White Bird in a Blizzard Page 3
“What?” she asked, pushing her hair out of the way so he could better see her annoyed expression.
“What’s for dinner? It’s six o’clock.” He was wearing a flannel, afterwork shirt, but he’d still have on his dress pants and his shiny black shoes, as if relaxation were something you only needed to do from the waist up.
These two decades, my father had also stayed slim. His face had aged well. He looked younger than fifty, staring down at her, but also as preserved and eternal as some frozen-faced saint painted on the wall of a chapel during the darkest Dark Age days. Pale. Uninquisitive. A painted saint gazing without judgment, or interest, at centuries of women passing by, bearing candles, or babies, or flowers in their black habits, lace veils, go-go boots, and girdles.
My father was the kind of man, like one of those expressionless saints, who sees a woman—naked, or roped in pearls, tied to a stake, or shedding tears of blood—and thinks, I wonder what’s for dinner.
“Go away,” my mother said. “I’ll make dinner in a minute.”
If he realized then that she hated him, he pretended not to notice.
Without another word, he left.
My mother could hear him in the den, changing channels on the television with the remote control again.
She rolled to her side and swung her feet off the bed, and perhaps the numbness of them surprised her on the bedroom rug. There was a mossy taste, lush and sun warmed, on her tongue—as if, in her dream, she’d eaten a butterfly.
Briefly, she might have thought of arsenic, though she didn’t even know what it was, exactly, or where one bought it. But she might have imagined my father at the dinner table, hunched over his stew, turning blue, looking up at her with a pleased smile, muttering, “This is good,” before he died.
It was just a thought.
Wives all over Ohio probably had them.
But the idea of murder was no more serious than the kinds of fantasies in which a suburban housewife imagines herself slapping a bad waitress, or punching a meddlesome librarian in the stomach: She is polite, she’d never do it. Instead, she might wad up a piece of gum and stick it under a chair, hoping the librarian would find it there years later and have to scrape it off with a knife.
Still, there was desire, there was poison in the air. Every night, my mother read the obituaries in silence, and I imagine she was comparing the ages of the deceased to my father’s. A lot of men die in their fifties, leaving behind a great many grieving wives.
But my father was so robust, it must have been hard to imagine. He did not seem at all like the kind of man who might die “unexpectedly, at home” or “after a long battle with colon cancer.” It might take gallons of arsenic to kill him, or years and years spent watching him across the dining room table, wrestling with his colon as it decayed.
One night, only a few weeks before she disappeared, my mother went down to the basement freezer to find something to feed him, her stockinged feet cold on the cement floor.
That night, the freezer light did not come on when she opened it—burnt out, she thought—but there were the usual two good steaks. A cutup chicken—twisted, yellow limbed, a little human. A pound of ground sirloin on a square of Styrofoam.
She took that out, brought it upstairs to the kitchen, and put it in the microwave for five minutes while she tossed some salad into bowls and filled a pot with water to boil pasta. She was wearing pearls, and a neat brown skirt, a soft beige turtleneck—perhaps she’d gone to the bank that afternoon to deposit my father’s check—all a little rumpled from hours of sleeping in them.
The linoleum under her panty-hosed feet felt warped, blistering up along the seams, as if something humpbacked were pushing itself up from the basement. She needed to call Herschel’s Furniture & Floor, and made a mental note.
When the microwave began its steady beeping, she took the pound of ground sirloin—defrosted now, heavier with its hot blood—and peeled away the plastic, tossed it into a pan, turned the gas on under it. And right away, she knew something was wrong.
Desire. Poison.
At first there was just the smell of toffee—too sweet, like a body washed up bloated on a beach. Blood and grease spat and sizzled beneath the shredded beef, but the smell grew stronger, and the kitchen filled up fast with the stench of old death, and something else—something fetid, stuffed with honeysuckle, as if a whole flock of cupids had drowned in a perfumed bath.
My mother felt dizzy with it. She had to lean against the refrigerator, and she could feel it purr against her hair.
“Jesus,” my father said, hurrying in, “what stinks?” He turned the gas off under the frying pan. “This meat is rotten.” He held the pan up by the black handle, then turned his face to her—curious.
“Throw it away,” she said. “We have to go out to eat.”
He tossed the bad hamburger, pan and all, into the garbage can under the sink, then went down to the basement and, a few minutes later called up, “Jesus, Evie, this freezer’s unplugged. The whole thing’s full of rotten meat.”
Of course: The light had not come on.
Two days before, she remembered, she’d had to crawl on hands and knees behind the freezer to find a mother-of-pearl button that had popped off one of my sweaters when she pulled it from the dryer, and she must have accidentally knocked the plug from the socket.
“Plug it back in,” she yelled.
I came home just as my father emerged from the basement.
“My God,” I said, coming into the kitchen. “What reeks?”
“Shut up,” my mother said, hurrying past me. “We’re going out to eat.”
