White Bird in a Blizzard Read online

  Bless my mother, I think some days, lying on her side of the bed, the bed she shared for twenty years with my father, looking at the ceiling, trying to imagine it from her perspective:

  She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space—all meteors, no atmosphere.

  There she’d be, idling in the station wagon outside my elementary school, wearing a black turtleneck sweater and small gold hoops in her ears—beautiful and simmering. I’d come skipping out of the orange double doors with my book bag and braids looking like a daughter you might have in an ad, happy to see you, having learned the names of the continents that day. The bloated lung of Africa, the broken arm of Europe in a cast. Now, I could point those out. But, looking at me, my mother would seem to have forgotten who I was, why I was bounding into her car with some atrocity of crayon and construction paper in my hand with “for momy” written on it. She’d seem annoyed by my drooping kneesocks. Or a dry mustache of milk on my upper lip. As we drove home, she’d ask me about my day, but when I started to tell her about art or gym, she’d hush me, turn up the radio, while the announcer told her something she would rather hear, something about casualties and accidents and prisoners of war.

  Still, there my mother would be—predictable, reliable—every afternoon, waiting for me. And in the morning, when she dropped me off, she’d hug me tight, kiss my hair three or four times, my cheek, the top of my head. “See you after school,” she’d say, and look at me with sweetness like a sad song played on the radio so many times you couldn’t hear the sadness anymore.

  And every Christmas she’d bake fifty dozen of the most elaborate cookies you’d ever seen. Bells and doves and stars. Cookies shaped carefully into wreaths and candy canes, dough dyed green and red, with bows, with miniature poinsettias, the petals of which she’d clipped with little manicure scissors. Finnish chestnut fingers dipped in melted chocolate. Pfefferneusse. Cut-out cookies. Santas with glittering blue eyes, rosy cheeks, coconut beards. Christmas trees crowned with blonde and microscopic angels playing golden trumpets.

  She had to use a magnifying glass to decorate their faces.

  She had to use a skinny paintbrush dipped in colored egg white to shellac the trees with melted sugar so they glistened as if a fresh snow had just fallen on their branches.

  Five dozen per batch.

  Fifty dozen before she was done.

  By June of every year, she’d have already made the dough, already have ten pounds of it wrapped in wax paper waiting in the freezer in the basement.

  We’d gone through two freezers storing that. Years and years ago, the Ice-Master hummed itself to death in the basement. Then the Frigidaire. Now, the Coldspot.

  We leave that Coldspot and its contents undisturbed. The dough in there belongs to my mother, and now the freezer is just a shelf collecting our lint and junk. A sock that’s come out of the dryer, crackling with static, having mysteriously lost its mate. Bundles of old newspapers. My father has begun to move those from the basement floor, where they’ve been gathering for a decade, to the top of the freezer.

  But for years my mother baked cookies out of that frozen dough, and those cookies made her the envy of the other mothers and their children. Plate after paper plate of her perfect perfection on display.

  Still, she’d scowl at me as I ate those cookies.

  “Jesus,” she’d say as I bit into the sweet dust of an angel’s wing, “you’re getting fatter by the hour, Kat.”

  So, this was my mother. So?

  We all had crappy childhoods. So?

  And, of course, she never slapped me. We lived in a suburb without violence. My father didn’t drink. He didn’t even smoke. We had peace and money beyond the wildest dreams of 99 percent of the world—as much food as we could eat, as much Pepsi as we could drink. In the winter, we just turned the dial as high as we wanted and there was heat. We simply pressed a handle to flush our waste away. And water—as cold as we wanted, or as hot. What exactly did I want? How much more plenty could I have gotten?

  Still, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine a huge, silent bomb detonating over our house, filling the air with a clean, poisonous gas that would get in my eyes and blind me, smell like bleach, kill us in our sleep.

  My hair, I’d think in the morning as I passed the mirror in the hallway and caught a glimpse of my own light reflected in it, the refraction of a daughter she didn’t want me to be, a daughter she had and had not wanted to have.

