by Tamsin J. Newton
Snow. It’s really blowing now, cold and cutting, a numb muffle on my world. Edges and sounds are softer while the chill cuts deeper. Even now, snow is almost a novelty to me. I didn’t grow up in snow lands; it still takes me by surprise. At this moment I have no clever words to describe the phenomenon, which is even more surprising for me.
I am driving, or rather being driven, from Salt Lake back to Provo. By a real cute boy, with olive skin and warm eyes and gel in his hair. He is not the type to call gel “product”— which is something, I guess. A BYU boy with a monosyllabic name, the form of his body even evident under his T-shirt. Muscled, the shape of him right below the surface. Nothing to hide. I know him from my previous stint at our school. Clever and sweet, like spun sugar. The type of caramelized golden-boy a Provo girl is supposed to go for. I always liked him a lot in a friendly sort of way.
His name’s Mark. A real-life artist. We are going to get ice cream before he drives me home —his suggestion. There’s only so much to do in Provo, which is odd for a college town. This perceived austerity of culture was my downfall before.
Now, I am content to get ice cream, I tell myself. I am perfectly content to get ice cream with a cute boy, to seek frozen treats in this frozen world. I am looking forward to it. I will get vanilla piled high like mountain peaks, tall and spilling under the weight of candy topping. Something a six-year-old might construct, although I am twenty-three. We will get sugar and brain-freeze — the type you get over — and giggle. I will like all that, I tell myself. I told him as much too, when he suggested it.
It is January. It has been snowing all month. It is snowing now. White flakes fall, making a white powder world, masking the fact that there is nothing the snow is masking.
I have not been in Provo in a long time. I was gone a while. I had to leave. I am back now, a student again. A surface good girl again. Bad things happened before, very bad things, and I had to go home. I made some of those bad things happen. Others happened to me. So I went home to Texas, where there was no snow.
Or blow. That one drug. A world of white powder. I escaped it, so now I can come back to Utah to do it right this time. To be a good girl and finish school.
I already miss Texas desperately. I can’t tell Mark. It would be petulant. It would be peculiar.
I certainly can’t tell him why I am so loathe to be back here.
He is talking about music as we drive back to Provo. He is talking about everything that happened while I was checked out. The last two years. The time I missed.
We are coming from a very pleasant day in Salt Lake, where we had watched slightly offbeat movies at the Tower Theatre — never approaching the places that I used to haunt. I made sure of it. And in Provo, there will be things innocent and vanilla and sweet.
Driving back, there is unending snow. Unceasing. A barrage. The snow is beautiful. I am watching it fall, soft and silent. I am silent too. This is not by choice. I want to talk. He is charming and attractive and I want to impress him. I want him to think, Well now! This is a charming and attractive girl in my passenger seat here, and she is so witty and intelligent!
But I cannot seem to speak. All I can think to comment on is the snow. And saying it is pretty is too easy. Too boring. I want to say what it is like. I want to dazzle him with insight and blind him with my own words. But I am having trouble translating from my head to the empty air between us. I am from warm, safe places, and I have only lived in snow for a short time in my life. Times filled with white powder. I cannot tell him any of this.
“And I have that website up,” he says, and I make impressed noises. I was the one who brought up what he has been doing. I do like to foster the illusion of progress, even though we both should have cleared town a long time ago.
“That’s so cool,” I say ridiculously, all I can think of. “You must be really excited.”
“I am, I guess. I mean, everyone takes wedding pictures.”
“I bet yours are really good though.” I meet his eyes for a moment and then glance, embarrassed, out the window. Not exactly a scintillating repartee.
I did mean it, what I said. I did not mean for it to sound so false. It’s just — this drive. Winding dark down the interstate. I can’t tell him how many times I have made this drive before, between Salt Lake and Provo. A hundred times. A thousand times. Long pale lines of road in a dark and sterile world. Other cars like ghosts. An hour drive, more or less, but always a respite from what lies at either end.
About halfway through there is always Thanksgiving Point. I have fond daytime memories there, with families and flowers and ponies (for real). Nighttime is another story. Nighttime, this strange place is all lit-up dinosaurs and glaring signage. Next to the road, the one big marquee is set in its false water tower. It cycles trite aphorisms in neon gold against the black and absent. At the moment, it is telling me and Mark all the ways to be Remarkable. And it reminds us to Smile.
I know smiles now that chill the bones under your skin. Moonlight off teeth like razors off our mirrors. Another set of olive eyes, and skeleton bones under skin I know too well. Truly remarkable. Worth remarking upon, maybe.
Yet as we drive past this marquee, across the street — not even pretending to have your best interests at heart — stand signs for pyramid schemes. Shattered dreams. Used cars, 100 percent approved, even for someone Like You. Multilevel marketing on all levels. All these pitfalls for the soft and credulous, empty promises bathed in bright spotlight. All these ways to waste oneself to nothing, meant for those trying to be remarkable in ways defined by even more invisible people. That sort of thing wears thin, up here in mountain elevations. The lights all around are sterile, illuminating nothing.
