Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  Incredibly, it had worked. All those other therapists who’d tried to help Holly work through the despair and the unconscious sources of all her anguish, to drag them to the surface and observe them in harsh light: Ha! Total wastes of time! What Holly had needed to learn was how to suppress her feelings—something human beings had been doing successfully since the dawn of time, the evidence for which was that they’d managed to get out of bed, eat, procreate, despite death’s unknowable horror potentially and inescapably waiting around every corner. Despite the fact that no one could really be sure that he or she would make it through the day, people did crossword puzzles and dug ditches and flossed their teeth. And, unlike the millions of Americans who needed prescriptions in order to do these things without panic or despair, Holly had been taught to do it with a rubber band!

  Of course, she hadn’t been writing poems, either, since Annette Sanders had cured her of—

  Of what?

  Of grief? Fear? The human condition?

  Still, it was worth it, wasn’t it? Rilke might not have thought so (If my demons leave me, my angels will, too—a quote one of her mentors in graduate school had hauled out every few weeks to warn the student poets—unconscionably?—against the psychotherapy and antidepressants some of them clearly needed), but, Holly felt sure, the cure had nothing to do with her writer’s block anyway. Her writer’s block had to do with how busy and cluttered her life had become with Tatty and Eric in it:

  Married life! Family life! Motherhood! Work life! Her writer’s block had to do with how many hours she spent behind the wheel of a car, getting to her office to write her ten million business-manager-memos a day instead of poems, and getting to the grocery store, getting back home, taking care of Tatty and Eric, going to bed to wake up to do it all again the next day. When would she have found time to write, whether she had writer’s block or not?

  Perhaps, in fact, writer’s block was a blessing, since her life could certainly not have contained one more activity without shattering into a billion pieces. And Holly didn’t care that (as Eric sometimes shouted at her if she whined too long about having no time to write) some poets had written, and perhaps still wrote, poems on the walls of their jail cells. That some poets were doctors, like William Carlos Williams, or insurance executives, like Wallace Stevens, and absurdly prolific. Sure, freshly written poems had been found in the pockets of the war dead of every war since time immemorial, and Miklós Radnóti wrote his last poems while in a forced labor battalion, despite having to endure beatings by the Nazi guards for it. When the mass grave in which he was buried had been dug up after the war ended, his wife found a book of poems written in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book in his back pocket. The pages had been soaked through with Radnóti’s blood and body fluids, so she had dried them out in the sun.

  Many of those poems had been love fragments written to Radnóti’s wife, and in graduate school Holly had memorized translations of nearly all of them, although the only lines she could now recall were Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever—still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death or a beetle inhabiting the heart of a rotting tree. . . .

  It didn’t help Holly’s writer’s block to think of these poets, or for Eric to remind her of the tales she’d told him of such poets. He didn’t mean to be cruel, but he also didn’t understand what she needed in order to be a poet. To be a real poet. To be the poet she’d wanted to be when she was in the MFA program. An American poet of the world, like Carolyn Forché, or a poet of the deepest interior, like Louise Glück, or a poet of love and loss, like Marie Howe, or a poet of humor and irony, like Tony Hoagland (whose poem “Hard Rain” had been the inspiration for her ringtone). Those were the poets she’d set out to be.

  Now, with Tatty back in her room, Eric of course would say, “Go write a poem now! What’s stopping you?”

  He had no idea. He had no idea how much she wanted to do that. But she couldn’t sit down and write a poem. A poem had to come to her. She couldn’t go to it. And no poem had come to her for a decade and a half.

  Fine. She was not a poet. She could admit that now. If she were, the poems would have come. She was not a poet like the ones she’d admired, or the ones who’d been in that MFA program with her. Even the fellow students who’d never published a word (which was most of them)—Holly knew that they were still out there writing. That they were scribbling in their studies somewhere. That they managed to find poems while they were shopping at the mall, working at mindless jobs like Holly’s. They were even managing to scribble on their lunch hours, or in the car while they waited for their kids’ ballet classes to be let out. They could not even be discouraged by rejection. If they could not get their poems published in journals, they published them on websites they started themselves. Holly had seen those poems on those websites, and, she couldn’t help it, had felt contempt for that self-advertising, that commitment by those poets to an art that had abandoned them. She hated, didn’t she, that they continued to write, and to write, and to write?

