White Bird in a Blizzard (19 page)

Suddenly, my mother flipped the light switch, and the whole room was exposed. She came to the edge of my bed, yanking the sheets and blankets off. I rolled onto my back, and grabbed them, struggling to pull them up again, but she kept them in her fists.

“What
is
this?” My mother was screaming. “What
is
this?” She tore the covers off completely, and they fell at the foot of my bed in a pile. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

I put my arms across my breasts, sat up, pulled my legs up to my chest, scrambling away from her. Her face was as white as a window shade. My heart was beating hard, and I was crying, shaking. “I was hot.” I said. “What do you care? What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference to me that my daughter has become a slut.” She spat at me. Hands scratching in my direction, but missing me.

I was gasping. I couldn’t catch my breath.

“Mom.” I sobbed it. “Stop it. Stop.”

But she pummeled my shoulders with her fists—softly. Her fists felt soft. I tried to grab her wrists. Finally, she stopped, but she was panting hard with a dry and hollow sound.

“I know about fucking,” she said—faraway, defeated—before she backed away from my bed.

“What is the matter with you?” I screamed at her back as she left.

W
E ATE IN HUMMING SILENCE
. M
Y FATHER MASTICATING
, Phil nodding and
mmm-
ing at my mother as I slid a piece of parsley around and around on my plate.

She’d made crabmeat thermidor over toasted Holland rusk, and the garnish of blanched almonds looked like fingernails burnt to a crisp.

Afterward, I went upstairs to change clothes. Phil and I were going to a movie. My father was on the toilet—his first stop every night right after he ate. He’d get up from the dining room table, say, “Excuse me,” and go directly to the bathroom to eliminate: The king upon his throne, my mother called it.

Phil was helping her clear the table.

He’d taken his sweatshirt off for dinner, as if dinner were a relay race or a basketball scrimmage, as if there were a trophy to win, and eating so much so fast made him sweat. The T-shirt he wore was tight, and his muscles were under it, right there, impossible not to notice. There was blond hair on his arms. You could even see his stomach muscles, how they rode all the way down into his pants.

My mother was wearing jeans, a wine-red sweater, and lipstick to match. She could hear water rush in the toilet, dragging my father’s waste away.

He was pulling up his pants, all done.

She could hear me bump around upstairs.

Phil had a stack of plates and greasy knives.

She blocked his path in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, and said, “Either I made too much, or you didn’t eat enough.”

He laughed, but he was nervous.

“Half of this is going to end up in Tupperware,” she said, taking the plate of crabmeat thermidor out of his hands.

When I came downstairs, they looked at me. I saw a napkin in my mother’s hand with her lipstick on it. My mother’s smile smeared off and crumpled up.

A ruined fist of it between them. Phil cleared his throat.

“What are you staring at?” she asked.

Many years before, my mother had been invited to a neighborhood Tupperware party, where she’d bought a whole set of it. The hostess of the party was the wife of one of my father’s golf buddies—a jowly, middle-aged man with the high shine of an alcoholic: rosy nose, buffed cheeks. He was away on business when his wife invited the other wives over to buy stackable plastic, but the smell of the man was all over the house—Listerine and whiskey and cigars. The hostess greeted her guests at the door of her Garden Heights home wearing a black dress and pearls—though she looked exhausted, worried. Her face was as unlined as a mask, skin pulled tight over her skull—the result of too much plastic surgery. As the wives filed in, the hostess ushered them one by one into the kitchen and opened the counters over her sink.

“I guess it’s pretty obvious I love Tupperware,” she said, grinning, painfully it seemed, showing off her perfect teeth along with five shelves of labeled containers brimming with Quaker Oats, white chocolate chips, sugar. “There’s not much I don’t have,” she said.

The guests sat on her floral divan, side by side, as the hostess wheeled out a demonstration for them. She pushed the lid of a clear plastic bowl down, then pulled up the side and let her audience listen to the burp. “Completely airtight,” she said.

