Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  “Yeah, actually, I’m looking out the window now, Tom,” Holly said. “It’s snowing.”

  “Snowing, ha! That’s a good one! Well, oh—just a second here, Mindy’s taking the phone, tell Eric, I—”

  “Holly, it’s Mindy. I’m so sorry. I know you’ve probably been working yourself sick getting Christmas together for all of us, and we were so excited to be there, but we just went outside to assess the situation, and, God, we can’t even see the street from our driveway. I mean, nothing’s going anywhere.”

  Mindy Cox made so many apologies and went into so much detail about the blizzard, and the road, and their car, and the impossibility of even shoveling enough snow to walk out to the car, that Holly realized something she’d been somehow too myopic to see until then—that Mindy didn’t like her or Eric, either. That she hadn’t wanted to come over for Christmas. That she had been, perhaps, dreading it for days. That her heart had sunk when Tom had told her they’d been invited, and that maybe they’d even been arguing about it, but what could they do? This was the kind of relationship Tom and Eric had, and all of their livelihoods depended on the continuation of this relationship. Tom would feel he owed it to Eric, who would have felt not only slighted but unnerved if Tom had turned him down, and Mindy Cox had been praying all night for a blizzard, and God had come through for her.

  After much reassurance, Holly said good-bye, exhausted by all the pretense, all the false bonhomie. And, yet, after Mindy Cox hung up, Holly continued to hold the iPhone to her ear, feeling inexplicably bereft. She felt even sadder than she’d felt about Thuy and Patty canceling! Ridiculous! What did it say about her that she was this upset to have been rejected by people she had not wanted to be with in the first place?

  But suddenly she did want to be with them. Suddenly Holly realized that the Coxes had been an intrinsic part of the day, a part of her life, a part of the plan—and that putting up with them had been for herself, and no one else. Wasn’t their company—on Christmas but also on earth!—one of the consolations of being a human being? Now she realized, too late, that she’d even actually wanted to feed their tiresome son his vegan salad. That poor, awful child, with a haircut out of The Great Gatsby but a face like a tangle of wires.

  Still, she reassured herself, Christmas dinner wasn’t entirely a dead issue yet. None of Eric’s siblings had called yet to say they couldn’t be there. The call of the tribe might be strong enough for them to make it through anything to be here with their parents and one another on Christmas Day. They could still begin to arrive, car by car, hungry, complaining, stomping the snow off their boots in her hallway. Holly needed to boil the potatoes!

  Setting the iPhone down on the kitchen counter, Holly considered calling out to her daughter again—but that was just out of force of habit. She didn’t expect Tatiana to respond, and did she even want Tatty’s help now, knowing how begrudging it would be? A better mother, Holly knew, might force the child out of her room in order to interact with her. (Hadn’t she read an article about that in Good Housekeeping? Hadn’t one of the rules been never to let your child isolate herself, to maintain physical proximity even when the two of you were angry at one another?) A better mother would exert whatever energy it took to get the child to confess what was wrong (something with Tommy? or had she gotten her period?)—but that was, frankly, far more energy than Holly herself had left after the long, wrangling morning, and her low-grade hangover.

  She was also fearful.

  Tatiana was in the kind of mood, it seemed, in which she might say anything. She might not say the most hurtful thing (You’re not my real mother!), but she might hint at it (I’m nothing like you!), or she might, as she already had today, without words, taunt Holly for the marijuana smoking.

  That was an issue that never failed to put Tatiana squarely in the right and Holly squarely in the wrong—the one time Holly had indulged in one puff since Tatiana had come home with them from Russia. A huge mistake, no doubt about it, but a small one in the scheme of things, surely? Holly’s favorite coworker, Roberta, fourteen years her junior, had been dying to get Holly stoned (“It would be so fucking fun!”) ever since the two of them had swapped college stories one day, literally around the office watercooler.

  “Maybe you’d be inspired to write some poems again!” Roberta had said.

  The suggestion had made Holly cringe and wish she’d never told Roberta that she’d once been a poet. “I don’t think clearheadedness is what’s standing in the way of my poetic inspiration,” Holly had said.

