Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  Again, she thought of her dream, and waking from it, and the need to write something, to make or create or weave something from the materials of her psyche.

  But what was the hurry?

  Jesus, she’d had plenty of time to write in the last twenty years, and she hadn’t written then. She’d had one whole summer off—the summer before they’d adopted Tatty, and what had she done with all that time? Instead of writing she’d rented herself a booth in a local antiques mall and filled it with junk she bought at garage sales, which no one but she herself would ever want. She’d completely wasted the months of June, July, and August—the months for which she’d been awarded a nice little grant from the Virginia Woolf Foundation for a manuscript of fifteen poems she’d submitted to them along with a page detailing how she’d use the money to “take time off from my job to finish my first poetry collection, the title of which will be Ghost Country, from the title poem of the collection—an ode to my lost ovaries.”

  She’d written not a single line of poetry. Instead, there was not a mote of dust on a single item in Holly’s booth at the antiques mall that summer. She put a thousand miles on the car driving from one estate sale to the next, thrilling herself with surprises:

  A ceramic doll she found at a multifamily sale at a trailer park, with ruby flecks for eyes. A last rites box, with a half-empty bottle of holy water tucked into it from an estate sale across the street from a Catholic church. She bought doilies and doorknobs and tiny primitive paintings in tarnished silver frames. But the only thing she sold that summer was the one thing she hadn’t wanted to sell—a wreath woven by some bereaved Victorian mother out of her little boy’s flaxen hair.

  The wreath was glued to a portrait of the boy, who looked like an ugly girl in his lacy dress. Under his chin, in a woman’s ink-blotched script, was written Our Beloved Boy Charles.

  Holly had been stunned one day to come into the antiques mall and find that wreath gone. She’d asked the owner of the antiques booth (Frank, of the handlebar mustache, who worked the register there ten hours a day, six days a week) who’d purchased it, but Frank couldn’t remember his customers, ever. And the buyer hadn’t written a check or used a credit card, apparently. There was nothing left but the price tag, which Holly had written out herself, plucked from it, and placed in the cash register to prove the mourning wreath had been bought, not stolen. The $325 had been credited to the rent Holly paid to Frank for the booth.

  It was during the period of this grant that Holly realized that it wasn’t time she’d needed in order to write the poems that would finish the collection. What she needed, she decided, was a child. She emptied the antiques booth and began to order books off Amazon about overseas adoption.

  THE STEAM FROM inside the bathroom was sucked out into the hallway when Holly opened the door. Once it had escaped, it disappeared so quickly it was as if it had a will of its own, as if it had been a caged animal waiting for this opportunity to escape.

  She had taken a longer shower than she’d meant to. In the mirror in the bedroom, she could see that her face and neck and chest were brightly flushed. She was burning brightly, but softly, as if her skin had been sealed—shiny, poreless. Holly stepped away from her reflection. Now that she had showered, the rest of the day, the real rest of the day, had to begin.

  What should she wear? Tatiana had gone for festive and sentimental with that hideous velvet dress. Eric had left the house in jeans and a sweatshirt, in which he would probably stay for the rest of the day. Ginny and Gramps would be in black. Whenever there was an occasion to travel or to attend a gathering of any sort, Eric’s parents dressed like Italian peasants at a funeral. Ginny might even be wearing that black shawl of hers. Gramps’s black would be rumpled, threadbare. The two of them would look as if they’d been on a very long journey by ship across the Atlantic, not on a jet from Newark to Detroit.

  Once, Holly had suggested to Eric that his parents dressed this way in public in order to be mistaken for poor people.

  “Well, they’re not rich,” Eric had said. “I have no idea why you would say that.” These words were Eric’s roadblock—his refrain whenever Holly suggested that his parents might have (as she knew for a fact, from snooping, that they did) considerable sums tucked away in a bank in Pennsylvania (a bank chosen, Holly felt sure, so that none of their neighbors would hear any gossip of those vast sums).

