House Under Snow (8 page)

Maria blamed me
for Billy Fitzpatrick’s lack of attention. It was irrational. We both knew it, but nevertheless, I woke up the morning after Skippy’s party friendless. Maria refused my phone calls. I would have to choose between her and Austin. I would probably have felt the same way, if the situation had been reversed. But I couldn’t change anything now. I had
driven into a fog so thick everything slid out of focus and disappeared.

When I was a child, the two most important people in my life had vanished, first my father, and then my mother, when she lost herself in her dates. Love to me was always sheer, something you could see right through. I longed for a kind of love that was impenetrable, that was tough and enduring.

By the snowy December the year my mother started her dating career, she was going out almost every night and sleeping all day. She forgot to wake us up for school in the morning, to leave money in an envelope in the milk chute for the milkman, to call the snowplow to dig us out. Sometimes the snow drifted so high that our house looked like an animal burrowing in the ground. My mother lost all sense of time and place; all sense of herself, except for an obsession with her figure. She went on liquid diets; for a week, she ate only three grapefruits a day.

While Lilly busied herself with her makeup and creams, Ruthie heated cans of Campbell’s soup for supper. Meanwhile, Lilly looked as elegant as royalty, the way she carried herself down the stairs in the late afternoon. Yet there was often little in the refrigerator except a stack of frozen dinners or a doggy bag from one of Cleveland’s elite restaurants filled with gristled filet mignon or leftover slices of prime rib.

By the time Kent Montgomery came to call, my mother’s flirtations had gone beyond playfulness and she had grown anxious.

That afternoon, I watched Lilly try on cocktail dress after cocktail dress, complaining that not one looked right. After
she finally decided on one, she worried over the color or wave of her hair. She became irritable at these times, snapped at us over small things—if she ran her last pair of panty hose—then begged our forgiveness.

I pleaded with my mother to stay home. She looked worn down and haggard, like a slab of meat hanging in the butcher shop. With panic in her eyes, she answered, “Don’t you see? I have no choice.” She continued to cream her tired face. Later, when Lilly glided down the stairs to meet Kent Montgomery, I saw her forced smile as she gazed into his eyes, and my heart plummeted.

When she got home from her date, the front door creaked open. Lilly fumbled with the lock; Kent’s voice echoed up the stairs. He stomped his feet on the front doormat to clean the snow from the perfectly polished leather shoes I had noticed when he had come for Lilly.

“
Shhhhhhh
,” Lilly whispered. I heard both of them laugh. The front door creaked shut again. Loose paint from the hall ceiling outside my bedroom fell in chips to the floor. My heart gradually slowed from quick, anxious beats to a more normal pace.

My mother’s high heels clicked up the steps and stopped outside our door. “I thought I heard you two talking,” she said to Louise and me, opening the bedroom door a crack. “How come you’re still up?” Her voice was slow and thick like syrup. She slipped inside the room and sat down at the bottom of my bed. She stretched out one leg and slipped off its shoe with the other foot; her red polished toenails shone through her nude stockings. Her body was warm and floppy. That’s how she got when she drank. Sleepily, she laid her head down and curled up her body. She let out a long sigh. She was absorbed in something dark and secret.

“Isn’t Kent adorable?” she asked at last, pushing herself up. She tossed back her head and laughed. “You liked him, didn’t you?”

“He’s got a beard,” Louise said.

“I like a man with hair on his face,” she said defensively.

“Maybe he can come to my school?”

“What are you talking about, Louise?” Lilly snapped out of her fantasy.

“For Father’s Day. Missy’s father works for Channel Five,” she said.

“Let’s not talk about that now,” Lilly said. She reached over to Louise’s bed and squeezed her hand. “I think it’s too premature to ask Kent,” she continued, in her out-of-body voice. “Girls, he has the softest hair,” she said. “Did you see the size of his shoulders?”

The tortured look on Lilly’s face, so clear earlier, had faded away. She grew soft and wistful. She was under one of her lovesick spells. She laughed a private, no-good laugh. “Kent’s sweet, isn’t he?” she said to no one in particular.

I didn’t think so. But I was slowly learning that my mother’s moods could be determined, like changing weather, by the kind of man she was with and how he treated her.