  “Well, how do you know unless you get high?”

  Roberta had gone on and on about how fun it would be to get stoned together, and eventually the nostalgia of it—silliness, youth, camaraderie—began to intrigue Holly. So one Saturday night when Eric was out of town, and Tatiana was out, Roberta had come over with a joint, and she and Holly had lit it up on the patio—an instantaneous fog of surreal entertainment (Holly had felt that her bare feet had turned to rubber, which instead of being alarming had seemed hilarious) but suddenly at the center of the cloud of sweet smoke, the giggling and Doritos and Roberta’s unintelligible story of the first time she’d gone snorkeling, stoned, there were Tatiana and Tommy, home from the high school football game hours early, standing beside them on the patio. Holly really couldn’t face that condemnation again today, whether she deserved it or not. She would just let her daughter sulk in her room until Eric, his parents, and his siblings finally arrived.

  THE CARROTS, WHEN Holly pulled them out of the crisper, looked shaggier than she’d remembered them. Fine little hairs now covered them, and the green tops seemed almost as if they’d grown longer since she’d brought them home two days ago from the grocery store. They looked, now, like they’d be a lot more work to clean and shred for the carrot salad (Gin’s overly sweet recipe/tradition) than she’d thought they would be. Like everything else, this was something Holly should have attended to last night instead of finishing that bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with Eric at dinner. And then the eggnog.

  She held the carrots in her hands. Was this actually even the same bunch she’d brought home from the store? Was it possible these were an older bunch, some purchase she’d stashed and forgotten about months ago? Holly put them down on the counter, went back to the refrigerator, opened and closed the other crisper. No other carrots.

  Well, she supposed, it was natural that carrots might continue to grow after being closed up in the cold dark of the refrigerator crisper for a couple of days. Didn’t they say that the hair and fingernails of a corpse continued to grow in the grave? Carrots were, after all, roots. The cold dark was where they’d thrived before they’d been yanked out of the ground. Why wouldn’t they mistake the refrigerator for the earth? Holding the whole bunch under the faucet, letting the water from the tap run over them, it was easy to imagine them underground—the way they would be feeling, feeling, feeling their way around down there, like long, creeping fingers.

  God, how hungry the first person who ever dug up a carrot and ate it must have been! These were nothing like slices of roast beef. Who was the first person to give that dirty thing a taste, and then to call over the rest of the clan and persuade them to try it?

  Holly took the chopping block out from under the sink, set it on the cupboard, and pulled a knife out of the drawer. She hated knife work, really. She knew there were special classes one could take just to learn how to hold a knife—something she’d never been able to do. If she ever had the time, maybe she would take such a class, but, in the meantime, she just held a knife clumsily in one hand and a shaggy carrot in the other.

  Unlike Tatiana, she’d never helped out her mother in the kitchen—or, if she had, she had no memory of it. Holly had taught herself to cook through trial and error. By the time Holly would have been old enough to help, or to remember helping, her mother had given up and let Holly’s sisters take over the running of the household. So, Holly’s memories of the kitchen mostly consisted of being gently pushed out of i
t by Janet or Melissa while something bricklike unthawed itself in the oven and someone checked a loaf of Wonder Bread to make sure it hadn’t gotten moldy. (Something Wonder Bread seemed perversely immune from, but still . . .) “Go watch TV, Holly. We’ll call you when it’s ready.” So that’s what Holly had done.

  All through the years of her mother’s slow death and her sisters’ servitude and her father’s enslavement by the U.S. Postal Service and her much older brother’s boring and inexorable suicide-by-Beefeater-and-tonics (so much more dramatic and prolonged than Melissa idling to death one night in a garage!), Holly had been lying on a floral couch with her dead grandmother’s afghan pulled up to her chin while one or another of the family cats slept on her ankles, and watching Gilligan’s Island.