  So why, then, did this couple in their eighties dress in public like a couple two generations more ancient than they were—as if they were the ones who’d come over on that ship, rather than their parents? Gin and Gramps owned plenty of brightly colored polyester sweaters, which they wore around their condominium. Gramps was a retired high school teacher. Gin had once sold Avon door-to-door. She had a huge collection of poodle pins, most of them garish and pink, many of them plastic, and she was never without one in her own home. So, why, then, did they pretend to be Old World olive farmers whenever they needed to board a bus or show up at a graduation? And what should Holly wear, given that she knew what the guests of honor would be wearing, if not why?

  Eric’s brothers and their wives—well, it would be a mix of formal and casual, but there would be tremendous effort put into everything, and very careful consideration:

  The nieces and nephews would be scrubbed down to the bones. Eric’s three brothers would be in denim mostly, but at least one of them would be wearing a suit coat. Their wives would have flowing sweaters, silk pants. There might even be a cape of some sort. Whatever Holly wore would seem plain in comparison, but she was certainly not going to totter around her own house in high heels. She owned no pretty slippers. She would just have to feel dowdy and flat-footed in her stocking feet.

  Holly scanned her closet. Wraparound dresses and dark skirts. Long-sleeved blouses and sleeveless ones. Nothing looked right for Christmas. The Coxes, she knew, would overdo it—a suit for him, a lacy top and Victorian-inspired earrings for her. Their son would be in a button-down with khaki pants.

  Pearl and Thuy would be organic—loose, clean, bland in subdued colors—although they’d have Patty dressed up like a Disney princess. Patty was, admittedly, all about princesses, but considering the number of tiaras the child owned (far more than could be reasonably demanded by a four-year-old) Holly wondered if it might be the gender-indifferent Pearl and Thuy who wanted their daughter to be Cinderella. Bless their generous hearts.

  Holly pulled a busy jersey dress off a hanger and tossed it on the bed. She’d worn it the other day to Tatty’s choir concert, so she knew it fit nicely.

  “Mom?”

  Tatty’s voice startled Holly, but she was also relieved to hear it. Tatty wasn’t sulking in her room. There was forgiveness implicit in that.

  “Come in, hon,” Holly said.

  Tatty opened the bedroom door a crack, and then stood with her toes on the threshold, peering in.

  “Your phone rang while you were in the shower, Mom.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Tatiana said. “I didn’t answer. It said ‘unavailable.’ ”

  Holly stepped behind the closet door to slip off her robe and put on her bra. She didn’t need a bra, of course. She had the kind of breasts that would still be pointing at the sky when she was in a nursing home, or in her coffin (fake ones). But wearing a bra made her feel more “pulled together”—a phrase her mother used to use, complimenting women who were nicely dressed, whose hair had been styled stiffly, and who were not, like Holly’s mother, terminally ill.

  “Well,” Holly said to Tatty. “Can’t be too important then. Some robot calling with a credit card offer or something.” She stepped into the dress and pulled the tie around her waist.

  “On Christmas Day?” Tatiana asked.

  “Well, robots don’t celebrate Christmas,” Holly said. “They don’t have souls, remember?”

  Tatiana didn’t smile, although Holly knew her daughter knew what she was joking about. There’d been a period, around third grade, when
Tatiana had become obsessed with what had a soul, and what did not. Holly had tried to explain the concept of the soul to Tatiana, impressing upon her that it wasn’t science, so there was no real answer to Tatiana’s question, unless Tatiana herself had some working definition of what she meant by soul.

  And, actually, much to Holly’s surprise, Tatiana had such a definition:

  The soul was the thing hidden inside the thing, and made it what it was. You could not be, say, an actual parrot without a parrot soul.

  “So a soul is inside a body?” Holly had asked.

  Well, Tatiana had explained, sometimes the soul could be behind the body, maybe, and sometimes it could be beside or beneath or above, but, yes, usually it was inside. A book, for instance, had its soul in the crack between the two middlemost pages. This was typical of foldable things. Like butterflies, who had their souls where their two wings came together.

  “So, like, the telephone book has a soul then?” Holly had asked, trying not to look too amused. Her daughter hated to be condescended to. She preferred to be argued with outright.

  “Well, that’s what I’m asking,” Tatiana said. “That’s why I’m asking you. I don’t know. I’m only nine years old.”

