White Bird in a Blizzard Read online

  More like roses steeping in sugar water than dead meat by the second week.

  Like an angel’s miscarried fetus by the end of the month.

  Some precious rag from heaven dropped and stinking now. Lost sweetness itself by the side of the street.

  This was how my father’s secretary smelled, and what she reminded me of as she handed my father a pink square of paper, smiled at me, and left—thighs rubbing nylon lightly across nylon high up under her skirt as she walked. Then my father waved the little square in my direction. “You have a dentist’s appointment tonight,” he said. “Your mother called.”

  Of course, I must have known already, since she’d left the message with his secretary as my father sat in his office, only too available to talk, drumming a flaccid pencil on his pants and staring out the window, that she hadn’t wanted to talk to him. But my father looked across his nearly naked desk—just those doodles on a legal pad—and said, anyway, “Guess she didn’t want to talk to me.”

  There was that watery expression on his face.

  After she disappeared, he would wear that watery mask every day.

  IN THE MORNING, PHIL COMES OVER. I SEE HIM CROSS HIS yard into ours through the shallow garden where Mrs. Lefkowsky—who lived next door until she died last year—planted her hundreds and hundreds of daffodil bulbs. They’re deep under the snow and frozen mud now, like Mrs. Lefkowsky herself, but I can imagine them as Phil trudges over in his big boots, that yellow writhing in the dark, a little light down there, like something you keep in the back of your mind, or buried in your backyard.

  It’s Saturday. My mother has been gone for one week and one day. I’d count up the hours and minutes, too, but she left on a Friday afternoon while I was at school, while my father was at work. We came home to no one. She didn’t leave a note, never packed a bag, only the quick phone call the next day to tell my father she wouldn’t be back, and then the nothing.

  It is a serious matter, I know. The kind of thing that makes the six o’clock news, gets into the local paper. When you go to the supermarket, you see her face on the bulletin board between BABYSITTER NEEDED and I WILL SHOVEL SNOW, and you pause, look at her face, wonder briefly who she was and where she went before you stack your silver shopping cart with frozen TV dinners.

  At school this week, no one said a word to me about my mother’s disappearance, but my teachers seemed shy, and friendly, and even Melody Little, the most popular sophomore girl, nodded at me in the shower after gym. She looked as slick as damp plaster in the steam, but the hot water had turned her thighs fire-truck red.

  It is that kind of serious matter—the kind that makes people who don’t know you like you, speak softly to you, avoid your eyes—but for some reason, I cannot take it seriously myself. I find myself smiling, instead, all the time, laughing too hard at jokes on TV. Last night I couldn’t catch my breath as Johnny Carson did a bad impersonation of George Bush, and my father looked at me sideways, his face lit up in the Tonight Show glow, and said, “Kat, are you really that happy she’s gone?”

  It wasn’t an accusation. He simply wanted to know.

  But after he asked me that, I thought I’d better try to start looking more serious, or troubled. Still, as hard as I try, I can’t get this smile off my face.

  I don’t tell my father about the dreams.

  Night after night I’m in a cave of snow, or my mother is calling to me but I can’t find her in the whiteout all around us. I’m driving slowly over a frozen pond, hear it cracking under me, but can’t open the car door to jump out. Then, there’s snow in the headlights, and suddenly I’m driving ninety-five miles an hour, and she leaps into my path wearing nothing but pearls. I swerve, but I’ve hit something soft and solid, thrown it to the side of the road, and, when I go back to find it, it’s gone.

  Or the light is too bright to find it. Or a white scarf is tied around my eyes. Or the bedroom window’s frozen: I can’t open it. It shatters instead—luminous, flashing—and when I finally see her face, it’s featureless. A helium balloon. Bloated. Her hair, you guessed it, is pure white now, like a white wig on a Styrofoam head, the kind in the window of the wig shop. She’s standing on a crust of snow outside the wig shop in a white nightgown, and there’s a halo hovering above her head—a band of frozen, electric stars.

