White Bird in a Blizzard

  Now, Phil’s crossing the shallow daffodil ditch between us: Nothing even close to blooming there. Maybe this year it won’t. Maybe Phil’s finally trudged through them so much, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s bulbs have given up, gotten the word, heard the ruthless boots above them, and decided to stay underground.

  My breath on the bedroom window makes a humid, quickly evaporating kiss out of Phil, just a circle on the glass where the imprint of my lips has kissed away his face.

  MY FATHER SEEMED PROUD AND RELIEVED THE DAY HE AND his girlfriend, May, drove me up to college.

  “Good-bye, good-bye!” he waved from the front seat of his new car—a black Cadillac with leather seats. Riding to Ann Arbor in it had felt like hanging in the air from long elastic bands. Sixty miles an hour’s worth of world rushed by, and it was nothing but a liquid blur.

  I imagine my father bought the Cadillac to impress May, who is exactly like her name—a petite container of spring that could explode any moment in a frenzy of petals and baby birds, screaming. She might have giggled uncontrollably on her first ride in my father’s new Cadillac.

  May’s a good girlfriend for my father, I like her—who could not like May?—but being in her presence for more than an hour makes me feel ditzy, agitated, a bit slaphappy, and very tired. As we converse pleasantly, I feel my voice rise higher and higher in pitch to match hers, as if we’ve both been breathing helium, gasping at weightless white balloons as my father sits in slim-lipped silence between us, seeming pleased.

  At one time, May was married to a textbook salesperson like herself. “But he was always depressed,” she said. “He never wanted to do anything.” Her hair is ash-blonde and bobbed above her ears. Permed tightly, it stands up all over her head, as if, at the beauty parlor, she got zapped with a cattle prod and it made her perkier, but nervous.

  She’s a lot younger than my father—only thirty-four—but seems maternal, in a childlike way, and eager to pick up where my mother left off. The day they left me at the University of Michigan, she had a lot of advice about college, about boys, about life. After we’d hauled my boxes to the room I would be living in (Cindy wasn’t there yet, and it was blank faced—all linoleum, just two thin mattresses on metal frames, two battered desks, and a sink that echoed boing boing as it dripped), May said, “Don’t take drugs. But if you do, make sure you know what you’re taking. Someone slipped me some angel dust in college, and I’ve never been the same.”

  It explained a lot.

  I imagined May in college—studious, sober, and unsentimental—before the angel dust incident, during which she’d sprouted wings, burst into frenetic flapping, been launched into the sky like a divine bottle rocket, and glimpsed the face of God—pure sweetness and sparkling light, like a lungful of air freshener on a cool spring day—before settling back to earth, altered forever.

  “Good-bye!” my father said and waved. In his new Cadillac, they buoyed away.

  The first few weeks at college, I thought things had changed—that, leaving Garden Heights, leaving my frilly bedroom and my mother’s stiff armchairs, her lipsticks still lined up on the bathroom counter where she’d left them, that I’d finally left my mother, rather than the other way around.

  But then the dreams began again—my mother in a white coffin, my mother in a snowstorm at the morgue. Or I’d dream I was walking with Phil across the icy Rite Aid parking lot, watching my feet, then see her face float up under my boot. In one dream, May came to me in my bedroom back in Ohio and said she’d found my mother in the cardboard container of a TV dinner. In another, Detective Scieziesciez looked up from between my legs, where he was giving me a dream orgasm—the kind you never reach, the kind you wake up still wanting—and said, “By the way, your mother called my office. She’s in a bank-deposit box in another town.”

  In the middle of every dream, I’d wake up screaming, and Cindy would be standing over me in her boyfriend’s SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt, biting her nails. “Jesus, Katrina”—she likes to call me that because it’s more ethnic, more interesting than Kat—“What’s wrong with you?” she’d ask. In the morning, she’d look at me carefully, as if I might crack right down the middle like a plaster statue, badly cast, and step out of my body.

  It touched me when she said, “I’m worried about you.”

  We’d only shared a room for a few weeks, but we were friends.

  She said, “Does your therapist know about these dreams?”

