White Bird in a Blizzard Read online

  My mother told this story right in front of Zeena at Christmas dinner that year, and as she told it, Zeena laughed. She wore that same unapologetic expression she wore in the snapshot with the roulette wheel.

  Even now, Zeena’s hair is blonde. She wears pencil-shaped skirts and thin knit sweaters, push-up bras. Her body is oddly solid, muscled—not like a young woman’s, but like a statue’s—though her face looks every year of her sixty-seven, half of them lived beneath a merciless Nevada sun, washing the sky with toxic light.

  But her teeth are narrow and sharp. They are the teeth of a woman who could chew up carpet tacks and spit them out all over the house. It’s no wonder, I think, looking at her, that my mother was the kind of mother she was.

  “Kat,” she asked me on Christmas Eve, sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning into me, “do you know where your mother is?”

  “Grandma,” I said, sincerely shocked and sounding it, “do you think if I knew I wouldn’t tell you?”

  Zeena swallowed that, and it looked like a spoonful of splinters going down.

  “I guess you would,” Zeena said. Then she thought. “But your mother was a secretive girl. I suppose you could be, too. You know,” she looked down at her fingernails, which were long and painted mother-of-pearl, “that Detective What’s-his-shh called me again a few weeks ago to ask if I’d heard from Eve.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “And I told him, I said, ‘Pal, you might as well just close the case on this one. Hell will freeze over before that woman comes back. She’s my daughter, and she’s got running in her blood.’”

  I swallowed.

  I thought of Detective Scieziesciez’s back, his trench coat. Sometimes at night I’d still think of him. His rough face pressed between my legs. I’d imagine him pulling up in his dark car, as he did that one day, busting through the front door of our suburban home with his gun drawn, sweeping me up in his arms, throwing the frilly bedspread to the floor in one clean sweep. “Everything here looks perfectly normal,” he’d say, as he’d said then, but this time he’d be yanking my panties down to my knees as he said it.

  I was hoping I’d get to see Detective Scieziesciez again at least once before he closed my mother’s case, and I hoped my grandmother hadn’t said anything to make the chances of that any slimmer than they already seemed.

  Marilyn appeared in the doorway then, a red dressing gown loose and frilled around her ample hips and the big, generous, water balloons of her breasts, blocking the light from the hall. Unlike Zeena, Marilyn is soft—a garden of petunias after a long, hard, humid rain. Her hair is red. (“Not just dyed,” my father would say, “that hair is dead.”) She has been a widow longer than she was married, and loves everyone to distraction. Over and over she’ll say, “I love you,” or “I loved him,” eyes tearing up, “I just loved the hell out of your grandpa Sam”—who’d died one day of a stroke while Marilyn was frying pork cutlets, just dropped over on the kitchen floor as though someone had snuck up behind him and pulled a drawstring too tight around his neck—or, “I loved the stuffings out of every one of my sons.” By the time she’s done, you are embarrassed about how few and little you’ve loved, how stingy you’ve been with your affections.

  “You’re so much like your mother,” Marilyn said. “It’s uncanny. The resemblance. It gives me the chills. I just loved your mother.”

  She shuddered, to show us.

  Outside, there was the sound of humming—power lines, or jets, or Santas cruising over us in their electric sleds.

  THE PHONE RINGS IN THE MORNING AS I’M GETTING READY for school, pulling black tights up to my waist, doing a little dance in the bathroom to get them on.

  Before I lost weight, I’d wear whatever was clean in my closet, whatever I could squeeze into, whatever I imagined my mother would not complain too much about when I emerged from my bedroom into her line of vision (“Jesus, Kat, you’re not going to wear that?”).

  But since I’ve been thin, dressing myself in the morning has gotten harder. The night before, I lie in bed and imagine myself in various combinations of skirt and sweater, and then in the various poses I might be seen in wearing them—leaning over the drinking fountain in the hall at school, slurping that water the temperature of body fluids, a tepid stream of something human and nauseating in my mouth. Or sitting behind my desk in Great Books, legs crossed at the ankles while Mr. Norman drones on and on about Paradise Lost.