  They make a whirring sound, revolve into the distance as she starts to run—and that halo, like a hubcap, spins away from my tires and lands, invisible, in a snowbank in the distance.

  That halo, had that really been my mother’s?

  When I wake up, I seem to remember my mother actually wearing a halo like it, standing above my bed in the middle of the night, and it bothers me. I wrack my memory for the details, and can’t get back to sleep.

  Phil wants me to see a shrink. He got the idea from his mother.

  Like my father, Phil is simple.

  Scratch the surface, and there’s just more surface—chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get.

  And this is what you see:

  He has white-blond hair, which he parts in the middle, combs back over his ears. His hair is stuck in the seventies, as if he is a rerun of Three’s Company—cute, but caught in the time warp of television. It’s long in the back—at least an inch below his collar, where it curls up smoothly, ladling light. He’s tall, but not broad shouldered, so he appears perpetually to stoop, as if he’s just stepped into a room with a low ceiling, as if even the sky might not be high enough for Phil.

  He thinks he is a ladies’ man, and, as with the idea of me going to a shrink, I think he got this impression from his mother, who is blind. On our second date, he brought me next door to meet her, and she said, “My son is pretty, don’t you think?” moving her white fingers around on his face. He pushed her away—gently, but it was a push.

  Before she disappeared, my own mother said, bemused, watching Phil cross our lawn on his way to our house, “That boy thinks he’s a crumb off the loaf of love.” Something in the way he was carrying himself must have made her say it. Jaunty teenage rooster. Cocky. A boy who likes the way he looks when he catches a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror.

  Even my mother must have been, as I am, charmed by Phil—his naked pride, walking around all day with his ego exposed, the boyish vanity.

  As I’ve said, his mother is blind, and his father left them two years ago, so Phil is now the one who leads his stone-blind mother around town by the arm.

  “Here’s the railing,” he might say, folding her bony fingers around a railing.

  “Here’s the ladies’ room”—placing her hand on the doorknob, looking worried as he lets her go into that darkness alone.

  Once, their white cat, Snowman, escaped when Mrs. Hillman opened the front door to feel her way to the mail, and it ran, belly close to the ground, across the street. That cat had never been outdoors before, and it cowered stupidly on the front stoop of the house across the street. From the living room window, my mother and I watched Phil go after Snowman, pick him up, and cradle him like an infant in his arms, bring him home to his blind mother.

  “What a good boy,” my mother said.

  I’d be lying if I said I’d thought much of him, or about him, before he stopped me in the hallway of the high school one day and said he’d be moving in next door. I remember saying, “How do you know where I live?” and he’d looked hurt, as if I were accusing him of something.

  “I saw you in your driveway,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  He looked relieved. He looked down at my shoes, which were flat and black, a pair I left in my locker so I wouldn’t have to walk around in rubber boots all day. I was wearing a maroon sweater and a pair of faded jeans, size fourteen. But my feet were small. They were the feet of a girl God had intended to be thin, but who’d mushroomed, instead, like a cloud.

  Phil smiled at my shoes. “I’m looking forward to being neighbors,” he sa
id.

  A few days after that first give-and-take, a week before he and his mother moved in next door, he stopped me again in the hallway. Wearing a sweatshirt that said PROPERTY OF OHIO BUCKEYES, he looked nervous, itchy, a boy with a bad burn just starting to heal somewhere you couldn’t see. His hair looked yellow under the washout of the hallway’s fluorescent light, and the skin above his upper lip was naked, scraped. That day, his blue eyes were naively wide and gray.

  “Kat,” he said, “would you want—you know—to go to that dance?”

  Winter Formal.

