White Bird in a Blizzard

  “How much did they cost, Brock?”

  “Seven hundred dollars,” he said, sounding defensive, maybe even a little desperate, as if he were being interrogated by the police about a crime he had committed years before, a crime he thought we’d all forgotten about by now.

  “You couldn’t have spent more than four hundred dollars on these,” she said, fingering each one critically. “You’re lying.” And she made this last statement with a kind of exuberant satisfaction, turning to fix him with her eyes.

  “I’ve never told a lie,” my father said, and he looked angry, backing out of the kitchen. I pictured him then with George Washington’s white wig on his head, an ax in his hand and that expression on his face.

  My father’s face was so unlike the face of Detective Scieziesciez, who looked sneaky in a calm, professional way, as if his sneakiness were sanctioned by the state. Detective Scieziesciez looked like a man who could pull the wool over your eyes for a long time—winking, calling you sweetheart, looking soulfully into your hungry eyes. He was a man of an entirely different order than my father—or, I thought, Phil.

  A man.

  Suddenly, I’d become aware of the line between men and men. Men with badges and hammers, and men who doodled all day on legal pads. Men who’d been to war, and men who’d studied accounting. And it was the former I found myself interested in. I found myself staring hard at jocks and cowboys on television—men with balls and helmets, or horses and whips, men who ate their dinners with their fists, always in a hurry, not two words for their women or their fans. After so many years of hearing and believing that men should be gentle, and sensitive, good listeners, wearers of slippers.

  Late one night I watched a television show about some archaeologists who found a Mammoth Man frozen in a block of ice. The archaeologists were afraid the ice would melt, and Mammoth Man would step out of it alive. On television, they were panicked, but in our living room in Garden Heights, I felt giddy with possibilities. Under that ice, you could see he was wearing only a loincloth, and he was carrying a club. I could imagine the smell of him as he melted—hairy seaweed, filth and microbes, the wet dog smell of snow turning into mud.

  “Teach Your Man How to Talk About His Feelings” the women’s magazines at the grocery store screamed at the check-out line, but why? I was tired of feelings being talked about. All this talk about feelings, it made children out of adults, adults out of children. Instead of men with their emotions, I started thinking about men with guns. Men in trenches. Hunters, and cops, and Vietnam vets. Men who kept their dangerous feelings to themselves.

  I thought maybe Detective Scieziesciez was a Vietnam vet. Maybe he had flashbacks. Maybe he closed his eyes at night and saw whole villages burned up, his buddies blown to damp balloon bits by land mines. Maybe he carried all that with him when he walked down the street in Toledo. Unlike my father, unlike Phil, Detective Scieziesciez might not be safe. He might have committed atrocities in the name of democracy, killed children, raped women, just to protect places like Garden Heights, Ohio, so dull suburban people like us could have VCRs and TV dinners.

  I thought of the first policeman I’d ever seen up close—Officer McCarthy—who’d come to our fifth-grade class to lecture us against taking drugs we’d never considered taking, never even heard of. I remembered the way that cop had stood, shrugging and armed, before us, cautioning us not to sniff things we had no idea we’d want, so desperately, to sniff—trying to imagine ourselves, in that classroom, as he chatted on and on about high and stoned and dead as a series of white kites above Ohio cut loose from the twine.

  Seeing Officer McCarthy in his uniform had stirred something inside me as Detective Scieziesciez had stirred me that morning. Officer McCarthy, I thought, was the kind of father I wanted—the kind who wore a uniform and dodged bullets all day. The kind who could fix the broken chain on your bike, who’d take his uniform off after work to do it, roll up his sleeves, get grease on his face, swear, and make a mess instead of reading a newspaper in an armchair for hours, sipping Bacardi out of a flashing glass, stiff with the kind of stress no child could comprehend—the kind of stress that loosens a man’s muscles instead of strengthening them.

