The Melting Season

by Jami Attenberg

  Instead my parents were inside snapping at each other. I could almost hear their jaws clicking from where I sat. I did not know what they were fighting about. I had an idea, but it was only that, and there was a haze around it, like the way the horizon looks after a daylong rainstorm: like the air and the earth will never dry up.

  A month before school started my mother took a day off work and dragged Jenny and me around to a bunch of appointments. Jenny needed new gym shoes for school, I needed notebooks and a binder and some pens. We both had to see the dentist, one after the other. I did not want to go. I did not like the dentist.

  His name was Howard Muttler and he was from Germany, and he had gigantic teeth that were so flat I was sure he filed them every night. He had a big head of blond hair, and he wore some sort of macho cologne and his shirts were always unbuttoned one button too many. He had married a local girl, Tracy Bottoms, after a whirlwind romance during her senior-year trip to Munich, followed by a long-distance courtship that had required Tracy to seek translation assistance regularly from the German teacher at the high school. Howard learned English when Tracy moved to Munich, and she had perfected her German. They lived there for a few years while he finished dental school, and then returned to our town to start his practice. Sometimes I wondered if he was really allowed to be a dentist. Were teeth the same in Germany? But there they were, with an office with his name on it two blocks down from the library. Tracy assisted him, and they would murmur to each other all day long half in German and half in English. I had heard that on Sundays they went to a special church in Lincoln, and I knew they went back to Germany for Christmas, which my mother always asked about.

  “Planning another trip abroad?” she would ask, as if “abroad” were some special place that only she and the Muttlers knew about. As if she had been abroad herself more than once in her life, which I could guarantee she had not. And their office had weird new furniture, shiny and with sharp angles. Like all the regular stuff the rest of us had was not good enough for the Muttlers. It made me nervous. I knew everyone in town from the ground up, but here he was coming from nowhere, and with an accent, no less. And who knows what had happened to Tracy while she was over there? But my mother liked Dr. Muttler a lot. I think she thought his accent made him exotic, and she had always loved foreign languages in general. I thought he sounded like what a horse would sound like if it could talk.

  During my visit with Dr. Muttler, he made a few noises like he did not approve of my teeth, or maybe even me in general. A little tut-tut sound here, a little tsk-tsk sound there. I always felt like he was pressing up against me. His wife, on the other hand, seemed scared to be near me. He left me in the chair for a while and then Tracy came in and took some X-rays. She looked older than she was, like being married automatically aged you. Or maybe it was just being married to a German. Her teeth were filed down, too, and there was gray hair coming in around her face. She had a sharp little figure though. The Bottomses were always an athletic bunch. After a few minutes, Dr. Muttler came back in with my mother. He was holding the X-rays. He put them up on a lighted board and pointed to a couple of teeth. He told us I would need to have my wisdom teeth taken out. Immediately, like the next week. He asked my mother if she felt comfortable with me getting anesthetic shot into my system. How does she do with needles? is what he said. She would have to sign some paperwork. All these things had to happen at once. Everything was changing, that was how I felt. My mother touched Dr. Muttler’s big German forearm and laughed about something. Every man in the world was suddenly funnier than my father, who was now not funny at all. It was a mess.

  The morning of my next appointment with Dr. Muttler, my mother decided to cut my hair. We had been having a bad day already. “I have a million meetings I’m missing today,” she said to nobody in particular as she handed Jenny a glass of orange juice at the kitchen table. My father had already left for work, his good-looking head ducked down as he kissed Jenny and me goodbye, his white pharmacist’s coat loose around his body, no farewell to his wife, not even a silent wave goodbye. Looking back now, that must have been the summer he lost all the weight. He never gained it back, and ever since he had been getting thinner every year.