  Well, that was never going to be Holly’s path, was it?

  For Holly it had always been futile, hadn’t it? She was fallow ground. She’d always allowed herself to believe that there could be something there—given the right amount of time, the right pen, the right desk—but she never got those things, because those were things she would have had to dig for with some tool she would have had to invent herself. Impossible. “Just sit down and write!” her husband would say, but Eric would never be able to understand this frustration, her frustration, the clear sense Holly had that there was a secret poem at the center of her brain, and that she’d been born with it, and that she would never, ever, in this life, be able to exhume it, so that to sit down and write was torture. It was to sit down with a collar around her neck growing tighter and tighter the longer she sat.

  It was the collar:

  When, at twenty-five, they’d told her at the Campion Cancer Center that (of course) she had the gene mutation they’d tested her for, Holly felt that collar being slipped over her head and put around her neck. The lovely red-haired oncologist had held her hand and said, “I really believe, Holly, that if you want to live to see fifty, maybe even thirty-five, or thirty, you need to have your breasts and ovaries removed.”

  They’d told her to take at least six months to think about it. Take six months to think about whether you wanted to die the way your mother and sister had. As if it would really take six months to choose between that fate or living to see fifty, or thirty?

  Still, Holly had taken the six months—the longest six months of her life. They’d been a lifetime, those months. She’d been a woman at the top of a tower during that half a year, surveying the land in every direction for thousands of miles. That land was flat, and familiar. There were gardens full of cabbages. And the weather never changed. A lukewarm drizzle all night and all day. She could see her mother’s and sisters’ graves out there, from that tower, and she could also watch the children she wasn’t going to give birth to playing on rusty, dangerous playground equipment. But she could see that she was out there, too—growing older, without disease, without passing her mutation on, and, except for this collar, for the rest of her life, nothing would be any different than it had been before:

  That fifty-year-old woman she otherwise would never be—Holly would pass that woman on the road. That woman would be driving a ghastly little car, and Holly would drive past her until she could no longer even see in her rearview mirror.

  She’d even quit reading poetry, except for happy nursery rhymes to Tatty.

  THEN, HOLLY REMEMBERED the inspiration she’d woken up with:

  Something had followed them home from Russia.

  As she’d known it would, that sentence had grown to mean nothing to her now. Now she needed to get on with things. Now she needed to put the roast in the refrigerator, so it wouldn’t rot, so that it could be eaten tomorrow, when the storm had passed. Now she should again call Eric
. And she also wanted to talk to Thuy—although she imagined her friend curled up on the couch, Patty between herself and Pearl, watching something on TV. It’s a Wonderful Life? Or Miracle on 34th Street?

  Pearl and Thuy were the kinds of mothers who seemed determined that every hour of their child’s life be filled with memorable and seasonal pleasures and events. They took Patty to orchards and to cider mills and on hayrides in the fall. In the spring they walked with her through the woods to sketch the wildflowers they found (and did not pick!). There was the beach in the summer, of course, and Christmas began in late November with the Nutcracker (in Chicago) and the Ice Capades (in Detroit) and the stringing of cranberries and popcorn. Holly thought of them on the couch together now, snowed in and glorious, and she thought how much she wished she’d had their model for motherhood when Tatiana was still a child.

  Because Tatiana was no longer a child, was she?

  It was a terrible thought. Tatty’s childhood was over! Holly walked over to the kitchen island and rested her hands on the cool and tomblike granite. It was a deep-sea blue, nearly black, but inside the smoothed stone there were tiny silver flecks. She wished she had more energy. She wished she felt strong enough to call out to Tatty again, to tell Tatty to come out of her room, to take off her terrible black shoes and that dress, to put on her white tank top and yoga pants, to wear her fuzzy slippers, and to bring a blanket. Holly would make hot chocolate, popcorn. If there weren’t any good old movies on TV the two of them could sit and watch the blizzard outside the picture window. Holly would keep her arm around the thin blue shoulders of her daughter.