  It had never even crossed my mind that anyone would ask, and certainly not anyone with Phil’s good looks and calm cool. He wasn’t one of the most popular boys. He wasn’t on any teams, but more than one girl was rumored to have a crush on him, to be going somewhere with him. And the popular guys seemed to have respect for Phil. He was tall, and looked strong. I would occasionally overhear those guys talking about the weekend parties that had taken place at someone’s house while their parents were out of town—and Phil had been there, he’d brought beer, and had drunk it, and acted crazy. He was not obscure. The cool kids knew who he was, which, in a way, created him.

  If every soul is just a thought in the mind of God, then every student at Theophilus Reese High School is just a thought in the minds of the cool kids. Without that, you are nothing but a gray shade, indistinguishable from the cinder block, blending into the dull shine of the lockers, something with a shadow but without substance.

  Our high school was named for a farmer whose cow got loose in what was once woods and is now the football field. He chased it all day. He got thirsty, and hot, and then there was a thunderstorm, and Theophilus hid, stupidly, under a tree, which was struck by lightning. Out of the lightning, God spoke, or so the story goes, telling Theophilus to chop down all the trees and build a church.

  He did, and found his cow.

  Now, there are twelve hundred teenagers who go to school where that church once stood, and some of them are rich, and beautiful, and poised, and witty, and well-dressed, and always have been. When they walk down the hall together, it is like a wall of power, all ecstatic laughter and glamour.

  They are like gods among the rest of us, walking faster, looking better.

  And those kids knew who Phil was, but I was invisible, and fat. Why would he ask me? When he asked, I shrugged, half thinking that this was a joke, a prank his buddies had put him up to. “Sure,” I said, as if I were doing him a favor—no skin off my nose—and he looked a bit deflated: one of those fireworks on the Fourth of July that fizzles out halfway into the sky.

  That night, the night of the winter formal, I was 140 pounds of myself in a long pink dress, but Phil didn’t seem to care. He walked from his house next door to get me in a rented tuxedo with big sixties lapels—brand-new but out of fashion—and he looked good in it, like a mock-up of the perfect first date. Teenage heartthrob. Lean but muscled.

  My mother had taken me to buy the dress, and everything I tried on displeased her. “Your coloring is good,” she often told me, by which she meant the pale skin, dark hair, blue eyes that mirrored hers, “but you’re forty pounds overweight.” I would step out of a dressing room with something long and ruffled on, and she’d shake her head and sigh.

  Finally, the pink one was the last straw.

  “Oh, well,” she said, “it’ll have to suffice.”

  And I was painfully aware of the fat as I danced: its folds, its white cream, its fluid pressure like a rain-swollen creek beneath the dress, which made noises like a thousand little girls whispering viciously against my flesh.

  Garden Heights, Ohio, is not a place to be plump, to be homely, or malodorous, or scarred, or shy. There were girls from my high school at that dance in strapless black sheaths and four-inch heels. Girls as flawless as mannequins, their feet preformed to fit into their mother’s expensive shoes. They didn’t seem to have been born with the nuisances of blood or skin or shame.

  Next to them, at this winter formal, I looked like a feminine whale, paddling the air with my thick fins, stuck between a couple of icebergs, going nowhere fast—a sympathetic character, perhaps, but not lovely at all. If, to anyone, I appeared sexual, it would have been the way in which the inside of a cat’s ears are sexual. As nude as scrubbed fruit. A glimpse of something vaguely obscene—obscene because you hadn’t wanted to see it, because you don’t want to think of something as vulnerable, as personal, as a fat girl’s sexuality exposed.

  And Phil, in his long-limbed blue tux, seemed to be perpetually dancing the funky chicken—arms jerking around his shoulders as if someone were yanking at him with strings from the sky. He thought he could dance—believed in his abilities on the dance floor with the same kind of stubborn confidence with which he believed he was handsome—and, after I got over my initial embarrassment for him, all that energy let loose like a flightless bird beneath the snuffed gym lights, I started to believe that he could dance, too. Watching him flail in front of me as I shuffled in front of him, I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying—dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body—if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you’d crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.

  Phil didn’t stop to think. He just danced.