At one end of the living room, she’d set out a silver tray of Brie, strawberries, grapes, and water biscuits. On the other, there was a basket filled with crudites, including three colors of bell pepper. But no one touched the food. Indeed, it was never offered. Instead, she gave each of the women a huge brandy snifter, then filled it again and again with white wine.

By the end of the evening, they were sloshed, throwing their arms around each other on the couch, flushed, snorting with laughter. The hostess stayed sober, but led the guests in a few songs. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “Old Man River,” and a round of “Row Row Row Your Boat.” Then, they took out their checkbooks and bought Tupperware, carrying it out into the snow to their cars, stumbling and giggling.

My mother came home from that Tupperware party—the only one she was ever invited to, as far as I know—happier than she had ever been.

“You’re drunk!” my father said, and my mother put a white plastic bowl on her head. She danced barefoot on the living room carpet for him.

He seemed pleased, too.

He liked the plastic items she’d picked out, and didn’t ask how much they cost.

Then, my mother wore the plastic bowl on her head upstairs, and came into my bedroom.

I might have been three or four years old, dreaming in an airtight container of sleep. What could I have dreamed back then—milk, snow, sugar? What could I have known?

She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily.

The hall light shone in my eyes.

There was a halo in her hair.

It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head.

T
HE DAY BEFORE MY MOTHER VANISHED, HER CANARY DIED
.

“You have to take it back to the pet shop,” I’d said that night. We could hear its stifled weeping from the basement all the way upstairs. “Something’s wrong with that bird.”

But my mother just stood in the doorway of the bathroom, a toothbrush poised near her mouth, wearing a silvery nightgown, and looked at me.

She said, “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“They offered me a guarantee, and I didn’t take it. They said they’d have to mark the bird if I might want to bring it back. I didn’t want them to mark the bird.”

Her hair was pulled up. I could see creases around her eyes like that canary’s feet, as if it had left its footprints behind on her face. She seemed more nervous than usual, and started to brush her teeth hard, running water, foaming at the mouth. From the bedroom, I could hear my father fart—loud, abandoned, like a man with nothing to lose. When she heard that, my mother threw her toothbrush down, put a hand on each side of the sink, and shook her head. “Jesus H. Christ,” she said, leaning into it, as if something were finally about to snap.

The next morning I got out the canary care book my mother had bought with the bird, but never read. It was full of startling facts—

I didn’t know, for instance, that canaries have no teeth. That the gizzard of a canary is full of gravel, which, instead of teeth, grinds the seed it eats.

Reading that, I tried to imagine my guts full of gravel—the terrible sound of my own gizzard grinding every night in the dark while I tried to sleep. Perhaps I’d tuck my head under my wing, too, not to hear it. Or maybe I’d sing, horribly, louder and louder every day. Maybe I’d look down at my own gray shit like a splattered skirt around me, and want to fly away.

Then I read the part that explained how disreputable bird dealers will try to sell you a female canary instead of a male. The female never sings, the book said. She’ll tuck her head under her wing all day.
Be sure to get a guarantee
. A bird who does not sing, who keeps her head tucked under her wing all day, is not a well-bred bird
and will only bring you grief
.

Of course, my mother’s bird sang, but its song
was
grief.

The next afternoon, when I went to the basement to feed it, the bird was dead at the bottom of her cage, wings wrapped around the silky change purse of her body, facedown—a terrible cherub, or a diseased angel’s handkerchief fallen out of heaven, full of coughed-up blood and phlegm. Something an angel had sobbed into for weeks.

My mother put it carefully in a shoe box and threw it into the trash.

“It wasn’t a male,” I said when she came back from the garage without the box. “They ripped you off.”

My mother had a look on her face I didn’t recognize, and she fixed me with it.

The next day, she was gone.

T
HE DETECTIVE’S CONDOMINIUM IS ONLY TEN MILES FROM
his office. Freedom Crest is the name of the complex it belongs to, a coil of apartments and condominiums with a small black pond in the middle—the heart of freedom, unbeating, iced over, and deep.

Detective Scieziesciez opens his garage from far away with the automatic opener on his sun visor. “That’s my unit,” he says, pointing to the one with cedar shingles and no lights on, except in the garage, the door rising to expose it.