  As soon as he was gone she started in on us, as if she was carrying on her own fight with him through us. “It’s like no one cares that I have a job,” she said. And we did not. We did not care how many meetings she missed, and we did not care that she wanted her own career. Jenny wanted her home to take care of her, and I wanted to have fun that summer. And now it was the last few weeks of summer, and I was going to have these teeth removed and my cheeks were going to swell up and I was not going to be able to leave the house. That meant Jenny had to stay home, too. The last moments of freedom before I started high school and Jenny started kindergarten, and our mother was worried about a meeting in a faraway office with people we had never met but assumed we would not like. Mysterious people who kept her late, away from us, and away from our father.

  “I think I have a fever,” I said.

  “Right,” said my mother.

  “I’m serious.” I put the back of my hand to my head. “I feel warm.”

  Jenny put her hand to her head, too. “I have a fever, too,” she said.

  “And also I feel like I’m going to hurl everywhere,” I said.

  My mother sat down at the kitchen table and stretched one tiny leg over another, and then put her palms together and then rubbed her index fingers together. She had always reminded me of a cricket when she did that, only no chirping.

  “We will not play any games today,” she said.

  “I want to play a game,” said Jenny. “I like games.”

  “I cannot help it if I am sick,” I said.

  My mother put her index fingers to her chin and studied me for a moment. “You still need that haircut,” she said. She looked at the clock. “I think we have enough time.”

  “I do not want to cut my hair,” I said.

  “You’re getting your hair cut, that much I know, Catherine. It’s either now when I have the time or later when I don’t. If someone were cutting my hair, I’d want them to have the time to do it right.”

  And then a minute later we were in the bathroom, my mother with the scissors, and me staring at myself in the mirror, a towel wrapped around my shoulders, the kitchen garbage can on the floor next to me. My mother had wet my hair and was combing through it. It felt nice. I could not remember the last time she had touched me, hugged me, kissed me. Still I was furious. Jenny was doing cartwheels and somersaults in the hallway outside the bathroom and every few seconds she would roll by the open door. My mother yelled at her to take it outside, but then she turned her gaze to my head. I tried to push my thoughts to Jenny. I wanted her to do something to distract my mother, to make her stop and leave my hair alone. Break something, I prayed to whoever was up there listening in the skies. And then I thought meanly: Break a bone.

  My mother split my hair down the middle into two parts and pulled each part over a shoulder. She swiftly took her scissors and cut a huge chunk of hair off. It was at least six inches. And then, a moment too late, there was a thump down the hall, the sound of a glass crashing, and then Jenny’s low whine for our mother.

  My mother waved her scissors at me in the mirror. “Stay there,” she said and then walked toward the sound of Jenny’s wail.

  I stood there, with one side shorn. Mismatched. Today everything was going to change, I thought. Dr. Muttler had told my mother that my face would look different after the surgery. He was going to pull out some molars, too. All in all, eight teeth. I would be reset in one afternoon. I did not want to cry, but I did, softly, just a handful of tears melting down the side of my face.

  When my mother returned, she quickly chopped off the other side of my hair. She let out a little laugh and said, “Really, Catherine, you act like your hair is made of gold.” She was right, though. I secretly believed it was.

  “IT IS REALLY PRETTY T
HOUGH,” said Valka. She twirled her hands in the ends of my hair. She sucked in her breath, remembering her own hair, I suppose.

  She pointed at my glass. “Are you going to drink that?” she said.

  I RESISTED QUIETLY again that day, a few hours later. We were in the parking lot outside Dr. Muttler’s office. My mother had just shut off the ignition. Jenny was strapped in the backseat, and I was in the front.

  “I do not want to go in,” I said. I felt like a big block of cement, and I pictured myself sinking through my seat to the bottom of the car. She would never be able to move me if I turned to stone. “It will hurt. And they are going to stick needles in me. I do not like needles. He said there were needles.” I started to talk faster, and then I began to hiccup.