  Mr. Norman wears horn-rimmed glasses and weighs only about a hundred pounds, but his lectures make Satan seem sexy and slick, like someone Mr. Norman himself might secretly admire.

  Listening, I imagine Satan and Detective Scieziesciez waiting for me in a silver Thunderbird in the high school parking lot, smoking cigarettes, waiting to see what I’m wearing that afternoon.

  God knows there’s no one else at my high school to dress up for, no one who matters, no one who would look at me twice even if I walked down that gray corridor stark naked. Phil wouldn’t notice, and my closest friends, Mickey and Beth, aren’t exactly fashion plates themselves. At Theophilus Reese High, by twelfth grade, you are whoever you’ve been until then. Your lot’s cast early. Your lot. Your caste.

  And, back when it mattered, back when the beautiful kids had been sorted from the homely, I’d been fat. Now, no matter what I weigh, until graduation day, I will be Fat.

  But lately I’ve noticed men—some of them older than my father—watching me walk in and out of restaurants, watching me walk from my mother’s station wagon, which is mine now, into McDonald’s, or the library, or the mall. “Is this yours?” a man in an expensive black suit asked me one afternoon last week as I stood in line at the drugstore with a package of tampons. He was out of breath and holding a limp red mitten in his hand. I shook my head, looking at it. That bloody hand, extended.

  “Oh,” he seemed disappointed, and then chagrined. “Well, then, would you like me to buy you a sandwich somewhere?”

  It was pathetic, and we both laughed. I handed the cashier my tampons, and even she looked shy. “I can’t,” I said.

  He looked at me for a few seconds before he said, “You’re an awfully attractive woman,” and then he left, winking over his shoulder as the automatic doors jolted open nervously for him, and the cashier stuffed my package into a plastic sack. “Some men . . .” she said, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

  He’d only been gone a moment before I’d forgotten what he looked like, or why I hadn’t wanted the sandwich he wanted to buy.

  Being noticed is new, and every day I have to prove to myself it can be done again to believe it ever has. In my imagination every night, I pan around the room I will be in the next day like a little Tinkerbell, viewing myself from every angle, appraising myself from the front, the back, above, below—a whirring electric eye.

  Of course, by morning I’m afraid to wear anything at all, and it takes hours to get ready for school. By the time I’m done, there’s a stripped heap of clothing on the bedroom or bathroom floors, as if the girls who’d been wearing those outfits had dissolved, sweaters and skirts dropping out of the air where they’d been.

  A lot of trouble. For what?

  But in the morning, at our lockers, outside the vinegar glare of the gym, Beth says, “You look great, Kat. I like your sweater.” Of course, it wouldn’t matter what I was wearing, or how I looked in it, Beth would say that: It is Beth’s role. Like an usher in an auditorium, handing out programs, saying, “Enjoy the show,” Beth is there for me. Even when I am bitter, or premenstrual—cramped, depressed, snapping at Beth—she will tell me I look good, smell good, did the right thing.

  Still, I can tell when she really means it, and lately she really means it. Lately, everything I wear looks right. The janitor calls me, “Hey, kitty-cat,” purring as he moves his mop around and around on the floor.

  “He’s got the hots for you,” Beth says, gesturing at the janitor, who has a limp, who has the name, or the word, “Dick,” embroidered above his hea
rt.

  I’ve known Beth since third grade, since she and I were fat girls together standing in the snow at recess, watching the other girls jump rope. We were both too fat to be invited to join them, so after a while we had to talk to each other. Those girls would jump faster and faster in a blur of limbs and clothesline while we waited in our big rubber boots for the bell to ring and call us back into the warmth of Mrs. Mulder’s classroom.

  Finally, out of sheer boredom, we invented a game of our own, which had to do with the teeter-totter. We’d go up and down, up and down, chatting amiably, but then one of us, the one who was down, would casually slip off the end and let the other one, the one who was up, crash back to earth.