  But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear it. The thought of going to that door and knocking on it again, of stepping into Tatty’s room—she couldn’t even do that, could she? She couldn’t even knock on the door. If the door were locked, if Tatiana had hooked closed that door on Holly with the lock that she herself had provided, what would Holly have to face then? And if it wasn’t? That would be even worse. Holly could not bear that, either, to step into that room and find her daughter’s cold back turned to her again.

  Maybe later, but not now.

  Instead, she went back to the picture window and looked out.

  One must have a mind of winter.

  Wallace Stevens.

  Wallace Stevens was the insurance executive poet whose name Eric was trying to remember when he blamed Holly for her own writer’s block, insisting to Holly that it wasn’t motherhood and her job in corporate America that was giving her writer’s block. (“Look at that poet, you know, that guy, the insurance guy . . .”). That her problem was, instead—

  Well, Eric had a billion accusatory explanations for Holly’s writer’s block over the years, hadn’t he?

  Beyond the window, there was now a high wall made of snow. The flakes that composed it no longer had the individuality that snowflakes were always being ballyhooed as having. They’d come together in solidarity, instead. They were shrugging off any claim to personal distinction. They might, each one of them, be different from the others, but they were far too alike to be differentiated. They could never have been sorted, or given names. Together they formed a door, and closed themselves. Wait—

  No.

  That wasn’t quite true.

  There was no door, just the illusion of one.

  What those flakes formed together was a window—a window behind this window, which Holly stepped closer to. She put her face to the glass, and cupped her hands around her face, and realized that if she narrowed her eyes against the light she could make out the fence between their yard and Randa’s. She could even see the snowchild of the birdbath, and the cloth bags she’d tied around the roses in the fall against that fence.

  Those cloth bags were gray-white, like the falling snow, and were now covered with snow, so that Holly could only really see their outlines against the cedar boards of the fence back there. From here, obscured by blizzard, those sacks protecting her roses looked like heads, lined up, seven of them, against Randa’s fence. Skulls full of roses, minds made of roses, hidden in there so that they could stay warm and dormant, so that her rosebushes had some chance of living through the Michigan winter:

  One must have a mind of roses.

  Now, it was hard to believe that, out there, covered in those bags and dormant (whatever dormant meant: somewhere between sleeping and dead?) were her Teasing Georgia, her Mardi Gras, her Cherry Parfait, her Falstaff, her Purple Passion, and her Black Magic—the one she called her Tatiana. Holly had placed the sacks over those herself, back in October.

  Several years before, when she and her neighbor were still on speaking terms, Randa had asked Holly (politely, Holly had to give her that) what it was that Holly was spraying on the roses. Randa told Holly that she loved the roses, loved to see them blooming along the fence line that they shared, and loved being able to look over her fence and see them in all their glory and perfection. Still, she wondered, could whatever it was Holly sprayed them with poison her poodle? Or, say, Holly’s chickens? Or the birds that came to their backyard feeders? Or anything else? Her little boy, or Tatiana? Randa’s questions became more hysterical the longer she was allowed to ask them. Was it a pesticide? Was it a carcinogen? Were there any organic alternatives?

  Holly had simply lied. In truth, she sprayed the roses with diazinon, malathion, and something else, something called Knock-Out. And, no, you couldn’t grow roses like this without poison. There were no organic poisons—or, you might say, all poisons were organic (of, related to, or deriving from living matter; of, relating to, or affecting a bodily organ). The earth itself was the ultimate poison, and the sun—they were all being slowly killed by radioactive fallout from the sun. She didn’t bother to argue with Randa. Instead, she said, “Yes. It’s all organic.”

