‘The Skating Pond’ evokes girl’s frozen emotional landscape

THE SKATING POND, by Deborah Joy Corey, Berkeley Books, New York, 2003, 246 pages, hardcover, $21.95.

Deborah Joy Corey’s starkly evocative second novel, “The Skating Pond,” begins and ends with the January landscape of Stonington, “when the weather has stolen all there is to steal and the earth looks barren under cold blue skies, as if waiting.”

Set on the town’s lily pond and in and around its harbor, the linear narrative is woven with the unsettling memories and erotic yearnings of the story’s main character. Elizabeth, a local girl, has been cut off from family and community by the loss of her sister and parents as well as by the isolated peninsula of the story’s setting.

In the winter of 1968, 14-year-old Elizabeth comes to an emotional standstill when her mother is seriously injured in a freak skating accident on the town pond. The accident is a catalyst for a series of losses and desertions Elizabeth endures. Left alone in the family house and unable to cope, her life quickly begins to unravel.

Increasingly haunted by the ghosts of her past, she imagines the islanders talking about her: “She wasn’t the same since her father run off. And her mother died. Maybe this one was like her sister … Maybe it’s bred in the bone … Regular coydogs.”

Once orphaned, like the wretched foundling of Jane Eyre, Elizabeth enters a nightmarish existence, on the verge of becoming a “tragedy” or disappearing altogether, as her father had forewarned. Using the village lore about local dogs mating with coyotes as metaphor, Corey builds a portrait of a person who has regressed from the strange civility of her emotionally dysfunctional family to a haunted and traumatized creature “gone wild.”

Fate intervenes, however, and due to the kindness of neighbors – her mother’s friend Bertha and her son Michael, a lobsterman – Elizabeth tries to hold on to a semblance of order and self-respect. From here, the two strains of innocence and experience, darkness and light, barrenness and fertility, loyalty and disloyalty, threaten to overwhelm Elizabeth as she is changed both by the place and the objects of her desire.

As the wildness in her continues to lure her out into the night world, Elizabeth finds herself wandering at the edge of town and into the woods, or running with her dog along the road. On one such night, she runs all the way to the causeway just before the Deer Isle Bridge. Weary from the long run, she hitches a ride with a stranger. Realizing she has become as dark and wayward as her artist father has predicted, she is drawn to this stranger, a foreigner and also an artist, as a potential protector and father figure.

“Besides,” she tells her sister on the phone to Camden, “wasn’t that the thing we were looking for? Father’s love.”

As the reader follows Elizabeth picking her way across the thin ice of a tumultuous love affair with her “rescuer,” Frederick, Corey also leads us into a kind of complicity with her. At times, we are duped by her sense of loyalty to family and children, believing she has found her center of balance. At other times, we are disappointed by her and for her, but always we remain hopeful – as Elizabeth does – that she will be freed from the painful memories that have made an island of her.

Still, while the action moves from season to season, from the real world to nightmare world and back, winter remains the dominant chord of the story. Again and again, Corey returns us to that frozen yet transparent surface of the skating pond where we can see through to those lilies below the surface, waiting for spring.

Kathleen Ellis is a poet and writer and teaches writing and literature at the University of Maine.