See, before all this, I was lonely in Salt Lake, sad and drawn into dark things. The first time I met that other man with the smile — in an outside hot tub, hopped up. Neon-blue liqueur. I was pretending, between cigarettes, to be a sea monster, and I splashed and sparkled in the water, bathtub-warm by then because they had run out of petroleum.
I wasn’t really a monster, not yet. I was still just a girl. But he was a monster. He had beautiful olive skin and a short, sharp name —Vince. It was still early in the year, and steam rose off the water, obscuring those on the other side. But I remember the stories he told. I remember his white teeth. I remember how he fished my little black lighter out of one of the snow banks on the side of the tub and held it out. A little black piece snared in a long spider-web hand.
“Silly,” he said, clicking the lighter uselessly, tick-tick-tack. “Now it’s just black plastic. You can’t leave it in the snow; it’ll be ruined.” He winked. I had always admired the gold agate glitter of his eyes.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said, emerging from the warmth of submersion into the exposed half-chill to sit beside him.
I took the lighter from him, placed my hand in his. We smiled. I was caught. I decided to be caught. I was done for.
But this whole story is not for this new boy to know. Mark. Bad form to talk about old boys, even if there’s no question of dating between us and I have left that life behind forever. I am a BYU student again, I say, that tragic mantra. I am happy again, and safe again. I have a God again. Mark and I drive on to Provo.
The snow is like a sci-fi film, Mark and I agree, the snow coming at us like stars, like we are in hyperdrive. Warp drive. An old screensaver. Whatever your preferred cosmology. It’s a safe thing to say because we’ve watched Captain Kirk together, the bright sixties golds and greens, with silver spray-paint special effects. Nothing too complicated. The good guys that always win.
The snowflakes coming at us are not stars, though, not really. The little bright sparks are dead on their own. Stars glow. The snow in the headlights only reflects, like the close-by salt flats. It has no luminescence of its own. See, I know salt too. Salt flats — where my sharp demon and I went ourselves. Fossil oceans. Expanses of death. Salt accruing on boots, a crumbling white dust, ruining everything. Corrosive and consuming.
But I can’t tell Mark about the salt flats either, of my time on salted earth, of my time as salted earth. A time and place where I couldn’t make things grow even if it had occurred to me to do so. A sterile world.
He called it sugar, Vince did, when he called for delivery. We were moving up in the dead-end world, to be vendors and consumers, as well as consumed. Vince was disappearing a little more each day. I was disappearing too.
“Can I borrow a cup of sugar,” he’d say on the phone, like no one around him knew what he was doing, like he was important enough to have his cheap phone tapped, and I just thought it was so funny because here we were living in the Sugar House district of Salt Lake, which was not actually as ironic and clever as I thought it was — but it was just so apt.
It was nighttime when he called, always. At that point I couldn’t remember the last time I had been outside in the sun. The evenings were so clear. We sat together on the porch, the telltale anesthetic dripping down the back of our dull throats. I was smoking rose-flavored cigarettes, and I blew the smoke above our heads, and I looked up at the smoke curling around the dissipated white powder of the stars. I tried to make smoke rings to capture them. To encircle some star, to have it forever. I wanted to always feel this good. I wanted to be with the bright ones in the sky. To have everything be some form of all right. I failed on all counts and laughed. I was as bad at making smoke rings as I was at making decisions — as I was at self-preservation. It was funny, all right.
It wouldn’t be the phone taps that got Vince in the end, though his exacerbated paranoia would tell him otherwise.
It would be me.
I would destroy him because he destroyed me, and I would wonder if that was real love. His downfall would be simple. All he would do was bring a girl to the wrong party — one I was at. Like I hadn’t warned him. Like I wouldn’t punch him. Like I wouldn’t turn his sorry excuse for a self in, like I hadn’t hated him all along for the thin white monster he helped turn me into. Like he wouldn’t be taken shouting from his house by police, all the while screaming who did it, who did it, how did they know. Like he didn’t know deep down.
That part is funnier, though. You can laugh. I’m still laughing now.
The funniest part? That we didn’t realize then that it wasn’t sugar or snow or any of the other obvious euphemisms. It’s salt. It burns. It kills.
Brand names are everywhere as Mark and I drive back home to Provo. Brand names on billboards and white temples shot with gold, the only thing we can see from the road. And chain restaurants — prepackaged experiences. The roads are grids here, so you can find anywhere. And yet everywhere is the same place.
It’s hard to describe a former life. It’s hard to describe a life with no faith. I had no gods, so I fashioned myself into one. Billions and billions of solipsistic dimensions, if you think about it that way, and I was goddess of my own skull — at least that bright little sliver of it that was still conscious. The part of it I remember — when the blood in my head throbbed round and round in circles, everything in circles, and I had to relight the same cigarette all night because I forgot time meant anything and it kept going dark. The glow faded to scattered ash, leaving it white and dark. It kept dying. It was no way to live.
We had no faith, so we looked into ourselves and what we knew. I recall Mrs. Lot, when she turned around. Just like her I was turned into a pillar of salt because I couldn’t make any leap outside my own white skull. We collected sugar, powder, salt, ice to preserve ourselves. We frosted our minds. Salted our brains. And I paid through the nose — powdered my nose — right, get it? To keep looking good. I saw our teeth on the mirror where we used to cut it, sharp. I saw our bones. I saw the bones of my own skull.