  We both danced, all night. Couldn’t stop. Out of breath within half an hour, but we danced nonstop for three more hours.

  A few years ago, about a hundred miles into the country from our suburb, there was a farm plagued by stray voltage. An electric current under the pasture was surging up from Toledo Edison, shocking the cows, turning their hooves to walkie-talkies. There was a lawsuit, and for months on the news we heard the details over and over: The farmer’s wife lost weight, her teeth fell out, his daughter started pulling out her eyelashes lash by lash, biting the backs of her hands to get at the static under her skin. When that daughter closed her eyes, she said she saw sparks. And the barn cats sang terribly in the barn before they died.

  But the cows danced the whole time.

  Perhaps they’d been driven mad, but they danced, and there had to have been some joy in that. I had never been happier in my life than I was as I danced with Phil that night. It was as if, with Phil—dancing, or fucking, or just driving around and around in the sedan his father left him when he left—I’d finally found something to do with all the nervous tension of that suburb, which surged through the power lines between our houses and street corners like a small girl’s braids pulled too tight, sending an invisible current into the air, a wave of nervous energy rising, falling, rising.

  That tension—I would lie in bed some nights and imagine I heard its volts and sparks swell an invisible river above our roofs, singing a high whine in my ears, boring into my brain like a wiry nail, the whole subdivision ringing in my ears, until my head and neck would ache from the weight of so much strident silence.

  Like that stray voltage, there was something raucous straining under all the politeness, all the quiet—and, finally with Phil, I found a way to move to it, or sleep through it. I bought a pair of running shoes and a green sweat suit, and when I jogged around the neighborhood—which had seemed so stiff, a stage set of a place, all edges and blades—it melted into a liquid blur, a soft backdrop of flaccid facades and sleepy trees. I let myself get thin, running in circles around Garden Heights. I no longer needed the padding. I had sex.

  “ANY WORD?” HE ASKS.

  “Not one.” I shake my head and shut the front door behind him. Snow’s coming down now in fat, gray, dirty-washcloth flakes, and they drape the lawns and trees with sluggish infant blankets. Who could blame my mother for leaving this place? The sky is falling.

  And, only a few days ago, I noticed a fine layer of dust on the dining room table—the dust she had devoted her life to dusting away. It was already accumulating in gray layers, and it had only been seventy-two hours since she’d
left. When I went into the living room, I saw it there, too, swirling around in the air, settling on the arms of her chairs, the coffee table, a galaxy of dust collapsing from inside itself in slow motion, burying us.

  It was what she’d been doing, chasing dust, all day, every day.

  So I went to the kitchen to get her feather duster with its pink plumes out from under the sink, but when I got back into the living room with it, I had no idea where to start. Dust was everywhere. It was in the light. It was in the air I was breathing. It was graying my hair. I was afraid to use the feather duster, which seemed weightless in my hands. I thought it might make it worse, kick up a whole new storm of dust that would choke or blind me. So, when my father got home from work, I said, “We have to call the Molly Maids. We can’t keep this house clean by ourselves.”

  “I did already,” he said. “They’ll be here tomorrow. They’ll be here every Wednesday.”

  “Shit,” Phil says, untying the sturdy laces of his brown boots. “How could she do this to you?”

  “She wanted out,” I say, looking at Phil’s feet.

  When his boots are off, I see holes in his black socks, and each of his big toes looks vulnerable to me, raw on the beige carpet, as if two sacks of skinned mice have spilled, and Phil looks down then, too, as if he’d like to gather up those spilled mice quickly. Then he shrugs.

  “So?” he asks the wall behind me, where a painting of the ocean hangs, all melancholy flotsam and churning water.

  Seascape it’s called. It’s the only real painting that hangs in our house—a dark ocean my parents bought in a motel lobby in Toledo the year I was born, the year my father got his promotion, the one that turned his youthful energy into a heap of laundry every night at my mother’s feet, the year they moved with me to Garden Heights.