White Bird in a Blizzard

  Once, after an appointment with him, my mother seemed so satisfied at dinner, sang Dr. Heine’s praises so eloquently, that my father finally got up from the table and stomped up the stairs.

  “Your father’s jealous of my dentist,” my mother said as if I hadn’t noticed.

  “So who are the new neighbors?” she asked, slipping her coat down her arms, feeling the coat closet for a hanger. The living room was brightly static with TV light, and, in it, I might have looked blue faced, drowned to her. I was still chubby. My hair was straight and brown, cut in a bit of a page boy. My eyes were blue: good coloring, at least. When and if I melted off some of that fat, I’d have that good coloring, and those good bones, which I got directly from her.

  “Phil Hillman, and his mother,” I said. “They’re moving into Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. Phil is in my class. Phil Hillman.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “He told me today. He told me they bought the house next to ours.”

  “How did he know where you lived?” I could see it puzzled and bothered her that a boy knew where I lived. For years, she’d thought of herself as an ocean, and me as a small boat in it.

  I shrugged. I said, “He said he saw me in the yard.”

  “Do you like him?” she asked, turning her back to me, hanging up the coat. “Not a thug or something?”

  “He’s great,” I said. “I like him a lot.” I paused. I wanted to say this gently, knowing what I knew about her, about what I meant to her. “He asked me out. Next Saturday. We’re going to a dance.”

  My mother turned toward me again, and her mouth swung open in a small hole of surprise, but she managed to turn it into a yawn. “Well, well,” she said casually, indifferently. “Well,” she said, as if she’d only half heard me, as if, after hours on a treadmill, she’d just stepped off.

  My mother inhaled the little 0 with her yawn, then exhaled it over my shoulder, but her heart was beating hard. I could see that. I might as well have dragged her to the freezer by her hair, stuck her face right into it and made her breathe those rolling clouds of frost. In there, she might have seen her own face in a dentist’s hands—a blurred plate, the features she was so pleased with dissolving as she stared.

  My mother came over to where I sat on the couch, pushed the straight brown bangs off my forehead, ran a finger from my brow down to my chin, passed her thumb across my lips, which were an exact duplicate of her lips—but smoother, younger, sweeter. “Well,” she said, “you’re the girl next door now, I guess. Pretty romantic.”

  I shook my bangs back. “We’ll see,” I said. “It’s just one date.”

  “Fat girls have to be pragmatic,” I’d heard her say once about a cousin of my father’s, a fat girl who’d married a crippled man. She’d said it as though she were talking about that cousin, but I knew she was talking about me.

  Still, it was my first date, and I was her only child, her younger self, all she had, had ever had, was ever going to have—her life, going on without her, going out with a boy she hadn’t met, to a dance she wouldn’t be at, next to a movie she hadn’t seen, and she might never see.

  Already, she was starting to vanish.

  I hadn’t even gone on that date yet.

  I was still fat.

  I was still a virgin.

  But my mother could already see what would happen next:

  She pictured my twin bed with its starched sheets empty. She pictured me in a bridal gown. She pictured me in a supermarket pulling a child of my own by its fat arm past the fruits and vegetables. She pictured me in a white coffin wearing a lace dress, my face like a wax mask, and a delicate spray of baby’s breath in my clenched fist.

  But something wild was going on in that coffin. She looked closer. I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn’t me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life?

  And then she realized—

  That was her.

  Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.

  Perhaps she gasped when she saw that.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, PHIL AND HIS MOTHER MOVED IN, AND my mother was the first person who went over to say hello.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m Eve Connors. Next door.”

  A woman slipped her thin hand out the storm door, and the hand passed sleepily through the chill mist without direction. My mother had to catch it in midair. She pressed it into her own hand and felt it give—small-boned, with thin, cool skin. “I’m Gina Hillman.” Then, “Come in.”