“Tell me the truth,” she continued. “I’m your mother. You can tell me.” Her eyes darted back and forth from me to Louise and back again. “What’s wrong, Anna?”

“Nothing.”

“You didn’t like him, did you?”

“I barely know him,” I said impatiently.

“Well, he’s very nice,” Lilly snapped. “Besides, he offered to fix the leak in the garage roof.” She dragged her body up, and with her shoes slung over her shoulder by their straps she closed the door behind her.

After Lilly had gone into her bedroom, I heard the telephone ring. I could hear my mother talking.

“Kent, is that you? . . . I don’t know, it’s so late.”

The spring on my mother’s bed creaked as Lilly rose to go into her dressing room. Then I heard the
swish-swish
from her lace nightgown as she passed our bedroom door on the way back downstairs.

“Where are you going?” I called through the door.

“Anna, go back to bed,” Lilly said.

“But where are you going?”

“Kent forgot his keys.” Lilly’s voice sounded defeated and tired.

“If he forgot his keys, then where was he calling from?”

“Anna,” Lilly said, exasperated. “There’s a hole in the garage about two feet wide.”

I wished I could travel far into space, like the astronauts who’d gone to the moon. Then my spirit would be safe from the world where my mother lived, with her assorted men and sultry music, her makeup and sexy dresses.

Throughout the years
of my mother’s dating, she often sat at the foot of my bed and quizzed me. I didn’t understand why my opinion mattered so much—perhaps she just needed to hear herself talk. But I didn’t want to hear her. I had my own problems. I would have liked her to help me.

Soon I would start third grade. I couldn’t concentrate on the math equations on the board that year. I had worried about what my mother was doing in the house all day alone. If Lilly had too much time on her hands, she grew vague and transparent as if you could slip right through her.

“Robert told me he was seeing other women,” she’d said
once. “Anna, is there something wrong with me? I thought we connected. Should I call him?”

I didn’t think so, but I knew she wanted to hear the opposite. My mother seemed to have an endless desire no man could fill. “When we were at the Reinsteins’ cocktail party, he said he loved children. Don’t you think he was trying to tell me something? When a man touches you . . . well, I thought it meant something.”

After the night of Austin’s party, my body didn’t feel mine unless he was next to me; I felt if he wasn’t in my vision he didn’t exist, or more to the point, I didn’t exist for him.

That spring and summer there was hardly a place to be alone. Like everything else in Chagrin Falls, my house felt incredibly small. When I wasn’t working or out with Austin, I sat in the living room and in the stream of sunlight I watched specks of dust slowly float into the air, and I wondered about the meaning of life until the sound of a lawn mower or the phone ringing drove a wedge into the silence and pulled me out of my thoughts. Upstairs I could hear the drone of the TV in my mother’s bedroom. Her melancholy overtook the air in our home like the smell of rotting fruit. Sometimes I retreated outside and sat in the gazebo reading a book, or laid out in the sun on a lounge chair working on my tan before it was time for me to go to work.

My mother had swung back to isolating herself in our house the way she had during those years right after my father died. I worried that my mother might decide to stay shut in our house forever. I suppose she could have if she had wanted to. She had enough money to squeak by on from her monthly
Social Security checks, occasional help from Aunt Rose’s pension, and handouts from Nonie and Papa.

After my father died Nonie and Papa were always after her to take some classes, get an education. But Lilly managed to skirt the issue.

Every time Aunt Rose came back to Cleveland for her yearly visit, she, too, pleaded with Lilly to get a job or an education. But Lilly always defended herself, saying, “The only thing I know how to do is take care of my family.”

“But, Mom, maybe Aunt Rose’s right. Maybe you’d be happier if you worked,” I’d say after Aunt Rose left.

“I don’t have Aunt Rose’s constitution,” Lilly reasoned. “Imagine me, working at a bank.”

That kind of logic had an awful effect on me. I wanted to jump through the roof. But if you stepped into those waters with my mother, it was as if you had walked into an inner argument she was having with herself. She sucked you in like an undertow, and then spit you out again, carrying her burden.

