White Bird in a Blizzard (13 page)

When I come back from the kitchen Mrs. Hillman says, “Look upstairs. Right above us. It sounds like a squirrel burrowing.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Phil says, standing up. “Just sit down, Kat. There’s no squirrels anywhere except in my mother’s head.”

“Phil,” I look at him with my eyes wide, knowing his mother won’t notice, “it can’t hurt to check. It’s probably just my father.”

But it’s not. My father’s asleep on his back on the bed. He’s wearing a sweatshirt that says “U.M.” in big blue letters, like a hesitation on his chest.

L
ATER
P
HIL SAYS
, “Y
OU JUST DON’T GET IT
. Y
OU DON’T
have to live with her.”

We’re on our way to the Rite Aid in his father’s car to buy the can of air freshener his mother wants. “Glade,” she’d said back at the house after the workmen were gone, “floral.” She handed her pocketbook to Phil and said, “I can smell them in here. Sewage and boots. Take three dollars.”

Phil took an extra ten out of her wallet and slipped it into his.

“I know,” I said, watching the road roll out its rug of slush in front of us. It’s gotten warmer: the usual big January thaw making its annual two-day appearance, duping us into thinking winter’s nearly over when, really, it’s just begun. “But she deserves to be treated with respect, Phil. She can’t help it that she’s blind.”

He glances at me, and the car veers a little closer to the curb. His face is scrunched up, eyes narrowed. I look away, back at the curb, which is painted yellow. A warning.

When I look back, he’s glaring at me. He says, “Do you think I don’t know that?”

Something flutters under my arm then. As if I’ve got a little mouse hidden under it. An artery, pumping. I realize I’m scared. “Forget it,” I whisper into the windshield. “I’m sorry I said anything.”

“Do you think I don’t fucking know that it’s not her fault she’s blind?”

I shake my head. “Of course not,” I say. “I just felt bad for her today.”

“Well.” Phil looks back at the road now, slowing, turning, seeming satisfied. “Well, a person could spend his whole life wandering around looking for things my mother thinks she hears and smells all over the goddamn house. Ten times a day she’s asking me, ‘Do you smell something moldy? Phil, go look in the attic, I think I hear a bat.’” He imitates his mother’s voice—whiny, childlike, but hard-edged, a cross between Betty Boop and my own mother, whose voice, I realize, I’ve nearly forgotten until now, hearing a bit of it in Phil’s impression.

I shrug. “It didn’t hurt me any just to check around the house. I don’t see what difference it makes to you. She was right last night, wasn’t she? About the plumbing?”

“So what?” Phil stops the car in the Rite Aid parking lot, squeezing between two fat mini vans. “
So fucking what?
” he asks again, slamming the car door, hurrying toward the store.

I unbuckle my seat belt, open the car door, and step into the parking lot, which is glazed with ice that’s been thawing and freezing and thawing now for two months, and I try to hurry after him, but, under me, the parking lot is slick, shifting in panes of gray beneath my boots, and I start to skid. Slipping, I see the fogginess of that slush rush at me, as if I’ve stepped into the path of a nebulous mirror. “Phil,” I call out, and for an instant I glimpse my own surprised face in that mirror as I fall among the swirling clouds and slop—

In that reflection, I’m wearing a veil of slop. The pavement underneath it stings the heel of my hands, and the hot pain brings tears to my eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asks, turning around, finding me behind him on my hands and knees, looking up, seeming to cry. He comes over but doesn’t reach down to touch me, just hovers, casting a wan shadow. I sit, now, resigned, and the slop starts to seep up through my jeans. I feel it spread through my panties, onto my bare skin, and the tears feel hot, the way it feels to pee after swimming in ice-cold water, the way freezing begins as cold and ends as burning.

“H
OW ARE THINGS WITH
P
HIL
?” Dr. P
HALER ASKS TEN
minutes before my hour’s up. By now, we have entirely dispensed with the pretense of psychoanalysis, the pretense that there is something scientific or medical about these hours we spend together. We no longer sift through the details of my childhood and dreams for trouble. That laborious process bore no fruit—just some dull nuggets, like unsalted cashews: a string of images that were not symbols, memories of childhood birthday parties at which no fun was had, insults endured in elementary school rest rooms. Even the subject of my mother has been for the most part exhausted, except on special occasions, like her birthday or my parents’ anniversary. Instead, we spend my sessions mulling over the trivia of the present, its minor annoyances and daily travails.

It is like gossiping once a week with a friend, except that the gossip is about me.

And, for a hundred dollars an hour, Dr. Phaler is a good dispenser of lightweight advice. She never seems distracted. She monitors her facial expressions for just the right display of detachment and compassion, and she always remembers the names of the minor characters in my life—my chemistry teacher, my friends Beth and Mickey, the assistant principal who caught me smoking in the parking lot and gave me a warning.

Dr. Phaler is like the mother you always wished you had. The mother you would have been perfectly happy to pay a hundred dollars an hour to have. Except that you could never afford such a mother. If you had to
buy
a mother, you’d end up with some old lady who lived with a dozen other kids in a trailer. Or a mother who’d get sick of you and leave, like the one I had.

“Not good,” I say. “I don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get?”

“Well,” I say, and look up at the ceiling of her office, which is tiled with white boards. The boards look porous, false, too light to be a ceiling, as if they’ve been pressed from dust and the buoyant, brittle hair of old ladies, as if they’d fly away if someone sneezed, leaving us roofless, exposed to the sky.

“He says he loves me, but we just don’t have anything together anymore. We don’t talk. We don’t hold hands. When I try to kiss him, he gets rigid,” and I see myself up there on the ceiling, projected onto those white tiles as on a drive-in movie screen, kissing Phil, Phil standing up straighter, backing away, as if I am an overly affectionate dog, one that might turn out to be vicious.

