The Scrape

Cold air blows through the vents and I shiver in the backseat, icy belt buckle pressed against my hip. My breath hangs in the air. The neon nylon of my puffy coat makes a pleasing sound as I rub my sleeves against my sides. The car warms slowly, cold air turning cool as heat is drawn from the rumbling engine. I feel like an astronaut, alone, shivering in the cold expanse of space—each of the windows surrounding me opaque with a thick layer of ice. Something scrapes against the windshield and a stripe of the outside world reveals itself. Another scrape, another stripe of visibility that reveals snow-covered trees, a collapsed section of wooden fence, a flash of maroon parka. Not the void of space out there, just my driveway. My dad. Another scrape reveals part of his face. Droplets frozen in his facial hair. Condensation gathering on the oversized lenses of his glasses. When he’s finished scraping three-quarters of the windshield, he makes his way to the windows. By the time he reaches mine, the car has begun to warm up. I unzip my jacket as a diagonal ribbon scratches its way across the ice of my window to reveal my dad’s face—his head tipped to the side, eyes crossed, tongue poking out of his mouth. He pulls an effortless smile from me, and I laugh and

suddenly I’m on the other side of the glass

and my son’s eyes are looking up at me. Expectation written on his face, waiting for a cue. I tip my head to the side. Cross my eyes. Grimace with my lips pulled back from my teeth. It pulls a smile from him. A giggle. He returns a face of his own—eyes wide, mouth snarling, tendons of his thin neck pulled taut. I smirk. My dad always made this look easy. Or at least it seemed that way to me. Maybe my struggles seem easy to my son. I hope they do. I don’t want him to know how hard it can be for me to pull my mouth into an expression of joy. How difficult it is to keep the ice at bay. How quickly it encroaches. How gray the sky can grow, how low it often hangs above my head. How tightly I have to squeeze my hands to stop the scraper slipping from my grip. I scrape—stripe after stripe after stripe—trying to keep the view as clear as I can for him. A smile on my face so he knows that the cold I feel has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with him. Because it doesn’t. It doesn’t. He can’t control the weather. But then, neither can I. For a moment, the sun peeks through the cloud cover and its warmth pulls the corners of my mouth up and into an honest grin. Then the clouds roll back in, and I fight to keep the smile on my face. My son unzips his jacket, comfortable in the slowly rising heat of the car. I continue to scrape until the motion itself brings with it a ghost of warmth, unsure anymore whether my frozen face is smiling or snarling or expressionless. I make my way to the rear windshield, and my son cranes his neck to watch my progress. So I cross my eyes, furrow my brow, try to stick my tongue up my own nose. He laughs, even as the frost starts to conceal him from sight again.