  There was a bit of humidity in the cold, a current of warmth running under it, and that current smelled like thawed water, old leaves, atomized ocean—as if a huge fan, pointed in our direction, had been turned on off the coast of Florida, and, by the time the wind kicked it up and billowed it to us here in our northeastern pool-table pocket of Ohio, it had accumulated the odors of the other states: the fish hatcheries, the sheep farms’ eely wool, the stripped mountains and muddy football fields of Kentucky, the light blue haze of ditto fumes left over from the sixties that still hovered over hundreds of elementary schools between us—that chafed smell of paper, factory waste, the rheumy, old-lady smell of lace, dank and sweet, a fine drizzle of it in our faces. The telephone poles stood out stiff and black against the haze-white sky, like crucifixes minus Christs.

  “I’m happy to meet you,” Mrs. Hillman said, ushering my mother in.

  My mother had never been in Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. It was oppressive. The ceiling was beige, and claustrophobically low. The carpet was worn away in patches, as if someone had stood in the same few spots, night after night for years, pawing at the ground like a horse for hours before moving on to another spot.

  It was a shabby replica of our own house.

  And the new neighbors had bad furniture, too, as bad as Mrs. Lefkowsky could possibly have had—scarlet curtains, vinyl lounge chairs, a coffee table as long as a coffin, with anchors adorning each end. There was even an afghan on the overstaffed sofa with an embroidered replica of the Liberty Bell.

  My God, my mother might have thought, looking at that bell. It resembled an enormous breast, and the crack along the side of it was violent, sexual, sewn up sloppily with thick black thread. There was nothing on the walls, only old nails where Mrs. Lefkowsky must have had something hanging—her own Seascape, perhaps—until her greedy daughter and son-in-law carted it off.

  There was no aesthetic here, no plan, no organizing principle at all. My mother must have been open-mouthed, looking around that house—my mother, who took such pains with our own house, her own aesthetic of polite denial, conservative grace. My mother, who was always so careful not to overdo anything, must have learned a lesson, in that moment, about what happens when you undo everything.

  The decorator here, my mother thought, seemed to be denying the very idea of decoration.

  The decorator here, my mother realized, must be blind.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said again into Mrs. Hillman’s blank eyes, one of which traveled over my mother’s face like a little, milky moon.

  Mrs. Hillman gestured in the direction of the Liberty Bell as if my mother should sit near it, and when she sat, the sofa cushions surged around her like a warm plaid bath. Then Mrs. Hillman felt her way to the sofa herself, and eased back. Upstairs, someone could be heard—presumably Phil Hillman—singing in the shower. The sound of a young man’s song—naked, muffled by falling water.

  “Welcome, welcome,” my mother said yet again—feeling absurd, struck dumb with discomfort.

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Hillman said and nodded. Her face was pointed in my mother’s direction. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “No,” she said too quickly and looked at her hands. They were white. Though she’d only come from the house next door, she should have worn gloves, she thought. Or she shouldn’t ha
ve come. “I hear you have a son,” my mother offered, “the age of my daughter.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Hillman nodded blindly. “I hear they’re going on a date.”

  They laughed.

  Two mothers: One of whom, my mother thought—seized with a panic that felt like the fast snap of an elastic band on the delicate skin of a wrist—may never have glimpsed the face of her own child.

  Mind you, my mother was never prejudiced against the handicapped. She did not think of them as possessed, or dangerous, or supernatural. She was not the kind of person who would look away from someone in a wheelchair. Instead, she’d look straight into his eyes and say hello, as if to let him know she was not superstitious, or ignorant. She did not think of herself as superior. She knew perfectly well it was only a matter of a few seconds in a station wagon on slick ice that kept her out of a chair just like it.

  But, like everyone else, my mother carried a million fears with her wherever she went—phobias, trepidations, anxieties—most of them groundless, she supposed. Fables and old wives’ tales.

  Still, she carried them with her, as if in a tin—a pretty tin, the kind grandmothers keep beads and buttons in, a tin fall of fish, stars, and trinkets.

