Free House Arrest by Mary Morris

have somehow been drained of my strength. I go up to my room, thinking I’ll lie down for a moment. My head rests on the soft pillow. My hands grope at the cool sheets. The room is darkened, the French doors closed. Outside there are shouts, laughter.
    I do not remember falling asleep, but soon I am dreaming. I am in a jungle where howler monkeys shake the branches overhead. Blue morpho butterflies loom. A capybara lumbers through the woods. Suddenly the sky darkens and turns awinter’s gray. At first only a light snow falls, but then it gets heavier, thick and billowy.
    I grow smaller, more compact. I’m in a snowsuit, heading into the jungle where now the snow falls densely. The jungle becomes a forest. My hands wear mittens, a scratchy scarf covers my face. I find a trail of human tracks and I follow these through the snow.

Ten
    O NCE WHEN I was a girl, there was an ice storm, and for days we couldn’t go to school or drive to the store. We skated up and down the street, but mostly Lydia and I stayed inside, where we played games. We pretended our beds were continents, the floor a roiling sea. For hours we jumped from bed to bed, never touching the floor, where we’d drown.
    We played trading places, though we didn’t look anything alike. Everything about her was long, even her fingers and her nose; even though I am older, I am small, round, and brown, like an acorn. But for a day I was Lydia and she was me. We put on each other’s clothes. Hers were too big and I had to roll them up, and her ankles showed when she wore my pants, as if she had just outgrown them.
    We switched beds. I did her English homework and she did my math. She could do math fractions in her head while I wrote an essay on why I liked to ice skate (which is what she liked to do). She liked to get out on the ice and twirl, and shenever fell because she had strong ankles, but I tripped over my feet, bruised my bottom on the ice. Still, I wrote how I loved to feel my feet beneath me as they glided, how I loved hot chocolate and rosy cheeks, when in fact I’ve always been someone who loves warm, open places, surf pounding the shore.
    I called her friends and made dates and she called mine. When our father hollered for Lydia to come downstairs and set the table, I came. He got so angry it was almost funny to see, the way his face wrinkled up and his eyes set their sights on me as if he’d hit me, but he never did. Instead he shouted, I didn’t call you, I called Lydia.
    I told him, Daddy, I’m Lydia today, but he didn’t think that was funny. He didn’t find it funny at all.
    My father didn’t like to be in the house, which our mother had furnished from a Sears catalog. He wanted to be at the office or in his “studio,” which was the unheated garage. He ran a small manufacturing firm, before it went bankrupt, that made plastic ashtrays, ice packs, and plastic handles for hamburger presses. The ashtrays had three designs in them that he’d drawn himself—horses, dogs, antique cars. Perfect for the sporty set, he’d joke. He had schemes for other things he wanted to do—refrigerator magnets, party balloons.
    In the garage during the warmer months our father painted. He painted mostly seascapes, landscapes, and cities from postcards—usually Paris in the rain. Lydia and I would go out there in the summer and he’d give us a brush and some paint and we’d try to copy his paintings on pieces of paper he’d tack to the trees. Whenever Lydia asked him to paint us, he always said, “I don’t do people.”
    When it was cold, he tried to paint in the basement, but hecomplained that we bothered him too much. “There’s not enough room here,” he’d say to our mother of the two-bedroom ranch house they’d never pay off.
    The January of the ice storm, there was a thaw and the thaw brought rain. It rained and rained, and as the temperature fell the rain glazed the trees, the power lines, the roads. Lydia and I saw fairy castles in the