White Bird in a Blizzard

  “Your mother never loved me,” he says before he picks up his fork and stabs into it again.

  THEY WERE AN ATTRACTIVE SUBURBAN COUPLE. BEFORE SHE vanished, you might have seen them on a Wednesday night at Bob’s Chop House. As the hostess led you to your table, you passed theirs, shushing past their silence, glancing at their salads.

  Both of them had dark hair only faintly tipped with gray. Hers was shoulder length and smooth. His was whatever length and style was fashionable then for men. Not too long in back, not too tall on top. Conservative, but in touch with the times. Perhaps he was wearing the dark slacks he’d worn to work that day—half a suit: He’d have left the jacket at home.

  My father’s features were sharp—a sculpted nose and deep-set eyes. My mother’s cheekbones were high, and she was as slender as a girl. Flat stomach, narrow hips. Her face was always made up with a careful hand—the right tint of blush, maroon lipstick, brown eyeliner, and a beige base. The girls behind those makeup counters in the department stores she frequented knew her name, her favorite shades. Bisque, Berry, Chocolate Mousse—as if you could make a woman’s face into an elegant dessert eaten off a delicate plate. Good French perfume, too, eau-de-vie—you could smell it on her if you got close.

  They were well-spoken. They seemed sincere.

  Still, when you saw her seated across from him at Bob’s Chop House, both of them sipping rocky drinks, linen napkins on their laps, shiny silverware between them, she might look up at you as you passed by—her blue eyes flashing—and what you’d sense, if you sensed anything at all, was cold.

  In truth, my mother disappeared twenty years before she did. She moved to the suburbs with a husband. She had a child. She grew a little older every day—the way a middle-aged wife and mother becomes ever more elusive to the naked eye. You look up from your magazine in the dentist’s office when she walks in, but you see right through her.

  And the younger woman she once was, the one you might have noticed—she became no more than a ghost, a phantom girl, wandering away in a snowstorm one day.

  Or she became me.

  Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that’s why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes.

  I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face. After I turned sixteen, I couldn’t bear to look at that face as it gazed into mine.

  “Kat,” she said one early Saturday evening in September, standing behind me at the mirror in the hallway upstairs, “you look like I looked when I was you.”

  I was wearing a tight black dress. Phil was taking me to homecoming. I was pinning my hair up over my neck, then letting it fall again. I had been thinking about him, how he might pull the pins out one by one in the backseat of his father’s sedan and bite my neck, unzip this black dress and slip it down over my breasts. I hated talking to my mother at all, but the worst was having to talk to her when I was thinking about sex—the sexual thought suspended, half exposed in the expression and smell of it on me. It seemed, those days, that my mother was always creeping up behind me just as I was leaning into an imaginary nakedness with him, as if she’d crept up after some wet trail I’d left. When there was long, moist kissing on the television, I had to leave the room. She was always looking too hard at that kiss.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I mean,” she said, “you look like I looked when I was your age,” and she wandered away, seeming dazed, as if Time had just snuck up behind her and knocked her on the head with a very hard pillow.

  In December, she’d turned forty-six. There were a few gray strands where she parted her dark hair, and she plucked those out with tweezers at the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. But she was still girlishly thin—still the same weight she’d carried down the aisle beside my father twenty years before.

  There is a picture on their bedroom wall of them marrying each other. In it, my father looks sheepish and stiff.

  But my mother already looks frantic, full of hate, wearing all that lightness—something white and exotic caught in an invisible net. That weight, or the absence of it, is draped in lace, and she drags a train of satin as long as winter, or the future, behind her.

  And there is another photograph of her that has enjoyed a fleeting fame since she disappeared. Tacked to the bulletin board outside the supermarket, taped to the pharmacy’s plate-glass window, MISSING above the picture, HAVE YOU SEEN ME?:

  Suburban housewife.

  Mid-forties.

  A whisper of frost wound through her dark hair.

  My father took that photograph himself, the one on the flyers, the one they used on the local six o’clock news. It was Christmas Day, two weeks before she vanished. She’d just opened a gift he’d given her. She peered at it under the tissue paper, as thin as pared skin, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take it back.”

  “Jesus Christ, Evie. What do you want?” he asked, the camera she’d just given him dangling around his neck.

  “Surely not this,” she said. And he snapped her bitter smile.

  Had they ever had any fun? Had they ever, as Phil and I did, groped each other in the dark, gotten lost swimming in each other’s bodies, that long kissing that turns your muscles to spilled milk, that numbness after hours of fucking, that blindness of eyes all over your body when the lights are out?

  Whenever I tried to imagine it, I failed.

  One early evening a few weeks before, when she and my father were out—perhaps at Bob’s Chop House—I went into their bedroom and stood looking at their bed for a long time. It was, of course, inconceivable that they slept together. Or, I mean, had sex. Their sleep was easy enough to imagine. My father like a snoring corpse beside her, his deodorized sweat sowing salt into their sheets. My mother’s tight lips parted loosely for a while, stardust gathering in the corners of her eyes before she bolted upright when the birds outside began to sing.

