Read White Bird in a Blizzard Online
Authors: Laura Kasischke
White Bird in a Blizzard
Copyright © 1999 Laura Kasischke
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Kasischke, Laura.
White bird in a blizzard / Laura Kasischke.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN
0-7868-6366-8
I. Title.
PS3561.A6993W53 1998
813'.54—dc21 98-11223
CIP
e
ISBN
978-0-544-46505-3
v1.0614
for Bill
I
WOULD LIKE TO THANK
B
ILL
A
BERNETHY
, L
ISA
B
ANKOFF
, J
ENNIFER
B
ARTH, AND
A
NTONYA
N
ELSON FOR HELPING ME WRITE AND REWRITE THIS NOVEL
; E
D AND
J
UNE
K
ASISCHKE FOR MANY YEARS OF ENCOURAGEMENT; AND
L
UCY AND
J
ACK
A
BERNETHY, MY CHILDREN, FOR LOVE
.
NE
January 1986
I
AM SIXTEEN WHEN MY MOTHER STEPS OUT OF HER SKIN ONE
frozen January afternoon—pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance—and disappears.
No one sees her leave, but she is gone.
Only the morning before, my mother was a housewife—a housewife who, for twenty years, kept our house as swept up and sterile as the mind of winter itself, so perhaps she finally just whisk-broomed herself out, a luminous cloud of her drifting through the bedroom window as soft as talcum powder, mingling with the snowflakes as they fell, and the stardust and the lunar ash out there.
Her name is Eve, and this is Garden Heights, Ohio, so I used to like to think of my mother as Eve—the naked one, the first one—when she was in the Garden, poisoning the weeds with bleach, defoliating the trees, stuffing their leaves down the garbage disposal, then scouring the sink with something chemical and harsh, but powdered, something dyed ocean blue to disguise its deadly powers for the housewives like my mother who bought it, only dimly realizing that what they’d purchased with its snappy name (Spic and Span, Mr. Clean, Fantastik) was pure acid.
The blue of a child’s eyes, the blue of a robin’s egg—
But swallow a teaspoon of that and it will turn your intestines to lace.
This Eve, like the first one, was bored in Garden Heights. She spent her afternoons in the silence of a house she’d just cleaned yesterday from bottom to top, and there was nothing left for her to do beyond planning the nothing of the future, too.
Sometimes, when I came home from school early, I’d find her asleep in my bed. She’d be dressed as if she had somewhere to go—black slacks, a lamb’s-wool sweater, pearls, dark hair set in smooth curls—folded onto her side, not a single light on in the whole house. But that afternoon, something else happened.
What, I can only imagine.
I imagine her standing at the bedroom window watching the sky toss its cold litter of snow on the lawn, thinking about loss, or love, or lust, bored again, then exploding like a bomb of feather-duster feathers, or melting into the wall to wall—a milky, evaporating shadow on the shag.
When my father gets home from work, she is gone completely. When I get home from school, he is sitting in the living room with his suit still on, hands turned up empty on his lap.
We wait all night for her to come home, but she doesn’t.
We don’t eat dinner. We don’t know how.
My sheets feel frozen when I get in bed, and I can hear my father snoring in their bedroom.
I realize now that I knew nothing about my mother except that one day she was here—making dinner, cleaning the house, scowling around with that feather duster—and the next day she wasn’t.
B
UT WHAT COULD
I
HAVE DONE ABOUT MY MOTHER
? W
HILE
she was metamorphosing right in our own home—changing, reshaping, going crazy, or sane—I was becoming sixteen. I thought her trouble was just menopause, or boredom, and by the time I might have said or done something, I
was
sixteen, my blood like a little creek flooded suddenly with hormones, a babbling brook that had become hot, and high, and dangerous.
I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I’d never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a
magnetic
field between them—something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light—and it was as though I could hold the life force itself in my hands.
Whatever my mother was up to, I didn’t care.
Phil, the boy next door, is tall, and blond, and actively stupid. “Fuckin’ A,” he’ll say when a bit of poetry is quoted by the TV news anchor. “Straight C’s!” he smiles, waving his report card at me in the cafeteria at school.
In the summer, he wanted me to wear nothing but halter tops, and when we met in our backyards, which were separated only by a yellow ditch of daffodils, he’d come up behind me and slip his hands into the top.
The fertilized lawns throbbed like green glass in the sun.
“Show me,” I would say to Phil as he drove us to school in his father’s sedan, and he’d unzip his pants, take his penis out, flop it around.
Phil has been my boyfriend for a year, and in that year we have talked about almost nothing. If he has any original ideas, any personal opinions wafting around like feathers in his head, he manages to keep them mostly to himself. He listens to WKLL, the heaviest of the heavy-metal stations around here, but he’s not the heavy-metal type. He’s never been to a concert, and can’t remember the names of the bands he likes or tell you what his favorite song of the month is called, let alone what it’s about, all that car-crash clutter behind the singing.