  I HAVEN’T SEEN DR. PHALER SINCE AUGUST, WHEN SHE wished me well at college, shook my hand, told me to call her when I came home for Christmas break if I wanted an appointment, if I felt I needed help. I never told her about Detective Scieziesciez because there never seemed to be a way to bring it up, and I stopped telling her about my dreams long ago, when she made it clear she didn’t think they had anything to offer. “Dreams don’t necessarily mean anything, Kat. We all have very strange dreams.”

  And I wondered then, why? Why do we all have strange dreams? Why doesn’t sleep just switch off our brains like a light?

  Instead, all over Garden Heights at night, bankers and lawyers and housewives are attending orgies, talking to the dead, flying over their own houses naked, wearing wings, and then it’s forgotten, everything is normal, and the plumber calls to say he’ll be a little late.

  How is it we manage to get out of bed in the morning, face each other, organize our ordinary days, knowing where we’ve come from, and where we’ll be going again?

  A few days after my father and May dropped me off in Ann Arbor, Detective Scieziesciez called and asked me if he could come up, meet me at a Sheraton Inn, spend the night—he had some business in Lansing, and I was in between—and I said yes, although my first classes were the next day, and I was nervous. I wanted to appear brighteyed and eager to my professors, my fellow students, but I also wanted to spend the night with Detective Scieziesciez, never actually having slept a whole night with a man. A few times, Phil and I had fallen asleep on the couch together, and I’d stayed at the detective’s condo once until five o’clock in the morning, but I wanted a whole night, dusk to dawn, in bed with a man, like a boat ride from one end of a black pond to the other.

  “Hi,” he said when he answered the door to his hotel room.

  I’d taken a cab to the Sheraton after he called me in my dorm room and said he’d just checked in. The cabdriver was a young woman with a long blonde ponytail. She had two armloads of silver bracelets, and as she steered they made wiry music. “Ann Arbor’s great,” she said. “You’ll like it here.” The cab smelled faintly of marijuana. “A guy tried to cut my throat last week”—she turned to show me a wound on her neck, just below her ear.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Detective Scieziesciez said. He was wearing a blue-striped shirt, button-down, with the sleeves, as always, rolled up, USMC on his forearm, and a pair of neatly pressed green slacks. His hair was combed—but all that thick, dark hair never really looked under control, just as the beard he tried to shave never looked shaved. In the last six months, I’d learned about his body hair, too. How it became damp and matted with sweat while we had sex. There were a few gray hairs mixed in with the black ones on his chest, but other than that he had the body of a very young man. Muscled arms and stomach. His legs were as solid as wood. He ran seven miles a day, and lilted weights for hours every night. “Got to keep myself fit for the young girls,” he said, teasing me.

  I knew he had other girlfriends—one even younger than I—and two ex-wives who lived nearby, one of whom brought their daughter over to his condo to visit him every Sunday, but who also came by alone occasionally on Friday nights, to have sex.

  I wasn’t jealous. I had Phil, after all, myself. And what I’d wanted from the detective all along was this undaunted virility. Sometimes, when he crawled on top of my body in bed, I closed my eyes and saw a corral full of bulls tearing up the grass, snorting, glistening black in the bright sun.

  It was Labor Day weekend, and I was wearing a white sundress with spaghetti straps,
white sandals. I wore pink blush, and only a little lipstick. “I like it that you’re so tiny,” he said once, his big hands on my naked rib cage. “I feel like I could snap you in half,” and he squeezed my torso hard, “but I won’t,” and then he laughed.

  That night, beside the detective in his hotel room double bed, I couldn’t sleep. I was hungry, and uncomfortable. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of the bed, and I had just enough room to lie beside him with his arm thrown informally over my bare chest, oppressively heavy, as though a log had rolled onto my body and was pinning me down with its casual weight.

  I could hear other rooms under and above us. The squeaking of bedsprings. Water running. A telephone rang, sounding hysterical, but far away. The light-blocking curtains on the window did not block out the light from the parking lot outside, and there were shadows draped across the detective in thick ropes. His sleep seemed to get deeper and deeper, like a train gaining momentum as it cut through a landscape of long grass. His hair sparkled darkly. During sex, he’d sweat a lot, and it seemed he also did this in his sleep.

