White Bird in a Blizzard (6 page)

A few years ago, about a hundred miles into the country from our suburb, there was a farm plagued by stray voltage. An electric current under the pasture was surging up from Toledo Edison, shocking the cows, turning their hooves to walkie-talkies. There was a lawsuit, and for months on the news we heard the details over and over: The farmer’s wife lost weight, her teeth fell out, his daughter started pulling out her eyelashes lash by lash, biting the backs of her hands to get at the static under her skin. When that daughter closed her eyes, she said she saw sparks. And the barn cats sang terribly in the barn before they died.

But the cows danced the whole time.

Perhaps they’d been driven mad, but they danced, and there had to have been
some
joy in that.
I
had never been happier in my life than I was as I danced with Phil that night. It was as if, with Phil—dancing, or fucking, or just driving around and around in the sedan his father left him when he left—I’d finally found something to do with all the nervous tension of that suburb, which surged through the power lines between our houses and street corners like a small girl’s braids pulled too tight, sending an invisible current into the air, a wave of nervous energy rising, falling, rising.

That tension—I would lie in bed some nights and imagine I heard its volts and sparks swell an invisible river above our roofs, singing a high whine in my ears, boring into my brain like a wiry nail, the whole subdivision ringing in my ears, until my head and neck would ache from the weight of so much strident silence.

Like that stray voltage, there was something raucous straining under all the politeness, all the quiet—and, finally with Phil, I found a way to move to it, or sleep through it. I bought a pair of running shoes and a green sweat suit, and when I jogged around the neighborhood—which had seemed so stiff, a stage set of a place, all edges and blades—it melted into a liquid blur, a soft backdrop of flaccid facades and sleepy trees. I let myself get thin, running in circles around Garden Heights. I no longer needed the padding. I had sex.

“A
NY WORD
?”
HE ASKS
.

“Not one.” I shake my head and shut the front door behind him. Snow’s coming down now in fat, gray, dirty-washcloth flakes, and they drape the lawns and trees with sluggish infant blankets. Who could blame my mother for leaving this place? The sky is falling.

And, only a few days ago, I noticed a fine layer of dust on the dining room table—the dust she had devoted her life to dusting away. It was already accumulating in gray layers, and it had only been seventy-two hours since she’d left. When I went into the living room, I saw it there, too, swirling around in the air, settling on the arms of her chairs, the coffee table, a galaxy of dust collapsing from inside itself in slow motion, burying us.

It was what she’d been doing, chasing dust, all day, every day.

So I went to the kitchen to get her feather duster with its pink plumes out from under the sink, but when I got back into the living room with it, I had no idea where to start. Dust was everywhere. It was in the light. It was in the air I was breathing. It was graying my hair. I was afraid to use the feather duster, which seemed weightless in my hands. I thought it might make it worse, kick up a whole new storm of dust that would choke or blind me. So, when my father got home from work, I said, “We have to call the Molly Maids. We can’t keep this house clean by ourselves.”

“I did already,” he said. “They’ll be here tomorrow. They’ll be here every Wednesday.”

“Shit,” Phil says, untying the sturdy laces of his brown boots. “How could she do this to you?”

“She wanted out,” I say, looking at Phil’s feet.

When his boots are off, I see holes in his black socks, and each of his big toes looks vulnerable to me, raw on the beige carpet, as if two sacks of skinned mice have spilled, and Phil looks down then, too, as if he’d like to gather up those spilled mice quickly. Then he shrugs.

“So?” he asks the wall behind me, where a painting of the ocean hangs, all melancholy flotsam and churning water.

Seascape
it’s called. It’s the only real painting that hangs in our house—a dark ocean my parents bought in a motel lobby in Toledo the year I was born, the year my father got his promotion, the one that turned his youthful energy into a heap of laundry every night at my mother’s feet, the year they moved with me to Garden Heights.

