Doris said she wanted to leave before the end of the story. I didn’t blame her. Every time we went out there were crowds clustered around the apartment building, sleeping in their clothes and rooting through our dumpster. They were barely people by then, skin and snow and stink and fur piled up like stacks of half-dead animals. Sometimes they actually were dead. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

I told Doris I'd see what I could do.

One died right outside our window, splayed out on her back like a statue of a snow angel. We thought she was just a kid, playing, until we saw the wild dogs browsing on her legs. When the sanitation department came to get the body, it was mostly eaten already and they couldn’t say how old or how young. They seemed used to this, shrugged and scratched their heads and shifted their feet until we let them go dump the leftovers in their truck.  “Do you want the coat?” one asked Doris—it was a woman’s navy blue parka.  She shook her head. Her small mouth opened, but nothing came out. The other worker shrugged and said shame to leave a good coat behind; he’d take it home for his daughter.

Mostly it just kept snowing, more and more until we couldn’t see to find our cars and it seemed like the storm was all there was, like if you looked through a telescope to find the stars you’d see only snow, or stars shaped like snowflakes.

The politicians came and went and solved nothing, echoed our opinions like we were children. We knew it was too early for the denouement anyway, so we turned off the television and played tennis indoors. We paid big bucks to hire armored cars; we bought trucks and buses to plow our way through the sludge and sleet. We invented new games to play, games that kept us warm and kept us strangers to each other. We dressed up like other people.

I wasn’t exactly loaded. My first book sold well enough, but this new one—well, stories about characters like Doris don't make the bestseller list. I was worried about it. So I conserved what I could, drove my car until the power steering cable snapped and the car would scream like murder when I turned hard and pulled into the driveway. It was turning colder; it was easy for things to break then, but it seemed like something was always breaking and nothing was getting fixed. We carried flashlights around all the time and we didn't care much for the dark. I bought snow tires and she bought one of those lock de-icers and we both lived in fear of the new heavy weather under the pull and balk of the old narratives.

And then it was deep winter here.

It was something we’d lived with every year, but this time was different.  Everyone was waiting on the winter’s edge, conserving strength. We’d stopped believing in any other season; we were all little Kai, touched by the Snow Queen. Sharp mirrored ice in our eyes.

That's when Doris first stopped showing up in scenes. Instead she would sit in front of the TV, watching films made before 1960.  She started using famous movie lines in ordinary conversation.  At a cocktail party at the Marsdens’, she told Annie Henderson to “play it again, Sam” after Annie’d gotten drunk and done a startlingly bad rendition of “Love, Look Away.”

“Oh, really,” said Jane Marsden, frowning at Doris across the piano. “You do know they don’t even say that in the movie.”

“They do too,” said Doris, “I just saw it.” She turned to me, the resident expert. In my fiction, I always looked a little Humphrey Bogart: short, rumpled, ordinary.

I shrugged. “Sorry, darling.  They never actually say ‘Play it again, Sam'. Common mistake.”  She took it very personally. I had to drive her home and she cried all the way there. 

“I think Jane Marsden is hateful,” she said later, when we were lying in bed. 

“Mmm,” I said. I was sleeping with Jane Marsden at the time.

When I came home one afternoon, I noticed Doris had started wearing her hair parted on the side and pin-curled. She looked unnervingly like that tap-dancing ingénue from the thirties, Ruby Keeler. She threw her arms around me and tried to kiss me, and I couldn’t help but flinch.  

“What?  What is it?” Her voice seemed higher, thinner.  Like Snow White in the Disney cartoon version, a strange, shaky pitch, staccato and shrill.

“You look like Ruby Keeler,” I told her. I stepped away from her.

“So? What’s wrong with that?” 

“She’s dead, that’s what.  You look like a dead woman.” 

I couldn't believe I'd ever fallen for such a vulgar, strange little personality. Secretly, I was trying to figure out how to replace her in the story with Jane, who was really much more my type: tall, blonde and witty as hell.

