Mind of Winter (8 page)

As she always did, Tatty had grimaced at the plastic bag (“They aren’t biodegradable! They
never
leave the earth!”) as the bag boy slid the roast (sixty dollars’ worth of prime) into it.

But Holly had given her a look, and said, “We need it in plastic, Tatty. So it doesn’t bleed all over the refrigerator,” to which her daughter had made an even more dramatic expression of revulsion and then hurried away from the checkout line to stare into the glass cage of stuffed animals near the automatic doors:

How many dollars, over the years, had Holly stuffed into that machine so that Tatty could try to snag a miniature teddy bear or pink cat? Something cheap and synthetic, probably made in China, stuffed with some kind of formaldehyde-soaked substance that had been outlawed in this country for years? It had been remarkable, really, how many times Tatty, as a little girl, had snagged one of those prizes with the machine’s mechanical claw. The cashiers used to comment on it, saying they’d never seen anyone outsmart that game as often as Tatty had.

At the car Tatty had helped her unload the groceries into the trunk from the cart, steering clear of the roast in the plastic bag, which Holly tossed into the backseat (was she trying to rile her daughter?), where it landed with a ridiculous, decapitated
thunk
. Tatty sat beside her in silence as Holly maneuvered them out of the parking lot, but when they were in the road and had reached the speed limit, Tatty said, “Before plastic bags there must have been ways to keep meat from
bleeding
all over the refrigerator, Mom.” She said
bleeding
in such a way that Holly anticipated that soon Tatiana would be announcing her vegetarianism.

“That’s right,” Holly had said. “I bet there were, but I bet they didn’t work as well as a plastic bag,” and then she turned the radio on to NPR, where some popular musician Holly had never heard of was being interviewed at length about his influences, which included, but were not limited to, the sound of ticking clocks and flushing toilets. She turned it down so the voices were just a whispering background and tried to engage Tatiana in a bit of conversation by asking her if she knew who the musician was, but Tatty just said, “No.” And then, as if to pound a nail in Holly’s coffin, they passed the town’s largest tree—a white pine that towered over the church next to which it grew, even over its steeple—and, snagged practically at the very top like a mocking Christmas star, a white plastic bag fluttered around in the wind.

HOLLY LIFTED THE
meat out of the refrigerator with both hands, as if it were a sleeping baby, and put it, in its white plastic bag, down on the kitchen counter.

As she’d known she would, she found the bottom of the plastic bag pooled with blood, but she resisted the urge to call Tatty over to show her what the point was of that evil plastic bagging. She wondered about those many public school teachers who’d driven home their lessons about sustainability and biodegradability and migrating birds with their feet tangled in plastic grocery bags over the years—what did
they
bring their meat home in? A little rivulet of blood made its way down the side of the granite countertop and onto the tiles near her stocking feet.

Holly glanced at it, and chose to ignore it. She’d clean it up later. The tiles were red, and the blood—dark as menstrual blood or cherry syrup—was camouflaged there. No one would know it was there but her. She opened the plastic bag, slit open the cellophane wrapper around the meat, lifted the roast off the Styrofoam it rested on, and peeled off the Kotex-like bandage from the bottom. She then lifted and placed the meat gently (again a sleeping baby came to mind) in the roasting pan she’d left on the counter the night before.

It looked, of course, unappetizing. It looked like an accident, Holly thought. It looked like what it was—an animal, uncovered, like what any one of them would look like, she supposed, stripped of all exteriors. Some mushrooms, onions, and potatoes would help, and pepper, and as Holly began to grind the pepper mill over the top of the meat she called over her shoulder to Tatty, “Could you get the mushrooms out of the crisper and wash them?”

There was no response. Holly turned and looked at her daughter, sharply, to which Tatty responded with an expression of such infinite weariness that it made Holly want to laugh.

This was the expression Tatty gave the world whenever she was asked to do some chore she didn’t want to do—a sad deflation, the expression that might be worn by a princess slave as she was being taken in chains to the dungeons.