  She was nervous, a light night sleeper who treated sleep as if it were an expensive dress that required many preparations to wear: glass of water on her nightstand, a room both warm and cool, a light on somewhere, but not on her—though, as I’ve said, all those afternoons right before she disappeared, there she’d be when I got home from school, folded up on her side, lost in the kind of sleep that swoops down on the sleeper in one big storm of wings and a funnel of feathers, hauling her off in its beak.

  I knew what their sleeping beside one another for twenty years was like, but when I tried to imagine the two of them doing what Phil and I did, I saw naked statues in an art museum instead, a guard in an olive uniform standing in an archway warning you not to touch.

  Their bedroom was as plain and orderly as a hotel room. A white spread, white curtains, oak chest of drawers. They had two closets, his and hers. Hers smelled like lavender soap. His smelled like leather.

  I got down on my hands and knees on their gray carpet and looked under the bed. Nothing there. I opened the top drawer of the chest. Socks, a shallow dish of cuff links, a handkerchief with BC, my father’s initials, on it.

  What had I wanted to find?

  Some sign of their secret life.

  A condom wrapper? A dirty magazine?

  I knew where my father kept those—the dirty magazines, I mean: in a file cabinet in the unfinished part of our basement beside the horizontal freezer full of yellow chicken limbs and slabs of steak gone pale with cold—a chest full of frozen hearts—and his tool bench, with his bright and expensive tools, which had the dustless look of things not used.

  He kept that file cabinet locked, but I knew how to open it. Right next to the cabinet, tacked to a piece of corkboard over his tool bench, was a file card with the combination: 36–24–35.

  It was like a joke—both the combination and where he kept
it, precisely where anyone wanting to open the cabinet would look to find the combination for the lock—and I’d spin those ideal measurements and look at his spread-eagled Bunnies and Pets whenever I wanted.

  Sometimes, my friends Mickey and Beth and I looked at them together, slipping an issue out of my father’s file cabinet there in the basement, the place we retreated to whenever Mickey and Beth came over.

  Down there, my parents wouldn’t bother us—only, occasionally, come to the top of the stairs to shout something about dinner, or to announce that Beth’s mother had called for her to come home. We could do whatever we wanted in those two rooms—the finished one, which had a gray carpet remnant covering the floor, an orange vinyl couch, a pool table no one ever used, and the unfinished one with its cement floor and white appliances humming in the emptiness. We could smoke. We could drink rum in our diet Cokes. We could look at those magazines, my father’s secret Pets.

  “Gross,” we’d say, or, “Oh my God.” But we would hold the glossy pages open for a long time, looking down at whoever she was that month—all those limbs, those wet lips. She’d look like something a wolf would eat, spread out like that, all that edible flesh, or something a hunter had shot out of the sky. When she landed at his feet, he’d jumped back in surprise with no idea what to do next.

  But those magazines had nothing to do with my parents’ secret life. That was my father’s hobby, and I didn’t want to think about it. Obviously, he thought no one knew what he had down there, hidden, locked up naked in the basement, waiting for him to sneak down in the middle of the night and take a peek. But in its secretness, it made him even duller, even safer, even less sexual than he already seemed.

  Still, if I’d found one, found Variations, or Big Boobs, in their dresser, a place they shared, that would have been something else. That would have meant that she knew, and approved, or that they looked at them together.

  Of course, there was nothing there.

  I fished through the second drawer. Women’s underwear. Nothing black. Nothing dirty. I looked in the third drawer, which was full of blouses she never wore. Too frilly, or too sheer, or too plain, but too expensive to throw away, and in the back, a shoe box, which I opened, and inside it a paperback book with a pink cover and raised white letters, Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide.

  I thought, Jesus Christ.

  I pictured her scrubbing the toilet, disinfecting.

  I pictured her in the kitchen, baking angry batches of cookies.

  I saw her in the basement, wringing the necks of my father’s white shirts while a choir of nasty children sang “Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar!” in her head.

  I saw her in the living room running the vacuum cleaner over and over a four-inch area of carpet, seeing something in there that the huge rattling suction of her machine could not suck up, and pictured her in a bookstore in the mall on a Friday afternoon, circling a rack of books for a long time before she got up the nerve to buy that one and take it to the register.

  She would have carried herself with a kind of stubborn dignity, buying that book. As the young clerk slipped it into a paper bag and handed her some change, she’d have looked him straight in the eyes and seen herself in there, wearing a camel’s-hair coat, a black skirt, a silk blouse with bone buttons.

  To that young clerk she must have looked like a woman with enough money to be happy (clearly, she paid another woman to manicure her nails, set her hair in smooth curls) staring at her own reflection in his eyes as he slipped this bit of bitter information about her into a paper bag—as if she’d just bought and paid for a rotten part of her own body, a limb that had been frostbitten and was putrid now, a limb the clerk was selling to her in public, in the weak light of the mall.

  Pathetic, and absurd, he must have thought as he handed the book to her.

  “Have a nice day,” he said.

  I put the lid back on the shoe box and closed the drawer.

  Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known—their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth.