Two weeks later I got the advance on my new book and I told Doris I’d take her to dinner. I was planning on cutting her out then, the coward’s way. I was going to get her drunk and then tell her, let her make a big scene. That would help a little; she liked to make scenes. She was a quiet girl filled up with too much drama, raw and unstable, too “workshop.” It would be good to let her go.

I had to park on the opposite side of the street and risk a ticket because my driveway was covered with sleepers. They grabbed at my ankles and pulled at my pant legs and mumbled at me as I stepped over them. I threw a handful of dollar bills into the middle of the pack to distract them as I opened the door and quickly slammed it shut behind me.

Doris was watching Singin’ in the Rain, the part where Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly are tap-dancing all over the poor diction coach. I waited until they were done and then I asked her about dinner. She shook her head without turning around. She was curled into my couch eating Chips Ahoy cookies from the package.

“Doris?” I walked around and stood in front of the TV.  She squealed at me to move in that hideous new voice, but I didn’t budge. “Doris. We need to talk.”

She nodded. She looked horrible, grayish and lined. Shocked, I realized I'd let her age twenty years in only a few lines. Her figure was gone, there were crumbs in her cleavage, and her pin-curls were matted down flat to the side of her head. She swallowed a cookie bite and said, “Talk.”

I waited, silent for the longest time, unable to think of any decent dialogue. I'd never imaged having to write this scene. I noticed her hands were curled into claws around invisible orange-sized objects, and I wondered what she could be thinking of. 

Finally, she spoke. “I was just thinking of the day…that the day was sadder than usual, sadder than yesterday. The forecaster said we’re due for hail tomorrow.  Droplets of moisture freezing in midair.” Had I let her go mad?  Maybe she was just tired out.

“Doris. What are you talking about?” I sat down on the arm of the couch and waited, and waited. It was like waiting for the weather to speak up. Her hands kept squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing, and she never looked at me once, and this is how I knew it was time for the finish.

We were never really together anyhow. Doris was the kind of character that will forever be a girl, the kind of girl every man thinks he can have a small affair with. Not leading lady material. She was small and soft, and because of that I thought she would be easy to bend. I didn’t realize that kind of girl never bends—she breaks apart like rotten wood.

Doris panicked when it hailed because she said it would cost too much to fix the dents in her car. Then she drove away, the TV in the backseat and her movies in the trunk and the chunks of ice pinging off the roof. She left everything else behind. I don’t know where she is, or if she’s even alive. A lot of my characters aren’t now. All I know is, I promised her dignity, but I’m going to end her story with a fairy tale instead. Unlike dignity, a fairy tale endures. It lasts. Once upon a time is better than here and now and never again. It’s better than garbage and gutters and frozen corpses in puffy coats.

So let's back up.

“I’m like a chorus girl to you,” she complained once, a long, long time ago. It had just started to snow. “You’re this big hotshot and I’m like this lucky little chorus girl, who you’ve taken pity on or something.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, or tried to say, but she was too worked up to listen.

“All your friends make fun of me,” she said. “They think I’m stupid. But I’ll tell you what.” She pointed her little face up to me and waited for my response.

“What?” I obliged her.

“I’m going leave one day, before the end. I’m going to leave you and I’m going do the whole chorus girl thing, go off the big city and leave you here with your books and papers and your snobby friends. I’m going to find the glass slipper and then my prince will come, and it sure as hell won’t be anybody like you. I’ll be so happy and you’ll be rotting here, and you’ll deserve it.”

“You’re mixing your clichés,” I said, though I knew they were mine, really. I suppose it was the smallest response I could have made.

Maybe she did go off to the big city, maybe she did find a glass slipper and a fairy godmother and who knows what else to complete the fairy tale. It’s better than believing that Doris is slumped in an alley somewhere with a broken heart or a broken mind, her thin arms wrapped tight around her TV and smiling, smiling just like Ruby Keeler.

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