House Under Snow (17 page)

After Lilly and Max’s first anniversary, she began to look small and self-conscious beside him. Perhaps she feared he was losing interest. He was spending more time away from home. She let him bully her. She felt she still had to put on a show to convince him that she was worthy of his affections. I saw through my mother’s forced smile.

One day Lilly cornered me when I came home from school.

“Anna,” she said. “If you were Max, what would you want from me?”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure I’m making him happy.”

“Mom, you’re worried about nothing.” She was getting on my nerves.

“Help me think of what I can make Max for dinner. Would you run to the store with me? Maybe I should take up tennis or golf. Anna, get your coat.”

My mother dragged me all over town while she got her hair and nails done.

“Let me tell you something about marriage, Anna,” she recited. “You can’t just sit there with your arms crossed. You’ve got to protect it like you would a little baby.”

When Max came home that night, she insisted my sisters and I go out for a hamburger. She and Max needed a romantic night alone together. Max scooped Louise up in his arms, then threw her on the couch and tickled her until she screamed. “Don’t you dare hurt my angel,” Lilly shouted playfully from the kitchen. “Anna, fix Max a drink.”

Louise screamed again. “Max, let her be,” Lilly called out flirtatiously. “My daughters aren’t used to your roughhousing.”

Now we had to be on guard for their fights. When Lilly and Max fought, they went at it so intensely that it lasted for hours. After they’d made up Max came into the kitchen and solicited our help while he cooked up plates of scrambled eggs, fried ham, and pancakes. Fighting with my mother gave him an appetite.

“Mom thinks Max doesn’t pay her enough attention,” I said, picking at my hamburger. We three sat around the brown linoleum table at Dink’s and conferred. Lilly and Max were at war again; they had started fighting before we left the house.

“I don’t care what she thinks,” Ruthie said.

“He just needs some space,” Louise said. “She gets jealous that he has to go out and make a living. Mom doesn’t understand that he has other interests besides her.”

“I bet he does,” said Ruthie.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You two are clueless,” Ruthie said.

We sipped on our milk shakes and picked at our fries until
we noticed, once the busboy began vacuuming, that we were the only customers left.

Max took us
out to dinner on Sundays to the Hunt Club for a roast beef dinner. He liked us to dress in identical dresses and parade us in like his harem. Of course, Ruthie was completely disgusted. At eleven, Ruthie felt she was too old to be dressed up as if she was a little kid. But I didn’t mind. I liked the orderliness of routine: clothes picked out for us, my mother at the head of the table next to Max, relishing that she was finally part of a couple. I didn’t care if we were playing some kind of dress-up. My mother beamed. It had been so long since she had sat beside a man she belonged to by law.

I grew accustomed to Max’s strong personality, his scent—the smell of Irish Spring soap on his skin—and began to trust him. I often sat next to him on the couch in the late afternoons, while he watched
The Honeymooners
on TV. When Jackie Gleason threatened to send Alice to the moon with his clenched fist, Max laughed so loudly he made me jump. But I stayed very still next to him, afraid that if I moved or made a sound, he would leave the room. I listened as the ice clinked in his glass of scotch, and smelled the warm liquor on his breath. I watched the TV blankly. When Max laughed I looked up at him and grinned.

“I’m making a leg of lamb with mint sauce for dinner,” Lilly would call from the kitchen—or whatever special dish she was working on. Max was no longer infatuated with or surprised by Lilly’s fancy meals. He had grown to expect them. Sitting next to Max, I could feel my mother, restless and impatient in the kitchen, waiting for Max’s attention.

Sometimes I developed stomach cramps so severe that I had to lie flat on my back until they passed.

During the day I slapped down plates of pancakes, sausage, and eggs, and in the evenings in August I went to the racetrack with Austin and bet half my day’s take on his picks. At night I curled myself against him on his thin, rusted cot and imagined I was happy.

And then, for days at a time, Austin disappeared. There was no phone at the track. It was too far to go on my bike. There was no way for me to get in touch with him. I wrote his name over and over in my journal and drew hearts next to each letter. I rode my bike past his house, hoping I might find his car in the driveway. I almost knocked on the door and begged Mr. Cooper to forgive Austin, just so that he’d come home.

