White Bird in a Blizzard

  Mickey and Beth can’t wait to go. Phil doesn’t plan to apply.

  I HEAR MY FATHER PICK UP THE PHONE, WHICH HASN’T RUNG this early since the morning after my mother left, the morning she called to tell my father she was never coming back. I never actually heard it ring that time, and, I realize now, it’s been months since the phone seemed like a likely way for my mother to contact us. I imagine, instead, skywriting, or telepathy, or a flock of birds in the bathtub as her method, at this point, of sending a message. I smudge the lid of my eye with mascara when I hear the phone ring, and have to wet a tissue to get it off.

  Two years ago, when my father first filed the Missing Persons Report, the cops told us to stick close to the phone for a few weeks, told us we might get a call at any time, day or night, that it might be an emergency.

  So, we got an answering machine, just in case we were out when the Big Call came, and my father recorded it with the only message we could think of, “No one’s home right now. Please leave a message after the beep.”

  But no messages came from or about my mother, except the shh-shh-shh of no news.

  The smudge on my eyelid looks like a bruise, and the harder I try to rub it off, the darker it gets, so I dot the other lid with mascara, too, and decide to make a determined action of it: black eye shadow. I hear my father say something into the phone downstairs in a throaty morning voice, and he hangs up quickly.

  Later, in the car, headed toward the high school, my father identifies the mystery caller. He flexes and bends his gloved fingers around the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. January is turning to water all around us. When it freezes again, it will be dangerously slick. I remember seeing the parking lot of the Rite Aid rush into my face last year, and the sting of it on my palms. “The person who called,” my father says, “was a woman.”

  There’s a silence from him then that seems to suck the air in the car into it. I look at the side of his face. My father’s hair is silver now—the color of dirty money. He’s handsome. He does not look weak. When did he stop looking weak?

  “Yeah?” I ask, and I know I sound surly. I’m a teenager. I’m not sure where my little-girl sweetness went. Like the weakness of my father, it simply vanished. I woke up one morning and it was gone.

  He swallows. “Well. She is a textbook saleswoman I met at the office. She wants me to go to dinner with her.”

  I laugh out loud, then cover my mouth with my glove.

  “Does that upset you?” my father asks, still looking fixedly into the firing squad in front of him.

  “Hell no,” I say. “Why shouldn’t you go out with women, Dad? I’m thrilled you scored a date.” I even touch his hand on the steering wheel: that’s how much of an open-minded and supportive eighties kind of kid I am.

  My father laughs a little to himself then, and it sounds like the laugh of a panicked man on a packed elevator, the needle dropping too fast, but not fast enough to scream yet: He still has to keep his cool.

  “Good,” he says, lightening up. He’s wearing a tan coat over his blue suit and a red wool scarf around his neck.

  “She’s nice,” he offers, tossing one hand in the air in my direction, as if throwing confetti, and I recognize my moment—this intimate space we’re in and its potential for personal profit. Don’t all teenage girls come equipped with radar for this?

  “But, Dad,” I say, “if I don’t like her, do I get to give you as much shit about it as you give me about Phil?”

  He checks the rearview mirror, puts the car into park in front of the high school, and sighs. Then he looks at me and says in a docile voice, thick with tongue, “I guess I should quit giving you what-for about Phil,”—making quotation marks in the air around “what-for”—“is that what you’re saying?”

  I raise my eyebrows and hum, “Mmm-hmm,” and try to sparkle at him as I give him a quick kiss good-bye and bound out of the car.

  I realize now that I’m playing the part of a vivacious daughter with a stern, worried, widowed father—although my quite-alive mother could very well be waiting for us right now back at the deserted ranch.

  Would she care if, when she came back, my father had a girlfriend?

  Was my mother a jealous wife?

  Had she ever been? Had my mother ever had that feeling I used to have when I’d see Phil leaning up against his locker, some other girl—maybe Bonnie Pinter, who never wore a bra, whose lips were always wet and parted in a kind of permanent blow-job invitation—giggling into his face?

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he’d say when I accused him of flirting with her. “She’s a hose bag.”

  But I’d feel as if someone had stuffed my throat with cotton. I couldn’t stand to think of him thinking of someone else. I could turn a corner in the hallway of that high school and see him standing in the glare, talking to Mickey, just Mickey, my best friend, and find myself riding that downward slope in my stomach, like a child on a tricycle, out of control, rolling down a hillside while something inaudible screamed inside me.

  Had my mother ever felt like that?

  When my father takes off his glove to wave good-bye, I see he’s taken off his wedding ring. Just yesterday, at the dinner table, it was there.

  I FEEL SURE THAT MY MOTHER WAS NEVER JEALOUS, SURE SHE did not think for one moment that another woman could take an interest in my father. To her, he must have seemed like the last man on the face of the earth any woman would want. Isn’t it why she left in such a hurry, didn’t even bother to take her purse?

  Getting stuck with him wasn’t even worth money, or credit cards, or lipsticks to her.

  But he had been a jealous husband.

  Once, at his golf league’s end of summer picnic, my father drank three beers too fast before the hot dogs were done and, flushed, sweaty, longing to brag to his buddies about something—all of them richer men and better golfers—he’d blurted out, apropos of nothing, “My Evie hasn’t gained a pound since we got married.”

  The other wives at this picnic gasped, feigning admiration, hyped-up envy, when all they really felt was dull loathing for my father, his boorish bragging, his drunken flush, and for his wife’s slender body, sighing at her, “Oh, you make me sick,” as if it were a compliment as their horny husbands looked her over slowly, and the hot dogs sizzled in their skins, and a mirage of fertilized heat hovered above the green. My father’s cleats glinted in the sun, which set itself like a big red face in the west. Annoyed, my mother chewed a sour ice cube out of her vodka tonic and shot a look in my father’s direction like a spray of silver thumbtacks in the air.

  But what my father noticed was the looks the other men sent her, not the one she sent him. He wanted to brag, but he didn’t want them to covet. He didn’t understand why they would. Didn’t they know she was his? He wasn’t a religious man, but he knew all about Thou shalt not stare at thy neighbor’s wife, and wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be polite.

  And what were women to my father anyway? Hadn’t he always been the kind of man who sees a rolling pasture, forty acres of wildflowers and red-winged blackbirds flitting from cattail to cattail in their brilliant epaulets, and thinks what a nice golf course it would make, where he would lay the sandtraps, what it would be like to ride those mowed, green hillocks in a cart?

  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 ri
de 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.

  THE 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.

  “SO,” MICKEY 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?”

  “WHERE DO YOU THINK YOUR MOTHER IS?” ZEENA 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 s
ame 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.