The Ice Storm Read Online Free PDF Page B

the holidays was safely enclosed in a Tretorn box on the 5½ shelf in the back of the very same store. Wendy wore the uniforms other kids wore, but she thought a lot about black gowns and putting spiders in the pockets of her girlfriend’s hip-huggers. She wanted to smoke pot and take sleeping pills (she had located some prescriptions in her parents’ bathroom) and fondle the one sad-looking boy in the special-education class. Fondling she had learned precociously like everything else, in conversation with her brother, from her mother’s copy of The Sensuous Woman , and partly from her own imagination. Sometimes it was hard to understand the descriptions of this stuff in books. You had to use the wilder senses.
    Only one place in this desolate village interested her really. She was lucky enough to live beside it. Silver Meadow! A private residential psychiatric facility. A drying-out joint, her father called it. Funny farm. It was marked off as precisely as a crossword puzzle on the hillside beside their house—neat little footpaths, neat architecture, neat bowling alleys and auditoriums, pools, saunas, paddle-tennis courts. Precisely landscaped shrubs and evergreens. Benevolent security personnel roamed Silver Meadow and they recognized in Wendy Hood a local sylph whose comings and goings were not averse to the therapeutic process.
    What did it mean to dry out? She had seen the lonely and decrepit emerging from the Mercedes and BMWs. They wore suede and fur and bangles or matching denim suits; they checked to be sure the car door was locked because issues of security were important to them. They tried to memorize their spot in the parking lot and failed. She saw them walking aimlessly around the parking lot, forgetting. What they had in common besides their wealth were their anguished faces. They had rings and minks but they were worn out and desperate. You could tip them over just by blowing hard. And they weren’t violent or criminal. They were just people. As far as Wendy could tell. No hardened serial killers sodomizing young girls and leaving their bodies in rural creeks. Wendy was among her people here on the premises of Silver Meadow. From all around the country, from New York and Cleveland and Athens and Dallas and Las Vegas, they came to Silver Meadow for the cure of folly. She didn’t want to overstay her welcome here—she didn’t want to exhaust its riches—but she liked the place better than her hometown. And that was why, on Friday afternoon, she was here waiting for Mikey Williams.
    Rain. Some fat, smiling weatherman would say it was raw . New Canaan was maybe a single degree about freezing. Surfaces contracted. There had been hail, too. Her poncho didn’t keep out the cold, but she withstood it, shivering, because she was precociously brilliant—everyone said so—and impractical. Anything was better than the homely, pink ski jacket her mom had bought her.
    Originally, it wasn’t Mike Williams but his brother, Sandy, with whom these trysts had taken place. He was a jumpy, quiet boy and Wendy liked how he was shocked by her, how he was always a little bit uncomfortable when she was around, how he didn’t want to kiss with his mouth open; she liked how he was always skulking off to work on a model airplane, one of those monuments to futility and boredom. He was a challenge.
    One afternoon she successfully persuaded him to let her enter the bathroom with him. It was just the sort of pastime they got into over the years. Wendy had wrestled with him at touch football; she had eaten the sandwich ends he left behind—cream cheese and jelly, Fluffernutter, deviled ham; she had shared her Mountain Dew with him and tortured insects with him. Though Sandy didn’t talk much, Wendy thought what he thought and knew what he knew. Until that time in the bathroom.
    The Williamses’ downstairs bathroom was wallpapered in a velvet floral print. As Sandy unzipped