  “Well, sweetheart,” Holly had said, “I’m forty, and I don’t know either, so don’t feel too bad.”

  But Tatiana rarely just let a subject go with an I don’t know. Often, it seemed purely willful to Holly. The pleasure and curiosity would have already gone out of the asking, but the asking would go on. A matter of stubborn pride would take over. A combative insincerity would be at the center of the discussion at that point.

  “So do our chickens have souls?” Tatiana asked Holly.

  “Well, if books and butterflies do, I—”

  “I didn’t say they all do! I didn’t say all books and all butterflies have souls! I don’t know! I’m asking you.”

  By then, Holly was exasperated. Tatiana was very young, but she was too old for this kind of illogic. She must have read something somewhere, or seen some inane kid’s comedy drama and was lifting the crappy, bombastic dialogue from it.

  “Okay then,” Holly had said, tilting her head, rolling her eyes to let Tatty know that she was onto her. “Here’s a list of things that have souls: People, cats, chickens, and all other mammals. Fish and insects have souls, and lilac bushes, but no other plant life. Some very nice cars, like BMWs and Subaru Outbacks, but nothing made by General Motors. Also, rocks don’t have souls, and robots don’t. How’s that?”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” Tatty had said, and shrugged. “I just wanted to know about robots. Thanks, Mom.”

  There was no sarcasm in it. Holly had shaken her head at her daughter’s back, not at all sure if she’d won or lost this game. Eric, of course, when he heard about the exchange, had expostulated about how precocious their daughter was, so Holly hadn’t bothered to explain to him that the whole thing had been, actually, not precocious but derivative. Tatty had understood from Holly’s reaction that she was making a little juvenile fool of herself with the questions, so she’d played the only card she had left, which was to shut the whole thing down with a shrug of the shoulders and a pat little answer. That’s all I wanted to know. But what would have been the point of trying to tell the doting daddy that? That his perfect daughter could occasionally be unoriginal, or manipulative? Unthinkable!

  Now, however, whenever Tatty tried to start some imitative argument (“All the other kids are going . . . !”) Holly would say, “And robots don’t have souls,” and Tatiana’s nostrils would flare, and there would appear that little muscle pulsing at her jaw, and her bluish lids would draw halfway down over her dark eyes, and Holly would just smile, ending the argument, knowing that her daughter knew exactly what she meant:

  You’re faking, you heard this somewhere else, you’re just mouthing these words, and I know it.

  “I JUST THOUGHT you’d want me to tell you that your phone was ringing,” Tatiana said. “It might have been important, even if it was Unavailable, even on Christmas Day.”

  “Honey, my cell phone gets a call from Mr. Unavailable every day. Mr. Unavailable has been trying to get in touch with me ever since caller ID was invented. Sometimes I even get a call from Mrs. Name Withheld.”

  “You’re funny, Mom. I mean, you are so, so funny.”

  Holly felt stung, but not surprised, that the conversation had gone from sarcastic to nasty so fast. She tried not to rise to the bait. She tried to sound genuine, asking, “Well, Tatiana, who do you think might be trying to call?”

  Her daughter said nothing. Holly sighed, and looked away from her to the window. She was surprised to see that the curtains were parted. She didn’t remember doing that. Perhaps it had been Eric, before he left, and Holly hadn’t noticed it until now because the heavy snow that was falling out there was like a second layer of curtains—but made of movement. Chaotic particles. Electrical sparking.

  She went to her dresser to find a pair of black tights, and said to Tatty, “Why didn’t you answer my phone, sweetheart, if you’re curious? I never said you couldn’t answer my phone. Answer my phone anytime you want.”

  Still, Tatiana said nothing. She was looking up at the ceiling, unblinking, so Holly took the moment to peruse her, and noticed that Tatty was wearing the tiny opals that Pearl and Thuy had given her for her thirteenth birthday. She was going all out, wasn’t she? The opals for Pearl and Thuy, the velvet dress for Gin. It was sweet. Tatiana had always been a thoughtful child—the first on the playground to run to a fight and try to stop it, the first to comfort a crying baby or a whining puppy—but she was growing into a genuinely considerate young woman.