  I wanted the kind of father who might guard the house at night with a gun, who could predict which way a storm would head, who would stand up to my mother when she insulted him to his face, who was able to tell a lie.

  Men killed things, and women cooked them. It had been that way since Mammoth Man. It was the way things were meant to be.

  But neither Phil nor my father had ever killed a thing. Maybe one or both had run over a possum on the highway, but they’d have felt pretty bad about it, a little sick. They didn’t hunt, or fish, or trap. I doubted my father, in fact, had ever once touched raw flesh with his hands. It was always my mother who’d cooked the meat. Those violent pounds of ground round. Cut-up chickens. That dark, cold place inside a turkey, the one you have to reach up into to pull out the plastic bag of livers and gizzards—frozen, awesome.

  My father could never have put his hand up there. If we’d had to count on my father to hunt down dinner, or butcher it, or stuff it, we’d have starved to death long ago.

  He didn’t even barbecue.

  As far as I know, in all the years they were married, my father never made himself a meal. And after she left, he might tear up some lettuce, open a can of olives, but he needed me to go to the grocery store, buy our bloody dinners, and bring them home.

  “Why would they ask you to take a lie detector test?” I asked my father, incredulous.

  “It’s standard,” my father said, “in cases like this, I guess.” And he shrugged, looking lost.

  The test was never mentioned again. My father never told me when he was going to take it, or what they’d asked him when he did, but a few weeks later a woman called from the detective’s office and left a message on the answering machine, very cheerfully, like a doctor calling to let you know whether you’re pregnant or not.

  “Mr. Connors, you passed your lie detector test. Detective Shh-shh-shh wanted to let you know that any further investigation of this sort has been called off.”

  I listened to the message when I got home from school, feeling relieved at the tone of the woman’s voice, the happy results of my father’s test—maybe even a little proud, uplifted, as if my child had been elected treasurer or secretary of the student council, a position without glamour but carrying with it a few modest responsibilities—and I left it on the machine so my father could hear it for himself. When he came home, I said, “There’s a message for you,” pointing at the blinking red light by the phone, and I stood behind him as he played it, then erased it, and then he looked at me without expression.

  “Whoopdeedoo,” he said.

  WHEN SPRING FINALLY ARRIVED IN FULL, WITH ITS MUD AND swampy grass and the pregnant dancing of robins in puddles, I couldn’t help but think my mother might show up again. The snow would melt, and there my mother would be in the backyard, where she’d been all along. Blossoms on her branches. A nervous bird’s nest pecked and braided in her hair—

  Not that I think she’s dead, not that I believe for a moment that she could be resurrected, but I do believe, wherever she is, whatever she is, my mother has changed.

  Of course she has.

  It’s been a long time, and everyone changes. Especially women. I imagine her returning as a younger woman. Paper-skinned, exquisite, carrying a pail of white cherries with her, each one with a worm curled sleepily around its pit.

  Or I imagine her coming back as an old woman, rocking in a rocking chair, knitting socks all day—surrounded by piles of those moist, breathy socks.

  Even in my dreams, she bears only the slimmest resemblance to the mother I thought she was.

  That January, a year ago, when my father first told the police about the argument they’d had, about the phone call from her the next morning, how she’d vowed never to return—when he went on and on in that trembling voice,
told the three cops who sat in a blue row in front of us how her own mother had done the same thing, run off on a husband and daughter in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and how, for months, she’d been acting strange, how she’d bought a miniskirt and a canary and started slipping away for hours without explanation, or sleeping in the middle of the day like a woman who’d been dredged out of a bog, they’d asked if he thought she might be dead. They’d asked if he thought she could have been suicidal, could have done something permanent and rash.

  The mouths of those policemen looked as though they’d been wired too tightly. Even when they smiled reassuringly at us, their lips stayed linear, corners pulled back, making a flat line in the middle of their faces.

