Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  Certainly, Tatiana had, as a child, been eager to please, and been frightened of offending—but had it ever been easy to make her laugh? Certainly not since she’d grown out of childhood—not for her parents, anyway, although Holly had certainly heard Tatiana laugh and joke naturally enough with Tommy.

  “Have you heard from Tommy?” Holly asked, remembering that Thuy had suggested that the bad mood might indicate that something had happened between Tatty and Tommy. If that’s why Tatty had been so quarrelsome earlier, maybe her lighter spirit meant that she’d gotten a text, a few minutes earlier, and now they’d made up. Kids were in such constant contact with one another these days that the whole world could change in half an hour, and there would be no way for the adults in the household to keep track. In Holly’s day it was a lot harder to quibble, and harder to reconcile. For one thing, the phone had to ring and to be answered in order for an argument to be started or ended. “Have you said Merry Christmas to him yet?”

  “No,” Tatty said. “My phone’s dead. It was on when I went to sleep, and I never plugged it back into the charger.”

  “Poor Tommy!” Holly said, trying to make a joke of it. “Do you two ever go more than twenty minutes without a text? He must have been trying to reach you all day. Is anything wrong?”

  Tatiana shook her head. She looked slightly pleased with herself, Holly thought, as if she’d played a trick on Tommy, and Holly went back to Thuy’s hunch that there’d been an argument. An argument, and now Tatty was playing games with him. Hard to Get was the name of this particular game. Holly herself had played it quite a bit as a teenager.

  “So you’re not going to charge up your phone then, and text Tommy?”

  “No,” Tatiana said. “I don’t think so.” There was no indication in Tatty’s tone of anything at all. Anger. Sadness. Bitter pleasure. She turned around then, and Holly couldn’t see if she was smiling or scowling, and Holly remembered, once more, that they hadn’t eaten, either of them, all day.

  “We need to eat something, don’t we, Tatty? We haven’t eaten at all today. Soon it will be after dinnertime, and we never even—”

  “I’m not hungry anymore,” Tatty said. “Later.”

  She was heading back to her bedroom, or to the bathroom, with deliberate and obstinate steps. She was walking the way Holly recalled the Russian guards in the airport in Moscow walking from one end of a gate to another, neither hurrying nor taking their time, as if they knew exactly what you were up to and could haul you off for it whenever it pleased them. Holly felt her annoyance return.

  “Hey, Tatty,” Holly said to her daughter’s back. “Go get the handheld vacuum, will you? In the basement? So I can clean up the glass.”

  “Okay,” Tatty said, turning on her heel so quickly it was as if she’d anticipated the request. “Where in the basement?”

  “I don’t know,” Holly said. “Plugged into the charger next to the Ping-Pong table I hope.”

  “Ping-Pong?”

  “Yes,” Holly said.

  Tatiana snickered:

  It was an actual snicker. As if she knew perfectly well that the vacuum was nowhere near the Ping-Pong table. “If you say so, Mom,” she said. “What does it look like?”

  This time Holly was the one who laughed unpleasantly, mostly through her nose. She said, “Well, first of all it looks like a handheld vacuum cleaner. In fact, it looks like our handheld vacuum cleaner!”

  Tatiana nodded her head, as if this hadn’t been a joke, and she turned then, heading back to her room instead of the basement. She was willfully ignoring Holly’s request! Had this new, better mood all been a nasty joke? Was it all a ploy to provoke her?

  “Tatty!” Holly shouted at her daughter’s back.

  “What?”

  Tatty turned around as she growled the word, placing her hands on her hips. Her teeth actually appeared to be gritted, and her eyes were huge. They were the huge baby-eyes of Tatty (Tatty/Sally!), that first Christmas—and, looking at them, it occurred to Holly for the first time that maybe it hadn’t been Tatty’s face that had changed, but her personality. Maybe her eyes had appeared so large when Holly first held her because she was scared, or hopeful, or—?

  Or what?