  Where is she? I think now, passing that mirror, looking for myself.

  Every night I pass that mirror on the way to my bedroom in the half dark of the hallway, and it looks like a cleft in the wall, a crack filled with dreams, tingling, star infested, a door to another dimension.

  Where is she? I ask it, looking at me. And why did she leave?

  “I’M NOT SURE,” I SAY, AND DR. PHALER NODS. HER WOOL suit shimmers.

  Dr. Phaler has clothes like moods. Passive, soft, pastel sweaters. Bitter navy blue suits and scarves decorated with geometric shapes, as sharp as words you’ve uttered and can’t take back, words you have to wear, now, as a punishment around your neck.

  She has a few premenstrual dresses, too—too tight, trying too hard to keep too much in, ready to let loose in an explosion of skin, popping the pearl buttons, ripping through the ribbons and lace—though Dr. Phaler is in her fifties. She must be done with blood. Or maybe not—

  Once, I arrived twenty minutes early to my appointment and surprised her in the rest room in the hall outside her waiting room. She was wrapping something in tissue paper, and it looked like a tampon, or a newborn kitten—something bloody, with a tail. I might have gasped when I saw it in her hand.

  “I’ll be with you in twenty minutes,” she’d said, professionally, throwing whatever it was into the trash.

  But today she is a conservative bride, getting married at the courthouse in a hurry. But a bride with a secret, perhaps: Under her white skirt, I can see panty lines—a secret she’s tried to suppress.

  “I don’t miss her,” I continue.

  Dr. Phaler bites her lower lip. “No.” She shakes her head, and her blonde hair, which she’s cut since I first came to see her about a year ago, clings in wisps to her eyes and lips. She whisks it away with her fingertips. “No, I didn’t think you did.”

  Last January, Dr. Phaler would not have given me even this—this little hint that she knew who I was, suspected how I felt. In the beginning she only wanted to hear about my dreams—all those snowstorms I’d lost my mother in, all those locked trunks and frozen outhouses and buses skidding off the ice into ravines. Nodding, nodding, nodding.

  That nodding, I must admit, gave me confidence. It was as if that nodding gave an order to everything, an A-okay: The Doctor has heard all this before, read it in a textbook, taken and passed a test on it.

  That nodding made it seem as if those details, as random as they appeared, made some sense, added up to something for Dr. Phaler, accorded with her professional opinions, her scientific constructs, and I began to see a pattern in them myself—began to see the ways in which those blizzards represented my mother’s distance, symbolized her emotional withholding, how her disapproval had become a metaphor in my dreams since she’d abandoned me for real, after so many years of cool remove, icy glances across the dining room table at my father and me—

  And as I came to these conclusions, Dr. Phaler nodded.

  Only once she said, “Your mother sounds cold-hearted,” and then we both nodded in approval at how snugly all the pieces—the adjectives and the nouns and the experience and the dreams—fit: nodded at how simple the mind, in all its complexity, is. Perhaps we each pictured a heart, frozen in mid-beat, locked in a human ice chest.

  It was at the end of one of those sessions, in the midst of one of these epiphanies, that I finally cried, and Dr. Phaler whipped out her box of sticky tissues—epidermal a
nd pink.

  But as the year spun forward, and I spent every Thursday from 4:00 to 4:50 in her office with its nearly empty bookcases and comfortable purple chairs, she started to ask for specifics. I told her how my mother, since I was a child, had told me I was fat, had not allowed me to put one morsel of food in my mouth without sneering at it—hexing, cursing, poisoning it—first. I told her how, in the weeks before she left, she’d begun to walk around the house half dressed, flirt with Phil, call me a pig in front of him—and Dr. Phaler, blue eyes darting around the room, pressed me for more. I told her about the night my mother came into my room and yanked the sheets off me, demanded to know if I was fucking Phil, called me a slut, and told me I was too fat and ugly to please a boy like that—and, finally, after all the hours of composure and nodding, nodding and composure, Dr. Phaler looked appalled and said, “What kind of mother would do a thing like that?”

