Chapters:

• Chapter 1: A Forgotten Rose

• Chapter 2: A Christmas Bandit

• Chapter 3: Colloquy on a Narrow Staircase

• Chapter 4: Three Wise Guys & The Little Zippo Girl

• Chapter 5: Five Times The Speed Of Wind

Chapter 1: A Forgotten Rose

In those days, Doc Winsor owned the only trampoline outside of Iowa. What they then called the Rebound Tumbler. His own daughter Nellie became a gymnastic wonder, but her best friend Mabel Hazelton was the real draw. Mabel was small for 11, short-legged and bony, but she could propel herself to mind-boggling heights. “No fair,” they teased, “you eat Mexican jumping beans!” On a campaign tour, before he ever became president, Franklin Roosevelt swung by Doc's neighborhood, awash with children. Trying to gain their attention, he joked about which they'd rather see: the planet Pluto, which had just been discovered, or the newly built Empire State Building. And to his great shock, they shouted back, “wouldn't he rather see Mabel fly?”

“Well,” he said, “I'd like to see what the child could manage.” And so everyone made for the tramp. Mabel leaped shyly upon it. She warmed up anxiously. And then sprung higher than anyone had ever seen! At the top of her most powerful bounds she could see into the third story window of the Winsor home. And there she spied Mrs. Winsor lacing up a new corselette. And Mabel thought, “gosh, that's what women have to wear?”

The photo in the next day's paper showed Mr. Roosevelt, a clot of children, the trampoline and a pair of feet, dart-shaped and blurred, rising out of the top of the frame.

One day, without knowing it, Mabel and Nellie hopped off the tramp for the last time and grew up. Its springs rusted; thin vines seized the posts, grew and withered. The tramp was sold; old man Hendrick used the canvas to cover his woodpile and made the wood frame into a bike rack. Years later the rack, all punked and rickety, was split apart. Pieces of it are still in use: as chocks holding steady the wheels of a tractor that hasn't moved in ages.

Old man Winsor died. Nellie married and moved away; she brought four children into the world then she, too, passed away. And so, here was Mabel, 87 years old, trying to remember where she'd put the box of Nellie's Christmas letters.

Mabel watched the snow filling up her backyard. The suncatchers at the kitchen window, crafted by her two sisters, Myrtle and Pearl, strove for light. Red glass, green glass, yellow: all muffled by the dust. Mabel could not extend her arms far enough over the counter to clean them, and she dared not use that grabber gadget with the pistol grip to pull them down. Too risky, too delicate. A step stool was out of the question: she could not raise her feet now more than the few inches needed to put on her slippers.

Like Mabel, her two sisters had never married, and the three spinsters had lived together for nearly half a century. The mortgage was long paid; Myrtle died in '88, Pearl in '98. Or was it the other way around? For 24 years Mabel worked as a hairdresser until arthritis conquered her. And so, at age 42, she went to work as an elevator operator in Kempsall's Department Store. She retired 23 years later. Her entire savings was exhausted by her sisters' illnesses, but Mabel was not overcome: after all, the house was theirs and Social Security provided everything she needed. She had forgotten that in a 5-pound can of White Rose coffee there was a spool of cash that amounted to over $55,000.

At 16, Mabel had won a lyric contest. Her verse prompted a bidding war between no less than Irving Berlin and Sammy Cahn. But neither had prevailed. Instead, Mabel sold her piece to a Syracuse composer who made a minor hit of it. Oh, his eyes, she said! Every year Mabel received a royalty check, a few hundred dollars at first. In 1957, the year of her greatest income, she earned $1,100. As the song's airplay faded the checks dwindled, and ten years ago they ceased altogether. One whole decade and her song had not been played once on the globe. Mabel wasn't the least sour. What she called her poetry can was already stuffed.

“What are you going to do with all those notes?” asked Myrtle.

“Saving it for a snowy day.”

“Been plenty snowy already,” added Pearl.

And Mabel smiled, “Not a hard enough snow yet!”

Long after the checks stopped Mabel completely forgot that she'd ever had such a fund. A luckless lapse of memory, seeing that she still never forgot to turn the stove off and never once misplaced her eyeglasses. Some memories stick, others wander.

As she looked out the window, Mabel recalled the path from the river through their side yard and how many boys she'd seen, fish poles in hand, cut through, weightless in their bare-footed youth. The new reservoir had brought an end to all that. It took half a decade for the path to vanish. “We skated on that river, too,” Mabel whispered in reverie, feeling again the strange comfort of her own tight-laced skates. She remembered, too, the peculiar man in a crushed hat and puckered moccasins who showed up every summer at her back porch, raising high a string of speckled trout: “More than I can eat, Ma'am.” The fish were sublime; no other meal before or after ever tasted so arrestingly good.Why? It was a question Mabel never discharged.

Now she heard a sizzling, and there it was: that smell. Pan-fried trout. But when she looked to the stove she saw only the pilot light: steady, blue and mute. She looked again to the river, and remembered her sister's words: “Time runs like a stream: first fall the leaves, then the tree.”

Someone was knocking at the front door: Mabel plugged in the electric percolator. It could not have been the postman or the old paperboy, her lifelines, for they knew always to come to the rear. Four years earlier, conceding her driving skills, she surrendered her license, and gave her car - a 10-year-old Buick with 4,000 miles - to a deliriously grateful paperboy. He would have to wait to drive it: he was only 14. But he cut her grass, shoveled the walks, brought all her groceries and ran what few errands Mabel ever asked. In segments too small to measure Mabel was becoming unalterably homebound. But Danny, the paperboy, prevented this from becoming an affliction. Before he left for college this fall they laid in an epic amount of supplies. In October the grass went slightly long. And now the snow was knee-deep and unshovelled.