STARVING ARTISTS’ SALE
, the sign on the highway said, and although my mother must have muttered, “That cheap junk, who wants that?” my father insisted they go, and they went. He took one look at
Seascape
and happily paid the forty dollars to own it.

Sometimes, I’d run my fingers across that canvas just to feel how thick and sticky the paint in all that choppy water was, the places the painter had gobbed on too much blue. The horizon was ominous and, with some imagination, you could smell salt, dead dolphins, weeds reeking on a beach. A thin line separated the water from the air, and though I hated the painting itself, that line was definite. Incontrovertible. There was absolute emptiness between the sea in that painting and the sky. It was a space that existed simply because nothing was in it.

“That’s no excuse,” Phil says.

“Who needs an excuse?” I ask.

He looks at me. There are snowflakes melting on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes are wide. I see myself in the small blue ponds of them, seeming brighter and sweeter than I am. My face is pouty and young in this reflection. I lean a little closer, looking for myself, surprised at what I see, and wonder what I’d expected: Had I expected to see my mother?

Phil looks at me strangely, looking at him, and says, “I’m worried about you, Kat. Your face looks frozen.”

I try to stop smiling.

He says, “You’re going to crack.”

O
NCE
, I
SAW A SHOW ABOUT EARTHQUAKES ON
PBS. T
HERE
was footage of bridges buckling and families shuffling through the open-air wreckage of what had been their homes, as a professor from Stanford explained in the background how there are huge movable plates under our continents and oceans and drugstores shifting around while we’re watching television, or eating party mix, thinking about other things.

And even though the families picking through the trash for their belongings were either Turkish or from California, it seemed like a likely event to me. It seemed to me that something like it could happen to us at any time: an earthquake here in the part of the world where there were no faults, where, instead, a thick layer of mud kept our pharmacies and supermarkets and houses stuck.

Garden Heights is, as I’ve already mentioned, proud of its newness, the sameness of its designs, but the houses in our neighborhood seem like imitation houses. Cheaply made, pieced together overnight with materials that did not come naturally from this world—plastics, pressed woods, drywall.

The houses are not inexpensive, but they must have been put up hastily. Who knows what they were built on? When I stand in the kitchen, I can hear every footstep my father takes upstairs. When my mother was here, I could hear the hangers clanging in her closet while she got dressed, and every word she said to my father, and even the thin, atomized sound of her cologne as she sprayed it. When I’m quiet, I still can, as if the ceiling is made of onionskin and very flimsy hope.

Our house, like all the houses on our block, has three bedrooms—mine, my parents’, and a guest room, the door of which is always kept closed. On the rare occasions that door is opened, a cool breath of mothballs rushes into your lungs, as if the past is a guest, trapped in there for years and trying to escape.

The living room has two green-winged chairs and a floral sofa with a brocade trim, which matches the chairs, and in the den there is a tweed and over-soft couch—which is, I imagine, supposed to be the masculine parallel to the feminine living room. Informal to formal. Comfort to decorum. As though a line has to be drawn between my father’s world and my mother’s. Like the horizon in that
Seascape
, or the door between the finished part of the basement and the unfinished part.

The finished part has a pool table no one has ever used, the orange vinyl couch with black patches of gummy tape addressing its old wounds—something left over from my parents’ poor, early married days. On weekend evenings when Phil is busy with his mother, Beth and Mickey sometimes come over, and we drink Boone’s Farm Apple Wine down there, look at those
Penthouses
. That wine tastes like something sour squeezed out of a May day, and after a few glasses it burns greenly behind the eyes.

The unfinished part of the basement is our family’s personal wasteland: cement floor with a drain hole like a navel leading directly from our home to the sewer, the Chagrin River, then into the huge, burning cesspool of Lake Erie. Just the washer and dryer—water and air, those elements tumbling their fuzzy stars and flowers with our underwear, our socks, our soggy monogrammed towels—and a horizontal freezer full of meat and cookie dough waiting in wax paper, waiting for Christmas, waiting for my mother to bake. Fifteen cubic feet of limbo.