It’s the home of a bachelor. Leather sofa, coffee cup in the sink, the smell of carpet and charcoal. There’s a wallet-size photo of a little girl magneted to the refrigerator, and a crude painting of an orchid with “To Daddy” scrawled in pencil under it. The little girl is a tiny, feminine version of Detective Scieziesciez. Dark hair. Sharp features. Her expression seems canny for a child.

“I’d offer you a beer, sweetheart, but I guess you’re not of age.”

He’s taken his coat off and hung it in the closet, and now he’s draping his tie across the back of a chair at the kitchen table. Just as I imagined, he’s wearing a shoulder holster, which he slips down his arm. Out of it, he takes a stubby gun. It looks heavy, professional, and the deep blue steel of the barrel is dazzling. I feel a little queasy, thrilled, light-headed seeing it in his hand. The only thing like it I’ve ever seen is the hunting rifle my father keeps locked up in the basement, and this is nothing like that, nothing like that at all. This is something a man hides next to his ribs, something he’d use to kill a person, not a jackrabbit, with.

Detective Scieziesciez empties bullets into his hands, and they’re thick and gold. A handful of very big and dangerous bees.

“I’d take one anyway,” I say.

He smiles out of one corner of his mouth, and says, “That’s my girl,” complimenting my spunkiness as if it’s a quality he’s grown familiar with, although we have met only once, for perhaps five minutes, before today. He opens the refrigerator and takes out two bottles of Heineken and flips the caps off them with an opener, hands me mine.

“Well, for Christ’s sake, you still have your coat on. Let me take it for you.” The detective comes around behind me and slips my coat down my shoulders.

I feel his hand graze my upper arm. The hand with the Band-Aid.

“Have a seat.” He motions me toward the leather sofa. For a moment I worry that he’ll put a record on the stereo—some kind of throaty jazz—and that I’ll be embarrassed by it, by the television drama of it, but he doesn’t. He sits down in an armchair across from the sofa, and leans back in it.

We don’t say anything.

I look around his living room, which has only a few framed prints on the wall. Something with big red stripes in the middle, a black-and-white photograph of a mountain shrouded in clouds, and an orange and two apples on a cutting board with a wood-handled paring knife. There’s a magazine called
The Ohio Sportsman
on his coffee table. The sportsman on the cover is posing beside a buck with dead eyes. Both of them are grinning at the camera. There’s a bit of steam coming out of the sportsman’s mouth, and snow on a hillside behind them.

“You seem nervous,” the detective says.

I cross my legs and pull my mother’s miniskirt a bit farther down my thighs, look at the green bottle in my hand, then glance back up at him. There’s only one lamp on in the room, and the detective looks even darker in this light. I can see he’s smiling—teasingly, maybe. His eyes are narrower than I remembered them being. I can smell him, too. On the drive here, in his black sedan, I thought I could smell his hair. It smelled like meat.

I say, “I am, I guess,” and a nervous laugh catches like an airy hook inside me, somewhere between my throat and my nose.

“Now, sweetheart,” he says, “you can leave any time you want.
You
wanted to seduce
me
, right?”

I nod, not looking at him.

“Well, I’m seduced. Are you sure that’s what you want? I’m a big boy, you know. I don’t think we’re just going to second base tonight, if you know what I mean.”

I look up. I say, “I know what you mean.”

“You’re not a virgin are you?” He’s still smiling, looking at me now out of the corner of his eye.

I shake my head.

“That’s good, sweetheart. So you know what’s gonna happen here, then, don’t you? And that’s what you want to have happen?”

I say, “Yes.” I can feel a weak blue vein throbbing in my neck.

“Good,” he says. “I’m not in the habit of ruining little girls. You’re not a little girl, are you?”

“No.” My voice is very low, as though it’s come out of my stomach, or out of that dead pond at the center of Freedom Crest.

“Well, you’re lovely to look at, sweetheart,” he says, and I cannot help but think of a sign I saw in a china shop,
Fun to hold, but if you break it, Consider it sold
, and, scrawled under that, as if it might be too poetic for customers to explicate on their own: “You break, you pay.”