Finally it was Labor Day weekend. I’d left the weekend open, thinking Austin would eventually call, but it was already Friday and I hadn’t heard from him all week. As each day had passed and it grew closer to the weekend, I’d sworn to myself I would stop seeing him. I couldn’t concentrate. I’d sacrificed my friendship with Maria for Austin, and now I realized how much I missed her. I plotted how I would break up with him. I enacted long scenarios in my head, as if I were writing a play. I composed profound soliloquies where I analyzed Austin’s motivations and actions, and where, through logic and reason, I came out the winner.

Then Friday, on my way to work, I ran into Brian Horrigan. He asked me to a movie with him Saturday night, and I took the invitation as an omen, as if he could see just by looking at me that I was losing Austin. For the first time I regretted turning Brian down.

In the late afternoon Louise came home from practice, her hair still wet. Her swim team had already started its workouts. Her body was long and thin. There was a time I’d been jealous of it, how she could eat and never gain a pound, but seeing how thin she was that day, I felt worried.

She looked at me, sprawled out on my twin bed, and delivered a lecture.

“Look at you,” she said. “Look what you’re doing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m tired of watching you mope around waiting for Austin to call.”

I hadn’t realized it was so obvious. I was embarrassed she was calling me on it.

“You should talk,” I said. “You’re the one we should be worried about. Look how thin you are.” I took my sister’s problems as a personal betrayal. “How come you’re not going out with anyone? I know Todd likes you. What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t think you should be giving advice on boys.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“At least I have something I care about,” she said, meaning swimming. “You’re pathetic.”

“It’s better than pretending not to need anyone,” I shot back. But her comment stung. I told myself that when Austin called, I would blow him off. Louise and I rarely quarreled, but that night we turned our faces to opposite walls and went to sleep without talking anymore.

As if I sensed he would come, I awoke as the light of dawn pressed against the window. From beneath the cracked shade, I made out Austin’s Mustang in our driveway. He tapped at
the windowpane of our front door. I flew down the stairs, still in my nightgown, and let him in, and we moved to the couch. “Come here,” he said. “I want to hold you.” I drew gentle circles with my finger on his back and told him I was glad he’d come. I didn’t understand why Austin went so hot and cold, but the inconsistency in his character was a puzzle I was determined to figure out. I rationalized Austin’s behavior, even though it was scaring me.

As we lay on the sofa, I tried to forget I was angry, but then I smelled liquor on his breath and the acrid stench of marijuana smoke in his hair. “Where were you?” I was suddenly fired up.

“Working.”

“How come you didn’t call?”

“I talked to you the other day.”

“It’s been almost a week.”

“Anna,” Austin said, his fingers gripped in my hair. “I’m here now, aren’t I? It can’t just be about you,” he said. “I’m on my own now. I have to make some money. Can’t you understand that?”

My mind went blank. All the profound and elegant ways I’d imagined I would tell him off had faded. I let him continue to touch me, just so I could go down with him to the black pond, a kind of oblivion, where time for a second stopped.

On their second anniversary Max flew the family to Miami Beach to meet his mother. That he had waited two years to do this should have registered, but I was oblivious to how a man’s history could shape him in the present.

Mrs. McCarthy remained seated on a leather chaise longue while the maid showed us in. She wore a pink Chanel suit that clung to her tiny, emaciated frame. Her cigarette dangled from a gold cigarette holder. When Max bent over to kiss her, she took a meditative drag from the cigarette and gave him her cheek. His very presence seemed to disappoint her.

“Max, you’ve got yourself quite a handful,” she said, looking us over from top to bottom. Max tried to make her laugh, but everything he did, down to the way he swirled the scotch in his glass and paced the floor, annoyed her. I caught his eye and smiled at him. I felt sorry for him. Everything about his mother’s house, from the nautical pattern on her dishes, to the formal Chippendale furniture, to the lime and rose colors of the pillows and wallpaper, was different from the world I had been raised in.