When Lilly went out on dates, we worried when she would come home or what kind of mood she’d be in once her date deposited her back inside our front door like an opened package. The winter I was in third grade, if I wasn’t at Maria’s house playing Barbies or Monopoly underneath the alcove in her attic while her father worked and her mother chain-smoked in the den, I hung out with my sisters in the yard building snowmen and making snow forts until it got late. We tried our hardest to stay busy, so we wouldn’t have to wonder when our mother was coming back.

One icy night she had gone out with Kent Montgomery,
and when she was with him we never knew what time she’d be home. When our hands grew cold and our cheeks stung, we went inside and had hot chocolate with marshmallows and slices of toast spread with butter and sprinkled sugar. Then we climbed up to our rooms. I cleared off the schoolbooks, trousers, and balled-up sweaters that were always piled in a heap on Louise’s bed. I untangled the blankets, tucked and dusted clean the flowered sheet. “Why are you such a slob?” I turned to Louise, and scolded. Louise, as a child, was disorganized and anxious. When I looked into her face, I could see the weight of sorrow she carried in her eyes. I knew her body, like mine, missed feeling the hands and warm lips of our father on her; showing a daughter what it meant to be loved. I was only four when my father died. My memories of him were vague, but poor Louise confessed she had no memories of our father at all.

I helped her pull the sweatshirt over her head and handed her a nightgown. There was dirt in her fingernails, and I made her go into the bathroom and clean them off. Soon we both slipped into bed, but later Louise went to Ruthie’s room and summoned her. Then Ruthie came and climbed into Louise’s bed with her. Before we fell asleep, we waited for Lilly to come back home. When Louise couldn’t sleep, Ruthie read
The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking
. I liked Pippi’s red braids, her skinny legs, brave adventures, and the sound of Ruthie’s voice creating the scene for us.

When we grew tired of hearing the story, we played a game where we bought three horses and had to name them. Sugar was a good one; Henry, Midnight, Star, Strawberry, Red Stallion, and Chester were some of the favorites. Ruthie liked Grand Canyon. We said the names until one fell asleep, then the other. Then the last one.

In the morning after Lilly’s date we heard the shrill ring of the telephone. I wasn’t sure my mother was home yet, but after two rings, Lilly picked up. I went downstairs. Lilly was still dressed in the navy blue dress she had worn on her date with Kent the night before.

I went back upstairs. “Something’s the matter,” I told my sisters.

We trailed downstairs and lingered in our mother’s shadow.

“Who was it, Mom?” Ruthie finally said.

Lilly sat up and wiped wisps of hair off her face with her sleeve. Snow had come in the night and was building faster in the yard, scratching out the last sliver of sky. There would be no school that day.

“Oh, it was no one you know, darling. It was nothing. I’m just tired. I was up all night.” Lilly was edgy. She had canceled her next date with Kent. When the phone rang again, Kent no doubt pestering Lilly to change her mind, she asked Ruthie to answer and say she wasn’t home. She stared out the window, biting the cuticle skin around one thumb. Her makeup from the night before was smeared under her eyes.

“Why do I have to lie for you?” Ruthie barked. But when she looked into our mother’s tired eyes, she gave in.

Lilly tied her hair back off her face in a ponytail. She began to move about the house, washing dishes, doing laundry, still in her tight-fitting evening dress, as if she were following a routine she’d carried out for years.

The doorbell rang. Lilly moved the curtain and peered out the window. It was Mr. Hopkins from down the street with the immaculate lawn that looked smooth as carpet or golf-course grass.

Lilly opened the door.

“Mrs. Crane, the block association has signed a petition,”
he began, clearing his throat. He shoved a piece of paper into Lilly’s hand. “You’ve got to do something about your house. It’s affecting the value of the neighborhood.”

Lilly looked at him the way sad widows do.

“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings,” Mr. Hopkins stuttered. “But we’ve got to consider our children. I wish we could do something to help.”

Lilly took the petition, crumpled it in a ball, threw it back at him, and shut the door.

“You’ll be hearing from our attorneys,” Mr. Hopkins called.

Lilly went to the kitchen and swallowed down three aspirin. “No one understands,” she sighed.

Around three o’clock she shoved us outdoors. “I need peace and quiet,” she explained. “My head’s throbbing.”