Five Tuesdays in Winter

by Lily King

An ornate sign announced PRIVATE WAY. High hedges hid most of these fancier houses from sight, giving everything an overgrown, Sleeping Beauty feel. As kids we’d ridden down here despite the warning, scaring ourselves into believing that we’d be put in jail if we got caught, but we never dared go down a driveway.

The only other person I had ever known to do such a thing as I was doing now was Maria from The Sound of Music. I couldn’t remember the song about courage that she sang as she walked with her guitar from the abbey to the von Trapp mansion, so I sang “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”

We’d always guessed it was a mansion because people spoke of it that way, but really all we could picture was a house like our small capes, only much wider and taller.

I wondered why, if they had this whole house, we were in such a small, dreary room.

It was the first room I’d ever had that had nothing to do with my parents, their

tastes, or their rules. I felt like Marlo Thomas on That Girl, a girl with her own apartment.

I pushed out thoughts of Rapunzel, a story that had always scared me, and of Charles Manson, whom Gina’s older brother had told us about that spring.

seeing the neglected flower beds, all the death and new life tangled together, I wrote, and surprised myself and kept writing.

I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house

and had charge of two children.

But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became.

broke into song about someone begging a doctor for more pills.

The song continued in my head. The Stones. “Mother’s Little Helper.” It thrilled me that he hadn’t spelled it out, that he’d been confident I would get it.

She keeps calling them sensitive and fragile. They’re fucking exhausted, Ma.” With Hugh, Kay sounded like my father after a couple of drinks. She sounded nothing like who she’d been before.

everyone in the family used it, except when Kay called her Molly Bloom, an allusion I wouldn’t get until twelfth-grade English)

I got the sense that it was an expensive wedding and there were still some outstanding bills in town (there were stores to be avoided, particularly the liquor store, and trips had to be made to vendors farther away because of it).

Mrs. Pike didn’t seem to resent Hugh for the wedding. She just needed to confirm, several times a day, that it had been worth it. For her, remembering it and talking about it increased its value,

And while she didn’t make continual conversation, she made just enough to keep someone from picking up their novel.

they’re just lying there looking at the ceiling and laughing. They’re weird, I guess.” “They’re not weird. They’re happy, Stevie. Will you promise me you’ll remember that?”

“They went into town for dinner.” Town, to the Pikes, wasn’t downtown Ashing. It meant Boston, an hour away.

I was already an expert calibrator of drunk and high and coked out of one’s mind.

“Happy.” He said it like it was a filthy word. “Is your husband happy? Every day? Some days? What is happy? What is being happy in a relationship? Are you happy? Such a stupid word. What the fuck is happy?” “It’s not that complicated. You either like living with someone or you don’t. You either like the commitment part or you don’t.

“My wife, with whom I made vows on that patch of grass right over there less than a year ago, wants out. That is not a pattern, Kay. That’s my life fucking falling apart.”

I sucked in another long deep breath of it. I tried to remember a specific moment, a place, but it was only a feeling. A good feeling. A warm, safe feeling I no longer had.

You cannot know these blistering feelings—you have not yet met your Rochester. But believe me, they are so powerful that now every novel, every line of poetry, makes perfect and vivid sense.

I want to ravish him. I did not know exactly what ravish meant. I didn’t think it could mean anything as boring as sex.

as usual the adults were not

thinking about me, and the words in my notebook were meaningless to them.

“Her parents recently—you know.” Mrs. Pike never used the word “divorced.” She always left it blank.

I recognized nothing about this body. It felt to me that the mirror itself, more like a looking glass, really, in its old-fashioned frame, had conjured it up, that I hadn’t had this body before I’d moved into this room.

I also knew there were times when it was not special. But I didn’t know that it could be not special with someone you liked.

You become a creature I can’t understand, my mother sometimes said to me.

He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections—if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?

He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance.

She was too tall and too sophisticated for a Maine preteen.

“I think as a rule people don’t like being spoken of in the third person.”

She was a reader (she borrowed and returned as many as ten books a week) but not a speller.

On the dupe sheet, she wrote J. Austin and F. Dostoyevski.

Thick broken slabs of ice, the size of mattresses, had been pushed to the shore by the tide. Out farther, beyond the frozen crust, the open water shimmered a luminous summer blue. In these kinds of cold spells everything seemed confused. Even the gulls overhead seemed lost.

If he told her she looked nice, she’d give the reason instead of saying thank you. But he was the type who could not give a compliment, so he just said hello and let her in.

He felt abstracted and disjointed, and it occurred to him that the sensation was only a slight magnification of what he felt all the time.

It was the voice of someone stuck in Maine for no good reason.

they worked together in the uninterrupted professionalism he’d established the first week of her employment. It was as if she never stood in his living room or giggled in Spanish with his daughter.

what he remembered most now about Watergate was the feeling of being nineteen in a one-room apartment

and the sound—though it had been silent for so many years now—of Aaron’s hyena laugh.

She had thin, straight hair that she’d probably complained about

“Sí,” Mitchell ventured uneasily.

He would have liked to have an intensely intellectual selection—no confessional poetry, no mass-market psychology, no coffee-table crap. But as it was, business was precarious.

A few days ago, a woman had come in with swatches of fabric and asked him to find her books only in those colors.

Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of