As we sleep, that appliance purrs beneath our beds, kicking on and off inside its strange private life like a big, dangerous pet. The great, white, humming brain of our house.

For sixteen years we have lived quietly in our suburb, with some elegance, some ease, but nothing out of the ordinary. When my mother disappeared, when I said to my father that we ought to call the police, the first thing he thought to say was, “Let’s go to the station. We don’t want them to come over here for all the neighbors to see. Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

And, of course, he was right.

My mother would have wanted to disappear without making a scene, without giving anyone anything to talk about. Every day, she worked hard to keep passion and its violence subdued in our house. From room to room, the tasteful carpet, the sturdy furniture, the neutral walls—nothing exotic, nothing bright. Even a little would have been too much, would have stood out, homely, sad, telling the story of her discontent, letting guests know she’d wanted—once imagined—more.

A Chinese vase, a rug of embroidered roses, even a peacock feather would have revealed my mother—naked, longing—for the whole world to pity. She knew this because she’d been to houses like that, the houses of women who served European teas, though they’d never been to Europe, and if they ever did go to Europe, they would see it through the tinted windows of an air-conditioned bus, watching the castles and the Alps roll by, too blurred in the distance to appraise.

There’s only so much beauty women like that can bear. You see them at the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Ocean, Niagara Falls, holding the hands of their bored children—who, having been presented with some wonder of the world are drop-jawed with awe at something altogether wrong: the hot dog that fell on the ground, roiling with red ants, or the retarded man with unzipped pants, or the metal railing that surrounds it, fences the awe itself, keeps the tourists from falling in. They want to make a balance beam of that, to walk the space between death and their safe American vacation, and who could blame them?

The children are just bored, but it is their mothers who can’t bear to look at the thing itself.

Not out of fear. No. They’re too far removed for fear. There are signs to tell you when you’re too close to the edge, bronzed lifeguards blowing whistles when you’ve swum too far. There are rangers in uniforms—and, below you, the
Maid of the Mist
, drifting into the cool kiss of it, then veering back just in time.

Fear would make sense. But it’s something else. A taboo. An inhibition. A kind of modesty imposed on the natural world by women. Their husbands might be gawking and snapping photos, but the wives call them back to the station wagons and their sandwiches and soft drinks stashed in picnic baskets.

And the suburbs are full of homes like those, decorated by women like that. It gave my mother a seasick chill to look to the bottoms of their wistful teacups, to smell the rueful, steeping leaves sinking to the bottoms of their hand-painted kettles. The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

And my father was not an exotic man. He’d never been to war. He’d never sailed the sea. He’d grown up in a suburb like the one we lived in now. A life without crisis, or wildlife.

Oddly, he owned a rifle, which his father had inherited from his own father, and which he kept in the basement but never used. He seemed, in fact, afraid of his own rifle. It was kept unloaded, locked up in the same cabinet where he kept his collection of dirty magazines. Like my father’s masculinity, it was useless, and unusable, in the basement beneath our feet. Just something he’d inherited from some earlier era, the manlier man of his father’s father, who must have been a hunter, who must have known how to skin a buck.

Once, my mother went downstairs to put a load of laundry in the washer, and surprised him. He was holding that rifle in his arms like a child.

When she saw him, she said, “Put that thing away,” and he did.

My father was a man who spent his days in an office, doodling, wearing shiny shoes, tapping a pencil on his thigh. All that testosterone surging and spiking like bees in the blood, and not a thing to do with it. On Saturdays, he chased little balls over a long slope of lawn with brilliant clubs, came home red-faced, frustrated, badly beaten, hardly a man at all.

“Beige,” I remember my mother saying to the painters who stood in our living room one summer afternoon years ago—two fat men in overalls holding brushes. It was June, and the windows were open. Outside, a sprinkler whirred in rusty spinning, and a domesticated dog yelped wildly for a moment, then stopped. Somewhere someone was practicing a flute, playing scales over and over, perfect and shrill, like a kind of obedient screaming.