  It was her first judgment, and it stunned me.

  Inexplicably, I felt something rush into my mouth—placenta, tentacles, phlegm—and, without missing a beat, I said, “My mother.”

  Of course, it had been rhetorical, and, answering that question, I sounded defensive, angry, all my naked longing and loss in those two words.

  After that, at least once a session, Dr. Phaler asked that question, but I no longer answered.

  Now, Dr. Phaler is braiding the silver chain from which her silver glasses dangle between her fingers. The fingers are elegant. The fingers of beautiful women—aren’t they always like fancy cookies? Lady fingers.

  I could imagine Dr. Phaler forty years ago, a little girl carrying a napkinful of cookies across the jade green of a lawn party in her own honor.

  “No,” she says, “I didn’t expect you to say you miss your mother, but I do wonder how her absence for one full year might make you feel.”

  I swallow. I say, “Surprised, I guess. I guess I’m surprised.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I guess I’m surprised she could hold out this long. I guess if nothing else I thought she’d come back for money, or shoes, or something else she needed.”

  “What about you?” Dr. Phaler sets those pale blue eyes on me. “Is it surprising that she could hold out this long on you?”

  Now Dr. Phaler’s glaring at the floor, at the face of my bad mother projected on her expensive oriental rug. She does not approve of my mother. She is paid to disapprove of my mother. It is what psychologists like her do for a living all day all over this country—express outrage at the failings of our mothers.

  But why? Among some species, it’s considered natural enough for a mother to gobble down her young—

  A mother gets hungry.

  A mother gets bored.

  And who could blame her? As a baby, you were fat, and pukey, and dull. You knew only a handful of words, but she spent all day trying to talk to you. You clamped your mouth shut as she fed you, then knocked the spoon from her hands, laughed as it clanged across the floor. You shit your pants when she dressed you up, then screamed as she changed your clothes. You threw your shoe from the car window. You scratched your name in the paneling on the side of the station wagon.

  “Do you love Mama?” she asked, and you shook your head no, no, no.

  Not guilty by reason of insanity, any reasonable jury could conclude.

  “Kat,” she says, “I asked you a question. Aren’t you surprised that she could hold out a whole year on you?”

  Dear, beautiful Dr. Phaler—

  Angel of Naivete.

  Angel of Stupid Questions.

  For a year her predictability, her belief in the simplicity, the banality, of the human brain has thrilled and astounded and insulted me—

  “No,” I say, and shake my head. “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  SHE’S WEARING A WHITE NIGHTGOWN, STANDING IN THE doorway of my bedroom. “Kat,” she says, “I put my hands in the water, and they disappeared.”

  She holds her arms up, the sleeves of her nightgown slip down to the elbows, and I can see that the hands are gone.

  “What water?” I want to know: I’m her daughter. I’m worried about my own hands.

  “The dishwater,” she says. “I was feeling the bottom of the sink for a spoon. The water was too cold.”

  I look at my fingers, which are longer than I remember them. They look fragile, and thin. From now on I’ll be more careful, I think.

  I look at my mother again.

  There’s no blood.

  It’s as if her wrists have sucked the hands into their sockets like something stared at too long, sealed up cleanly in two sealed eyes.

  PHIL’S MOTHER SEARCHES THE ROOM WITH HER EAR, COCKING her head, moving it from side to side. “Do you hear that?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “Hear what?”

  “It sounds like scratching,” she says, then makes the sound, “Scratch, scratch, scratch.”

  “The furnace?” I offer, but she seems unconvinced.

  “No,” she says. “It’s electrical. Like radio static. But regular. Rhythmical.”

  Phil looks annoyed: One good thing about having a blind mother is being able to roll your eyes right at her without getting slapped. Mrs. Hillman’s face is pointed in his direction, but she can’t see his expression—the boredom and total irritation with which he glares at her.