  The object of this game was to slide off your end of the teeter-totter when the other least expected you to—perhaps in midsentence, smiling—in order to heighten the terror and thrill of suddenly plummeting through air, pure gravity, a fat girl with wings shot out of the sky.

  The first time Phil and I had sex, I remembered that game with Beth. The jovial anticipation of danger and pain, looking all the time into her inscrutable face as she looked into mine.

  Although I’ve lost thirty pounds, Beth stubbornly remains sixty pounds overweight. She has become a bit of a celebrity at school—admired, but not liked: an object of envious pity. Beth’s claim to fame is the steel trap of her brain. She’s won every math award the state of Ohio has to offer, and her bedroom walls are papered with certificates and plaques and letters of congratulation signed by one of the governor’s aides. Even when she’s simply eating a fruit pie in the cafeteria, that brain is chewing up the computable world and its reams of ticker tape.

  “Kat,” she said to me once when I told her how many pounds I’d lost, “that’s 489 ounces. 32.7 milligrams. 457 liters of fat,” or something like that.

  “Jesus Christ, Beth,” I said, “shut up. I don’t want to know that. What makes you think people want to know stuff like that?”

  I sounded like my mother as I said it.

  Beth looked sad, with her bland face, her light brown hair. It is the same face she wore long ago, back on the teeter-totter. Little girl pudginess. A bit desperate, painfully clever, and stuffed up with secret rage.

  The third of us is Mickey.

  “The weird sisters,” my mother used to call us, or “the three blind mice.”

  Like me, Mickey’s lost weight, left the fat-faced girl we met in seventh grade behind her like a bad date, ditched. She’s a cheerleader now, having snagged one of those coveted positions with all its myth and pomp and prestige despite being unpopular and acne-scarred.

  Though they must not have wanted to give it to a girl like Mickey, the selection committee simply could not have denied her a place on that squad. Even Miss Beck, the cheerleading coach, with her perky smile and high cheekbones, all cream and peaches, must have had to admit that Mickey is cheer, pep, the fighting spirit of pride—the personification of it.

  “The Savages” our teams are called. Mickey’s job is to urge them on.

  But, according to Mickey, the other girls on the squad won’t even sit next to her on the bus as it lurches and wallows its way across Ohio for our team’s away games. That bus, Mickey says, smells like panties.

  FDS. Scent: Spring Rain.

  As if a cool May afternoon were clamped between those cheerleaders’ legs, its sweet mist rising from their crotches, condensing on the windows of the bus.

  Those pretty things will not, apparently, accept Mickey as one of them. Instead, they huddle together, swapping a hairbrush that grows more and more beautiful with silk and gold as it passes.

  But, as I’ve said, Mickey could inject team spirit into the heart of a dead man—cartwheeling, scissoring, frantic zeal. Dancing to the flat music of the pep band, she is a morale machine. Arms and legs and voice, the tilt of her head, the sway of her hips, synchronized. More than once, Beth and I have sat together in the brisk wind of a football game and watched our friend go wild with blood lust on the field, leaping, backlit by the pure glare of stadium light and scoreboard neon —“Ho ho, hey hey, we are going to make you pay”—and shaken our heads in admiring disbelief. After a close game, Mickey might be hoarse, or even voiceless, for days.

  But the acne scars along her jawline and on her chin sometimes burn purple beneath the skin—angry, permanent scars, seething, rising to the surface on damp days, especially in the harsh light of late winter or early spring. I never knew Mickey when she had acne, though I’ve know Mickey for what seems like forever, and she’s always had those scars. Perhaps she was born scarred.

  “Make new friends,” my mother used to say when Mickey and Beth left our house together, cutting out the back door like a pair of dull knives. She refused to learn their names. She called them Becky and Mindy right to their faces. “Those two are morbid. What’s the matter with them?” But I’ve never wanted other friends. I like what’s wrong with the friends I have.