  And for a moment, my mother turned back into my mother again. Like I had seen part of her when she was gently combing my hair that morning, and I remembered what she had been like when I was younger. It was only in the last couple of years that she was anxious and hard almost all of the time. The job was supposed to help her, make her feel like she had something of her own, but only seemed to make her more miserable in the end. But there she was, right there, sitting across from me in the car, her car keys dropped to the seat, her hands on mine, the whole world around us quiet. Like it was early morning. I felt like it was just me and my mother together.

  She promised me everything would be fine, that doing this now would help me feel better in the long run. That I could eat ice cream for the next two days. That it would be over in a minute. She stroked my arm. She told me I was her little girl, and that she would take care of me. “I’ll be right there,” she said. “Waiting for you to wake up.”

  Inside I sat back quietly in Dr. Muttler’s dentist’s chair. My mother kissed me on my forehead. She pointed to the wall and mouthed, “Right there,” and smiled her mom smile. The door closed and Dr. Muttler and Tracy moved in over me, and I could feel his thigh and smell her cool peppermint scent, and the whites of her temples looked sharp at the ends. Old lady hair.

  Tracy tied a piece of rubber around my upper arm, and tapped my forearm. A small vein surfaced. She took a needle from the tray that seemed to be floating in front of me. Dr. Muttler was organizing some of the tools that rested on it.

  “This will only hurt for a second,” she said, and she calmly slid it into my arm. It was true: the prick only hurt for a second, and then I felt nothing. After a few seconds she mumbled, “Nope.” She pulled the needle out.

  “What?” said Dr. Muttler.

  She said something to him in German. He shrugged.

  “Honey, we’re going to have to try again,” she said. “Your vein collapsed.”

  My heart started to beat a little faster.

  “It’ll be fine, I’ll just find a stronger one,” she said. “You’re just a little thing, that’s all. We need to feed you, plump up those veins.” She tied the rubber a little tighter, and studied my arm, then dove in again with the needle. Again, she pulled the needle out in just a few seconds. She spoke rapidly to Dr. Muttler in German again. “Nein,” he said. She made another point, a little bit louder, and then he nodded.

  “I’m just going to try this other arm, Catherine,” she said.

  “I do not like it,” I said. “Where is my mom? Does she know you’re doing this to me?” I was starting to freak out. I could hear the chug of the train in my head.

  Tracy briskly untied the piece of rubber and moved it to my right arm. She and Dr. Muttler switched positions. She ran her finger lightly on my arm. And then—she must have seen how terrified I was—she patted my head gently.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.

  “But you are hurting me,” I said. I started to cry. Everyone everywhere lied.

  She plunged the needle into me, there was a tick, and then a tock, and then she cursed. Dr. Muttler said, “All right, enough.” He walked behind me and I heard him open a cabinet door and rustle through it. He came back and stood over me. His hands were behind his back. Maybe they were not behind his back. Maybe everything was front and center. But in the tiny little part of my brain that remembers that day, I swear his hands were behind his back, and that scared me more than anything else.

  And then there was a mask dangling above my face and Dr. Muttler told me to count to ten, and Tracy was putting another needle in a vein, but this time it was on my hand, and that hurt so much, it was like being stabbed. I was crying and counting and then, thank God, at last, it was dark.

  When I woke, the first thing I saw was my mother. I was lying down on an uncomfortable bed that was covered with a piece of paper, and when I moved the paper made a crunching sound. The paper felt weird against my skin, and I hated that sound. My mother was sitting on a folding chair. She was reading a magazine. Julia Roberts was on the cover. Her lips and teeth were gigantic and her hair was long, as long as she liked.

  “You’re a liar,” I said. I said it louder. “A fucking liar.” I did not know if she could understand me, my mouth felt all stuck together. “Everyone knows.” The door opened, and Tracy stuck just her head inside. “How’s our patient?” she said.

  “Everyone. Knows. You’re. A. Fucking. Liar.”

  The words were just coming out and I could not stop them and I did not care. I could not even see my mother through the haze. I heard her start laughing. It was a nervous laugh. It was the first time I had ever cursed at her.