  “Phew,” Randa said. “Thanks for not being offended that I asked!”

  But Holly had been offended:

  She’d been offended by Randa’s ignorance, and then been offended by her gullibility. She’d been offended that anyone could be so naïve as to think that roses like these might be able to fend off their own aphids and fungi and black spot without help from humans and the toxins they concocted in their factories. She was offended by Randa’s innocent idea that Holly had any options (other than not grow the roses at all) but to spray them with something potentially deadly. Roses like this were worth some risks, weren’t they? She felt a little guilty, yes, especially about Rufus the poodle, who spent most of his time sniffing around the fence between their yard and Randa’s, where the roses happened to be growing. But, after all these years, Rufus was still alive, and Holly had felt much less guilty since Randa had confronted her (attacked her) about the cat.

  AH, TRIXIE:

  Back there, near the roses, under the snow, along the fence line, there was a little grave mound in honor of Trixie, on top of which Tatiana had placed a small ceramic cupid they’d bought at Target.

  Eric had been in California on business, so Holly’d had to dig the grave herself, and it had been winter then, too, and the ground had been so solid that Holly could hardly make a dent in it with Eric’s shovel, so it had been a shallow grave. Really, a shamefully shallow grave.

  Holly should have known that it wasn’t deep enough, that something could come and dig the body up. But it had also been so cold that day that she’d assumed that Trixie’s body, inside a cardboard box, would be frozen stiff by nightfall. No animal could have sniffed out such a frozen dead thing, surely, and by the time the body thawed?

  Well, what did Holly know about dead bodies? It wasn’t until the snow melted in March and Holly went out there to check on her roses, to peek under their hangman’s hoods, that she noticed that the grave had been dug up, and that the cardboard box was in damp shreds, and that the cat was gone. Luckily, she discovered this on a Saturday morning, and Tatty and Eric were still in bed, and Holly was able to hurry to the garage and to fake a grave mound and to replace the ceramic cupid, which had rolled on
its chubby face beside the empty grave.

  HOLLY STEPPED AWAY from the window.

  She remembered, then, the roast, cooling now in the cold oven:

  Twelve pounds at 12.99 a pound. She couldn’t just leave it to spoil. She would wrap it, she decided, and put it in the refrigerator. If Tatty would agree to eat any of it with her later, Holly would just slice off enough for the two of them and finish cooking that on a tin plate in the oven or, if she was in a hurry, in the microwave.

  But when she turned to face the kitchen she saw that Tatty was already there, and that the roast had been taken out of the oven. It was on the kitchen counter now, and Tatty was bent over it with a knife and fork, and she was chewing!

  “For God’s sake, Tatty!” Holly called out. “I kept asking you if you wanted something to eat, and you just ignored me. Let me cook that before you eat it.”

  But Tatty didn’t look up, and her mouth was, apparently, too full of raw meat to speak. She just chewed and chewed, ignoring Holly—and before she could possibly have swallowed the bloody lump of meat that was already in her mouth, Tatiana was carving off another piece, and stuffing that piece in her mouth. Witnessing this, Holly went from annoyed to alarmed:

  “Tatty! My God! You’re going to choke. Stop it! Please!”

  She came up behind her daughter and yanked the carving knife out of her hand. She didn’t really expect Tatty to grab for it, but she held it up and away from her daughter anyway. Holly knew how sharp this knife was. Only a few days earlier, foolishly, she’d left it point-side up in the dishwasher drainer and, reaching in to get a clean spoon for her cereal, she’d stabbed herself—quickly, but thoroughly—in the very center of her palm.

  Tatiana’s eyes were huge again. They’d never been larger, really. Had they? They were twice their usual size! Was this a symptom of something? Some sort of vitamin deficiency? Was this what the eyes of a person in a manic state looked like? Could Tatty be displaying symptoms of some mental illness she’d not yet presented? Mental illness had been something a few coworkers (not necessarily well-meaning, in Holly’s opinion) had suggested to her when she’d first begun discussing her interest in adopting a child from overseas: