White Bird in a Blizzard Read online

  Though, clearly, my mother could be anywhere right now, doing anything. She could be visiting a shrink, or at a shrink convention, or studying to be a shrink herself, for all I know. At Harvard. Or Berkeley.

  This is the way I’ve begun to think. Every morning I lie in bed and imagine the most absurd place my mother could be.

  This morning, the Shrine circus came to mind, which led me to imagine my mother in sequins, brandishing a whip in a cage of yawning tigers. I pictured her going back to a trailer with a clown after the show was over, helping him take off his makeup with a blob of cold cream on a rectangle of Kleenex.

  But when the makeup was off—that greasy frown—I couldn’t envision a face for my mother’s new lover. It was as if she’d wiped his face off with the makeup, and he was looking in the mirror for it as my mother filed her fingernails behind him. A clownish blank.

  “Katrina’s a nice name,” Dr. Phaler says, fingering the chain that holds her spectacles. “You don’t use it?”

  “No.” I shake my head too slowly—perhaps I appear despondent. With a lighter tone I add, “My mother wanted to call me Kat. She wanted a cat.”

  Dr. Phaler doesn’t laugh.

  “So, on the phone you said your boyfriend suggested you see me. How can I help?”

  The question throws me. I hadn’t thought of myself as here for help. I’d imagined I was here to defy analysis, to banter wittily with a professional about my personal life until she managed to wrestle some kernel of truth out of my clenched fist, weasel some secret out of my subconscious mind. Remember Spellbound?

  Surely I, too, had something extraordinary repressed, something Dr. Phaler was being paid a hundred dollars an hour to find—the way Ingrid Bergman forced Gregory Peck to remember how he’d slid down a banister into his brother’s back as a child and impaled him on a gate.

  Gregory Peck held his head a lot during his long psychiatric sessions, trying to keep it in, twisting around in close-up after close-up, looking exquisitely tortured—all that guilt and grief—while Ingrid Bergman kept on needling him. Couldn’t Dr. Phaler do something similar for me, shine her professional flashlight to the bottom of that well, that quiet ice at the center of myself, where my guilt, or grief, or anger, or mother still was?

  Then, I’d have a good long life fall of healthy relationships and mature responses to life’s inevitable ups and downs—spared all the psychosis and neurosis for which I am otherwise headed:

  The frigidity, or nymphomania.

  The handwashing.

  The hair twirling.

  The drive to fail, or the compulsive need to achieve.

  Perhaps I could dredge my memory, the way Peck did, and make some room in there so I could heal, or begin the healing process.

  Except that there doesn’t seem to be much dark mystery in there to dredge.

  I’ve tried.

  Over and over.

  Night after night.

  There must be some reason I feel nothing.

  Surely it is not just that I feel nothing.

  Surely I am suffering some exquisite torture, too. I am sensitive. I am good. Surely I am a victim of something, not nothing. I am not merely devoid of feeling, am I? I must be troubled. The troubled are everywhere. There are books and television shows and whole industries devoted to them—magazines for them to read, hot lines for them to call, uplifting magnets to stick on their refrigerators. They surround us, loving too much, crying real tears, confessing their sins and being forgiven.

  But there are no twelve-step programs for people who are selfish, or heartless, or shallow, as most people seem to be. There are no Monday night movies about girls who aren’t troubled at all.

  Instead, the girls on the Monday night movies are fragile, and big-eyed, and too sensitive for this world, and the bad things that happen to them bother them a lot. Their beauty is the beauty of suffering endured. You can always see their collarbones under the flimsy dresses they wear, and darkness gathers there.

  But I have never been able to imagine myself in one of those movies. Until my mother left, my life seemed ordinary, and dull, and untroubled. No “funny” games with uncles. No vague memories of my father torturing my childhood pets. I never had any childhood pets. Just a glimpse here or there of my mother in a bathrobe, looking annoyed. A few dull family outings—my father with a fishing pole, my mother running after a paper napkin that got loose from the picnic basket and flew across the park. There was a trip out West when I was five. I had to get out of the car to pee in the desert and got red dust on my knees. When I climbed back into the car, I asked my father where we were.