  And the blind were in it—along with bearded women, cancer, amputees—tapping their way across the intersection with their white canes, coming at her.

  Ever notice how, if a blind man is headed in your direction, whichever way you try to escape, he will be headed that way?

  Once, she’d had a blind teacher in elementary school. Mr. Ferguson. Music. The children in that class would pass notes to one another, make faces, put their heads down on their desks and sleep.

  He was the first blind person my mother ever saw up close, and his face was badly shaved, pockmarked, pale. He wore dark glasses, but my mother could see that the eyes behind them were always open, as dispassionate and inorganic as Ping-Pong balls. His voice was frail and wavering, and when he sang he’d lift his chin toward the ceiling and sway sleepily—

  My mother imagined him alone in his bed every night in the black, crooning like that to the silence, and she hated that picture. It was how she imagined death. Night closing down on you like a lid. No way out. Brightly, emptily white, or pure fluid darkness.

  Perhaps my mother remembered this as she looked into Mrs. Hillman’s eyes, then looked past her, around her house—the layout of which was identical to ours. Except for the smell of it, Mrs. Hillman might not know the difference between her own house and ours, and to think of that gave my mother a chill that began behind her knees—to imagine Mrs. Hillman in our home, to think that one day she might pull into our driveway and find Mrs. Hillman stumbling across our lawn, believing it was hers, or in our hallway. How was she to know where she was, or wasn’t? My mother imagined Mrs. Hillman feeling her way to our bathroom, washing her hands in our sink, slipping into one of our beds without ever opening her eyes.

  “Winter Formal,” my mother said too cheerfully. “Yes. Tomorrow Kat and I are going to look for a dress.”

  Look—it echoed off the bare walls. She wished she’d used another word.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hillman nodded. “Phil’s renting a tux.”

  “Kat’s excited,” my mother said.

  “So is Phil.”

  Mrs. Hillman’s chin drifted toward the kitchen, and my mother looked in that direction, too. There was the sound of footsteps overhead, a door opening.

  First, my mother saw his legs, in jeans. The big brass buckle of his belt, and then the skin of his stomach, and the sparse, damp hair on his chest, between his nipples—those hard, dark buttons of flesh. She could see his ribs—he was boyishly thin—how they tapered into his waist as if a witch’s bony fingers had grabbed him from behind, as if the witch were squeezing him. His face was long, shaved. Dark eyebrows. But his hair was light—the straw blond of a child—and it was wet, combed back. When he saw my mother, he said, “Oh.”

  “Phil,” Mrs. Hillman said without turning in his direction, still speaking to the kitchen, “this is Kat’s mother. Mrs. Connors. Our new neighbor.”

  “I’m sorry,” Phil said, covering his bare stomach with his arms. “I heard something. I didn’t know anyone was over. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Connors.” And he hurried back upstairs.

  There was a hollow place in his back where his spine swerved neatly into his jeans.

  PHIL AND HIS MOTHER ARE AT OUR HOUSE THIS AFTERNOON because their basement flooded last night, and now the plumbers and the forty-dollar-an-hour workers have come to patch and bail. They’re pounding in and out of the house in their big boots with the doors wide open on a ten-degree winter afternoon.

  Last night, while Mrs. Hillman was bathing—hot water and bubbles spilling over her—she’d heard the rush of bursting pipes, the gulping ocean roar of plumbing run amok. “Phil!” she’d shouted, feeling her way out of the tub, both hands gripping the slick rim.

  Phil pretended not to hear her at first. He thought she just wanted something, like a sponge, or that she’d dropped her washcloth, or she’d slipped, or she couldn’t find her bathrobe because it had fallen off the hook, and he couldn’t bear to walk into the bathroom, to see his mother’s long breasts naked, to see her soaped and groping toward him with her needs, her panic disguised as impatience—

  “Where were you?” she’d want to know. “I’ve been shouting for ten minutes.”

