Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
One winter in New Hampshire, when I was a heartbroken grad student with a stack of books beside my bed, I happened upon a trio of snow-logged plastic flamingos. I was on one of my romantic walks — not romantic as in sexy but Romantic as in Jane Austen or William Wordsworth. Homework completed, I’d apply a dab of Vaseline to both cheeks, zip on three to four coats, search the apartment for my missing left mitten, and make my way into the snowy lane.
At this point it had been almost a year since my heart had been broken, but when it’s winter and it’s New Hampshire, there’s very little to do but pine. I had sent my girlfriend a Valentine’s card, and 11 months later the card had come back with a “return to sender” stamp. I love us, I’d written idiotically. And so I walked. Past the frostbitten CVS and the green-and-white diner. Past the little white house that said “First Church of Christ, Scientist.” I always thought it sounded like scientist was the job description. Where was the First Church of Christ, Zoologist? Or the First Church of Christ, Obstetrician? I marched onward into the snow, thinking up jobs for Jesus.
That winter I was reading Ann Patchett’s book Run, which takes place during a snowstorm. It was an old paperback copy, battered as a fish. I’d cozy up under my electric blanket and read chapter after chapter. My roommate, who was still angry at her high school boyfriend many years after high school had ended, would knock on my door. Did I have a moment to copy edit her 12-page diatribe against him?
“Twelve pages?”
“Yes. Twelve pages, front and back.”
“That’s more like 24,” I observed.
She gave me a look that told me she was prepared to write a hundred pages. Like I said, it was cold. We were bored. The most exciting thing to happen that winter was the mouse on the counter — a plump, brown specimen that appreciated the nights when we held parties and went to sleep without bothering to toss the charcuterie board.
Back to the flamingos. I was puttering down an icy street wondering if I was lovable when I spotted them on the lawn of an old clapboard house. Houses like these seemed white in the spring, only to be revealed as dusty gray giver-uppers upon the first snowfall. I felt sorry for the house. It looked as if a smoker might have coughed on it. And yet, there were the flamingos. Bright and jolly. Pink as can be. The snow had not managed to cling to their slick, plastic bodies, and so they rose, triumphant, above the sea of white.
They became part of my routine, the flamingos. I checked on them the way you might check on a neighbor’s outdoor cat or a bookstore’s latest offerings: eagerly, often and with rapt attention. Winter wore on. The snow held fast to the lawns, and I read my way through Ann Patchett. The thing about winter — everywhere, but especially in New Hampshire — is that it always seems like it will last forever. It’s terrifically hard to fathom June when the hair in your nostrils freezes on your way to the canteen, or when a mouse will not vacate its warm spot under the sink. Looking up from my book at the empty left-hand side of the bed, I found it hard to believe that anyone would ever share my electric blanket again.
Around the time I downloaded Tinder, my roommate caught the mouse. She chased it around the living room with a spent cottage cheese tub and, trapping it on the charcuterie platter, declared her victory. We pretended there was only one mouse in the house. A singleton, just like us.
“Where do we put it?” I wondered.
I remember the way it rustled around in the plastic. Scratching, desperate. My roommate and I had been like this all winter, but unlike our whiskered loiterer, we’d placed the cottage cheese tub over ourselves. We’d wallowed. We’d hibernated. Now, kicking open the front door, we carried the platter, the tub, and the mouse out to the driveway. And suddenly, miraculously, it was spring.
A few days before graduation, I took my last walk. Goodbye, CVS. Goodbye, First Church of Christ, Scientist. The houses were white again, gleaming in the tentative June sun. And there were the three flamingos, strutting up from a hearty patch of monkey grass. They knew — had always known — the seasons would change. Snow will melt, hearts will mend, and Ann Patchett will write another book.