  “Death Valley,” he said.

  I slept all the way to the ocean while a groggy wand of sun moved back and forth across my face.

  I remember a beesting at Great Serpent Mound National Park one summer. A twisted ankle at the circus. A Jujube caught in my molar at the movies: I had to go to the rest room to dig it out.

  Nothing. Less than nothing. A childhood without trauma. Who ever heard of such a thing?

  Even now, I feel just lightness when I consider my life, even more lightness than ever now that my mother’s gone, as if I am carrying a hollow cake with me wherever I go, balancing it on a tray that wants to sail out of my hands like a kite in wind.

  What can an analyst possibly analyze out of such a life?

  But that’s exactly how it is in the movies: You resist all the lust and tenderness and terror, while your shrink ice-picks at you until your head’s been cracked.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess you helped Mrs. Hillman when her husband left—”

  Nothing from Dr. Phaler. Not even a nod. Patient/doctor confidentiality, I suppose. She can’t even clear her throat.

  “And, I guess, well, my mother left.”

  Now she cocks her head as if she’s heard a flute note in the distance.

  A few seconds pass.

  She says, “Your mother left.”

  I lift and drop my shoulder. The left one. The side of reason, and control.

  Or is that the right?

  I’m looking at her knees, which are like the flat faces of two owls.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yes.”

  “Where did she go?” Dr. Phaler asks.

  “That’s an excellent question,” I answer.

  TWO

  January 1987

  “I’M UP HERE!” I HEAR HER SHOUT.

  “Over here!”

  “Down here!”

  It doesn’t matter. I’m locked in. I pound my fists on the lid of this—whatever it is—until my hands ache. She’s out there, telling me finally where she is, but I’m stuck in this cold, locked box. This void. This square cut out of winter air with a pair of very sharp shears.

  When I wake up, there’s snow spitting under my window shade, melting mid-bedroom, and I remember opening my window before I went to bed, desperate for fresh air because the smell of her perfume—eau-de-vie—wafting down the hall, leaking up under my bedroom door, had been so strong I thought that I might choke to death on the scent of my mother in my sleep.

  IT’S A YEAR TO THE DAY SINCE SHE LEFT—WITHOUT A WORD, without a trace, without her coat, without her purse, without so much as a glass slipper dropped behind her in the driveway, run over, crunched to glittering Cinderella bits.

  The first few months she was gone, Detective Scieziesciez would call every few days to ask, again, if we had heard from her, and to assure us that he hadn’t. The flyers his people put up all over town—the ones with her photograph, poorly reproduced, grimacing into my father’s camera on Christmas morning—were taken down or blew away in the winter wind. No one even called with some crank clue, some paranoid theory linking my mother’s disappearance to the sighting of a UFO over Lake Erie.

  What can you do? It’s a free country. If a grown woman wants to disappear in it, she can. None of the authorities we’ve spoken to has had any authority over this kind of thing, the kind of thing involving women who turn to dust i
n the suburbs and sweep themselves up. God knows, as the saying goes, where she’s gone. And He’s not talking.

  Nor have any of the authorities expressed much concern. When we went to the Bureau of Missing Persons, everyone we spoke to took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote my mother’s name at the top, then wrote “Adult White Female” underneath it, as though that might conjure her up.

  If anything, I imagine they felt sympathy for her. Looking up from that blank sheet to my father’s face, down at that emptiness again, they might have been able to imagine her life, and hoped she’d managed to escape.

  “We see a hundred cases of missing wives a week,” a missing persons secretary said, laying a hand on my father’s hand, as if it would make him feel better. She had fingernails as long as hooks, a paperback book hidden under her telephone switchboard, Women Who Love Too Much, and she snuck it back out before we’d even left her desk. It seemed, that year, that every secretary in every office had that book on her desk, spine broken.