  “That’s so nice,” Holly said, looking at her daughter’s earlobes, “that you’re wearing the opals Pearl and Thuy gave you.”

  Tatiana immediately touched, as every woman does, whatever part of her was under discussion. Her earrings, her scarf, the necklace at her collarbone. Eric used to swat Holly away from her hair, saying that every time he told her it looked nice she put her hands into it and mussed it all up. But it was hard, if you weren’t facing a mirror, to be sure what was being observed about you if you couldn’t see it yourself. It was natural to try to feel it.

  “I wasn’t trying to be nice,” Tatiana said. “I like the earrings.”

  Holly deflated again. “I wasn’t trying to pick a fight,” she said. “I like that you thought to wear earrings that were given to you by guests we’re having over today. I know there are other earrings you own that you like, and I was trying to point out that it was a nice thing to do to choose those. But, Tatty, I’m sorry if I misunderstood.”

  Tatty turned quickly on the heel of her black ballet slipper then, and she was over the threshold before she saw Holly grit her teeth at her daughter’s back.

  Holly sat on the edge of the bed, and rolled one leg of the black tights up her leg. She would, she supposed, be punished all day for sleeping in on Christmas morning. Not only would her daughter be in a continuous state of disapproval, Eric’s brothers and their wives would soon be here, full of concern about their parents, which would hold the subtext of blame directed toward Holly that Eric had overslept (which would be Holly’s fault somehow) and been late to pick them up at the airport.

  Why must Christmas always be at their house? Holly would have happily traveled to New Jersey or Pennsylvania or upstate New York for the holiday. She’d love to spend Christmas Day walking around Tony and Gretchen’s house—inspecting Gretchen’s silverware for sticky remains of some previous meal, holding her crystal up to the light to see if it was greasy. She’d have happily accompanied Eric to his parents’ condominium, for that matter, and cooked dinner there! She’d have happily made arrangements for all of them to meet at a resort in Florida! Or Cancún! Or Bend, Oregon!

  But, it seemed, having had Christmas at Eric and Holly’s the first year they were married meant that Eric’s family would have Christmas at Holly and Eric’s forever, even i
f Holly was so disrespectful and irresponsible that she hadn’t even woken her husband up on Christmas morning.

  Holly didn’t put shoes on, or her perfume, or her earrings, or even her watch. She went straight out to the kitchen in her stocking feet, where she found Tatty holding, and peering into, the iPhone Holly had left on the counter. A cool blue glow rose from the screen of it, and it turned Tatty’s skin to a color Holly didn’t like—the color of a sick girl, or a drowned girl.

  Tatty had a beautiful complexion, which could have been called porcelain. Except that porcelain was whiter than the color of Tatty’s skin, which was more the color of crayfish bisque—or at least the crayfish bisque Holly’s mother used to make before she grew too ill to cook such things. A little grayer than bone. Creamier than ivory. Cream with a drop of violet mixed into it. In certain light, and in certain photographs, there was a tint of pale blue to Tatiana’s face—a little deeper near the temples, under her eyes. Sometimes her lips looked as if she’d just come in from the cold, deep end of the pool.

  It was the most beautiful complexion Holly had ever seen. Elegant. Mildly exotic. But institutional light didn’t suit it, nor did the glow of the iPhone. “Put that down,” Holly said.

  Tatty looked up, opened her mouth, unhinging her jaw slightly, and huffed. She put the cell phone down on the marble top of the kitchen island, and then gestured to it, and said, “I knew you’d be pissed. You always say, ‘Go ahead and answer my cell phone,’ but I so much as pick up your cell phone and you’re all over me.”

  Holly shook her head. She was so tired of this teenage tone of voice, these reflexive accusations. How long was this phase of Tatiana’s existence going to last? “Jesus, Tatiana,” she said. “Take it down a notch, would you? I wasn’t all over you. I just—”

  “No. You just reflexively reprimand me these days, that’s what! I can’t do anything right.”

  “Look,” Holly said, picking up the cell phone between them. “We don’t have time for this. Did Unavailable call back?”