  But then he’d heard the basement overflowing, too. Water, he told me on the phone a few hours later, sounds just like fire, and his first thought was that the house had burst into flames, that he’d have to haul his mother out into the snow without her clothes, that she’d catch pneumonia and die—or worse, that she would suffer for a very long time, complaining.

  Now Mrs. Hillman is cocking her head in our living room again—a mechanical Mrs. Claus in a Christmas department store display. Phil bounces his foot nervously, ankle on his knee, glaring at his mother. He looks rangy in a flannel shirt this afternoon, thermal underwear beneath it, like a blond boy playing the part of a woodcutter in the high school play.

  She listens. Fogged eyes wide.

  “It’s nothing, Mother,” Phil suggests. “It’s probably the furnace, like Kat says.”

  “Do you want some more coffee?” I ask politely, trying to make up for Phil’s unkindness—his tone, which is the tone of an angry youth, a disrespectful son, one who needs a father around to frighten him now and then.

  “No,” Mrs. Hillman says, fidgeting with the rim of her empty cup, looking worried.

  “Maybe it’s my father,” I offer. He’s upstairs, and won’t be coming down as long as Phil is here. Although my father admires Mrs. Hillman—her spunk, her homely courage (“She’s a good woman,” he says. “The kind of woman you could hang your hat on if you had to”)—he refuses to come into any room Phil’s in. This has gone on for more than a year now, since before my mother left, since the afternoon he caught me with him in my bed, Phil’s naked ass rising and falling over the pale shadow of my body.

  It had been an accident. Until then, Phil and my father had gotten along well—nervous and polite in each other’s company, chatting about football, looking respectfully at the emptiness just beyond each other’s shoulders as they shrugged and nodded.

  But my father had come home from the boat show in Toledo early. “Daddy,” I’d called to his back as he hurried down the hall. “It was my idea.” But he didn’t turn around. I could hear water running in the bathroom sink behind the closed door for over an hour.

  “I’ll look around,” I say in Mrs. Hillman’s direction, “if that will make you feel better.”

  “I’m sure I hear something,” she says, which means she wants me to look around.

  Phil’s hands turn into fists, as if he’s just grabbed two slim throats in them. Maybe he hates her, and who could blame him? It would be nearly impossible to be her son. Her stubbornness. Her needs. “What will I ever do?” Phil asked me angrily one afternoon as we drove together to
the grocery store on some errand his mother had sent us to do. “I can’t ever leave, now that my father has. She can’t even open a can.”

  “Oh, Phil,” I said, “you’re her son, not her father. She has to let you go.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” he said, and I could see a blue vein in his temple. I didn’t want to think about whether or not what he said was true, but I could see how hard it would be for him to imagine the rest of his life, and where it would lead him, unless she died. It would be like having a job in a fortune cookie factory, standing all day on an assembly line while optimism passed through your hands on flimsy strips of paper—“You will inherit a million dollars,” “You will go on an exotic vacation”—but never moving, standing in one place while the damp batter of the fortune cookies slid by, all your possible futures settling into that clamminess as it passed.

  Once, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Phil in the backyard with his mother, a plastic basket full of laundry between them. She was telling him how to hang it on a line, and the wet sheets looked as heavy and limp as dead women. I could see she was worried that he’d drop the clean laundry on the ground. She was gesturing, tugging on his arm, until finally a pair of her underpants slipped out of his hands, dropped at his feet. Phil just left them there for a while, and then he stepped on them, hard, purposefully, before hanging them on the line—white, over-bleached, too intimate, and dirty.

  I hated seeing that laundry hanging in their backyard.

  But then it started to rain, and Mrs. Hillman made him take it all down and bring it in again.

  Mrs. Hillman is dogged, obstinate, a woman like a log. Perhaps she has to be, being blind. If she didn’t insist on the correctness of her perceptions of every single thing, who would ever believe her perceptions, ever, of anything?