  Who or what had that little girl been that she no longer was? Holly glanced instinctively from her daughter’s glaring face in the hallway to the close-up of her daughter’s eyes peering up at her from the iPhone in her palm, and she thought, suddenly, heart-stoppingly:

  They were different eyes!

  They were similar, of course, they were recognizable—but the eyes in Holly’s palm were not the wild-animal eyes Tatty had fixed on her now. They were a different daughter’s eyes. This daughter from two summers ago, standing in front of a waterfall, smiling beside her father, was not the girl standing and blinking at Holly now.

  Holly looked away from the phone, and away from Tatiana. She could not think about this now, and she could not take Tatiana’s bait. This was a day of bad surprises. There were such days in every life. Together they would get through this day, and in the morning, with Eric returned and the holiday over, everything would be fine again. In the calmest voice she could muster, she said, “Tatty, I asked you to go to the basement and get the vacuum cleaner.”

  “Fuck!” Tatiana said, and Holly flinched. “I was going to the basement to get the vacuum cleaner.”

  Tatiana hissed the s at the end of was and pronounced the w like a v:

  I vass going to the basement!

  “Okay, Tatty,” Holly said, softly, although her hands had begun to sweat and shake. She was not, however, going to reprimand her daughter now. Now, she thought, was a time to model reasonable behavior, not to get angry, not to be punitive. Now was the time to take control of the situation, not to make it worse. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If you fetch the vacuum, I’ll clean up, and then I’d really like to feed us both something, because we’re getting hungry and irritable. Then we’ll call Daddy and see what’s going on, and if he isn’t going to be back for a while, what do you say you and I go ahead and open a couple presents?”

  Tatiana seemed to be trying to control her breathing as she stood in the hallway with her hands on her hips, regarding her mother. Maybe she was trying not to have a temper tantrum, or maybe she was afraid she might have a panic attack? Hadn’t Holly been sixteen when she’d had her first panic attack? Weren’t a panic attack and a temper tantrum one and the same? They just occurred at different ages.

  “Sweetheart,” Holly started, but Tatiana had turned (again, on the heel of that hideous shoe) to the linen closet by then, and she’d yanked the door open as if in a desperate hurry to find something in there, and, not finding it, she slammed it shut, and then she went to the basement door, yanked that one open, switched on the light, and straightened her shoulders, ready, it seemed, to descend the stairs as if she’d never seen stairs before. She took hold of the railing but seemed to hesitate before taking a step, and Holly said, “Tatty, honey, be careful on those stairs in those shoes. Okay?”

  There was no answer at first, but when Tatiana was halfway down the stairs Holly heard her speak. But, surely, she couldn’t have heard her correctly. What she thought she’d heard Tatiana say from halfway down the basement stairs was, “You didn’t get me any presents.”

  “What?” Holly said, and went to the top of the stairs. Tatiana was at the bottom of them now, staring fiercely back up at her mother. Holly asked again, “What did you say?”

  Tatty made her hands into fists and beat them against her thighs and screamed, literally screamed, “You didn’t get me any Christmas presents!”

  “What? Tatty! Have you lost your mind, Tatiana?! You picked out your own presents. You know you’ve got a treasure trove of presents under the tree! We must have spent two thousand dollars on Christmas presents for you this year!”

  Holly had bought and wrapped so many gifts for Tatiana this Christmas that she didn’t even remember what they were! Tatiana had gotten ever
ything she’d asked for, from a list as long as her arm! Who was this spoiled stranger looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs, her face blue in the basement light? No presents? Clothes and shoes and electronics and books, and—

