White Bird in a Blizzard (16 page)

So, on the drive home from the picnic, he sulked.

My mother looked out at the passing landscape, all blurred edges in the twilight and August fog, and refused to ask him what was wrong—a little woozy with vodka, waiting for him to talk the way you wait for the dentist to stuff a piece of cotton between your lip and gums.

“I don’t like those guys looking at my wife,” he finally blurted out.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t point me out, then, and encourage them to look,” she said.

Silence.

He was thinking about golf courses—

Blackbirds and cattails and loosestrife once grew wild in the hills all over Ohio.

But what my father wanted was a smooth ride in a small motorized vehicle over domesticated pastures, plastic golf flags snapping in the breeze as they led you cheerfully from fairway to fairway, hole to hole.

T
HE GRANDMOTHERS MADE A BIG FUSS OVER MY FATHER AND
me for Christmas. They stuffed our stockings with athletic socks. They made rice pudding. They played carols on the stereo all day, as if to drown out the white noise of a winter afternoon with shouting.

“
HARK the herald angels sing
. . .”

All day, a standing rib roast hissed and spit in the oven. The smell of scorched flesh, the domestic torture of a burning cow made our mouths water for hours before we ate it.

Phil came over with Mrs. Hillman just before the grandmothers piled the table with meat and relishes and pudding and bread, and they pretended that Mrs. Hillman was not blind, and that my father did not treat Phil like a mortal enemy—staring when Phil wasn’t looking, then looking away when Phil looked back.

“Merry,
merry
Christmas,” Marilyn said, raising a crystal glass of champagne above her head. We raised our glasses, too—my parents’ wedding crystal—and they caught the light from the ceiling and flashed it around the table as small, sharp pieces of air and water in our faces. When a bit of champagne spilled over the rim of Mrs. Hillman’s glass into my father’s mashed potatoes, Phil rolled his eyes.

“Brock, you eat some more roast,” Marilyn said to my father, her son. But, next to me, my father looked pale before the mounds of food, which were hidden under pot lids and plastic wrap. He looked like a man at a feast for the dead—afraid of the food, surrounded by the ghosts of Christmas past: hazy females shaking fists at him, or a host of Virgin Marys in their blue robes, tapping their toes impatiently, visibly annoyed to be waiting in a manger, somewhere else to go.

There’s always been a bit of the scrooge in my father anyway—the miser, the worrier. He’s always been the kind of man who’d try to haggle the price of a Christmas tree down from twenty dollars to ten, standing outside the trailer that was set up in the supermarket parking lot, puffing at the tree salesman, who was unshaven in a flannel work shirt, shaking his head
no
,
no, no
in the piney cold, the smell of sap, as my mother and I waited for my father back in the car, windows rolled up, heat blower stuffing our throats with dried-up air.

My father would come back to the car red-faced, without a tree, and say, “Let’s go somewhere else.” My mother would look down at her leather gloves then, the muscle in her jaw pulsing.

“But, Daddy,” I might have said, “that one was
perfect
.’”

And it had been: full-branched, smelling green and genial.

It didn’t matter.

We’d come home with a ten-dollar tree. The sickly twin of the one my father refused to buy.

Of course, someone being generous might have called my father
practical
. After all, we weren’t rich, really. He made a fine salary, but my mother didn’t work. And the mortgage on our house in Garden Heights was no small price to pay for a quiet suburb and a big garage. We paid a price to be surrounded by quiet, as if it were a jagged wall of diamonds.

So, someone generous might have pointed out that my father was looking out for us—socking it away for my college education, making sure we had nice clothes and sturdy furniture. He was a man who knew what waste was—how it accumulated in the emptiness you made for it: heaps of gnawed bones, empty tin cans, used paper plates, overpriced trees you only kept around for two weeks before hauling them to the dump—and he hated waste.

But my mother never saw him, never described him, in a flattering light. She used to call my father her wet blanket—

“
How
much did the new curtains cost?” my father would ask, standing open-mouthed before them after she’d spent the whole day hanging blinds, ruffles, rods.

