiling potatoes in the kitchen, Far watching a beauty pageant on TV. There was a mudroom by my bedroom that opened into the backyard, and it comforted me when I knew that I was closer to that door than Far was to me. I occasionally practiced climbing out of my bedroom window, too, and left the window cracked open even as the nights grew colder, stopping only when my bedside water glass shelled with ice. The bedroom door had no lock, though I wished for one. Maybe the cold was a kind of lock.

  Early in the year, I found a path that led past the backyard. It wound steeply uphill, snaking around bushes and scraggly trees, and finally flattened out toward the cap of the mountain, dissipating into bouldered terrain. The first time I followed it I was nervous, and stopped where the path petered out; but the next time I brought some gingersnaps and a blanket and spent a delicious few hours spread out on a rock, catching sunlight on one of fall’s last warm afternoons. When I couldn’t stand another moment in the house, all I had to do was go uphill and to the right, and I’d have a world of my own. The mountain wasn’t peaceful, but it was all-encompassing, and on subsequent afternoons as I wandered farther I felt the tightness in my chest dissolving. The thing about being outside, I realized, was that I had to be alert—to landmarks, to weather, to dusk—and yet that alertness on the mountain restored whatever it was that alertness at home had drained. Pretty soon I started playing, spinning in circles before wandering myself lost. Getting lost didn’t seem like the worst thing. I could wind between trees, an explorer, thinking I could be anywhere. But the game was rigged; the mountain led downhill, and I always found my way back to the house.

  One day, soon after the first snow, I came back to the house at dusk. I heard happy shouts as I approached, and stepped from the woods onto the white lawn to find the family waging a snowball fight. A chunk of snow hit my cheek and dripped into my collar. It came from May, one of my host sisters, and she shrieked at the clean hit. Pretty soon I was laughing with all of them, slipping on the snow as I ran, scooping up damp handfuls and flinging them at Mor and my host sisters. It occurred to me how much I liked them—how much I had, in avoiding Far, distanced myself from a family with whom I could, for instance, engage in snowball fights. This was all I had wanted. And here was Far himself, laughing with us, looking so happy and small compared to how I saw him in my mind’s eye. Maybe, in the shock of transition, I had been too quick to judge. Maybe it was up to me now to bridge the distance.

  I caught one of my sisters with a snowball, then Far, and sprinted toward the entryway to hide. But when I turned around, Far was walking toward me, twisting a perfect snowball in his hands. He had me cornered. I stepped forward and held his gaze, amused at my own small-scale valor, anticipating snow down the back of my neck. A trial by ice to earn my place as temporary daughter.

  But instead, upon reaching me, Far pulled open the neck of my jacket and slipped a hand down the front of my shirt. There was ice, yes, something cold crushed onto my throat, but I hardly noticed it against the electric pressure of his hand. A brief, funny feeling—his fingers against the tops of my breasts, pressing down, my collar strained tight around his forearm. He withdrew his hand, caught my eye again, and backed up a few steps, slowly. Then he turned and ran back to the yard, calling—“I got her for you! May, I got her!”

  It was a snowball fight, I thought, tugging on my bra to loosen the ice that was melting there, the memory of his hand still imprinted on my skin. A snowball fight.

  Nothing had happened.

  A week or so later, my father e-mailed to say that he needed to talk to me. He would call today, while I was at school. He needed me to pick up. The curtness of the note, and the fact that it was unexpected, frightened me. I thought maybe someone was sick.

  When my phone buzzed in class, I ducked out of the room and into a next-door science lab, which was dim and empty. Since no one was there to stop me, I climbed up and sat cross-legged on a lab table, the act of rebellion easing my nerves about the call. My father cut to the chase. He’d heard that a friend was worried about me. His voice was tight—angry.

  I thought I knew what he was talking about. After the snowball fight, I’d written to a friend at home, asking, Is it ever okay for a grown man to touch under my shirt without asking? She’d been unsure. It depended on the circumstances, she suggested, citing, for example, a visit to a doctor. I thanked her, but felt dismayed; I had hoped that she would say no, it was never okay, and that then I might have clarity to support my own apparent bias.

  I could have confided in my parents, but until I knew for sure whether Far was “bad” or not, it would be embarrassing to suggest as much. For one thing, though it was hard to put my finger on why, my worries—my feelings about Far, my unarticulated fears about what he might do—felt deeply private, at least where my parents were concerned. To cast doubt on an adult in such a way seemed to require solid evidence, not just feelings. More impo
rtant, my parents had worried that sixteen was too young to go abroad, and I’d spent months petitioning them as to my readiness and maturity, doing extra chores as a contribution toward the cost of the exchange, which—another worry—was already paid for. To be only two months into the year, and already struggling, would only prove their doubts right.

  And now my father was on the phone, and his voice frightened me. I thought of how far away he was, and how little connected us: I could open my hand, drop the phone, and all connection would be lost. Then I could be alone. If I was alone, I wouldn’t have to think.

  “Blair,” said my father, “are you safe?”

  The question seemed huge.

  It was the first time I’d heard my dad’s voice in weeks. That hadn’t been his choice—my parents would have loved to talk to me daily, to send letters, to visit. It was out of respect for me that they didn’t. I’d asked them to give me space, to let me explore without them. I’d wanted to follow the guidelines, to do things right.

  On the drive to the airport, my father had given me a cartoon he’d drawn on yellow legal paper. In the picture, a long-haired girl sat on a throne, flanked by two bulldogs with spiked collars and bared teeth. The bulldogs’ collars were labeled with my parents’ initials. He said that when I was in Norway, I should think of myself as the princess on the throne. My parents were my bulldogs; they would always be there to protect me. I could sic them on anyone. I’d packed the drawing carefully, so as not to bend it. Now it hung by my bed, taped to the pebbled wall.