Not the iceman but the ice itself comes in a gust when I’m three, grappled up the last flight and around the banister. The huge chunk resides in a white vault outside our door. Back from the bathroom by myself I dawdle by the icebox, lever it open, and stand there facing, trying to know, the cloudy inscrutable block.

Oh the smell of it, clean and cold as a man’s suit-jacket in from the snow!

Even when I’m in our room I know it’s melting. At first, Don’t touch—you’ll stick! but soon a valley dips under my finger. Can my hand really be that hot?

When little Jay Gullbrand comes to play, alligators in the skylight make me make them make us shriek and shriek!

The body of the ice recedes, losing its square-cornered shoulder, leaving behind the not even frigid air, the smell of scouring powder. Gouges from the iceman’s tongs grow shallow, healing over like watery eyes unable to look.

The jacket from the cold is supposed to come with presents. It’s supposed to settle into the big chair, not to back away into the hall—to where? Your father’s room, number 11, its unknockable door.

If it could the ice would say, I cannot keep on creating perfect weather. Your small hand a star, itself gouged with four small stars, terrifies me, sears me.

The cloud-colored boxy animal who gives us wool lives in the cold, shies away from human touch, jumps the fence, and hunkers down, shielded by its grease, growing, in its confusion, dingy and stale.

Rough wool, smooth wool, shouldering out the door.

Does my body become the man who melted away? He’s a tall, large man, as I have become tall and large. I overhear him talking to my mother before he goes out. Does he speak to me, other than to say, I don’t want any? His voice, is it deep? Trying to know the starry block is like facing a slick, towering ship, which wants nothing, and offers nothing but blankness, and yet is the utter bass note that cannot but call forth desire.

~

The bulky dark-suited frame of Perry Mason, the advocate who never gives in and never raises his sternum-stirring voice, is untouchable too, but his eyes (very like the eyes of my father, large, dark, and slightly protruding), Perry Mason’s eyes in the reruns those Wednesdays, his eyes hold onto mine. I stay home from sixth grade for him, and no, please, not for Della Street; her, I feel for and despise, always waiting, steno pad at the ready, dressed for dinner with him just in case. Idling at home with a “stomach ache,” I wait for Perry at four o’clock

and (how can I tell whom I love more?)

Lucy at eleven, flame-headed Lucy at the helm of her crazyhouse, lips painted outside the lines; angling for a role in her pop-eyed husband’s nightclub act—any role, even a horse—as manic in her schemes as I am frozen in those Wednesdays, nearly bursting from the fifties shirtwaist, from the round-cornered picture tube, flubbing up, undiminished.

But I want to be Ethel, the wise-cracking sidekick, alto, autumnal, hands on her hips, standing at a slight remove from the chaos.

It isn’t true.

It’s spring I want. I want to be spring, to burst the last skin of ice on the grass with both bare feet: Spring, the clown-colored daughter, her whole three-ring show.