  My father looked at me. I was sitting next to him on a folding chair in one of these officers’ offices. Both of us had our hands folded in our laps as if we were praying or holding on to butterflies—cupped loosely, secretly between our palms—and I just shook my head.

  No, I thought then, and still think now. She isn’t dead. The world’s too full, still, of my mother. I think of a pile of leaves my father left raked last fall in the backyard, but forgot to bag, to have hauled away—

  Those leaves sank back into the earth after only a few months of rain and snow. They turned first into a layer of thatch, melting into each other, becoming one thing—a thin black mattress that seemed to exhale a cool but festering breath. Then, they started to shrink, curl up, absorbing light like skin, as if you could dig there and find night itself in the center. And then one day they were simply gone, merged with the earth, swallowed up, a damp shadow, something as thick as gravy spilled where they’d been.

  Looking into that, I felt my skin crawl with maggots, with the kind of soft, toothless insects that get into your body when you have no more use for it, and shivered.

  It’s impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

  When she left, she left her station wagon behind, and my father gave it to me when I got my driver’s license. Now, driving it across town, I feel her beside me, giving directions, criticizing the landscape, the other drivers, the weather, which is a big fist of earth and sky with us struggling in it.

  And I can hear her in the morning as I pour cereal into a bowl, telling me what’s wrong with what I’m about to eat.

  Now, at dinner, I sit in her chair at the dining room table, to get the view from there. My father looks handsome and boring across the table from where she’d be, and my own place shimmers with my absence instead of hers—dust motes, nothing. I try to imagine what she would have thought of Detective Scieziesciez, and remember the way she used to scoff at my father’s weakness.

  “You wimp,” she said to him once when we were at Cedar Point Amusement Park and he wouldn’t ride the Nile.

  “I’ll get wet,” my father said.

  “That’s not what you’re afraid of,” she said, and he wouldn’t look her in the eyes.

  And I remember the way she watched Phil move around our house—his lanky teenage body, all breastbone, and the way his spine curved neatly into his jeans—like a woman with something on her mind. I could imagine the younger woman she once was looking back at the woman she’d become, thinking, This is where it’s ended? All those long, sensual years spent slipping in and out of my body like an erotic pond or a fresh, white bed?

  I was following my own flesh here?

  I’ve sorted through the clothes in her closet for the skirts and sweaters that fit me, that I like, and I’ve taken over the expensive ones—the cashmere sweaters, the linen skirts. But the night before I wear them to school, I leave them in a pile on the bottom of my closet, to rumple them, so they no longer look like the clothes of someone’s suburban mother. When they’re dirty, I don’t bother to dry-clean them. I just haul them to the basement, toss them from the washer to the dryer. They come out altered. Pilled, softer. I figure when she comes back, she can buy herself new clothes.

  And some afternoons, when my father’s gone, I lie on her side of the bed, the way I used to find her sometimes after school in mine, and I look at the ceiling that was hanging over my mother night after night.

  “SO HOW DOES THAT FEEL?” DR. PHALER ASKS. “YOUR mother’s been gone one year.”

  I shrug.

  Dr. Phaler is lovely today in a white wool suit. The little silver spectacles perch happily on her nose. As always, her makeup is tasteful and soft. A rose-beige base. Basic red lips. Right now her eyelids are light blue, but she’s done them well—not at all like Charlie’s Angels, that bad seventies blue.

  No. The light blue on Dr. Phaler’s lids makes them shine like startling little pools, the kind you might glimpse from a jet over California. I want to be able to tell her how I feel about my mother being gone for one whole year, but what I say instead is what it seems a reasonable person in this situation would say she felt.

  “Confused,” I say. “Maybe mad.”

  Dr. Phaler looks disappointed. Perhaps she was hoping I’d cry. The one time I did cry in her office, I thought I noticed a swipe of red across her neck, as if she were excited. She whipped the box of tissues out so quickly I knew she’d been waiting a long time to do it. Those tissues were pink and clammy, and they smelled like a thin layer of lotioned skin when I blew my nose in them.