As he left the room, she’d watch his back. “My wet blanket,” she’d say, and I pictured my father flattened by a steamroller, like a cartoon character—a drenched square of pale flesh with just his face still sticking up.

My father the bearskin rug.

At the dinner table this year, my father wore his familiar Christmas grimace, as if the expense of it had whittled his teeth down to painful nubs.

He’d given his mother and mother-in-law matching clock radios, and I’d gotten one, too, along with a little change purse with some cash crammed into it. “Buy yourself something you want,” he said while the tree blinked in his eyes. I didn’t count the bills.

“Have more, more,” one of the grandmothers said, pushing the roast toward him.

My father fished around the platter of beef with a fork, but took only one gray knuckle of hard fat, and then he cut it into two gelatinous halves, which he put in his mouth, sucking on each one for a while before he swallowed.

“S
O
,” M
ICKEY SAYS, “IF YOU FIND THE DETECTIVE THAT
attractive, why don’t you go to his office and seduce him?”

We’re smoking menthol cigarettes in my mother’s station wagon in the high school parking lot. A minty scarf of smoke floats above us like something my mother might have worn home from her dentist’s office on a spring day.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say. “He’s at least forty years old. Even if I
could
seduce him, couldn’t he go to jail for making it with a high school girl?”

“No,” Mickey says, considering this seriously. She looks like an accountant going over some numbers in the distance of the windshield. She’s wearing her cheerleading outfit, and her legs are bare and mottled with cold under the green-and-gold pleated skirt. Her short white socks are regulation, just above the ankle, and her leather coat is zipped up over a big green
R
. It’s basketball season again, those long months of muggy gyms, the smell of sweaty jockstraps, the rumbling thunder of bleachers and screaming muffled by cinder blocks.

Because Mickey is a cheerleader, if I wanted to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, she’d urge me on, she’d convince me I could do it without a problem: Am I seriously considering her advice?

She advises, “I don’t think so. I think the age of consent in Ohio is sixteen. Besides, Kat, he’s a fucking
detective
. Surely he could figure out some way to avoid getting
caught
.”

“What about Phil?” I ask her.

“What
about
Phil?” she asks me back, and we both start to laugh.

Laughing, she says, “Give Phil the old heave-ho, like the one your mother gave your father.”

I stop laughing. I think about my mother.

“Kat,” Mickey says. “I’m sorry. Shouldn’t I have said that?”

“W
HERE
DO
YOU THINK YOUR MOTHER IS?”
Z
EENA ASKED
me as we cleared the Christmas feast from the table and slipped the greasy dishes into gray sink water.

“Grandma,” I said, sounding impatient, “I have no idea.”

“Your father looks awful,” she said, licking a little gravy from the ladle before rinsing it off. “I left two husbands, God knows, but never like this. I told them where I was going.”

Marilyn appeared behind us then. She said, “But that wouldn’t be Evie’s style.” She shook her head sadly. “Evie would want to just disappear, to just
poof
”—and she made a starburst with her fingers, as if she were sprinkling the air with magic dust—“be gone.”

Zeena took a dishcloth out of a drawer, and smelled it, then looked at me. She said, “Wager a guess, Kat,” holding the checkered rag in one hand, wagging it cheerfully, “about your mother. Just a guess—where could she be?”

Always the gambler, Zeena.

Okay, I thought. Okay. Why not?

Wager a guess—

I was game to try.

I narrowed my eyes and thought hard for a while as my grandmothers looked at me, but the only thing that came to mind was the message on a billboard we used to pass on the highway on the way to the mall. It said, in stern black letters,
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH
.

I just shook my head. I said, “Sorry, Grandma, I can’t even guess.”

“Fair enough,” she said.

The next day, their planes left for opposite ends of the country at the exact same time, the grandmothers 40,000 feet above the earth in identical tin cans with wings, unzipping the clouds and the precipitation and the gray Midwestern sky between them.