  Then he started to snore. Quietly at first. But, like his sleep, it deepened. It sounded like a dictionary being violently paged in his chest. A through Z. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I thought of sheep wandering slowly around in fields, and tried to count a few of them before I slipped from the thought into a dream. But then I saw a butcher, holding, in one of his white gloves, a piece of meat across the glass counter. He was showing the piece of meat to my mother.

  “Lamb chop,” he said.

  Was I dreaming, or just thinking?

  And then Detective Scieziesciez began to groan.

  Low, difficult groaning.

  He didn’t move, stayed heavy where he’d fallen asleep, but the groans began to stretch out longer and longer, and grow louder. My heart started to beat harder, and I wished I had my clothes on. I felt cold, naked, afraid, wide awake. When he began to shout—words, though the words were unintelligible, the rise and fall of sentence structure, muffled—I shook him by the shoulder. “Theo,” I said, “Wake up. You’re dreaming.”

  But when he didn’t wake, and did not stop shouting, I reached up and turned the bedside light on, and shouted, “Theo! Theo! Theo!” I could see that his face was twisted, a look of torment, or sexual pleasure. Then his eyes popped open, and he looked up at me.

  I was standing now at the side of the bed with my arms crossed over my bare breasts.

  “What’s up?” he asked, rolling onto his back, rubbing his eyes.

  “You were having a nightmare,” I said, and I realized there was a note of panic in it. “You were shouting and groaning and . . .”

  “Well, come back to bed, sweetheart. I’m sorry I woke you.” He was smiling. He scooted over to make room for me, and he patted the spot beside him in the bed. It was damp.

  The sheets felt too warm and tangled when I pulled them over me again. I was shaking. “What were you dreaming?” I asked in a whisper. I wanted to talk. I did not want to turn the light back off.

  “I don’t know,” he said, propping himself up on his elbow to look at me. He pushed my bangs away from my face and traced my cheekbone with his finger. “I have bad dreams. Violence.”

  “Always?”

  “A lot.”

  “What are they about?”

  “Mmmm.” He thought. “Things I saw. When I was a regular cop, I saw a lot of things.”

  “Like what?” I wanted to know.

  “Mmmm.” This time he thought longer. “I saw a man shoot his own kid in the head.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You want to hear this?”

  I nodded, but didn’t look at him.

  “I saw a guy bleed to death real slow in the back of a truck. He’d gotten his throat cut.”

  I tried to imagine it.

  I imagined that slash across the man’s throat like an opening in the earth. I pictured the detective looking into it. There were beetles and frogs down there. I tried to imagine whether or not Detective Scieziesciez, in this scene, would be frantically trying to help the man, or whether he just watched.

  “And some much worse things. I’ve dug up some pretty unhappy bodies.”

  I thought of my mother.

  I thought of her lying next to my father in the morning, listening to him snore.

  “One thing I know for certain, sweetheart, from being a cop, is that the safer you think this world is, the less safe it gets.”

  “YOU MEAN YOUR MOTHER JUST DISAPPEARED?” CINDY SAID, her mouth open in big surprise. We were drinking Riunite Royal Raspberry wine in our dorm room. She was crosslegged on her bed. I was sitting on the floor, leaning up against mine, legs tucked tightly to my chest. Exams were over. We were wearing nightgowns, like a little girls’ party, except that we were getting plastered.

  “Yeah.” I nodded, and took another slug of the wine, which was the color of blood when they’ve just taken it from your arm—the deep velvet red that fills the vial. It was lush, warm, and gory in a clear plastic cup, tasting like a late harvest—the fruit overripe and juicy, sloshing on the vines, sloppy and heavy in the trees: I imagined the palms of the fruit pickers’ hands stained permanently red. The wine was going to my head.