  If only, Holly thought, she could take Tatty back there, to that doomed family (really, like a horrible fairy tale, how they’d started dying one by one as soon as Holly had been born!) and point out the lonely child on the couch who had once been Holly herself. She would say to Tatiana, “This is why you should be happy to be asked to help your mother with Christmas dinner. By the time your mother was your age, her own mother, her sister, and her fucking brother were dead. And the rest of them were well on their way.”

  “Tatty?” she called then (again, force of habit) over her shoulder. Why not give it one more try? Tatty was going to have to come out of there eventually. She’d need to use the bathroom, if nothing else. She’d grow hungry, wouldn’t she? And even with a roomful of electronics (and an Internet connection that could attach her to any corner of the globe and any other connected person on that globe in a matter of nanoseconds) surely she’d get bored, wouldn’t she? And, anyway, of course, when Gin and Gramps got here, Tatiana would be by their sides. Gin and Gramps had seven other grandchildren, each of them biological, but not one of them was as devoted, as in love, as respectful, as reverential of her grandparents as Tatiana.

  Three Christmases earlier, Eric’s brother had posed all those grandchildren around Gin and Gramps, and taken a photograph, and then posted it later, of course, on Facebook. In the photograph there were seven freckled, blue-eyed children ranging in age from three to twenty standing in a semicircle around the old couple in their black clothes. Each child bore a cautionary resemblance to one or both of the grandparents—that portrait seeming to whisper These are your future faces, these black-clothed elders, this is what happens to pretty little freckled people who survive on this planet for eighty years, see how time and the sun and gravity will wither and bend you, beware—except for Tatiana.

  She was the Jet-Black Rapunzel at the center of that portrait. And even though it could not have been more clear that Tatty bore no biological relationship to these grandparents, she was the one standing at the center of the photograph with one hand on each of her seated grandparents’ shoulders. She was the closest to them, and she was the happiest to be there. Gin had an arm crossed over her chest, and her spotted hand was at rest on Tatiana’s wrist. Gramps had his head tilted in Tatiana’s direction as if he were trying, lovingly, to listen to his granddaughter’s heartbeat. Someday, Holly felt sure, some descendant would unearth (or, in the case of electronic photographs, download?) this portrait, and would point out Tatiana and wonder aloud, Where did this one come from? But it would also be clear that the story this photograph told was that Tatiana, stranger in a strange land, was the one who loved and was loved best.

  “Tatty?” Holly called again. Then, speaking as loudly as she could without feeling absurd: “I’m worried about Gin and Gramps and Daddy, aren’t you? They should have been here a long time ago.”

  Holly turned the faucet off and held still, a carrot in one fist and a knife in the other. She listened for the creaking of Tatty’s bedsprings, but didn’t hear a sound. She placed the carrot and the knife in the bottom of the sink, dried her hands on a dish towel, and stepped over to her iPhone again, checked her messages. No one had called. And why the hell not? They all had cell phones. Probably each of Eric’s siblings’ cars held three or four cell phones! They were all late, very late, by now—and whether it was because they were on the freeway in a blizzard or not, late was late, and people called their hostesses to explain why they were late. Right?

  Holly looked for Eric’s name in her list of contacts. She’d never figured out how to put him on speed dial, and had never memorized his number since all she had to do was touch his name to reach him (although she did occasionally wonder what would happen if her phone fell into a lake, sank to the bottom, and she needed to call from a pay phone).

  Eric picked up on the third ring. “Hello.” Not a question. He knew who it was from the name on his own cell phone, and he had clearly been expecting her to call.

  “Eric,” Holly said. “What’s going on? Are you stuck on the freeway?”

  “No,” he said. “Not anymore. I was going to wait to call you until I had some idea of what to say. We’re at the emergency room. St. Joseph’s Mercy. Something’s wrong with Mom. We’re in a room with her now, waiting for the doctor.”

  “What?”