  Holly looked away from her daughter to the living room, to the Christmas tree, to the thirty-plus boxes under it, wrapped in Russian paper. Holly had driven into Hamtramck, as she did every year, to buy the Ukrainian paper she always wrapped Tatiana’s gifts in, always the same. (Holly had grown up with no traditions! Her mother had died! Her daughter would be raised with holiday traditions!) This was the first year she hadn’t been able to find cream-colored paper decorated with Russian nesting dolls in neat rows. (The dolls were all dressed differently but all had black hair like Tatty’s.) This year the store’s owner told Holly that the Ukrainians, it seemed, from whom the shop owners got their shipments, were going in for the same sort of Christmas wrapping paper as the Americans these days—Santas, trees, trumpets, etc.—and that’s all he had for sale, the kind of wrapping paper you could buy at any Wal-Mart. So Holly had come home and ordered wrapping paper directly from Moscow—ridiculously expensive, and exquisite. Shiny black paper with a variety of scenes from Russian lacquer boxes. Czars and knights and minarets and princesses. Holly had bought two hundred dollars’ worth of that gift wrap, and now thirty or more boxes were wrapped in it under the Christmas tree, and Tatty was accusing her of not having gotten her any presents!

  Holly was about to say something, maybe something she would regret, about selfish American kids and the wretched excess of American Christmases, and maybe something even more horrible, something about the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 and the children who were still there instead of here—but before the words could rise out of her, Tatty was gone, as if a trapdoor had opened and she’d been sucked into it. If Holly wanted to say something terrible, she was going to have to shout it. She sighed instead, but she was no longer feeling sorry for her daughter. Now she was furious, and her blood pressure—well, luckily there wasn’t any heart disease in her family. She managed to make her way back to the living room, where the stringed lights on the Christmas tree looked, in the brilliance from the window, to be glowing with even more futility than they had been earlier, as if their whole claim to being lights was being mocked. “Sure,” the blizzard raging outside the window might be saying. “Sure, in the pitch dark, a bunch of little electrical pencil-tips might look bright, but this is what brightness is.”

  Truly, those bulbs appeared, now, to contain no light at all, as if they’d been emptied of light. Sapped. Drained. And Holly stared at them for a full minute before she realized that, actually, they were no longer glowing at all. Holly went over to the tree and saw that the plug had been pulled from the socket. She bent over to plug it back in, and wondered if Tatiana had unplugged the lights, if this was yet another teenage passive-aggressive act. Was Tatty sending some message that Christmas was over, or ruined, or pointless, or—?

  “Is this what you wanted?” Tatiana asked. Holly turned to find her standing in the living room with the handheld vacuum cleaner.

  “Yes,” Holly said. “Thank you.”

  “Not a problem,” Tatiana said.

  Holly expected her to turn on her heels then and head back to her room, but she didn’t. Tatty stood close to Holly, smiling at her with what looked, hearteningly, like a bit of affection, or at least like sympathy, and then she asked, “How in the world did you break all this glass, Mommy?”

  Holly sagged away and narrowed her eyes at her daughter, realizing that it had not been sympathy at all. It had been smug condescension. Holly tried to control the anger in her voice, but said, “You’re hilarious, Tatiana. Really hilarious. Now, would you please just get out of here?”

  Again, Tatiana shrugged. What was with this shrugging? Was this some new teeny-bopper affectation? Maybe some teenage actress had done this in a movie, and all the girls were imitating it now? Tatty turned around and walked slowly back to her room. Sauntered back to the room. Those ridiculous shoes with their hard little heels were going to scuff up the floors, Holly realized—and, my God, when had Tatiana changed back into that black dress? Hadn’t she gone into the basement wearing Gin’s red velvet? How could she have emerged in this black dress? And what the hell was the point of changing clothes four times for a party that wasn’t going to happen?

  Before Tatty could close the bedroom door (slam the bedroom door) Holly called out, “When I get this cleaned up, we’re going to eat. We’re both cranky!”

  The door slammed on the word both.

