I’ve been gushing about how great it is to be back in Chicago all day. Snow is, after all, in the forecast.
“What are you even doing out there?” she asked, investing a lot in the nasality of her incredulity. “Prime time starts an hour earlier. Everything starts an hour earlier. There’s no accounting for the strangeness of that. You’re existing in the past even as we speak.”
“You’re faulting a city on the basis of time zones. What about the West Coast? I never hear you complain about the space-time continuum when you’re talking about LA,” Beth said.
“Beth. That’s California, and it’s different, and you know that. Do you know the kinds of people who live in your current particular time zone? They survive on corn syrup and wear plaid.”
“I kind of like plaid,” said Beth.
She heard a sigh on the other end of the phone.
“Stop it. Get the hell out of there and come back here where you belong. Buy a plane ticket, pack your bags, and for God’s sake set your watch forward.”
They hung up after awhile, having eventually gotten through the necessary remonstrations about her escape to Chicago and moved inevitably onto the subject of Karen’s career malaise, and the impossibility of actually quitting the job that she hated, and the impossibility of finding a good dry cleaner on the Upper West Side but she was seeing someone, at least, a guy she met at a bar in the Lower East Side and perfectly nice, said he was a writer, but had an unshakable habit of calling her “doll,” which would definitely be a dealbreaker if it didn’t cease in a few weeks but anyway how were things really in that awful sounding city.
“Beautiful. It just started snowing again,” said Beth.
Another sigh on the other end.
The conversational rhythms of these Sunday afternoon calls had begun to drive Beth, simply, insane. She felt herself starting to shake before she dialed Karen. Maybe they could skip the weekly check-ins and stick to emails, or some other mediated form of communication. Word choice seemed paramount. In quiet moments by herself, she could think clearly of the reasons she had moved to a city in the horrifying tundra of the Midwest. The job, clearly. But other things too. She could name them in complete and flowing sentences, mainly in the middle of the night with the covers pulled up to her chin.
But not when she hung up the phone with Karen, who had from the start embodied every Northeastern prejudice that Beth assumed Midwesterners lamented. Northeasterners who had clearly never seen the skyline on approach to O’Hare. Who would never think of walking in sub-zero windchills in January just to get to a bar. Whose anemic constitutions limited them to what struck her as a nauseating meteorological dilettantism.
“I don’t even know what negative 10 would feel like,” they’d say.
“Then why don’t you come out and see for yourself!”
Silence on the other end. No one really wanted to find out.
She had heard somewhere that Chicago becomes the loneliest American city in the winter. The Kiev of the lower 48. But something else characterized the solitude of late nights in her apartment with the windows cracked. A pleasant aloneness that, ardently resisting to her inclination toward the rejection of simple clichés, felt easy and comfortable. She felt inwardly embarrassed about the simple and newfound confidence that she felt in solitude on the coldest nights. When the circumstances created by weather limit an entire city to the indoors, it becomes possible to draw upon inner resources for simple instances of contentment.
In the bitter cold, old things took on new glories. If the wind battered against her office window, but the sun glinted off the lake, it became a new reason to celebrate blue sky. And, sure it could have been her imagination, but it seemed that when friends hunkered down together on snowy nights, their conversations took on a more relaxed tone. No one needed to go anywhere else. Bar hopping here presented the real risk of frostbite and hypothermia. Better to huddle together in one place and drink as much Schlitz as possible until everyone started to pass out on couches, on floors, on tables, warm and content.
She began to roll her eyes when she received emails from friends who promised to visit “In the Spring,” “When it’s warm!” “If it’s not still snowing in July!” She insisted they always had a spot on the couch, but stopped trying to convince them to visit sooner.
“I honestly don’t understand anything you say when you say that you love the cold. It just about doesn’t register. Like it hits synapses and bounces right off of them. I get this beeping sound in my head,” Karen said the following Sunday.
“Maybe you should get a CAT scan,” said Beth.
“Temper, temper. Is the weather getting to my favorite eskimette or what? Don’t tell me the gray skies have you grumpy today.”
Beth looked out her window onto the icy street below. A man hacked at his windshield with a plastic blade, determined to clear the latest layer of slush and snow off of his car. The simple struggle to wrest his car from the elements. Beth thought she saw him smiling, but realized he was just grimacing against the skeletal shock of the wind off the lake. His breath exploded into white clouds of vapor. He wiped his face with the back of his mitten and opened the back door. Threw the tool into the back seat and then got in and drove away, pulling out slowly from the plowed curb.
“Seriously, give me one reason. Just this one time this week. One reason why you should have to endure that punishment.”
No explanation would do. Nothing would compute. Synapses were synapses and it struck her as pointless to engage.
“I’ll talk to you next week,” Beth said. They hung up with each other and she laid back on her bed. She knew there would be snow in the forecast without checking it. For reasons that she could understand but still chose not to explain, this was just fine by her, thank you very much.
