White Bird in a Blizzard

  “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.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” DR. PHALER ASKS. “DO 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.

  “So, why did she marry him?” Dr. Phaler asks.

  “Because,” I say, “he was there. And he wanted to marry her.”

  She was twenty-seven, a receptionist at Waterhouse Steel, and lived with her father, who built model airplanes in his study all day. At night, he would fly a radiocontrolled helicopter around the house—sweating as he did, manning the operations nervously, knocking over lamps, breaking things.

  When she was hired at Waterhouse Steel, the company president assured her she’d have a long and promising future there, but five years later she still spent every day at the reception desk, answering the phone, listening to the other secretaries behind her whisper about layoffs and pay cuts, voices full of asthma and nervous itching.

  “Waterhouse Steel. How may I direct your call?” she asked hundreds of times a day.

  She even said it in her sleep. But in her dreams, there was no one on the other end of the line when she answered, just the sound of blood pumping in her own ear. Her own blood. Pale and pumping. A little wind, too. A bit of static—as if, far away, a small brown bird with dry and wiry feet was hopping across a waxy sheet of sandwich wrap on its way to her.

  And she began to think the sound of that emptiness might be the music of her future—

  Weather, nasty birds, and nothing.

  She’d gone to college, and she’d done well. She’d received some modest attention. For English 472, her senior year, she wrote a paper about Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience entitled “Sacrificial Lamb,” which was prefaced by a quote from “The Tyger”:

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  The paper considered the dual nature of human existence as it was depicted in the songs. And Professor Norman Owen, who was a minor poet in his spare time—gray-bearded but with a rippling chest of muscles he must have spent a fair portion of his working life developing—read my mother’s paper out loud on the last day of class and even asked her to stand afterward as her classmates clapped. Through most of the semester she’d sat in the back, taking notes, and he hadn’t spoken a word to her, nor had he any reason to until that day.

  “Eve,” he said, handing the paper back to her, “splendid work!”

  It was what he’d written on the bottom of it, too:

  Eve, Splendid work! A+

  And that was that.

  After class, he left the auditorium where he lectured, dogged by three or four young men—all of them bespectacled, white shirts tucked sloppily into their pencil-legged pants, huffing seriously about “The Waste Land” all the way back to Professor Owen’s office with him.

  This was 1962.

  The next day, her father came to pick her up in Columbus, happy to see her, happy to be carrying her clothes and books in flimsy cardboard boxes out of her little dorm room with its peeling walls, bringing her home with her A+ paper and a degree on a piece of parchment that smelled like stale cake.

  When they got back to their old farmhouse outside Toledo, when they’d hauled her things back to her childhood bedroom, my mother’s father collapsed on their sagging couch and said, “Thank God that’s over!”

  Meaning college.

  How had it come and gone so fast?

  She’d barely blinked, and she was back.

  So, my mother’d had an education. She’d wandered through one of the largest libraries in Ohio for four years: all those yellow pages eaten up by worms and doubts, and that musty air in her hair when she went back to the dorm to sleep.

  She’d never gotten into a sorority. For four years she’d studied English and worked in a cafeteria, cutting squares of Jell-O and spice cake with a flat knife, then placing them carefully under the chilled cafeteria glass.

  Why the idea of a real career never came to her in those years between college and my father, I do not know.

  Why she didn’t do something later with her good education is a puzzle. It must have been a puzzle even to her. Those four years in college, perhaps they turned, after five years at Waterhouse Steel, into a cool and trembling cube in her mind. Perhaps she was afraid, after all that time, to turn it over in her memory, afraid to lay it out again on the plain, white, cafeteria plate of her life.

  Her job was dull.

  Her father was not a talker.

  She’d started to look for excitement in Toledo bars at night, looking for a man, looking for a future. She was beautiful, and smart. A sexy, witty, desperate woman.

  Once, in a magazine I picked up in a dentist’s waiting room—perhaps Dr. Heine’s office, waiting for my mother, perhaps Woman’s Day—I read a statistic that surprised me: The most likely place for an American woman in her midtwenties to die is in the passenger seat of a car.

  I tried to imagine it. All across America, young women in passenger seats, watching the continent roll past them from those car windows, counting crows, and cows, and rest stops, crossing and uncrossing their legs, flipping the mirrored sun visor down to get a look at themselves—pretty, lipsticked, hair tucked neatly behind their ears—while so
me man drives them somewhere they may or may not want to go. To a bar, to a movie, to bed.

