In One Person

Stratton Mountain and turned east-southeast on Route 30. My mom and Muriel were headed west-northwest on Route 30; somewhere between Bondville and Rawsonville, the two cars collided. There was plenty of snow for the skiers, but Route 30 was bone-dry and crusted with road salt; it was twelve degrees below zero, too cold to snow.
    The Vermont State Police reported that my mother and Muriel were killed instantly; Aunt Muriel had only recently turned sixty, and my mom would have been fifty-eight in April of that year. Richard Abbott was just forty-eight. “Kinda young to be a widower,” as Grandpa Harry would say. Uncle Bob was on the young side to be a widower, too. Bob was Miss Frost’s age—he was sixty-one.
    Elaine and I rented a car and drove to Vermont together. We argued the whole way about what I “saw” in Rachel, the thirty-something fiction writer who was teaching at Columbia.
    “You’re flattered when younger writers like your writing—or you’re oblivious to how they come on to you, maybe,” Elaine began. “All the time you’ve spent around Larry has at least taught you to be wary of
older
writers who suck up to you.”
    “I guess I’m oblivious to it—namely, that Rachel is sucking up to me. But Larry
never
sucked up to me,” I said. (Elaine was driving; she was an aggressive driver, and when she drove, it made her more aggressive in other ways.)
    “Rachel is sucking up to you, and you don’t see it,” Elaine said. I didn’t say anything, and Elaine added: “If you ask me, I think my tits are bigger.”
    “Bigger than—”
    “Rachel’s!”
    “Oh.”
    Elaine was never sexually jealous of anyone I was sleeping with, but she didn’t like it when I was hanging out with a
writer
who was younger than she was—man or woman.
    “Rachel writes in the present tense—‘I go, she says, he goes, I think.’ That
shit
,” Elaine declared.
    “Yes, well—”
    “And the ‘thinking, wishing, hoping, wondering’—
that
shit!” Elaine cried.
    “Yes, I know—” I started to say.
    “I hope she doesn’t verbalize her orgasms: ‘Billy—I’m coming!’ That shit,” Elaine said.
    “Well, no—not that I remember,” I replied.
    “I think she’s one of those young-women writers who baby her students,” Elaine said.
    Elaine had taught more than I had; I never argued with her about teaching, or Mrs. Kittredge. Grandpa Harry was generous to me; he gave me a little money for Christmas every year. I’d had part-time college-teaching jobs, the occasional writer-in-residence stint—the latter never longer than a single semester. I didn’t dislike teaching, but it hadn’t invaded my writing time—as I knew it
did
invade the writing time of many writer friends, Elaine among them.
    “Just so you know, Elaine—I find there’s more to like about Rachel than her small breasts,” I said.
    “I would sincerely hope so, Billy,” Elaine said.
    “Are you seeing anyone?” I asked my old friend.
    “You know that guy Rachel almost married?” Elaine asked me.
    “Not personally,” I told her.
    “He hit on me,” Elaine said.
    “Oh.”
    “He told me that, one time, Rachel shit in the bed—that’s what he told me, Billy,” Elaine said.
    “Nothing like that has happened, yet,” I told Elaine. “But I’ll be on the lookout for anything suspicious.”
    After that, we drove for a while in silence. When we left New York State and crossed into Vermont, a little west of Bennington, there were more dead things in the road; the bigger dead things had been dragged to the side of the road, but we could still see them. I remember a couple of deer, in the
bigger
category, and the usual raccoons and porcupines. There’s a lot of roadkill in northern New England.
    “Would you like me to drive?” I asked Elaine.
    “Sure—yes, I would,” Elaine answered quietly. She found a place to pull off the road, and I took over the driving. We turned north again, just before Bennington; there was more snow in the woods, and more dead things in the road and along the roadside.
    We were a long way from New York City when Elaine said, “That guy didn’t hit on me, Billy—I made up the story about Rachel shitting in bed, too.”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “We’re writers. We make things up.”
    “I
did
run into someone you went to school with—this is a true story,” Elaine told me.
    “Who? In school with
where
?” I asked her.
    “At the Institute, in Vienna—she was one of those Institute