  “You’re beautiful now that you’re thin,” Beth said one afternoon before Christmas. Maybe she was drunk. We were sitting on the old vinyl couch, while, upstairs, my father could be heard in the kitchen, pacing, or marching in place. Mickey had poured a bit of filched gin into each of our diet Coke cans, and I was smoking without inhaling, just letting the smoke smear aimlessly across my mouth and face, roll off my tongue like a bitter cloud, or a big gray comma indicating a very long pause. The basement was cold, oozing with underground life, a clammy womb. There were only two windows in the finished section, and they let in just a little bit of cold prison light that, as soon as it crept in, was soaked up by the paneling and the gray carpet remnant.

  “But you still act fat,” Beth said.

  I thought about that, looking down at my short corduroy skirt, black tights, soft white sweater. I knew I dressed, now, like a person who was thin. I looked good in the clothes I wore. I’d started to wear lipstick, shave my legs, blow my hair dry so that wisps of it flew around my face, flattering and framing it like the bright plastic face of a doll, but I still felt fat.

  “It’s my mother,” I said. “She’s inside me, with a balloon, waiting to blow me up.” And I remembered going to the mall with her before Christmas one year when I was a child. She wanted me to sit in Santa’s lap. I remembered how she handed me over to him, and how his arms felt warm, his lap was soft, and how the eyes lost in all that false beard were glassy, but very friendly. There were carols being sung somewhere above us, and the sound was fragile and full of light, like a glass straw held gently to a soprano’s lips.

  “Can I take this little girl home?” he asked my mother, and she snatched me back.

  “He liked you because you’re fat,” my mother said.

  “She liked me fat,” I said.

  “So did Phil,” Beth said.

  We are intimate. Beth and Mickey and I talk about only the most personal things—our periods, our parents, our dreams. By now, we’ve snooped into the darkest corners of each other’s homes. Found each other’s mother’s diaphragms under the bathroom sink together—like flimsy UFO’s, or Playtex sand dollars, hinting vaguely of the sea, looking internal, but no more sexual than the plastic scrubbers with which those same mothers washed the dishes. And we were less impressed by the fact that our mothers might actually have sex with our fathers than by the possibility that something might still be generated from it. The possibility that fertility, for our mothers or for us, could go on for that long—little chickadees pecking nests in our uteruses forever.

  We’ve seen each other’s fathers in their underwear stumbling to the toilet late at night, half awake—gray specters of manliness in middle age, shameful and concave.

  “I can’t eat meatballs anymore,” Mickey said one evening in the basement, “since I saw your father without his shorts on, Beth. Your father’s balls look just like my mother’s.” And she waved her hand in the air as if to wave Mr. Warnke’s awful balls away.

  “You’ll be sorry,” my mother said. “These are the ha
ppiest days of your life, and you’re not going to have anyone but those two Unsightlies to remember them by.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, and turned my back, as blank as a lost memory, to her.

  And, I think, What does it matter that I’ll never look back at my high school yearbook and recall, fondly, the dime-size faces of my classmates, the camaraderie of those days, the kegs thrown through plate-glass windows on Saturday nights when someone’s trusting parents were out of town, or my name spray-painted red on the east wall of the high school, where those popular kids traditionally immortalize themselves and one another in big, goofy letters in the last months of their senior years: hearts and stars and exclamation points, until the janitor comes and whitewashes another year of popular kids off the cinder blocks with his bucket and brush?

  It would be like being a rabbit, being one of those popular high school girls—trembling, ephemeral, just a vaporous urge full of hindsight, hopping. An essence, all bubble, whim, and vim slipped quickly in and out of a sock of bright, pretty far, about to be ripped limb from limb by Time’s stray dog.

  Why even assume I’d want to be one of them? Besides, my life in this place is swiftly ending. Already my college applications are in the mail. Four of them. Each with a carefully worded personal essay that begins, “I wish to attain the finest education I can, which, for me, means attending——.”

  In truth, college has always been the last place I wanted to go. It looms in my imagination as a kind of Emerald City full of sunglass-wearing rich kids with bandannas around their necks in the ice-green light of their Heineken bottles. At the center, an awful little man runs the show. Not a professor: an administrator, like my father. If you saw him, you would gasp in disappointment and sudden understanding.