  It was the only word that came to Holly’s mind. She wasn’t really asking Eric to repeat himself, but when she heard him sigh impatiently she realized that’s what he thought she was asking, that she hadn’t heard him. He hated cell phones, became irate when a call started to break up or someone hadn’t heard what he’d said. He’d go on and on about how bad the phone service had become these days, and how back in the old days you were connected to a cord, yes, but you could carry on a fucking conversation. Pointing out to him that now you could be standing in the center of a forest while talking to someone at the top of a mountain did no good. He’d ask what difference it made if you couldn’t communicate. For his birthday, she’d bought him an iPhone, which he’d returned to the store. He’d apologized, saying that it was a thoughtful gift, but he didn’t want to carry a tiny high-powered mainframe on which he could compute astronomical algorithms, or check Facebook. He wanted a phone.

  “Well,” Holly had said, feeling more hurt than was warranted, since it wasn’t a very sentimental gift—still, she’d been excited to give it to him—“it’s a phone, too, even if it’s more than a phone.” She realized, as the words left her mouth, how much like an advertisement they sounded.

  “And Steve Jobs is more than a human being,” Eric had said. “That’s why his Chinese slave workers are happy to throw themselves off the roofs of his factories as a human sacrifice to the iGods.” He hated Steve Jobs.

  Holly thought she could hear some sort of hospital machine whirring behind Eric.

  “You didn’t hear me?” Eric asked, and the irritation in his voice was clear. Their connection itself was, actually, crystal clear—one of those connections that made it possible even to hear the clicking of the speaker’s teeth in his mouth as he sounded out consonants.

  “Yes,” Holly said—all business now. “I’m sorry. I heard what you said about Gin and the hospital. I just—I just don’t know what to say. Should we come there? Can I—”

  Eric laughed with what sounded to Holly like bitter condescension. He said, “You’re kidding, right? I guess you haven’t looked outside yet today?”

  “I know it’s snowing, Eric.”

  “ ‘Snowing’ doesn’t exactly describe it, Holly. Don’t you two dare leave the house.”

  Holly didn’t like his tone, but she also felt touched to hear him express concern for his wife’s and daughter’s safety, despite his distraction and anxiety and annoyance. His protectiveness was one of the hundreds of things she loved about Eric. On their very first date, strolling from his parked car to the restaurant, he’d switched places with her on the sidewalk, and Holly had understood that it was so that, if a car jumped the curb, it would kill him instead of her.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, no longer annoyed. “What happened? What’s wrong with Gin?”

  “I can’t go into that right now.”

  “Because Gramps is there?”
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br />   “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you call me back?”

  “Later. Wait. I’ve gotta go. I’ll—”

  “Eric, no one’s here yet. Have you heard from your brothers?”

  “My brothers? Of course! No one’s coming, Holly. They’re wherever they could get a roof over their heads. If they can get anywhere at all, it will be here to the hospital. They certainly won’t be making it to Christmas dinner. Just stay home, Holly. I’ll call when I have real news. Bye.”

  Before the connection was cut Holly heard Eric say a grave hello to someone who must have just walked in the door, and then what sounded like a rooster, cut off in mid-crow—but of course that couldn’t have been it. It had to have been the legs of a chair scraping against linoleum, or a door with squeaky hinges closing. But it alarmed her. She fought the urge to call back, to ask what that sound in the background had been, but calling him back would only add to Eric’s distractions. He’d said that he’d call her. And they were at St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, he’d said. Even if that sound had been the worst thing Holly could imagine (some sort of agonized cry for help?), they were at a hospital. In the emergency room. To call Eric again would be selfish, as if this crisis had anything to do with her. It didn’t, and she knew that, and so did he. Although Holly had always been fond of Gin and Gramps, they weren’t her parents. She didn’t love them. She knew that, and they knew that, and they felt the same way about her.

  In point of fact, Holly felt she barely knew Eric’s parents, really. They’d lived hundreds of miles away from anywhere she’d ever lived since she’d been married to their son. How much time had she spent in the same room with them in all the years she and Eric had been married? Could it have totaled more than a hundred hours? Maybe not even close! And never alone. She’d never been in a room with the two of them that hadn’t also been occupied by at least ten other pale and freckled members of the Clare clan.