  Still, I’m embarrassed for Mrs. Hillman. I look at her feet. Shoeless, in beige panty hose, they look a bit like Cornish hens, or fists—gnarled, with crooked, plucked wings. Her legs aren’t long enough for those feet to touch the carpet as she sits back in my mother’s stiff armchair, which also has stunted wings. She’s a small woman, with drab curls. No makeup. She’s wearing a housedress with big brown flowers on it—who ever saw a brown flower?—as if the garden’s gone stale, all the roses overdone by sun or rusted in the rain, the gardener having long ago defaulted on his obligations.

  Perhaps the salesgirls had a big, silent laugh behind the cash register as the blind lady bought that dress.

  Mrs. Hillman is nothing like the other mothers in Garden Heights with their chunky gold jewelry, their designer slacks. She’s nothing like my mother, who, despite her fondness for Phil, couldn’t stand Mrs. Hillman.

  “I know the new neighbors,” I said one evening, trying to sound casual. Mrs. Lefkowsky, who’d lived next door to us all the years we’d lived in Garden Heights, had died. It was winter then, too, and a damp snow had begun to fall outside—big, white flakes in the pewter blue 5 P.M. sky. My mother was coming in from outside, and I could see that snow behind her when she opened the front door and stepped into the living room, a blanket of it covering Garden Heights with a camouflage of purity. Some of it was in her hair.

  Next door, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s porch light was on, but, of course, no one was home. She’d been dead for a month. The shades were pulled in each of her square windows, as if to separate the dark emptiness on the outside from the dark emptiness inside. Snow had buried her front steps, too—cloaked the roof in white corpse hair, and I remembered my mother’s bitter adages about snow, quotations taken from her own mother:

  The farmer’s wife in heaven is plucking her white hen.

  Or, God is beating his angels again.

  I thought of our dead neighbor, Mrs. Lefkowsky, wearing a pair of skeletal wings in a frenetic afterlife. God going after her with his fists. A flurry of spine and feathers, which turned silver, then grizzled, as they hit the ground.

  We hadn’t liked her much, or thought about her often—Mrs. Lefkowsky. She was just the Daffodil Lady, the Widow Next Door. And then she died, and her daughter, along with her stubby husband, pulled up in a U-Haul and hauled her things away. My mother and I watched them from the kitchen window one Saturday afternoon. They were bundled in down jackets, stumbling across the front yard as they struggled with an olive green army trunk between them.

  That trunk looked so heavy, I wondered what could possibly be in it. Salvaged bricks? Gold doubloons?

 
When that trunk slipped between them, it tore a gaping hole in the daughter’s jacket, and a breath of feathers flew out. From the kitchen window it looked as if the daughter’s body were a mattress full of fluff, hacked up. I could see her husband pick them out of his eyes, knock them out of his hair, spit them into the wind like a dry, choking snow.

  My father was sitting in his La-Z-Boy with an ankle up on his knee, shaking his plaid slipper. “They’re having some trouble over there,” my mother said to him. “Maybe you should offer to help.”

  My mother had worried, after Mrs. Lefkowky’s house was emptied out, that it might be sold to someone of poor quality, someone who might put plastic garden ornaments in the yard, someone with sticky children. So I was eager to give her the good news about Phil and his mother. She’d just come from the dentist, of whom she’d spoken highly for years, and often, and she was smiling.

  Apparently, Dr. Heine was an attentive dentist. He polished my mother’s teeth like miniature windows, gagging my mother pleasantly with his fat fingers, leaning over her in a silent and intimate embrace, mingling his minty breath with hers. When she opened her mouth wider, his white shoulder pressed into her neck. “Beautiful,” he said, fingering her gums. “You must take good care of these babies.”

  My mother would swallow with her mouth open and try to smile, as if he were strangling her with her consent, with her blessing choking her to death. Then he’d hold a mirror up so she could see her teeth for herself, and she looked gorgeous in that mirror—flushed, lovely, dark hair subtly mussed, a bit disheveled. “See you in six months?” Dr. Heine would ask, and there was a throaty touch of longing in his voice.