Frozen (2013)

directed by Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee

Jessica Hudson

The day the girls moved out of the toddler house and into ours, their former resident teachers took them shopping to buy decals to decorate their new bedroom walls. By dinnertime, pink and purple flowers bloomed in happy bundles on Katrina’s walls, glittering unicorns and rainbows surrounded Brittany’s windowsills like a protective ward, and a variety of six-inch Disney princesses swirled their colorful skirts along the horizon of Anne’s bed. Sometime during the flurry of decorating and unpacking, Ashley ran up to me and begged me to help her.

On her bed lay two four-foot sheets of stickers that refused to flatten. The first was dotted with blue-and-white snowflakes of varying sizes. The other was a full-length portrait of Princess Elsa from Disney’s Frozen, almost as tall as Ashley herself. Finding enough royal wall-space for the ice princess called for some furniture rearrangement, including Ashley’s dresser (filled with school khakis and polos, colorful leggings, and Frozen pajamas), her bedside table filled with bedtime books, and her personal trampoline. As I maneuvered the furniture, Ashley made her other walls start snowing, sticking each flake on with rare precision. We guided the ice princess onto the wall beneath the light switch. From then on, the yellow moon night light lit Elsa’s face every night and Ashley’s sound machine (she wouldn’t fall asleep without it) thundered from another corner.

*

Even though she was the second oldest, Ashley went to bed before the other girls every evening, as sweet and willing as a lamb. Within half an hour of swallowing a few milliliters of berry-pink liquid, she’d be snoring, the medicine a stronger tonic than our bedtime stories.

Sometimes before bed, Ashley would spend the points she’d earned that day to do a round of Cosmic Kids Yoga with the peppy Australian instructor on YouTube who weaves easy yoga poses into children’s stories such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and Frozen, Ashley’s favorite.

I can see her now: two wide-eyed Nordic ice princesses poised on her pajama shirt, matching snowflake-spotted fleece pants cinched around her waist, arms lifted, legs wobbling as she tries to balance. All her attention focused on the difficult task of becoming a princess.

*

The campus had been Ashley’s kingdom since she was born seven years earlier. Ashley’s mother had been enrolled here as a teenager. Less than a year after graduating from high school, she returned with a sparkly newborn. Ashley was raised in a residential home with a handful of other infants and toddlers gathered from nearby cities. The only child whose mother was a former student, Ashley was the campus princess, and she knew it.

On a day-to-day level, she was mostly concerned with herself, her hair, and her clothes, often in the reverse order. The tiny eye of my smartphone camera was her adoring audience. She’d clap for my attention, lips pursed, hands tucked beneath her soft chin, legs popped open in the splits, declaring with choreographed poses: I am a star. I was only able to photograph her naturally a handful of times: mid-slide on the indoor playground, dashing past us on a trip to Chuck-E-Cheese. In these photos, Ashley seems to be saying hello only to me. No hips popped or lashes lowered. All eyes and dimples, one front tooth just starting to make an entrance, silky blond hair flying behind her.

Whereas hair salon, nail salon, and dress-up were happy weekend pastimes, her showers were long drawn-out affairs, involving many check-ins to be sure she was using shampoo and not simply standing in the gushing water for an hour. Like Goldilocks, the water had to be just right: not too hot, not too chilly, and no matter how many times I reminded her to set out her pajamas before getting in the shower, she routinely “forgot.” I have no doubt she had servants in a previous life. She was self-involved, alternately cheerful and whiny, and a persistent know-it-all. Outspoken about her opinions of others and the correct way to do things on campus, always demanding more peanut butter with her apple slices and more ketchup with her chicken strips—she ruled our home with her whims and well-acted crises.

*

The polar vortex blew in that winter. First one in fifty years. Mother Nature arrayed the sidewalks with homemade Slip ’n’ Slides, but by then we weren’t allowed outside anyway. At negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit, any area of exposed skin could freeze within 30 seconds, so we were under house arrest with four antsy girls, who were excited to be stuck inside their new house instead of at school, excited enough, we hoped, to stay out of crisis. But when the elements aligned just right, any day, any walk, any bedtime, any homework assignment, any gift, truly any situation could become an icy slope into chaos and the time-crunching crisis at the bottom. Rarely were there footholds to climb back up once we’d slipped past a certain point.

