Gwen, in Green

Such a friendly house it was. Warm. The colors were vibrant and everything was so clean and new. It was a glorious winter. George had rented a building in Ocean City and was installing equipment. He had plenty of work, more than he wanted, actually. Ocean City was a fishing town and there were dozens of boats with radio­telephones. He was the only man within thirty miles licensed to work on them. He was swamped with radio work and depth-­recorder repair, and he had to turn away quick, easy money doing home TV sets. They were no longer living on their capital. Their expenses were low. They ate what they liked, drank the best booze, went to movies, and had dinner at nice places, and still there was more money coming in than going out and life was a blast, with a fire in the fireplace and Don Ellis playing “Turkish Bath” on the magnificent music system George had installed in the big room, and the wind whistling outside and a light snow in February to give a fairyland atmosphere to their woods.

Inland, the snow brought hardship and death. It was a heavy fall, closing schools and roads and bringing the entire state to a frozen standstill. Even in Ocean County schools closed, but there, near the warmer water, the effects were short-­lived. Early morning was elves’ work on the trees, whose limbs were artistically draped in snow and diamonded with ice. George, the early riser, rolled her out and forced her to walk, still half asleep, to the glass doors leading onto the balcony. She was jarred into full alertness by the beauty. The white glare squinted her eyes and tears formed, tears of joy engendered by beauty.

She put on a set of George’s insulated hunting under­wear and rounded her form with layers of outside clothing. He met her outside, having gone out before her to track the clean, virgin snow. Playful snowballs flew. There was a thin film of ice on the clear pond, making it a glassed-­in jewel of green.

Before the snow began to melt at mid-­morning, they had covered the estate. They both said the word “estate” in quotation marks, teasing each other about having satis­fied their peasant land hunger with two hundred three and a quarter acres of swamp, cut off from civilization by a radioactive canal.

“I wonder if they’re cold,” Gwen said, shivering as she looked up at pine boughs sheathed in ice and topped with a frosting of snow.

“No, Gwen,” George laughed. “You can’t take all the poor trees inside by the fire to warm them up.”

Sam and Mandy were chasing each other, discovering the fun of snow. Mandy’s blackness was a vivid contrast to the white. Sam, gray going on white, blended in now and then and seemed to disappear. Mandy, the larger, threw herself on Sam and tumbled him. Sam rose, shook, examined nearby trees with a calculating eye, lifted one leg and let fly at a sapling pine.

“Old Sam’s warming up one of them,” George said.

“They shudder when a dog comes near,” Gwen said.

“My wife, the nut.”

“I talk to trees,” she said, keeping her face straight.

“You didn’t do too well with those African violets,” George said. Hands in pockets, they were walking back toward the house.

“I didn’t know about talking to them then.”

“Aaaarg,” he groaned. “That’s the trouble with teaching women to read.”

“It’s not just a crazy idea,” she said. “They feel. Plants feel. They appreciate it when they’re watered. They faint when they’re threatened with violence.”

“I know a few trees that are going to have severe and fatal fainting spells,” George said. “I’m going to buy a chain saw and cut some wood for the fireplace.” A large deposit of snow, loosened by the heat of the sun, fell. It splattered down from a high limb, going down his neck.

“See,” Gwen said, giggling. “They heard you.”

She helped gather wood when the snow was gone and the warmer weather had returned. There was a wealth of fallen trees and dead limbs for starting fires in the big fireplace, and plenty of the resin-­filled longleaf pine, called fat-­wood, to kindle. George bought his chain saw and felled oak. It sizzled greenly on the fire, burned for a long time, and sent out waves of heat.

With the fire, hot chocolate and cheese toast in the early evenings, and music on the four big speakers in the main room, the cozy winter passed. It was spring before it occurred to Gwen that not once had they had anyone in the house. Telephone men, meter readers, and a stray insurance salesman had knocked on the door, but not once had there been a guest in the house. George knew almost everyone in the area and kept Gwen up-­to-­date on gossip. She had met many of the local people while hanging around George’s shop or doing the groceries in the local markets, but neither of them had expressed a desire to invite people to the house.

“Who needs people?” George asked, when Gwen talked about the situation in early March.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m just a worry-­wart. I keep thinking that we’re too happy, too smug, too content with ourselves. Perhaps we should share it.”

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