The Ice Storm Read Online Free PDF

the door.
    Where to stow the evidence?
    The garter belt was an empty snakeskin, a stately and somber artifact of his failure, a sort of Shroud of Turin. In the hall, with it balled in his fist, he turned first left and then right. Like a ghost, he ventured into Janey and Jim’s bedroom and gazed sadly upon the pacific waters of their waterbed.
    He thought to set it right upon their pillow, but he couldn’t do it. Scruples.
    In the hall, though, he found himself again at Mike’s door. Impulsively, he entered with his death shroud, with Mike’s mother’s soiled garter belt, and stuffed it in the back of Mike’s closet. The kid would never even know he had been framed.
    Then with a lightness of heart, a relief at folly alleviated, Hood started down the stairs. He thought about riding the banister, but the newel post had a sort of asparagus bulb at the top of it, one that must have neutered generations of banister-riders. Unable to leave the premises, he toured the first floor. Possession was the larger part of ownership. Fluted crystal, lace napkins, the finest eight-track stereo components, all the Williamses’ personal property belonged that afternoon to him.
    At the front door, however, the last of Hood’s resolve failed. He was a spook, a fool, a voice from the beyond, a housebreaker, and it was time he faced up to these things. His wife took no notice of his comings and goings, his mistress abandoned him in her own house, his children wouldn’t speak to him. Only the back exit was fit for Benjamin Paul Hood. He would leave by the servant’s entrance, with imperceptible footfalls. On tippy-toes. Like a Plumber, an official burglar.
    Then, at the top of the basement stairs, having opened the door already, having opened the door absently, he heard laughter. The laughter of teenagers. That hard, bitter, revenging laughter of distrust and disillusionment. One way out! One way only!

New Canaan was tiny already, but as Wendy got older it seemed to be shrinking, too. It was vanishing, maybe. Its avenues were like the crosshatching on a legal tender dollar bill. You could read Wendy’s town with one of those beginner microscopes that Paul had gotten for his birthdays from three or four relatives. Next to New Canaan, a black ant was like a Cadillac or like an armored personnel carrier; a housefly, the Huey helicopter. Shag carpet was like an Asian rain forest.
    One time she had cut her wrist lightly—just a scratch: long sleeves to school for a while and no one knew any better; later you couldn’t even tell—so that she could look at her own blood under the microscope. Just the usual traffic and hustle, though, these globs of color overtaking these other globs.
    In New Canaan, there was one high school, one junior high, four elementaries. No school bus more than fifteen minutes from its destination. This meant that you could know everyone in your demographic category by the time you started high school. So Wendy Hood knew everyone. One movie theater. One grocery store. Churches were Protestant. Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night stayed New Canaan’s relentless progress toward neighborliness.
    The girls took home economics and the boys took shop or else risked civic humiliation for the rest of their lives. Wendy took home economics but she hated it. Best thing about it was its resemblance to sorcery. Between cooking and science, she had learned all the fundamentals of poisoning. Eagerly she imagined dispatching a loved one, or altering her own future, or turning her father’s SX-70 camera into a twisted sculpture of metal and plastic.
    To class she wore ponchos and handmade sweaters, and her blond hair tickled the top of her butt. She had toe socks and clogs and painter’s pants. Wendy’s Tretorn tennis sneakers were filched from Mike’s Sports not two days ago (the day before Thanksgiving) and now the patent leather gear she was supposed to wear for