Skating on Thin Ice

“You’re skating on thin ice, young lady!”

Abigail freezes. Her chubby finger, coated in the whipped white frosting of grandma’s angel food cake, hovers somewhere between the cake and her mouth. Grandma looks anything but angelic. She’s tall and wiry, and she scowls at Abigail as she swoops in to take the cake (so temptingly adorned with strawberries and roses!) away from her sneaky little hands.

“That’s for later,” Grandma scolds. “Don’t let me catch you picking again!” She carries the cake away, out of the kitchen and off towards the big dining room, set up with two vast tables and a whole herd of chairs for all of Abigail’s aunts, uncles, and cousins. Abigail sighs, and licks the frosting off her finger. There’s no harm in that now.

Grandma’s house is old. It always smells like chlorine from the pool in the basement, garlic flavored bagel chips, and the color green. Abigail is in the smaller of the house’s two kitchens, the one that used to be reserved for the servants when the house was first built around a gazillion years ago. Grandma doesn’t have servants, though. She just has a really, really, super big family. She orchestrates and they get things done.

The thing they’re doing today is preparing Christmas dinner.

“Come over here and help me peel the corn,” Abigail’s daddy calls.

Uhg. There’s nothing Abigail hates like peeling corn. The stiff sheaths hurt her hands, and the silken hairs get all over her dress. Even so, arguing with Daddy is worse than arguing with Grandma. She sits down next to him at the kitchen table, where the corn is already laid out. He gives her left pigtail an affectionate tug.

“What did Grandma mean about the ice?” Abigail asks. “I’m not skating. Wish I was.”

“It’s a metaphor. God, you don’t understand that, do you?” Daddy rubs the back of his neck. “It means you have to be careful, or you’ll be in big trouble soon. You know what I used to say when she said that to me?”

“What?” Abigail rips away at her corn.

As he speaks his next words, Daddy’s voice goes high and lilting, just like the little boys in Abigail’s first grade class, when they make fun of her for being fat and quiet. “I hope I don’t fall through!” Daddy sneers, finishing off with a protruding tongue. Abigail giggles.

Later, at dinner, Daddy drinks enough Grey Goose (a funny name for a drink that looks like water and tastes like fire and crusty socks) to make his face smell kinda like Mommy’s nail polish remover. Grandma doesn’t tell him with her mouth that he’s skating on thin ice, but the looks she keeps giving him say that loud and clear.

Daddy laughs and tosses back another shot.

I hope I don’t fall through.

———

Abigail’s father as somebody with a unique ability to put himself in precarious situations, dance on the edge of consequences, and somehow escape from them all unscathed.

He drives his car with a coffee thermos filled with beer in the cup holder, yet never gets pulled over or causes a traffic accident.

He comes home from “work” at all hours of the night, and Mommy always forgives him.

He runs out of money to pay electricity, plunging the family’s house in darkness for weeks at a stretch, yet there’s always food on the table and presents on the holidays.

There are hairline cracks in the ice he’s skating on, but he doesn’t see them until it’s too late.

———

It’s January. The water at Abigail’s house is shut off. That means they can’t flush the toilet, so the whole house smells awful.

“Come on,” Daddy says. He has a bucket. “Put on your glove and coat. Let’s have an adventure.”

Abigail rushes off to get her things. When she can’t pull the gloves down over the right fingers fast enough, Daddy yells at her to “figure it out”. He doesn’t help her.

“This is all your grandma’s fault,” he says, watching Abigail struggle with her gloves. “She never does anything for me.”

“Okay.”

“Come on!”

The gloves are hopeless, so Abigail jams them in the pocket of her jeans as she rushes to follow Daddy. She doesn’t bother with the coat. She doesn’t want to fight with the zipper.

They walk outside. They walk into town. They walk past town into forest. They leave their footprints in the snow, and Abigail shivers.

They arrive at a frozen pond, and where Daddy easily kicks through the ice with his foot. He fills the bucket up with frigid water, and they carry it home to pour down the toilet, to get it to flush.

Mommy’s angry when she finds that Daddy brought Abigail out to fetch the water with her and even angrier when the pipes burst from all that cold water.

———

When did Daddy fall through the ice? Abigail doesn’t know. She only knows that he’s drowning. Mommy announces the divorce in early March. Daddy mopes around the house like a ghost, till Mommy and Abigail move out.

Mommy explains it like this:

“I love him very much, but he takes risks. It’s not good for you. Or for me.” She sighs. “It’s not good.”

“It’s not good to take risks,” Abigail echoes.

Mommy buries her face in the palm of her hand. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not good to take stupid risks,” Mommy amends.

“Like skating on thin ice?”

“Like skating on thin ice.”