The New Yorker Stories полностью

They went back to the house. Music was playing loudly on the radio, and her father was hollering to her mother, “First we get that damned ‘Drummer Boy’ dirge, and now they’ve got the Andrews Sisters singing ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.’ What the hell does that have to do with Christmas? Isn’t that song from the Second World War? What are they doing playing that stuff at Christmas? Probably some disc jockey that’s high. Everybody’s high all the time. The guy who filled my gas tank this morning was high. The kid they put on to deliver mail’s got eyes like a pinwheel and walks like he might step on a land mine. What about ‘White Christmas’? Do they think that Bing Crosby spent his whole life playing golf ?”

Peter came up behind Cammy as she was hanging his scarf on a peg on the back of the kitchen door. He helped her out of her coat and hung it over the scarf.

“Look at this,” Cammy’s mother said proudly, from the kitchen.

They walked into the room where her mother stood and looked down. While they were out, she had finished making the annual bûche de Noël: a fat, perfect cylinder of a log, with chocolate icing stroked into the texture of tree bark. A small green-and-white wreath had been pumped out of a pastry tube to decorate one end, and there was an open jar of raspberry jam that her mother must have used to make the bow.

“It was worth my effort,” her mother said. “You two look like children seeing their presents on Christmas morning.”

Cammy smiled. What her mother had just said was what gave her the idea of touching the Yule log—what made her grin and begin to wiggle her finger lightly through a ridge, widening it slightly, giving the bark at least one imperfection. Once her finger touched it, it was difficult to stop—though she knew she had to let the wild upsweep of the tornado she might create stay an image in her mind. The consolation, naturally, was what would happen when she raised her finger. Slowly—while Peter and her mother stared—she lifted her hand, still smiling, and began to suck the chocolate off her finger.

In the White Night

“Don’t think about a cow,” Matt Brinkley said. “Don’t think about a river, don’t think about a car, don’t think about snow. . . .”

Matt was standing in the doorway, hollering after his guests. His wife, Gaye, gripped his arm and tried to tug him back into the house. The party was over. Carol and Vernon turned to wave goodbye, calling back their thanks, whispering to each other to be careful. The steps were slick with snow; an icy snow had been falling for hours, frozen granules mixed in with lighter stuff, and the instant they moved out from under the protection of the Brinkleys’ porch the cold froze the smiles on their faces. The swirls of snow blowing against Carol’s skin reminded her—an odd thing to remember on a night like this—of the way sand blew up at the beach, and the scratchy pain it caused.

“Don’t think about an apple!” Matt hollered. Vernon turned his head, but he was left smiling at a closed door.

In the small, bright areas under the streetlights, there seemed for a second to be some logic to all the swirling snow. If time itself could only freeze, the snowflakes could become the lacy filigree of a valentine. Carol frowned. Why had Matt conjured up the image of an apple? Now she saw an apple where there was no apple, suspended in midair, transforming the scene in front of her into a silly surrealist painting.