Convalescence

Convalescence My neighbor Maggie calls me up this frozen morning. I have been heating only the back rooms of the trailer, my bedroom and study, and when I part my way through the plastic that shuts off the rest of my home, I can see the telephone on the cold kitchen table, its ring vibrating the delicate salt and pepper shakers, silver wedding trinkets that have remained with me in spite of the divorce. The floor is uneven; the table is on a light slant, and every time the phone rings the shakers make a tinny sound and slide closer to the edge. I almost wait to watch them fall. Maggie will let the phone go forever; she knows I am home. We live in the only two trailers out on this two hundred acres, and for some reason with all this space and hills our landlord stuck our trailers nose to end, pressed together. Her kitchen is ten feet from my bedroom, and beyond the two of us are the grey sky and the frozen hills of southern Appalachia, sunk beneath a blizzard that has left three-foot drifts around our automobiles. Maggie has a kerosene heater in her kitchen. She turns her heat off completely and stays at her table taking a week-long leave of absence, writing in her journal, reading her Big Book, following the Steps to try to paste her life together into a discernible picture. It's a bitter winter and we're both broke. The phone keeps ringing. "Hi!" I can see my breath. There is frozen condensation on the inside of my windows between the glass and the plastic . During the winter I cover all the windows but the one above the kitchen sink. It faces east, identical to Maggie's, but while her window overlooks my bedroom, mine faces out over a hill, down into a grove of baby pines with a Sandra Kolankiewicz pond at the bottom. The deer gather there, and in the morning the sunlight crests the ridge and shines upon the cut crystals that hang above my sink, throwing rainbows around my walls. And while the other end of my trailer offers a view of Maggie's kitchen, out her bedroom is a red oak that somehow survived the turn of the century clear-cutting. All summer long her bedroom is cool, while mine bakes. "Have you seen Herb lately?" she asks. She travels a lot in her job, can put one hundred miles on her car in a day, and days like these, short and dim, she leaves her house in the dark and returns long after the dusk has fallen behind the farthest hill. "I've seen lights," she continues, "but, you know, I think they're on a timer, the same lights are always on." She pauses. "But old people do that." "I haven't seen smoke coming out of his chimney for days," I say, moving out of the kitchen area to the couch. I wrap one of my mother's quilts around me, look for a cat to hold in my lap. But the cats are both in the back of the trailer, underneath the warm light of the lamp on my desk. "And someone came and loaded up all his firewood," I finish. "Oh, my," says Maggie. I hear a squeak squeak. She is sitting in the rocker in her warm kitchen. Squeak. "I was just thinking that we should walk over and visit him, " she continues. "We haven't since the fall." Behind me, if I tore the plastic from the window, I would see Herb's house, way on the other side of this horseshoeshaped ridge. I turn and look out the window anyway, into the fuzzy greyness , and despite the covering, I can still make out the dark immensity of Herb's 33 barn. I cannot see his house nor any of the outbuildings, but the barn is there, a recognizable shape through a frosted window and a sheet of urethane. I cannot see the hill behind the barn but know it is dotted with horses and bales of hay. "I've been checking the admittance list in...