  When she smiled good-bye her teeth looked false and bright.

  Just once, Detective Scieziesciez came to the house. It was morning, and my father had already left for work. “Dad,” I’d shouted down to him from the upstairs bathroom while he was huffing around in the hallway waiting for me, “just go. I’ll walk. I’m going to have to be late.”

  “Are you sure, Kat?”

  He said it generously, but I could tell he was annoyed. His voice sounded thin, transparent, like a piece of cloth stretched tightly over the mouth of a jar.

  Tardiness, in my father’s book, was a sin right up there next to homicide, although I knew he wouldn’t reprimand me for it. Always, we’d had a polite relationship, but since my mother disappeared, it had become even more so. It had become something formal, Victorian, lacking even the intimacy of irritation. When I said I didn’t feel well, didn’t want to go to school, or was going to be late, he never asked me why, and I suspected it might be because he was afraid I might tell him I’d gotten my period, and had cramps, or some other terrible embarassment from which neither of us would ever fully recover.

  That morning, I was running late for school because I’d spent too much time trying to decide what to wear. I was upstairs, standing in the bathroom with a pile of my own discarded clothes at my feet, naked except for a flowered bra and matching panties. It had been months since my mother left, and the last thing I expected was that Detective Scieziesciez would pull up unannounced in his unmarked car.

  I heard a knock on the door, and I peeked out from under the mini-blinds in the bathroom window, and I could see him pacing around down there on our front steps in a trench coat, smoking a cigarette, looking up toward the bathroom window.

  I dropped the blinds, grabbed a red turtleneck sweater and pulled it on, a plaid skirt and pulled it up—a kind of schoolgirl costume I’d never truly considered wearing to school—and I ran barefoot down the stairs.

  Detective Scieziesciez knocked, again, hard and insistently on the front door as I was opening it, and he lost his balance briefly, knocking on the emptiness, stumbling into the house, and looking like a handsome actor playing the part of a detective—dark-haired, maybe forty years old, five o’clock shadow dusking his strong jaw, though it was still only early morning.

  I was impressed by that shadow, that implication of unbridled beard. It made Detective Scieziesciez look like a man with such a surplus of virility he couldn’t possibly shave it off. I’d never actually seen him in the flesh, just listened to his husky voice on our answering machine, seen his letters lying on the kitchen table where my father left them—official messages regarding the ongoing investigation into Eve Connors’s disappearance, which was being handled with appropriate gravity and attention (although, in those letters, often her name was misspelled as Eve Conyers, or Eva Connors).

  He introduced himself, asked if he could have a look around.

  As I’ve said, I was impressed by the five o’clock shadow, the trench coat, the smell of fresh smoke on the detective, but I was also a little annoyed. It was almost spring. My mother had been gone since January, and it seemed crazy and unreasonable to want to search the house at such a late date. If there’d been a murder weapon on the kitchen counter—a big, bloody spoon—we’d had plenty of time to find it ourselves.

  Still, the detective looked damp and sexy wiping his muddy shoes on our rug. I looked down at those muddy prints, affected. Although I realized that I shouldn’t just let this stranger in without checking some kind of ID—a badge, passport, dog tags?—I stepped out of his way and let him pass me in the hallway. The idea of not letting him in seemed more foolish than letting him—as if, while standing on the deck of the Titanic, I’d been offered a seat on a lifeboat and decided not to take it because I was afraid it might spring a leak.

  I could smell deodorant soap under his coat, and inhaled as much of it as I could as he passed.

  It had been a long time since I’d felt excited—sexually or otherwise. Some time in February, it seemed, a kind of spongy numbness had settled into my imagination, a physical numbness in my brain, not unlike the rather pleasant exhaustion one feels after a long, hard hike. I slept hard every night, never daydreamed, rarely worried about anything more than what to wear to school. I thought, perhaps, that I was becoming more like my father. Food tasted good. Television entertained. Work was work. Time passed, and the weather changed.