  But I don’t cry today. I don’t feel sad—though I also don’t feel confused, or particularly mad. I’ve only said these things because there are no adjectives for this lightness I feel, this whiteness. It’s as though I’ve been caught in a diaphanous net—bodiless, that net holding my whole essence loosely in a breeze. Or as though I have weights around my wrists and ankles, but the weights are lighter than I am, as though I am wearing a dress made of emotion—a damp, invisible mesh. How could I possibly tell her that?

  “After a whole year?” she asks, and I look down at my hands, which tremble a bit in my lap.

  It was a beautiful year, I should add.

  An early spring started one morning in March with a swarm of sudden, glassy, bird cries, and then the cool jewelry of primrose and violet loosened themselves in the dirt. Then summer burst into the world like a gorgeous car accident, opening eyes all over our bodies in the brilliant light. Fall—the smell of pumpkin guts, sluttish and unsweetened. Until winter fell all over us like pieces of heaven, glazed with oxygen or ether, hitting the ground in small, cold shards.

  It was like a year in Eden where no Eve had ever lived.

  WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, MY MOTHER TRIED TO CURL MY hair.

  “Kat,” she’d say after my bath, standing in the doorway as I toweled myself, steam obscuring us, as if we’d just stepped together into a Hollywood set of heaven, “let’s do something with that hair.”

  In that heavenly Hollywood fog, perhaps we had wings.

  I remember watching my own face in the mirror of her vanity as she rolled dark hanks of my hair into hotpink cushions. I was maybe seven years old, and in that mirror the whole future was waiting for me like a skyline of cut-glass perfume bottles, silver tubes of lipstick.

  She wanted me, as her female child, to be a sylph. A girl like a powder puff. Soulless, weightless, inhabiting the oxygen instead of the earth.

  But I was awkward and overweight, with pin-straight hair—so much body on me I could never have lived in air.

  And those nights of pink-cushion curlers worn to bed went on forever. I’d dream of Hansel and his older sister, Gretel, in a very dark forest dropping phosphorescent stones and bread crumbs behind them, hoping.

  Those nights, knowing I’d wake without curls to my mother’s disappointment, I couldn’t roll over in bed because the curlers, tight as they were, would yank at my scalp. In my dreams I’d grab, panicked, for the fists of the witch who’d gotten hold of my hair, before I woke, remembering who and where I was and the curlers on my
head.

  Then, in the morning, she might even seem pleased. “Well, it’s not curly, but it’s fuller.”

  And briefly, she’d be right. The hair stood away from my head as if it were offended, but as the day wore on, it would settle down, and my mother would gaze across the dinner table with an annoyed expression on her face. She’d look at my father, and then at me again as we ate her turkey, like her silence, in thin, white slices.

  “Pass the butter,” my father would say.

  With the butter in her hand, my mother would say, “Please?” holding it just out of his reach.

  “Please?” he’d repeat. Without balls. Without imagination. A film of spit on his lower lip.

  She could barely stand to eat in his presence.

  I could tell by the look on her face that she wanted to throw her knife across the table and watch it vibrate in the wall. She might have been imagining the sound it would make, boing, as it wobbled there above my father’s head.

  By the time I asked for the butter, too, she would be seething.

  “You don’t need butter,” she’d say, “you’ve got about twenty pounds of it on your hips.”

  “Evie,” my father would say, looking down, counting the peas on his plate.

  The first few times we’d tried to curl my hair, it had been her idea. But one night, maybe I was in fourth grade, the eve of picture day at school, when even the kindergarten girls of Garden Heights would be wearing pearls, pink sweaters, a little smudge of frosted lipstick, a swipe of powder on their noses and their mother’s department store blush, I asked her to curl it for me, and my mother shrugged, looked at me as if she were sucking on something sour, and asked, “Why?” She said, “Your hair won’t curl.”