“What have I done?” Lilly asked, after dragging me with her to the bathroom.

I watched in the mirror as she carefully arranged her hair with her fingertips.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I was furious with my mother. Didn’t she see that Max needed her to be supportive?

“Before you get married, promise me you’ll meet his mother first, Anna. You can tell everything about a man by his mother. Don’t make my same mistakes, darling.” Lilly dotted on fresh lipstick and blotted her lips with a Kleenex.

“It’s not Max’s fault,” I said. “He didn’t choose her.”

“I suppose you feel that way about me, too,” Lilly said.

I looked away.

After we returned to the living room, Max’s mother pulled out her photo album to show Lilly the rest of the family.

“Who’s that?” Lilly said.

“Johnny. Max’s twin.”

Lilly looked surprised.

Max took another sip from his drink and looked out the window.

“Max never told you?” Mrs. McCarthy asked critically. “The boys were bumper hitching. A truck sideswiped them. Johnny was killed instantly.” Mrs. McCarthy poured herself another glass of scotch. Her thin body was so brittle, it looked as if she might snap.

“I’m sorry,” Lilly said. She reached over and squeezed Max’s hand.

I was relieved when Mrs. McCarthy stood up and announced that she’d better start on supper.

I pushed my mother forward to encourage her to follow Mrs. McCarthy through the pink parlor into the kitchen and offer some help. It annoyed me that she hadn’t thought to do it herself. The point was, whatever I thought about Lilly’s and Max’s marriage, I was worried that she was going to ruin the only stability we’d known since my father died.

As far as I was concerned, the world was ordered in two ways. The world of women and men, and the world of women without men. Now that Max lived with us, there was a certain symmetry to our lives. When Max had entered the picture, our world became tame and manicured. At first it was as if I had walked into a museum, I was so transfixed by beautiful objects I was afraid to touch, lest they break and shatter into a million pieces. I knew what it was like now to have balance in a house. To not feel everything was slipping into a pool of emotion. Now I thought I understood the chemistry between a man and a woman, what the combination could do.

Even though the trip had been a disaster, once we got back home, they seemed closer. Maybe Max had realized how much
he needed my mother. Perhaps Lilly felt sorry for Max, once she had learned about his lost twin brother. Regardless, inside the walls of our house was the smell of my mother’s perfume, mixed with the liquor smell from their breath, the damp smell of sex—I felt the warmth of their bodies over my sleep all night long. I stopped trying to shut out their sounds in their bedroom. Now, deep in the night, through the walls, I listened for Max’s snoring, the great dark voice of his sleep that rose and fell in my dreams. The house echoed with the almost horsey gasps of air going through his thick nostrils; his snore was a deep hum, a music box whose song I never tired of.

As Austin grew more involved in the insular world of the track, and less attached to the world outside, I began to worry. I told myself I had to try harder to understand him. One Saturday afternoon I told him I wanted to spend the day with him at work and arranged for someone to cover my shift at the diner. I sat on a stool in the corner of the stable as he brought in fresh hay for the horses and began to pick his brain.

“So what’s the goal?” I said. “I mean, what are you trying to get out of this?”

“What do you mean, Anna?”

“I mean, is it just to have the fastest horse? To win the most money? I thought it was the horses you loved. But from what I can see, it’s really all about commerce.” I had been studying the owners as they came by, how they studied the program, then cussed out the grooms and trainers if the horse the night before hadn’t lived up to expectation.

“Sometimes passions don’t make any sense. I didn’t think you’d understand.”

I thought for a moment. “I just don’t know whether you’ll be happy here in the long run,” I said, listening to the horse in the stall go at a salt lick with his tongue.

“I might not be. But I have to give it a try. I’m not a shirt-and-suit guy, Anna.”

Jane Smart poked her head in and said hello. Austin went out to bring in another bale of hay. I overheard the two of them talking outside about getting together to go riding. When I confronted Austin about it later that day, he shrugged it off, but I sensed the chemistry between them. Maybe Austin was right. Maybe the track life wasn’t so bad for him. After all, he was only seventeen.