The knock came again. Mabel remembered last year's Christmas. A turkey delivered for shut-ins. Her pride was not wounded. Into the oven went the bird, but when time came to take it out she realized that the strength in her hands had gone; she could not lift what three hours earlier she had lifted without effort. How an instant changes everything. And so she carved her feast right there on the oven rack. No, whoever was at the door would go away.

Mabel left the kitchen and shuffled down the short hallway, past the bath, into the living room. These three rooms, now her universe. In man's coldest state, blood recedes from the extremities. So, too, Mabel had retreated to the center of her house, gathering all the essentials into this core. She set up a cot in front of the TV. She brought out all her house dresses. And on one of her last trips out, in May, she took a taxi to Home Depot for a weatherproofing kit. Then in the seven other rooms she would not use, she turned off the radiators, closed the doors and had Danny seal each with heavy plastic sheeting. A week later she remembered a stack of crosswords and she broke into one of the rooms to retrieve them. Most of the puzzles - perhaps 15 years old - had been half completed, left off when Mabel just didn't know the answers. But now she was filling in the empty blocks without effort.

On Mabel's side table was her will, her bank book, her address book. Of all the names in the address book, none were still living. Her will contained a succession of beneficiaries, each crossed off as they themselves had expired. Inside her bank book was a slip of paper: “if in spring or summer I should die, please bury me in the light blue dress. If in fall or winter, the gray.” The two dresses, inside clear launder's wrap, lay side by side on the pink spread of her well-made bed.

Mabel straightened the TV on its wheeled stand. This set, perpetually tuned to the Weather Channel with the volume muted, was never turned off. Mabel had come to terms with radar and satellites. Doppler images of precipitation were as striking as original art. But what she loved best were the satellite views. The world, steady in its turns, and the wheelmaster always vigilant. Each night she slept serenely beneath the fountain of blue and green reflections shifting over the walls.

Mabel drew open the curtains. There was no poverty on Donner St. for Christmas lights and decorations. She gazed on the colors with a childish awe. Not a gaudy sight among them. “Tasteful” she thought, “joyful.” Mabel felt again that primal urge to light up the house, the season, not out of lack or shame or competition, but because she wanted to contribute to the sense of harmony so evident down the entire length of the street. There was not even a candle in her window. It was the first Christmas her home would go unadorned. Last year she had a modest display, but it pleased her. She'd set it up herself. Then with a wince she remembered the end of the holiday, when she returned the decorations to the attic. It was a slow train: she could tell the petty afflictions of her ankle and knee and hip were turning solemn. It took many trips and she moved insufferably slowly up and down the stairs, but she managed. The job was done. When the next day she realized that she'd left an upstairs light on she tried to go up to turn it off: she could not ascend more than two stairs.

Mabel did not believe in signs, but she didn't need an egg timer to tell her her moments were few. Every sundown a patch of light from that upstairs bulb appeared as a squashed diamond on the front lawn. Mabel would watch it sharpen as the evening grew. She tried the stairs a few more times, but it was pointless. Her joints were singing all the wrong songs. She would sit on the bottom step, sometimes for an hour or more, gently crying. Nine months later the bulb burned out and the diamond disappeared.

Mabel turned the volume up on the TV. They were reporting a ferocious storm in the mountains. The forecast was for another, more crushing one to follow. “Blizzard!” Mabel shouted, as if the word were both friend and foe. And without any false severity - neither firm nor grim - she said, “I will not have my home dark at Christmas.” She pulled her sweater tight and made her way, ever slowly, to the kitchen.

Was the dumbwaiter still working? Mabel pressed the Call button, mildly surprised that it whirled to life. Oh, if only she could fit within. Her first thought was for extension cords. “I'll send them up,” she thought. “What else will I need?” And then, facing what she already knew she had inwardly resolved, she went to the one cupboard that hadn't been opened in forty years.

Even when they called her silly, Mabel had always been full of forethought. Once, on a seashore vacation she'd found an old foot-long wooden sign: “Harbor Springs, 1 Mile” Then came the idea.

“What are you going to do with that old thing?” asked Pearl.

“When the end comes near - if I'm blessed to know ahead, that is - I'm bringing out all this stuff. A send off with all my favorite things!” Mabel fixed the sign - which resembled a fine piece of folk art - to the furthest pantry cupboard. And she placed inside a dozen items that, after long thought, she had reckoned most fundamental, the frivolous and the sacred.

“The end? Good god, you're only 47!”

“What? You think the end will never come?”

“If you're going to put that LP in there, you better put the phonograph, too. There might not be such a thing by the time you kick off, girl.”

Satisfied that her stock was complete, she sealed the cupboard door with wax.

Christmas was now three days away. She would make the climb. Her house would be lit. She reckoned a day to get up the stairs, a day to set up the decorations, a day to prepare for the nativity.

Mabel broke the seal on the cupboard. She'd lost her taste for wine and so set the bottle aside. Everything else went into the dumbwaiter.

She turned off the television. At precisely 3 p.m. that afternoon she began her ascent.

The first leg was staggeringly easy: all she did was simply turn round and sit; it was a hard pitch, but she was already two steps up! She gripped underneath her knees and pulled her feet to the first landing. Three hours later, trembling with exertion, she was now on the fourth step, sitting in complete darkness, amid stabbing pain. Go Back up to the Chapter List

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