  Our dorm room seemed slippery around us, and Cindy’s face, under her crimson hair, was huge and pale in the bright overhead light. Her expression was fixed with surprise. I said, “Poof! Here today, gone tomorrow,” and heard myself slur.

  “Wow,” Cindy said, and paused a long time. She was thinking with her plastic glass raised in one hand. It was the color of her hair, and I remembered seeing, once, a mosquito drowned in a glass of my mother’s burgundy at a picnic, an end-of-season party for my father’s losing golf league. My mother had reached into the glass, fished the limp, winged thing out with her fingernails, and flicked it in my father’s direction when he wasn’t looking.

  I imagined, in all that liquid red, that the mosquito had died of joy, thinking it had finally found the heart of God itself, and stung it.

  “Where is she?” Cindy asked.

  “Who knows?” I said. “I don’t.”

  “She has to be somewhere,” Cindy said.

  “Does she?” I said, spilling wine on my flannel nightgown. “Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s nowhere.” I smiled.

  But Cindy looked serious, and sad.

  THIS YEAR THE GRANDMOTHERS DIDN’T COME FOR Christmas. Zeena hadn’t called for months, and when she called on Christmas Eve, she didn’t bother to ask about my mother. When I told her my father had a girlfriend, she sighed and said, “Life goes on, Kat. You can be sure your mother has gone on with hers,” and there was an edge of prejudice in it like the blunter side of a knife—the kind of knife you’d use to pare an apple, nothing too sharp, but a knife nonetheless.

  She said the weather in Las Vegas was bright and dry.

  Marilyn sent a basket of fruit that must have weighed fifty pounds. The UPS man left it on the front steps—oranges and grapefruit and a fan of green bananas wrapped in red cellophane. When I opened the front door and saw it waiting, I thought some woman’s elaborate hat must have blown off and landed there.

  That basket was exactly the kind of hat one of my grandmothers might have worn—ferocious but feminine, shimmering fruit and rubies—a hat like a minor explosion, maybe an IRA bomb left in a trash can at the train station, no one killed, just a warning, just one innocent man, a bystander, left standing near it, waving his bloody hands. A slightly violent, semi-edible hat.

  In the center, there was a coconut, as hard and hairy as a shrunken head. “I LOVE YOU!!!!! LOVE, MARILYN!!!!” the gift card said in an unfamiliar, feminine, florist’s hand.

  I weighed the coconut in my palm. When I shook it, the watery milk inside it sloshed.

  May and I made Christmas dinner for my father, Phil, and Mrs. Hillman—the usual seared hunk of rare roast beef surrounded by carrots and potatoes. Rice pudding. Flour-dusted rolls that left everyon
e’s upper lip smudged with chalk. May even molded green Jell-O into the shape of a cornucopia with little squares of canned peach and pear floating eerily in the green, like goldfish in suspended animation in a scummed and weedy bowl—dormant and adrift at the same time.

  I felt bored.

  I missed Cindy, and our dorm room, and the happy routine of class, study, cafeteria—all of it washed with strong coffee and diet Coke. Phil cut Mrs. Hillman’s beef for her, and she chased the pieces with her fork around and around her plate, where they’d suddenly become animated as soon as she tried to catch one. My father complimented May profusely on everything she’d made before he ate it, and she batted her eyes at him like a cartoon Tweetie bird. A few times, I tried to catch Phil’s gaze, but it was locked on his greasy knife.

  “Merry Christmas!” May ejaculated, and we all raised my parents’ wedding crystal into thin air to toast.

  Toasting, I imagined us smashing that crystal so hard between us that it would explode in a shrapnel of champagne and flying glass, opening little eyes all over our faces and hands.

  After dinner, Phil and his mother went home, and May and I cleared the table. She was wearing a sweater with a Christmas tree on it. There was so much yarn involved in that sweater, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if it snagged. Would she be spun around like a spool, some kind of battery-operated ornament, as that sweater unraveled around her? Would her spinning make a sort of wind-up music—play a version of “Jingle Bells,” or “Onward, Christian Soldiers?”

  “Kat,” May said shyly, her arms loaded down with dirty dishes. “Thank you so much for including me in your family gathering.”