He’s what you’d call a clean-cut kid if you were the type of person who believed in clean-cut kids. No ripped T-shirts. No tattoos. No steel-tipped boots. As suburban as it gets.
But it’s always in the background as he’s driving, and he nods his head as if he’s listening (“W
-KILL!
” the disc jockeys scream between songs, sounding juvenile and halfhearted and nonviolent), as if he’s enjoying what he hears, as if it speaks to some part of him that is not the least bit visible to the naked eye, some slam-dancing protozoan part.
I’ve learned to tune it out, myself, having always worried that if I listened, really listened, to that kind of music, it might fry some delicate tissue in my inner ear and I’d go deaf.
Phil doesn’t talk much, but it doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted to talk, I could have talked to my mother. For a long time, she was trying to get me to talk—
“Kat,” she said, “do you love this boy?”
“
Mom
,” I said, turning on her. “What business is that of yours?”
She was standing behind me in the bathroom, looking over my shoulder at the two of us reflected in the mirror above the sink. Just out of the shower, I had a towel wrapped around me, and a veil of steam came between us and smudged our reflections. The humidity smoothed the lines out on her face, and she looked like a foggy me.
“Well, I can’t stand your father,” she said then, and the bluntness of it was like a rubber bat slugging into a rubber ball.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Tell it to someone else,” and pushed past her into the hall.
As simply as my mother was here, and then she wasn’t, Phil and I were virgins, and then we weren’t.
One afternoon when we had no school—my father was at work, my mother was still at the mall—we got into my bed, which was decorated with pansies and piled with stuffed animals that I knocked in one smooth gesture to the floor while Phil stood behind me, thumbs hooked into belt loops, waiting.
Phil is lanky, and when he stands in one place he rests all his weight on one leg, and this turns his body into nothing but angles and planes, a boy made of scrap metal.
It was March, and the light that bled in under the window shades was blurred and pale, as if March had gray water in her veins.
We undid each other’s buttons and zippers under the covers. Neither of us said a word. We stomped our clothes down to the bottom of the bed in a panic of embarrassment and desire, a kind of prone peasant dancing—trampling the grapes, mashing the potatoes. I rolled onto my back, and wondered what I would know next that I’d never known before. Sin? Ecstasy? My own mortality? A glimpse of the cosmos as he entered me?
But when Phil rolled on top of me, what I had was a sudden knowledge of skin.
How much of it there is.
How, like an elastic sock, it’s slipped over all the mystery and liquid that make us live. I could feel Phil’s heart thumping in it, bobbing like a plastic boat in a warm and salty bath, and I could hear that ocean, too, sloshing between his lungs. When he started going faster, getting ready to come, rocking the bed, turning red, he pushed my thighs farther apart with his arms, grimaced horrifically, and the two of us sounded like wet rags being furiously slapped together—
If it hadn’t been for skin, we would have spilled.
So, this was what was on my mind that spring and summer and fall into the bitter beginning of this winter—taking up all my time, occupying all my thoughts—as my mother was preparing herself to vanish, buying miniskirts and birds, talking to herself in the kitchen, hissing at me as I passed her in the hall, making confessions I didn’t want to hear. Just as my mother’s body was turning to glass, cracking all along the spine. Just as my mother was about to become nothing but invisible particles of brightness and air, I was becoming nothing
but
my body.
Even in the middle of U.S. History, I could smell myself—blood and semen and spit and sweat—between my legs. I’d see him turn a corner in the hallway of our high school, and I would nearly groan with it, imagining the arc of him—hairless and hard, and all that skin—over me in my bed. I’d close my eyes in Psychology and picture my own legs spread, seeing myself from the sky, my nipples pointed up at me, and that teary pinkness waiting for Phil, or God, or something to fill it up.
Desiring him had made me suddenly desire everything. Some nights I’d dream I was lying on a table in a restaurant—maybe Bob’s Chop House—naked, a sprig of parsley near my feet, maybe even an apple in my mouth, and every boy at my high school, maybe even the men—the principal, the janitors, all of them—were lined up, all of them with hard-ons, looking at me hungrily, with Phil at the end of the line, the longest and hardest and hungriest of them all.
This was a whole new planet I suddenly found myself living on, wading every day through a sexual river on fire, and the last thing on my mind was my mother—who was slipping out of the physical world just as I slipped in.
T
HE FIRST NIGHT MY MOTHER’S GONE
I
DREAM MY SHEETS
have turned to snow, and their cold white wraps me in winter like a stillborn baby. The light, the bed, the sheets—it’s as if a pale angel, enormous, is kneeling over me, a colossus of pure marble, as if she is pressing me with her bare-fingered wings back into the womb of January in Ohio—
I am the small
o
slipping into the other
O
, the large empty
O
that swallows everything whole.