  And sex seemed unnecessary. Phil and I were still together, still a recognized high school couple, still spending our lunch period together, whispering through study hall, smoking cigarettes in his father’s car on the short drive home from school, but we hadn’t had sex since my mother disappeared, never took our clothes off in one another’s presence again, almost never even kissed.

  At first, it had been Phil who seemed to have changed.

  That whole first year, he’d wanted to do nothing except fuck. I’d have just climbed into the passenger seat of his father’s sedan, and already he’d have his hands inside my shirt, moving around fast, as if he’d lost something slippery in there. When we parked in the empty lot of some strip mall late at night, the windows would steam up like the snake house at the zoo—the deep weedy humidity of reptiles crawling over and under one another behind glass aquarium cases, and the night around that sedan would be a darkening green, closing down on us like eggs in a huge, watering mouth.

  Then, suddenly, Phil wanted nothing—no physical contact at all.

  For Valentine’s Day I bought a red satin bra and panties at the mall and invited him over. But he looked sad when he saw them.

  “I don’t feel very well,” he said, and I put my clothes back on.

  When I looked out my bedroom window I could see something small and blond-furred down there that had been run over in the road. It made a red sash of blood in the snow between two tire tracks. The naked trees were fringed with a loose, bluish fog. It looked like a Valentine—beautiful, brutal, cold—and my sexy underwear seemed to burn against my skin.

  I was horny—a word I’d always hated, with its connotation of clumsy eagerness and need—and felt humiliated, standing there at the window, by my desire. It had only been a few weeks since my mother had vanished, and those first few weeks I wanted sex more than ever. I thought about it constantly—in bed, in the shower, in Great Books, in the passenger seat of my father’s car as he drove me to school.

  And then one day my desire was simply turned off like a faucet, as if someone had called the water company while I was gone, and when I got back home, there was nothing but a dry, sucking sound when I tried to turn it on.

  But as I watched Detective Scieziesciez’s back as he passed through our living room I could imagine straddling his hips in my mother’s armchair, my hands in his hair, my mouth against his. It was as if Detective Scieziesciez shed a subliminal mist of maleness into the air as he passed—musky, intoxicating.

  Perhaps, I thought, he had a gun under that trench coat, and knew how to use it. Perhaps, I
thought, something exotic might happen right here in our Garden Heights home with Detective Scieziesciez in it.

  Detective Scieziesciez looked around the kitchen, turned, smiled at me, and said, “Have your dad call me when he gets back, sweetheart.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Everything looks perfectly normal here,” he said, gesturing toward the kitchen, where the Formica glowed in the sterile morning light. “Perfectly in order—but, of course, in a case like this, we have to double-check every little thing.”

  “Double check,” I repeated in my head, “every little thing.” It was absurd, of course, since my mother had been gone since January, and this was the first we’d seen of the detective, the first visit we’d had from any authority whatsoever. Double-checking didn’t seem to be what he was up to, let alone every little thing, since he’d spent hardly five minutes in the house.

  Still, I was hoping he’d come back. When I opened the door to let him out, the early spring air smelled blatantly of sex: snails and garlic and muck.

  MY FATHER CALLED THE DETECTIVE THAT EVENING WHEN HE got home from work, and when I asked what he’d wanted, my father said, “Detective Shh-shh-shh wants me to take a lie detector test.”

  “You?” I asked. The word shot out of me like a bat flying fast and blind into a picture window. I looked at my father’s pale plate of a face—the face of a man who took an absurd amount of pride in never having told a lie, his face like a bare lightbulb, all nakedness and surprise. My father couldn’t hide anything in the plainness of that.

  Once, my mother accused him of lying to her about the price of a strand of pearls he’d bought for her birthday—she didn’t believe they were as expensive as he said—and she’d held them up to the light of the kitchen window, looking hard.