That night, we did go out to eat. Perhaps we had Chinese. Or we each ate a steak at Bob’s Chop House. Maybe we had a pizza at Mariani’s. I sat between them at the table, thinking about Phil, sloshing the ice around and around in my water glass until my mother said, “Stop that.”
Wherever we were, we’d eat in silence. Just a word now and then about the service, about the noisy children of the other patrons. My father might have asked me how school was going, then nodded his head while I answered in a low, bored voice.
As a family, we were vague. My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees. My father, on the other hand, was right there, right on the surface of the world, taking it all in too easily—the salad, the beef, the silverware—but there was nothing more to it, nothing in his world you couldn’t see. And I was sixteen, trying desperately to slip into the privacy of my own mind, a place where their questions and faces could not interfere with my thoughts about sex, a place where they couldn’t find me in some fantasy of naked flesh.
“What are you thinking about?” my father would ask me cheerfully as I sat there between them sawing my steak in half. “You sure seem lost in thought.”
I’d imagine telling him. The sound of his utensils dropping from his hands.
But, perhaps I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air—looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged.
I could smell the death between them.
When my father came up from the basement, he had a look of puzzlement and blame on his face, his surprise at finding something wretched in the kitchen, cooking—something cloying and corrupted, which his wife had planned for supper.
And my mother’s delicate suffering, the elegant clothes, rumpled. In a few weeks, she’d be that woman with MISSING written above her picture.
But that night, she was just the suburban wife of someone who’d wanted a simple dinner of macaroni and grease. And she’d cooked him something ghastly and mortal instead.
“What’s that smell?” Phil asked when he came over to see me later that night.
“Something’s dead,” I said.
AND I KNEW WHY HE ASKED IT. IN MANY WAYS, MY FATHER was dead. When I was only ten or eleven years old, I used to ask my father, as a joke, what the world had been like when he was alive—was there television, for instance, were there cars? Of course, I meant, when he was a child, and my father got the joke, and always laughed, but there was a bite to the joke, and I stopped making it after a while.
My father was, as I’ve said, healthy. A good-looking man. But the kind of dullness he wore like a badge—(“I’m a simple man,” he would say to my mother when she complained that they never went anywhere, never ate anything but steak and potatoes, and he’d say it as though it were the thing about which he was proudest, something commendable, something my mother might not have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out)—also embalmed him, ran in his veins like that gray March rain.
Every morning, he would mix a spoonful of vegetable fiber into a glass of water, stir it around and around, clunking his tablespoon against the side of the glass until that water was the color of dullness itself, and then he’d gulp it all down in one deep swallow that seemed to go on and on—
“Ah!” he’d sigh. “That’s good,” setting the empty glass down hard on the kitchen counter.
It was a laxative, and kept him regular, and he appreciated that.
Occasionally, after drinking this dull cocktail, he’d exhale a long, slow fart, and my mother might throw her dish towel down and mutter, “Jesus Christ, Brock.”
She hated those farts.
He’d smile, big and happy, and say, “Excuse me!”
When I was ten years old, my father took me with him to his office at the Board of Education. Perhaps I’d had no school that day. Maybe I’d asked to go. Or was it his idea? Was there something there, at his office, he wanted me to see?
What I saw stunned me then. It mystifies me now:
My father was loved by women.
Old women and young women. Fat and thin. Married, single, serious women, and empty-headed flirts.
To get to his office, we had to walk down a long, gray corridor of women. I was a child. I would have been holding my father’s hand. He would have been wearing shiny shoes, a black suit. Even then, he was gray at the temples, but his features were chiseled out of solid rock—not at all like a man with the kind of job he had: a job telling women what to do. Ruggedly handsome, my father spent his days at the end of a telephone with a felt-tipped pen in his hand, doodling onto a legal pad.
I’d seen those doodles.
Stars. Pyramids. Bull’s-eyes. Once, a pair of women’s shoes with a woman, drawn only up to her ankles, in them. Above her ankles, just air.
Still, my father had the features of a French legionnaire. An aristocrat. A mystery writer. A painter of abstractions. Give him a series of hats—a black beret, a turban, a sailor’s cap—and you could have had your classically attractive anyman: sailor, artist, sultan. Instead, he was simple. Friendly. A school administrator. As he passed the secretaries who were at his disposal with their beige panty hose, soft breasts behind soft sweaters, toes pinched into skinny shoes, my father glistened.
“Good morning, Mr. Connors,” a woman with a file folder in her hand said, fanning the folder in our direction, opening her eyes wide. “Is this your daughter?”
“No.” My father raised his dark deadpan eyebrows at her. “Mindy, I’d like you to meet my new secretary, Kat.”
Every time my father said this, and my father said this all day, a woman would open her slippery red mouth as wide as she could to laugh.
What’s wrong with this picture? I thought, remembering the puzzles we puzzled out in kindergarten—
Three dogs and a toaster: Which one doesn’t fit?
