The Descent
“Passes, please sir.” He doesn’t look at her. They never do.
Her husband hands over the laminated lozenges and the attendant scrutinizes Robert’s face, finally allows his eyes to travel across hers.
“All right,” he nods curtly. All in order then. She’s allowed to shuffle up to the waiting ramp for the chair lift, Robert’s hand in the small of her back, proprietorial. She lines her skis up with the yellow X on the swept concrete, carefully taking her designated place.
Robert grasps her arm unnecessarily as the chair sweeps up behind them and they sit, pull the bar down, and watch the ground drop away. Her skis drag on her ankles, bobbing with each puff of breeze the cable pulls them through. Between her feet the tops of pine trees, fat with snow, recede as the chair ascends. A sudden wave of vertigo clutches at her stomach, and Robert pats her knee as if he senses it, as if he’s quieting a nervous child.
When did it begin, this shift in their relationship, in their world? She remembers the first jolt, can taste the coffee on her tongue again, hear every grain in the newscaster’s voice.
“…against expectations, have passed a controversial law to make abortion illegal in every state across the country. A further law limiting contraception will go before the House today.” She’d slammed the coffee cup on the table, the brown liquid slopping out to make a puddle that spread across the white cloth.
“Don’t worry darling, it won’t affect us,” he’d said, and she’d bristled at the glibness in his voice. She remembers how guilty she’d felt, later, when he told her about the vasectomy he’d arranged, so they’d be ok.
“I’ll look after you,” he’d told her then, and every time a new law clawed away more of the ground she stood on. The “Jobs for Men” act that took away her career in a single stroke. The “Women’s Place” movement that demanded she give up her driver’s license, retreat to the passenger seat of their car. The credit card companies that began asking for a male signature to verify her right to an account. The new forms that required his blessing for her to cross state borders.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” he said, again and again as he wrote his name on this and that piece of paper to safeguard the shrinking space she was allowed to exist in.
The air around them was thick with mist, the top of the mountain loomed grey some way ahead. Far beneath her dangling feet the ground was a soft, undulating white swell, mendacious. It looked like a thick, yielding quilt, but its rises and dips hid chasms, snow holes twenty feet deep.
Skiing was one of his little treats for her. Not everyone allowed their women such indulgences. Swooping down a mountainside, the white snow open before you, the wind streaming through your hair: that was too much like freedom. Dangerous. For precious moments as she plummeted down the run she remembered the power and the will of her own body, what it had been like to be unafraid. Zigzagging around other skiers, nearly all of them men, she left them in a flurry of powder. She recalled what it was to feel skilled, to feel strong. Then the ebbing of momentum, the levelling of the ground, and the long wait for him to chaperone her to the lift again.
They were almost at the summit. In a few moments they would dismount the chair lift, shuffle their way to the top of the run. Already the ground was rising to meet them, the sickening distance a little less vast. His hand left her knee as he fussed with the zip on his jacket, the strap on his goggles. She stared down at the whiteness below, still remote enough to send a jolt of pins and needles through her legs at the thought of how little separated her from plunging into that great emptiness. Just a few inches of wooden seat, a thin iron bar at chest height. Between them, ample room to slip down. Nothing to stop her sliding forward just a little, pushing herself into that void of air. Her blood prickled in her veins at the possibility. Nothing to stop her. Nothing at all.
It happened before she realised it. An impulse, almost an involuntary spasm. She felt the seat slip beneath her, saw the bar skim over her head, and then she was falling in open space. Only the air rushing over her skin, making the fabric of her jacket thrum, only the white of the snow beneath racing toward her. Her head felt wonderfully crisp and clear, as if it were filled with cold, clean water. She drank in glorious, icy gasps of air. Alive, she thought, I’m alive, after all.
Sounds filtered through first. A measured, even bleeping; the soft irregular breathing of someone crying quietly, as if they had been doing so for a long time. She lifted eyelids weighted with lead.
“Sarah!” he cried out, “You’re awake!”
He leaned over the bed, his embracing arms careful not to disturb the tubes and wires.
She did not hug him back. She noticed, with detached curiosity, that her arms did not move if she willed them to. Neither did her legs. She became aware of a heavy strapping around her chest, a machine that wheezed as her lungs inflated and contracted. Panic buzzed in her head, flittered, phantom-like, through limbs that no longer felt anything.
He pulled back, smiling tearfully.
“Don’t worry,” he soothed, “I’ll look after you.”