Because I was wearing thin. I became too thin. You couldn’t live on stardust. It was no sustenance. You couldn’t live on salt or snow or any white powder. It was without substance. I was losing my substance.
For a moment, I lost myself.
Yet, in a strange sort of purity I found myself — living on nothing, I had nothing left behind to hide. Nothing remained to me. Not my own mind, not my own machinations, no thought nor feeling, not even my body — it all wasted away. Everything from thought to habit was out in the open.
I almost miss that involuntary honesty, the exposed wiring. I could see everything about me that was broken. I didn’t have to wait for flaws to evidence themselves in inconvenient circumstances, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time because of subconscious jealousy or insecurity or fear. There was a certain security in everything I did being the wrong thing at the wrong time. There was nothing about myself I didn’t know because there was nothing to know. With all that faulty machinery out in the open, I maybe could have fixed myself had it occurred to me. It never occurred to me.
Of course, all that twisted junk is hidden again now, under soft white. Not fixed, really, just hidden. So I never know now when I might suddenly handle things badly. I don’t know my exposed nerves or poorly healed wounds. I never know when I might cut myself good on hidden razors, once not-so-hidden.
For instance: Mark says something. Something complimentary and innocuous like “You were always so cool, what are you talking about?” or “You were always so smart, I bet you’re glad to be back in school.”
And I almost start crying. I’m not sure why—maybe because he is a nice, handsome boy saying nice, handsome things, and I’ve never thought I deserved a nice life where that happens to me, which might have been the problem all along. But that isn’t important. What is important is that I have to pause and laugh politely while I look out the window, to watch my reflected face contort in despair, and swallow my own unwelcome tears.
This almost-outburst is a mysterious kink in personal mechanics that I would have seen coming before, because something would have always been malfunctioning. My reaction to nice things would have been reliably wrong, consistently crazy, and I would have known why and how.
It’s the only thing I miss. And I do not miss it that much.
The Utah world outside the car is white now. When I left it a couple years ago, I left it a desert summer — the golds and greens of real life, not dormant, not dead. But I did not see the summer. I remember seeing only the nighttime. Snow-blindness had overtaken me. Frozen like that, I saw nothing. My eyes were blind, the boiled blue-white of stale eggs.
Other people were there for me, though, people who had kept their color and warmth. They kept loving me. They saved me. I was saved by them. And I dried my tears and went home. I cleared away the wreckage. I covered up the darkness to make everything bright and white again. Right again. I am now soft and pure and overwhelmed once more. I have found God again.
But I miss my more cosmopolitan Texas town desperately. I have not yet taken to Utah. When I make this highway drive, between two places, I still think, What a sterile world. Utah, a way station between one life and the next. Station to station, here to there, Salt Lake to Provo, death to life to death. Ashes to white ashes.
I am clean now in more than one sense. I found my faith and my life and myself all over again. But I keep it to myself. I can’t tell him any of this. It wouldn’t make any sense. It would only alienate him, and it is an absolute zero of his business. We will watch the snow together, and that will have to be enough. We will not get to know each other any better. It won’t be his fault. I don’t think I’m capable of that sort of connection right now.
We arrive at ice cream. Mark gets out first, and while I am fumbling with my purse, he opens the car door for me. Already he is gentler with me than my old love was, my other olive-skinned boy. The one with dead eyes and razor teeth, with whom I shared only a violent language. The one I put in prison because he forgot how much I knew and how little of me there was left. Mark takes my hand to help me out, and I smile silly.
Our feet go piff-piff in the fallen snow on the way inside. I am wearing impractical boots and almost slip on the hidden ice. I almost fall again. But not quite. I am good — quite good — at catching myself.
“You okay?” Mark laughs. “You gotta be careful on snow!”
“I know,” I say. I laugh, and I look around. “It’s so pretty, isn’t it?”
There is no way to communicate snow. Not right now.
“Almost makes me not miss Austin,” I lie.
“It is pretty,” he says. “It’s one of my favorite parts about Utah.” He is from warmer climes too. I wonder what he really thinks. He thinks in interesting ways. It shows up in the pictures he takes and the paintings he paints. But not in the language he speaks. Not in words — not in the way I express things.
I am sad. I will never know what he really thinks. I know that this will be the last time I see Mark, that we will make no connection, that I won’t bridge the gap between our two skulls. It is my fault.
I am still too withdrawn. Still too strange. Maybe I always will be and this will be a constant state. I mean, look at me. I can’t even talk about snow.
But I can think about it to myself, in my silly little brain, still trying to piece itself back together. Pretty powder, sure, but what isn’t these days? It is so much more. I am so much more. More than I was. I was salt and ash and everything else, but now I am snow. Real snow. Sterile, white, pure. Too much has happened and I have done too much. I tried to live off powder, now I just live. I cover up everything that went before until I can start anew. Until everything underneath dies.
I am snow.