At home, my father’s corniness would be met with grimaces from my mother, pain spreading itself across her face as if she’d been poked in the small of her back by a very hot pitchfork, or she’d shake her head. She might say, “Oh, please,” or leave the room—or, if they were in the car together, look out the window blankly, saying nothing.
But here, his corniness was charming. Back in their break room, over cups of instant coffee and sandwiches slipped out of plastic bags and a haze of cigarette smoke winding exotic, haremlike, around them, those secretaries must have talked about my father like a pleasant, shared master. Here and there, a foot was slipped out of a shoe, tucked up under a thigh.
He could have had one or two of them, I’m sure. The skinny blond. The sweet and slightly giddy one. The one with shapely calves sashaying beneath her pleats.
Flattered to be chosen, she would have kept it quiet. She’d have met him on the sly, in a motel, black teddy stashed in her pocketbook, diaphragm already in. She’d have done whatever she could to please him in bed, just as she always tried to do his typing with a flourish, file his papers with style.
Then, back at work, she’d have kept her mouth shut. She’d have stopped lunching with her girlfriends if she had to, started keeping to herself. And when, a few months later, he broke the news that he couldn’t risk it anymore—his wife was asking questions—she might have been generous enough to quit, to find a job in another office, even if it meant a bit less pay, the loss of some fringe benefit she’d grown used to having but could, finally, manage without. And, years later, when she passed him with his wife and daughter on a street in town, she would politely look down at her shoes and walk on.
But my father was far too simple for this.
His imagination was limited, and, for whatever reason, it was only my mother he loved.
I know.
I know because I was their daughter. Their only child. The product of their marriage. A soft, lopped-off part of it. I saw the looks he sent her, though he hardly spoke to her. (“A man of few words,” my mother would snort at his back when he’d offered a one-word answer to some complicated question she’d asked.)
Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could lift the lid and precious gems would spill all over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy—an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter.
There was never any of that in our house either.
“Evie, what can I do to cheer you up?” he might ask her on a Saturday when she’d spent all day complaining. He meant a movie, a drive, a quart of ice cream. She’d say, “Just pick up your dirty socks. That’s all I want,” and she’d be looking hard at his feet propped up on the ottoman when she said it, her jawbone making vicious little squirrel movements when she closed her mouth.
But the fact that she hated him did not seem to lessen his love for her. When she was late coming home from the mall, he’d twist the snug wedding band around and around on his finger—always conscious of her, not forgetting for a minute that he was married, looking out the window at an unfathomably high and empty sky.
He had her photo, too, enlarged, on the wall of his office, framed in oak. In it, my mother smirked into the sun at the slippery edge of a river—the Chagrin River, which ran past our subdivision, a famous river:
Once, between Cleveland and the lake, an oil glaze on that river caught fire like some stripper’s slippery negligee tossed onto the water, and it went smoking through the city and its valley of warehouses, steel mills, refineries, rubber factories—through the suburbs, where the stench and the fames and the flames were politely ignored—and it passed, then, into the country, spitting cinders into the wind, burning itself past the gawking sheep and cows, burning itself down to the great, polluted, viscous, all-forgiving mouth of Lake Erie.
That afternoon, when I was ten and went to his office with him, two or three times my father stood up from his desk, went over to that photograph on the wall, and looked carefully into it. Then he’d sit back down, seeming thoughtful, and watch the snow fall in soggy fragments of light outside.
I sat across from him. I
t was a long afternoon. The light from the window was so bright, we could barely open our eyes. My father tapped his pencil on his thigh, and as he did, it made a rubbery yellow blur in his hand. His desk was mahogany, buffed, with only a desk calendar, an ink blotter, a leather-bound appointment book and a coffee cup full of pens on it. I could see the elastic band of his Timex peeking out of his sleeve, cuffing his wrist with time as if he were its prisoner—time turned to x’s and scattered into the void.
My father didn’t seem to have any work to do that afternoon, and it bothered me. I could too easily imagine him sitting in that chair every day, watching the sky throw wet blankets all over the world—the parade of his life passing by the window with its threatening clowns, big-breasted women on the backs of white horses, asthmatic elephants wheezing in an icy rain as he tapped a too sharp pencil on his thigh.
As he tapped, that pencil made a solid, dispensable sound.
Then, after about half an hour of this, his secretary came in—all business, but her cheeks were flushed. She had on too much cheap perfume, and it trailed her in scented veils, filling my father’s office with an awful sweetness, like decay. It was a smell I recognized because, during that fall, each morning on my walk to school I’d passed a squirrel that had been flattened by the tires of a car and tossed to the side of the street, near the curb, where it was slowly vanishing—
And, although, after my first glimpse of that bristled, ash-blond fur softened by blood and guts and time, I’d cross the street to avoid seeing it again, I could not avoid smelling it, and the smell of it got stronger every day—sweeter and sweeter.