Phil and I drove them to the airport through a miniature blizzard on a Tuesday afternoon. He and I sat in front, Phil driving, while the grandmothers held each other’s hands in the backseat. Zeena was wearing a denim dress and boots. Marilyn had her rabbit jacket zipped up, hood over her red hair, and, in it, she looked like a pet, which, when you brought it home from the pet store, you hadn’t expected to grow. You’d gone and bought something small and cuddly for your kid, but it kept getting bigger. And wilder. Maybe even a little mean. The highway scrolled its sooty cold ahead of us.

“Maybe your flights will be canceled,” I said over my shoulder, “because of the weather.”

“No way,” Zeena said, and Marilyn also shook her head. “No flight I’ve ever been booked on has ever been canceled.”

“Me either,” said Marilyn.

In the backseat of Phil’s father’s car, the grandmothers looked radiant, as if old age had embraced them with light, like two filaments in two lightbulbs—that kind of bright incarceration, each one in her loose cage of glass.

Where
was
my mother? I wondered.

I tried to think. But the possibilities seemed as uncountable as the stars, and to try to consider them all at once was like trying to decide where the universe might end or who invented God if God invented the world, like trying to see something white on white.

“What
is
infinity?” Mrs. Valentine asked us one day in Geometry as she drew a perfect chalk circle on the blackboard with a compass. No one raised a hand. And when I tried to think of an answer in the silence of that classroom, I found myself suspended and dizzy above my own brain, which did not seem to be contained by my skull any longer, but which drifted above me, invisible and
uncontainable
, without questions, let alone answers, only hinting at its possibilities through dreams and half glimpses of things I thought, briefly, I might have seen.

These thoughts of infinity exhausted me, as it did to look up at that perfectly empty circle on the blackboard, Mrs. Valentine waiting for an answer as I considered where my mother might be.

That circle was like the
0
on the cover of my mother’s book,
Achieving Orgasm
.

Or the
O
in Ohio—the big one, separated forever from the small one by a perfunctory salutation.
Hi
.

Hello
.

As I stared into that circle, singular flakes of snow seemed to blow through my imagination, tossed around in the wind of it, some of it settling, some of it lifting and falling like a veil in front of my face, or a ribbon of breath I was chasing—trying to catch it, trying to keep it, in a flimsy Dixie cup.

“W
HAT DO
YOU
THINK
?” D
R
. P
HALER ASKS
. “D
O
YOU
THINK
your mother might have been having an affair?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I think about my mother.”

But what I think is this:

She was a housewife,
his
housewife.

For twenty years she served his dinner at six o’clock. Afterward, she washed the dinner dishes in Palmolive, to keep her hands soft. One Christmas when he offered to buy her a dishwasher she insisted she would never use it, that washing her husband’s dinner dishes by hand was one of the greatest pleasures a woman could have. And he had no idea she was being sarcastic.

This is what I know about my father:

When they were first engaged, he would have wanted his mother and brothers to see her dressed up and wearing his ring—an unimaginative diamond solitaire, quarter carat, the kind of engagement ring jewelers keep in a velvet-lined drawer labeled
Tightwads
. He liked the way it looked on her finger. A bit of smudged light he’d given her for agreeing to be his wife.

Simple, it made a simple statement about him on her hand.

Sometimes, he’d write my mother’s new name under his on a scrap of paper:

Brock Connors

Evie Connors

Then,
Mr. and Mrs. Brock Connors
.

Then, the one that hurt her teeth to see,
Mrs. Brock Connors
—as if, by marrying, my father would be himself, and also become her.

Newly engaged, waiting for the Big Day the way you wait for a pleasant dentist jangling his tray of silver instruments your way—all that necessary pain—perhaps my mother imagined herself in a white apron in the suburbs, wearing a pleated poodle skirt, hair pulled back in a glistening bun, plugging a vacuum cleaner in and being sucked up.