  For a while, my mother was one of them.

  She was single, twenty-seven, a receptionist at Waterhouse Steel. She lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Toledo with her father, who was turning into an old man. She needed to get married, but what she wanted was excitement, and there she was, trying to find it, night after night in the passenger seat of some bass player’s, or pilot’s, or Marine on leave’s car.

  I could easily imagine my mother as a young woman in the passenger seat of that car. There it was. All that trust in nothing, like faith in God, letting this guy decide when to change lanes, letting this guy (and maybe he’s been drinking beer all night, maybe he’s stoned out of his mind—which, even sober, was never razor sharp) roll through the intersection under a blinking light.

  Like faith in God—only he’s no god. He’s wearing plaid pants. He flunked out of high school, or he studied marketing in college. Maybe he fails to see the semi, bearing down, or he flips the car he’s driving, with that young woman beside him, into a ditch. Perhaps, before they come to rescue her with the Jaws of Life (she’s pinned in the wreckage while he smokes a cigarette at the side of the road, feeling bad about what happened, telling the cops it was an accident) she sees it all flash before her eyes. She thinks, This was bound to happen. There’s blood, and something worse—something soft and squidlike—on her tongue, and then it’s done.

  “Is this Eve?” my father asked when he called one week after they’d met in the lounge of the Franklin Hotel. He’d been there for a conference. She’d been there to watch a bass player she’d been dating.

  “Do you like to dance?” she asked him on their first date. They sat in the red vinyl booth of a restaurant downtown. My father chased a rack of ribs, bloody with barbecue sauce, around on his plate with a knife. His hands were slick.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  My mother pushed her plate away and put her hands in her lap. She imagined herself with a diamond on her hand saying, “I quit,” to the president of Waterhouse Steel. But she couldn’t look across the table at my father, who had a red gash of sauce stretching from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Phaler says, “our time is up.”

  I’M WEARING A NIGHTGOWN MADE OF FOG, AND I’M INVISIBLE in it. My mother dusts my bedroom with a huge fan of feathers, and the motion, the wind she’s lifting, billows around me.

  “Mom,” I say, “stop. I’m going to blow away.”

  But she doesn’t hear or see me.

  She’s dusting the top of my dresser, and the windowsills, and the comers of the floor. A cyclone of dust is kicked up by her feathers, and somehow I know that, really, it’s my father she’s trying to dust out. I can tell by the angry trembling of those feathers, the way she shakes them like a soft fist all around her all at once, making a storm of the calm. But I’m only fog—

  I feel my feet lift off the ground.

  She opens the window, and I feel myself sifted into a million little wisps, drifting out the screen.

  Slipping past her I say, “I was there, too, but you didn’t see me.”

  “I KNOW SHE DIDN’T HAVE ORGASMS,” I TELL DR. PHALER.

  Though there is only the slightest change in her professional expression (What is it? A minute widening of the eyes? A barely registered raising of the eyebrows?) I can see she’s interested. “How do you know?” she asks in a tone of total composure, as if her voice is coated with wax.

  “There’s a book, in her dresser, in a shoe box, Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide.”

  “What made you look in her dresser?”

  “Oh.” I shrug. “I looked in it years ago. I was curious.”

  “Have you looked there since? Is the book still there?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Do you think there’s something significant about this?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “I guess it’s just more evidence of her dissatisfaction. Her frustration, I guess. I guess her sex life with my father must have been pretty dull.”

  “What does this mean to you?”

  I think for a long time. I think of my mother reading that book in the afternoon while my father was at work, while I was at school. She spilled coffee on it, broke the spine, then shoved it back in her drawer, in that shoe box, to hide it—but she couldn’t have learned anything she didn’t already know:

  You need to relax, it urged.

  You need to learn to let go.

  You need to believe you deserve pleasure, then go off in search of it.

  The book was full of silly, New Age suggestions:

  When no one is at home, take a long, naked look at yourself in a full-length mirror, and tell yourself you love what you see. Say it out loud. Say, “I love my body,” to yourself. Say, “I love you,——,” to your mirror.

  I couldn’t imagine my mother doing that. I couldn’t stand to imagine my mother doing that.

  “She was getting older,” I say to Dr. Phaler, but my voice sounds far away. “She didn’t want to die like that.”