Holly remembered, then, her own teenage years, and a few friends she’d had like this. Girls who rolled their eyes so languidly and so often it seemed their eyeballs could have permanently disappeared somewhere above their brows. She recalled lying on the floor of Cindy Martin’s bedroom, listening to Billy Joel on a transistor radio propped up between them, and the way Cindy had parted her lips at the ceiling in a kind of silent scream, squeezing her eyes shut and letting her shoulders sink deeper into the white shag carpeting when her mother called from below, “Cindy? You need to feed the dog!”

Holly herself had been envious. The mother. The chore. The dog. These normal trappings of a normal childhood. She herself was never asked to do anything at home, because she had two older sisters, each of whom had made it her goal in life to let Holly have a “normal childhood” despite their mother’s death and their father’s “secret” alcoholism. It was why Holly did not chastise Tatty for her resentful reactions to being asked to empty the dishwasher or take out the garbage. These were luxuries, these small burdens. It was a luxury to be able to dole out such burdens. As Tatiana made her way to the refrigerator, to the crisper, Holly said, cheerfully, “Thanks, Tat,” trying to let her daughter know that she recognized that this was an effort for her, this indignity, but also that it was ridiculous, and charming, that it was such an effort.

Outside, a snowplow growled by, and Holly heard the sound of its blades scraping against the pavement. It really
was
a blizzard, then, wasn’t it? These days it seemed that the snowplows only came out during emergencies. Cutbacks. And this was Christmas! Imagine the overtime the city had to pay a snowplow driver on Christmas Day. Like the U.S. Postal Service, snowplowing had been a service Holly used to take for granted. There was a time (only ten years ago?) when the snowplows came out just, it seemed, for the show of it:

Give us a flurry, a dusting, a glaze
, it had seemed,
and we’ll make it rue the day!

But those days seemed like longer ago than a decade now—like those old-fashioned days when they used to serve you dinner on airplanes, or pump your gas for you, or carry your groceries out to the car. And now, of course, they were talking about shutting the post office down.

How much snow must have fallen for them to be willing to pay overtime to the snowplowers on Christmas Day?

Holly glanced over at Tatty, who was staring at the carton of mushrooms in her hands as if completely baffled by them.

“Did you hear that?” Holly asked.

“Hear what?” Tatty said, under her breath, still looking down at the mushrooms.

That profile:

The lowered eyes. The fixed stare. An ancient beauty carved by someone whose identity was lost to time. And the ancient message of it, which seemed to be,
Gaze upon me, I’m here and also not here, of you and apart from you.

Tatiana’s cold marble profile unnerved Holly. She said, “Just put those down, Tatiana. I’ll do it.”

Tatiana continued to stare into the carton of mushrooms.

Holly said, too loudly, “Did you hear me?”

Tatiana seemed, then, to hear her, but it was as if she’d picked Holly’s voice up on a walkie-talkie from miles away. She shook her head a little, placed the carton of mushrooms carefully in the sink, looked over at Holly—and then Holly realized that the attitude she’d taken to be Tatiana’s annoyance at having been asked to do a chore was not that.

Tatiana had been crying!

“Honey!” Holly said, turning from the meat to her daughter, wiping her bloody hands on her dress—because who cared? There were more important things, and the dress was so busily floral a bit of blood would simply look like part of the ridiculous pattern. “Oh my God, what’s wrong?”

She took her daughter by her shoulders so quickly that she almost knocked Tatiana over—so thin, that frame, so frail!—and she pulled her to her hard, cupping the back of Tatiana’s skull in a hand just as she had when Baby Tatty had been small enough to carry on her hip from room to room, from crib to bath, from car to playground. “What’s wrong, my sweetheart?” she asked again.

Tatiana let her forehead rest on her mother’s shoulder, but she said nothing and didn’t raise her arms to return Holly’s embrace. It was like holding a mannequin, except that Tatiana smelled like tea tree oil and citrus fruit and fields full of unearthly flowers—flowers that had been raised in factories and tinkered with until their scents conformed to some inventor’s idea of the scent of the perfect flower.

And something else. Something not quite right. A bit of rotten fruit, again. Just a whiff. And then Holly felt that urgency return.

Something had followed them home from Russia!

There was
something
in all of this. Something
about
it that, without time to sit at a desk and puzzle it out in words with a pen, Holly feared she would never understand! And, yet, the very thing she was doing—embracing her child—made it impossible to slip away, to find the pen and paper or to boot up the computer.