  FOR SEVERAL SECONDS Holly stood still, trying simply to swallow, trying to blink back the tears of frustration and rage that were threatening to fill her eyes. Then she turned to the task at hand, squinting her eyes at the splinters of glass on the floor. She tested the vacuum cleaner to see if the battery was charged, and, miraculously and thankfully, it was. She bent over:

  It wasn’t going to be easy to vacuum up all this glass. In fact, Holly was quite sure she never would. For years she would be finding little slivers of it in the cracks between the floorboards. She would find it in the most far-flung corners of the house, where she least expected to find it, long after this accident had been forgotten. A better housekeeper would have a whisk broom, and a dustpan, and would sweep the big pieces into that first. But Holly had no whisk broom. There was a broom—somewhere, surely. Garage? But she didn’t know for sure because she never used it. It was quicker and easier, although perhaps less effective, to vacuum the wooden floors with the upright and, when things accumulated in the corners that couldn’t be reached by the upright, to dash around with this handheld, assuming it was charged. There was something about the broom, motorless and primordial, that never seemed suited to any task Holly set out to do. And now, of course, she associated that broom with Concordia.

  Black-haired Concordia, who looked so much more like a mother to Tatiana than Holly herself did. Is that why Tatty had loved her so much? The first time the housekeeper came for her weekly cleaning after they’d brought Baby Tatty home from Russia, Tatty had gasped as Concordia walked in the door with her plastic tote filled with sponges and sprays. Then Baby Tatty had rushed the housekeeper at the speed of light, and thrown her arms around her legs. When Concordia, laughing and speaking in baby-talk Spanish to Tatiana, had crouched down to take the child in her arms, Tatiana had clung to her neck, laughing with a kind of delight that Holly had not yet heard from her. And, after that, Saturdays were Concordia Day, and Tatty would sit near the front door like a loyal puppy waiting for her master, and then she and Concordia would play cleaning games all day.

  “Seems like we’re paying her to babysit, not to clean,” Eric had said—not critically, for he loved Concordia, too—while watching the housekeeper chase after Tatiana with a broom, singing a nursery song in Spanish.

  And then, the accident. The lawsuit. Their expensive lawyer had fended that off handily, but they’d never seen Concordia again. If she’d left that broom behind, Holly had no idea where it was, and simply thinking of it made her want to sit down among the tiny bits of glass and weep—for herself, for Concordia (whose ankle would never, apparently, properly heal because of the kind of fracture she’d sustained), and, of course, for Tatty.

  Holly decided to pick up the big pieces first with her hands—and, naturally, immediately she cut her index finger. A drop of incredibly bright red blood snaked down the finger into the palm of her hand before she could stick the finger in her mouth. It didn’t hurt, and when she looked at it, except for the mess in her palm (it was incredible how bright her blood looked to her in the glare from the picture window), there seemed to be nothing but the most superficial of wounds. A pinprick, really, would have been worse. Holly ignored it and continued to gather up the big shards. She carried a few of those, mixed with a little of her blood, to the garbage can under the sink and tossed them in.

  The stem of the water glass had snapped into two nearly equal-sized sections, so
Holly picked those up and put them on top of the dining room table. Then she bent over with the handheld and vacuumed up all the tiny bits and the glassy dust that could be seen with the naked eye. Still, those pieces and that dust didn’t, in the end, seem to be nearly enough to have composed an entire water glass before it smashed, so she got back down on her hands and knees and felt around on the floor. A bit of blood from the cut on her finger smeared across the floorboards as she did so—and, indeed, some very finely ground bits of glass stuck to her palms, particularly the bloody one. Finally, Holly sat back on her heels, ran the vacuum over the general area, and then stood up and went to the sink to rinse her hands.

  There was only so much she would be able to do.

  Again, a better housekeeper would—what?

  Well, maybe a better housekeeper would know some method for completing this task, some way to be certain there was no glass left on the floor. A damp microfiber cloth? Duct tape? This was the kind of thing that her sister Janet would have known. But Janet was long gone. Janet was as broken and dispersed as their mother’s water glass by now.

  No. For God’s sake, do not think of Janet, today of all days . . .

  It was easier than Holly had thought it would be for one to put people and events out of her mind. Until the few counseling sessions she’d had with Annette Sanders, Holly had thought that the mind had a will of its own, somehow, and ruminated of its own volition. But Annette Sanders had taught her otherwise. She had made Holly wear a rubber band around her wrist, and told her that, every time Janet’s last days or Melissa’s suicide came to mind, Holly was to snap the rubber band and think of something else.