  “Like what?” Dr. Phaler asks. I see her through a scrim of cold ash, as if we are in one of those plastic globes of snow, shaken.

  “She was tired of baking Christmas cookies”—and, up on Dr. Phaler’s ceiling tiles, I see all those sheets and tins and ovens full of cookies, all that frozen dough in the freezer. I remember Hansel and Gretel’s witch in the woods. How her house was made of candy and cake, and how she was crippled with rage.

  And I remember how, when Phil and I had been dating for only a few months, my mother came downstairs one night while we were making out on the couch.

  Back then, our bodies were like two plants growing everywhere at once, getting closer and closer, twining and choking and groping—writhing in the night, unfurling enormous leaves in the dark, thorns and flowers and birds’ nests—swiftly, but in slow motion. I suppose she could smell us from her bed above us, the panting and rustling, the sound of pores expanding, oozing hormones, drooling into each other’s hair.

  When we noticed she was standing on the stairs, looking down on us, we panicked, and sat up fast. I pulled my sweater back down around me. Phil zipped up his pants. But my lips were engorged, obscene, a sexual organ.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “C’est moi.”

  She wasn’t wearing a robe, just a nightgown, and she came downstairs slowly and stood before us. The only light that was on was behind her, and her body was outlined—a solid, dark silhouette of hips and breasts—under the thin silk. I noticed Phil look up, then look away, too fast.

  “Listen,” she said. “Do what you have to do down here, kids, but don’t spot my couch, okay?”

  I looked down.

  Phil flinched.

  Maybe, back in bed above us, she lay awake and listened to the dark.

  The whole house was breathing hard. The furnace, snoring dust. That freezer in the basement—like agitation, frozen stiff. Water slowly rising in the toilet tank. The humming of the fuse box. The tight, silent whine of the telephone line stretching into the night.

  My father slept restlessly beside her, and she could hear his toes rustle under the covers.

  She hated those toes.

  Then, the darkness under her seemed to expand:

  She could tell we were at it again. Clawing, clutching—

  Maybe she remembered seeing Phil that first time, the day she went to introduce herself to his mother. How he’d descended the stairs shirtless, just a feather ridge of hair along his breastbone. Naturally muscled. The muscles of a boy, not a bodybuilder. Maybe she saw herself wearing a long-lost and forgotten dress—gauzy, embroidered with pale glue pearls. Now where did I wear that? she thought, and then it all came back: the Kleenex and lotion in her purse, the sentimental music, some boy’s big hands moving over her like the flu. She had been sick with kisses.

  And the darknes
s below her seemed to rise like dough—flour and yeast and water mixed up with night.

  We were down there in that darkness, that darkness that might rise and rise, and push everything out of its way as it rose, as it pushed its way out of the living room, swelling up the stairs. It might smother her in her sleep with its sprawling, domestic flesh. Maybe she was thinking about that, and couldn’t possibly sleep with us below her, doing that.

  When we heard her descending the stairs again, we pulled our clothes together, and Phil fled.

  “Go to bed,” she hissed at me between her teeth as I passed her on the stairs.

  “It’s why she left,” I say to Dr. Phaler just as my time runs out.

  “I BOUGHT A BIRD,” MY MOTHER TOLD MY FATHER WHEN she got home one Saturday from the mall. “It’s in the car.”

  “What?” he asked, then asked again, “What?”

  “I said,” she said, pronouncing each world carefully, “I bought a bird.”

  Phil and I came down the stairs then. Perhaps we looked tousled, mutually pawed. At that point, my father was still naive, and he let us stay up there all day with the door closed. He must have thought we were playing an intensive game of chess, one that left us sweaty and short of breath.

  “Go get it for me, would you?” my mother said to Phil, who was used to taking orders from women. His blind mother issued them from her armchair all day, and that was why he spent so much time at our house—nosing through our kitchen for cheese and cold meat.

  And every night, he stayed for dinner, and liked to eat—complimenting my mother’s cooking with every bite he took, mmm-ing and nodding. She liked that, and started making dishes she’d never made for my father and me—mignon Alfonse, beef medallions l’orange, chicken in wine, letting the chicken stew a long time in a whole bottle of burgundy until the soaked meat shed like wet feathers from the bones—slippery, tinged with purple—and the kitchen smelled like a shelter for drunks, humid with booze, warm and debauched.