And even if she’d had the time—then what? What would she write? Something had followed them home from Russia? It was meaningless! It explained nothing! And Holly was no longer a writer, had not been one for years and years, had not written a decent sentence or a real line of poetry since way back then, back in those days of dinners served on airplanes, back when you could wait at the gate for your loved ones to disembark from the plane and the snowplows roared out into the roads at the first few flakes. Holly knew that she could be given all the time in the world, and despite this conviction that she had something to write and no time to write it, there would be nothing. How many
beginnings
had she jotted down in the last eighteen years, and how many of those jottings had led to anything but frustration and an ill-temper that lasted for days?
Hundreds
of beginnings, resulting in nothing. What could possibly have been the point of trying to break her writer’s block, and, no less, on Christmas day?

And still she felt the need to push her daughter (gently) away from her. Holding her, asking her what was the matter—it was just more futility, more fruitlessness. Her daughter, even if she knew what was wrong, wasn’t going to answer, would never offer any explanation for her tears or her moping or moodiness. If pushed, she would simply start up the argument about Holly oversleeping again, or the plastic bag. It would be a waste of both their time.

Holly loosened her grip on her daughter, and Tatiana, who’d remained stiff through the embrace, straightened up, stepped away, and headed silently back to her bedroom. Holly heard the door close with an efficient little click, and then (surely not) could she have heard Tatiana slip the hook into the lock’s eye? That hook and eye she had refused even to
acknowledge
since Holly had installed it for her? Was
that
the kind of day this was going to end up being? Was Holly
never
going to be forgiven for having overslept?

She shook her head at the place where her beautiful, impossible, impossibly beautiful daughter had vanished from the hallway, and continued to stand and stare at that emptiness until the oven behind her beeped that it was preheated sufficiently to slip the roast into it. Holly picked up the mushroom carton, ripped the plastic off of it, ran cold water over the fleshy nubs, and dumped them into the pan with the meat. She still had at least, she wagered, an hour to deal with potatoes and onions, and almost everything else—the mashed sweet potatoes and fruit salad and the dinner rolls—had been purchased premade at the store. This was not going to be one of her more impressive Christmas feasts. But what difference did it make? She couldn’t care less what the Coxes thought of her, and Eric’s family—well, how many impressive Christmas feasts was she really obligated to prepare for them in a single lifetime?—and Thuy and Pearl and Patty would have been pleased with nothing but a couple of beers (Thuy), sweet potatoes (Pearl), and fruit salad (Patty).

Holly turned her back on the kitchen and went to the window to assess the snowfall. As she’d expected from the snowplow action, the accumulation since she’d last looked outside was truly surprising. The wind was blowing the flakes sideways as they fell, yet there was still a kind of organization to the mass of it on the ground, as if someone were taking great pains to distribute the snowfall evenly over the lawn. The birdbath—which was a cement angel bearing a water dish in her hands—was completely cloaked. Holly realized that the snow must be sticky and damp, because it clung to every bit of the angel, even the bottom of her wings, and her whole face was swathed as if in bandages. Because that angel was only slightly smaller than life-sized, she looked, disguised like this, as if she could have been a child or a little adult, frozen out there in the backyard, still holding out that plate imploringly, as if begging for something from the picture window and the cozy comfortable interior beyond it.
Please?

WHEN THEY’D ARRIVED
in Siberia on their first trip there, Eric and Holly were picked up by a driver at the airport for a three-hour trip to the hostel run by this orphanage—this, after having traveled by plane and train and bus and again by plane for nearly twenty-four hours. In the car, in the backseat, Eric had immediately fallen asleep, but Holly had been unable even to close her eyes. Never in her life had she been more awake. She’d stared out at the snow and the landscape, and the landscape and the snow, as they became one and the same passing by. The people and their houses and their vehicles and their farm animals—all of them were buried, blurred. Snow ghosts, all of them, everything, for two hundred miles. Holly could not make out a single detail, and early on she gave up trying, yet never felt the slightest desire to close her eyes. It was a kind of comfort, really, to look out at this country and find it to be populated by nothing but apparitions.