*

Afterward, our counselor told me, “You should have let her go.” As metaphors go, this one was pretty obvious. I couldn’t let her go. I wouldn’t let her sprint off across the frozen campus grounds by herself, even though this was her realm. I was there with her and I was there for her, even if that meant slipping into crisis. And she really didn’t want to go to her piano lesson. So we slipped.

It took all of my strength to lift her as she pushed back against my weight, but somehow we made it up the concrete stairs and into the screened-in porch. When I blocked the door to the lawn, gulping cold air, she punched a hole in the newly-installed window screen. She tried snaking her hands around my waist to twist the doorknob. She chucked rubber balls at my coworker who was blocking the door to the living room, one foot inside the house so the other girls would not be “alone” inside while they waited on their beds until Ashley was calm and able to respond to simple instructions again.

But Ashley relished her crises. Once she was in crisis mode, she would max out her time, giggling maniacally as she sprinted from one corner of the living room to another, calculating what to do next—first I’ll throw this pillow across the room—hardly aiming, simply throwing for the pleasure of throwing—now what? I’ll go for the kitchen door, that’s not usually locked—and she’d dash over to it, and I’d thank my long legs as my fingers reached the doorknob right before hers—she’d pout at me briefly, fists on her hips, then face the room’s many options—toss the DVDs off the shelf? the books? climb the couch? draw on the walls? She released her pent-up energy like a freak ice storm: from sullen and whiny to shrieking, whirling, hailing in a matter of moments.For the next half hour, the living room was her kingdom under her frenzied reign.

Watching her leap around the room with giddy self-importance, I saw her a decade from now: a young woman with blonde hair woven in a long gleaming braid down her back instead of cropped at her shoulders, puffy pink winter coat replaced by an icy-blue dress, eyes bright and clear. Her kingdom, relegated to crises for so many years, simply a snow-blurred past. I watched her step into the future, and I let her go.

*

A few days later, I’m spooning hot meatballs onto plastic plates for dinner when Ashley runs over to me and holds up a wobbly tracing of a coloring book picture, “Look what I drew!” A purple snowman, I think.

“Oh my goodness! How did you do that?”

She smiles coyly, shrugs one shoulder, “Magic.”

*

Chunks of ice lie on the sparse grass under the gutter, thick as encyclopedias. More sprout from the base of the rain pipe, heavy heads hacked off by the workmen to keep the pipe clear. It looks as if the house has been crying through the night, her tears frozen and shattered all around in a dangerous, glittering skirt.

After pledging our allegiance to the flag, the school, and a bashful girl’s birthday, the resident teachers return home. It's 7:15am, 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and my husband and I have been up for two hours already. We'll take the shortcut home, thank you very much: straight across the field, crunching through frosted grass, sweatpants tucked into our snow boots, eyes watering in the wind.

Two plastic sleds and a forgotten kiddy pool have become ice molds on our deck. My husband turns a Crayola-blue sled upside down and narrowly avoids getting sloshed with the water sleeping beneath the ice. The oblong ice slab cracks into glistening chunks on the wooden planks. Cradling the largest slab in his gloved hands, my husband leads me down the steps and around to the windowless side of the house. No one can see us here. He motions with a free hand for me to step back, then raises the ice block above his head and hurls it onto the pavement. Shards and stress release on impact, the frozen bits of us reduced, if only for a moment, into morning laughter. He motions to the chipped chunk of ice lying on the sidewalk.

I bend down and heft the solid, slippery weight into my arms.

Jessica Hudson is a graduate teaching assistant working on her Creative Writing MFA at Northern Michigan University. She is an associate editor for Passages North, and her work has been published in The Pinch, Fractured Lit, and perhappened mag, among others. Read more at jessicarwhudson.wixsite.com/poet.