“What does he say when you ask about this?”

“He says he’s got a lot on his mind right now. To cut him some slacks. I think he means slack—”

Dr. Phaler laughs. She is familiar by now with this aspect of Phil’s character, his struggle to express himself in clichés, never quite getting the cliché right, and it is a joke between us.

“He says kissing just doesn’t do anything for him. He feels numb inside. He complains about his mother a lot, says she’s ruining his life with her whining, that he needs some space.”

“Do you think about ending the relationship?” Dr. Phaler asks, sounding serious, though she is still smiling at our joke.

“For what?” I ask, looking down from the ceiling tile and back at Dr. Phaler.

“Do you mean
what for?
”

“No.” I shrug. “I mean
for what?
There aren’t any other boys to date around here—dorks and jocks. I don’t want one of those. And I don’t have a real active social calendar right now. It’s not like Phil’s standing in the way of some glamorous alternative lifestyle I might be leading.”

“So?” Dr. Phaler is playing the fool. “Do you have to stay in a relationship that’s unsatisfactory because no other relationship is available? Wouldn’t you be better off with no boyfriend at all than with one who doesn’t even want to express affection? Kat,” she leans toward me in her chair, looking hard into my eyes, “isn’t that a lot like the relationship you’ve described your parents as having? Haven’t you always said your mother married your father because there was no one else around to marry? Kat,” she continues, glancing at the clock, which is about to run out, “I want you to spend some time this week thinking about your parents’ marriage. Can you do that?”

I don’t bother to answer. Of course, of course. So many connections to be made. So many obvious parallels. Do we really need a Ph.D. for this?

Besides, my time is up.

It occurs to me to tell Dr. Phaler about my fantasies concerning Detective Scieziesciez, how it has crossed my mind that I could make an appointment with him on the pretense that I need to discuss the case of my missing mother, and that this appointment might end with my legs spread on this detective’s desk.

But Dr. Phaler looks satisfied, as if she’s given me a tidy box of explosives to carry with me onto the plane. She stands and opens her door to usher me out, and she smiles sympathetically but says nothing more than “See you next week” as I step out of her office, smile my good-bye politely.

Leaving, I see a young woman, maybe twenty-one, sitting in the waiting room, waiting for Dr. Phaler. This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen her there—as pale and thin as an exhalation. She looks a little shaky, and smells like smoke doused with watery perfume. Bulimic, I imagine: At our high school we have quite a few of those, and I recognize the type. This one looks like a woman perfectly capable of going home and eating four gallons of vanilla ice cream with a big, silver spoon—like eating pleasure itself: creamed, sweetened, frozen, momentary. Then gagging it back into the toilet, washing her face in the sink, rinsing out her mouth, then going straight back into the kitchen for a bag of potato chips—

Those chips would be painful, though.

So many golden sections.

Coming up again, it might feel as though idealism itself had gotten caught in your throat. But it could be satisfying, too. A hard job well done, choking perfection back into the world outside yourself.

Today the bulimic has on too much lipstick, smeared all over her lips as well as above and below them. She glances up from her fashion magazine at me, and her forehead looks cool and damp. And those lips: It looks as if she’s been kissing something painted red while the paint’s still wet, or as if she’s just come back from an emergency room, where she kissed someone bloody.

When she smiles at me, I see the shape of my own smile cut itself into the clamminess of her brow, and I imagine she can see some distorted reflection of herself somewhere on me.

T
HE GRANDMOTHERS CAME FOR
C
HRISTMAS, AND ALTHOUGH
it’s been a month since they left, I still feel as though I might turn any corner in the house and find one of the grandmothers there—wolf mouth open, arms outstretched, ready to eat me alive.

My mother’s mother, Zeena, and my father’s mother, Marilyn, are crazy about each other. Every morning of their long visit, there they’d be when I came downstairs, sitting on the couch, knees pressed together, hands in a huddle between them, discussing my mother’s disappearance in whispers, marveling at how terribly and well she’s vanished.

Two years. Almost two years.

Grandma Zeena is thin, hard, robust. She looks every inch the woman who, decades ago, left her only child behind in Ohio, moved to the desert, started a bright new life, and didn’t look back. My mother kept a snapshot of Zeena pinned to the mirror over her dresser, and it’s still there. Like everything else, my mother left it when she left us.

In that photograph, Zeena’s standing to the left of a roulette wheel, smiling. The wheel is wild with numbers and lights, rhinestones and gold letters, and Zeena is getting ready to spin it. The expression on her face is wide open, the face of a clock without hands—free of liability, or fear. Whatever happens, this photograph implies, she’ll still be smiling—not smugly, but with true, untroubled joy.

Perhaps Zeena sent this particular snapshot back to her daughter in Ohio as a kind of apology—one that tried to express how we live, really, at the mercy of chance, the accidents of our own impulses, the toss-up of our individual desires. And now that my own mother has left, I think maybe all those hours she spent at the mirror, fussing and unfussing, buttoning and unbuttoning, putting earrings on and taking them off, she kept that photo of Zeena as a model there beside her own reflection, beside the image she was making of herself.

Grandma Zeena managed to go a decade without seeing her daughter. “Time just flew by,” I heard her say one Christmas to my mother. Zeena had flown in for the holiday then, just as she did this year, and the two of them were in the kitchen, peeling potatoes at the sink. I looked at those two women holding blunt roots in their hands, those women I’d issued directly from, and pictured Time as a mechanical sparrow with a little clock radio in its belly, whizzing back and forth between them.