  A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long.

  My MOTHER MOVED TO THE SUBURBS WITH A HUSBAND, AND she vanished in Garden Heights. Her name was Eve, and although my father’s name was Brock, not Adam, they were one of Garden Heights’s first couples.

  Garden Heights was an Eden without a past, like the first one—but also without temptation, or snakes, or trees. Our house was built in the middle of a cornfield in a subdivision a few miles from Toledo, and no one had ever lived in it before us, as if God had decided to re-create the world without variety this time.

  Newness was the whole idea behind Garden Heights. Newness and sameness. Every house in the cornfield had been built with the same blueprint, and there was even a bylaw that prohibited the building of fences and additions. The point to the place was fitting in, and my father did.

  This was a life he liked. Every night, he came home happy. “Evie!” he might say to my mother, “Guess what? I bought a raffle ticket for the board of education benefit, and won a crockpot. Look.”

  It was brown with a long, winding cord. For years my mother kept it above the refrigerator. Only once, she let a piece of pot roast shrivel up to shoe leather in it, and after that, she threw it out.

  Or, he’d bring home the civic section of the Monday paper, and he’d show my mother his name in it: “Brock W. Connors is to be honored by the Executive Men’s Charitable Foundation for work benefiting the Lion’s Club of northeastern Ohio.”

  For weeks, he’d collected pairs of old eyeglasses, gone knock-knocking all over the neighborhood like a child’s corny joke, kept them in cardboard boxes in our coat closet. When I asked him what they were for, he said they were for the poor. When I asked him what good other people’s—rich people’s—glasses were to the poor, he looked at me blankly, then narrowed his eyes, as if I were either very obstinate or very blurred.

  In Garden Heights, my father thrived like a rubber plant left in a sunny spot and watered a lot, but my mother didn’t. She was a different kind of plant entirely. A plant that could have borne thistles and juicy, dangerous fruit.

  Instead, she planted petunias in our yard, and by July of every year they were dried out. Like complaints, or exasperation. Our house was stuck into some of the world’s most fertile earth—black and loamy and damp—and anything could have grown there. A handful of it was as heavy as a heart, or guilt. As a child, I used to dig it up with a plastic shovel and pretend to bake cakes and cookies, shapeless pastries patted out of gravity.

  That dough, that dirt, was as dark as space. For thousands of years, our backyard had been ice, and when the Ice Age ended it thawed into a swampy dinosaur forest, and when the dinosaurs got zapped by whatever zapped the dinosaurs, farmers came and turned it into farmland and country meadows, which were later bulldozed to make way for subdivisions with names like Country Meadows Estates.

  Still, they’d find the skeleton of a woolly mammoth in there every once in a while as they were pouring concrete for a strip mall close by—something giant and shaggy that had gotten sucked into the ancient muck—and the sweat and blood and milk of those farmers before us could still be smelled in our backyard. The smell of yeasty manure just under the golf-course smell of lawn.

  Anything could have grown there, but my mother grew petunias. I never knew what she wanted, but I knew it wasn’t in Garden Heights, and it wasn’t my father.

  She was attractive. She walked gracefully in her high heels—but quickly, without hesitation, like a woman with a crystal dish of butter on her head. Men looked at her when we went into restaurants, staring at her ankles as we waited for the hostess, and my mother would pretend not to notice. But she noticed.

  Once I saw a truck of sheep U-turn on our street. It must have been lost on a detour off the highway. I could see them from our front yard in the back of that truck—maybe fifteen sheep peeking out at me between the s
teel slats of that truck’s trailer.

  To keep from falling over as it turned too fast, those sheep had to dance. It was so pathetic, it wasn’t even sad. There they were, being driven to their deaths, trying not to stumble, not to bump into each other, dancing a graceful, desperate dance of politeness.

  That was how my mother looked when men looked at her.

  She was getting older, but she was still attractive. When they looked at her, she noticed. And so did my father. He would glare down at his own shoes with their shiny noses.

  Maybe he knew, too, that my mother wanted something.

  How could he not know?

  Those men looking at her ankles in Bob’s Chop House, they knew.

  And every afternoon and evening of those last months before she left, there she’d be, folded in half on their bed or mine, asleep like death, waking finally to the sound of canned laughter after my father got home, rising to the surface of her life like a sick aquarium fish.

  When my father turned the television off, there would be nothing but the sound of flat and endless heaven above and beyond our house. Wind in a parking ramp. An empty tin can held up to an ear. It must have been unbearable. If I was off somewhere with Phil, there wouldn’t even be the sound of the radio playing in my bedroom.

  And then my father would climb the stairs. Loose change in his pockets—silvery, a tin bucket of forks and knives, as if a janitor were jangling his cold ring of keys toward the bedroom as winter dusk descended, earlier and earlier every night—

  A man with a handful of dull bells, getting closer.

  “What’s for dinner, Evie?” he’d ask, and she’d roll over to look at him through her hair. His face would be lit from above. He’d switched the ceiling light on, and it blacked out his eyes and cast shadows from his sharp features down his face, as if it were cracked.