  “It’s the drugs,” said Tracy. “She’ll calm down.” She walked over to me and held my hand. “You did really great,” she said. My mother followed her. She held the other hand. There they were, two women, holding my hands.

  “You lied,” I said. I started to cry. “You said it would not hurt.”

  “I’m sorry,” whispered my mother.

  “You are a liar,” I said.

  “You’ll be okay,” said Tracy.

  And then there was a shift in my brain, I steered it from one path to another, and I remembered that I loved my mother, that I should show her respect in public, that I was not the kind of girl who cursed, that I was a nice girl, I obeyed my parents, I obeyed the rules, my mother was not a liar, my parents still loved each other, a dentist was just a dentist, his wife was just his wife, and in two weeks I would start high school with a brand-new haircut.

  Within two months I had grown an inch and a half taller and my breasts were one cup size bigger. A few weeks after that I met Thomas Madison, and he made me his moon, and I took him to be my stars. I learned how to love. But somewhere in the middle of that—or was it before, I do not know anymore—I forgot how to feel.

  15.

  I left the house only once during the week after his surgery. Those seven days during his recovery period were some of our finest times together. We grew closer than ever. He was fragile and I tended to him just as I loved to do, as I believed I was born to do, put on this planet to take care of my man. Or at least that was how I felt at that time.

  “NOW YOU KNOW THAT you have to take care of you, too,” said Valka. She had ordered up a full bottle of champagne from room service, and a big breakfast, too. I picked at some bacon, and grumbled at her. I did not need to be reminded how wrong I had been. It just made me feel stupid.

  “Oh, honey, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault you love to love.” She rubbed my arm. “I meant no harm.”

  The bacon was too salty but I ate it anyway.

  HE DID NOT WANT company besides me. He did not want anyone to see him weak, and he did not want to have to lie about why he was sick. We sent the contractors home—the in-ground pool would have to wait a few more weeks—so it was just me and him sitting around. He sat on the couch in his sweatpants, the same pair every day because they were his loosest and he needed room to breathe around his bandages. Sometimes he slept on my lap and I would stroke his hair then, feel the fine flat bangs and the way it thickened into a tough curl in the back at the base of his neck, as if it were an entirely different head.

  “Does
it hurt?” I asked him.

  “Only a little bit,” he said. “Mostly it just feels like it’s different.”

  We both read my magazines and looked at all the pictures of the celebrities. I liked to read him the bits and pieces about who was sleeping with who. There was Rio DeCarlo on a yacht with the twenty-sixth-richest man in the world. He also looked like the twenty-sixth-baldest man in the world.

  “Couldn’t even break the top twenty?” said Thomas. “What’s the point?”

  “Twenty-six is plenty rich, Thomas Madison,” I said.

  Finally on Sunday he let me go. He sent me into town to get carry-out from the diner. “No offense against your eggs,” he said. By then it was a relief. I felt like I had to break free to visit my mother’s house, just for an afternoon. It was not like he was keeping me there, but as soon as I left I let out a giggle, like I was being a bad girl. There was just something in me that needed relief.

  “Say hi to your friend Timber,” Thomas said as I left. He said it with a little lisp. Sometimes Thomas was such a child.

  At my parents’ house, there were the stirrings of something dangerous. I pulled up in the driveway and saw Jenny standing on one side of the front door, car keys in her hands, and my mother standing on the other side of it. The way their lips were moving, and their stance, even though I could not hear a thing, I knew something terrible was happening. It made me think about the way the sky looked an hour before a storm hit during tornado season every fall, the way it turned so fierce and dark in an instant. The wind always felt so invigorating, even though it was too strong for anything good to come from it. And my mother and my sister were so swollen with beauty when they were riled up. The rosy color in their cheeks, the way their eyes glittered, the thrust of their bodies upward. I sat there and watched them for a minute longer; I allowed myself the luxury of watching the disaster, and then I turned off the car and got out. Once I opened the door I could hear my sister yelling.