White Bird in a Blizzard

by Laura Kasischke

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1999 Laura Kasischke

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Kasischke, Laura.

  White bird in a blizzard / Laura Kasischke.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-7868-6366-8

  I. Title.

  PS3561.A6993W53 1998

  813'.54—dc21 98-11223

  CIP

  eISBN 978-0-544-46505-3

  v1.0614

  for Bill

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK BILL ABERNETHY, LISA BANKOFF, JENNIFER BARTH, AND ANTONYA NELSON FOR HELPING ME WRITE AND REWRITE THIS NOVEL; ED AND JUNE KASISCHKE FOR MANY YEARS OF ENCOURAGEMENT; AND LUCY AND JACK ABERNETHY, MY CHILDREN, FOR LOVE.

  ONE

  January 1986

  I AM SIXTEEN WHEN MY MOTHER STEPS OUT OF HER SKIN ONE frozen January afternoon—pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance—and disappears.

  No one sees her leave, but she is gone.

  Only the morning before, my mother was a housewife—a housewife who, for twenty years, kept our house as swept up and sterile as the mind of winter itself, so perhaps she finally just whisk-broomed herself out, a luminous cloud of her drifting through the bedroom window as soft as talcum powder, mingling with the snowflakes as they fell, and the stardust and the lunar ash out there.

  Her name is Eve, and this is Garden Heights, Ohio, so I used to like to think of my mother as Eve—the naked one, the first one—when she was in the Garden, poisoning the weeds with bleach, defoliating the trees, stuffing their leaves down the garbage disposal, then scouring the sink with something chemical and harsh, but powdered, something dyed ocean blue to disguise its deadly powers for the housewives like my mother who bought it, only dimly realizing that what they’d purchased with its snappy name (Spic and Span, Mr. Clean, Fantastik) was pure acid.

  The blue of a child’s eyes, the blue of a robin’s egg—

  But swallow a teaspoon of that and it will turn your intestines to lace.

  This Eve, like the first one, was bored in Garden Heights. She spent her afternoons in the silence of a house she’d just cleaned yesterday from bottom to top, and there was nothing left for her to do beyond planning the nothing of the future, too.

  Sometimes, when I came home from school early, I’d find her asleep in my bed. She’d be dressed as if she had somewhere to go—black slacks, a lamb’s-wool sweater, pearls, dark hair set in smooth curls—folded onto her side, not a single light on in the whole house. But that afternoon, something else happened.

  What, I can only imagine.

  I imagine her standing at the bedroom window watching the sky toss its cold litter of snow on the lawn, thinking about loss, or love, or lust, bored again, then exploding like a bomb of feather-duster feathers, or melting into the wall to wall—a milky, evaporating shadow on the shag.

  When my father gets home from work, she is gone completely. When I get home from school, he is sitting in the living room with his suit still on, hands turned up empty on his lap.

  We wait all night for her to come home, but she doesn’t.

  We don’t eat dinner. We don’t know how.

  My sheets feel frozen when I get in bed, and I can hear my father snoring in their bedroom.

  I realize now that I knew nothing about my mother except that one day she was here—making dinner, cleaning the house, scowling around with that feather duster—and the next day she wasn’t.

  BUT WHAT COULD I HAVE DONE ABOUT MY MOTHER? WHILE she was metamorphosing right in our own home—changing, reshaping, going crazy, or sane—I was becoming sixteen. I thought her trouble was just menopause, or boredom, and by the time I might have said or done something, I was sixteen, my blood like a little creek flooded suddenly with hormones, a babbling brook that had become hot, and high, and dangerous.

  I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I’d never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them—something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light—and it was as though I could hold the life force itself in my hands.

  Whatever my mother was up to, I didn’t care.

  Phil, the boy next door, is tall, and blond, and actively stupid. “Fuckin’ A,” he’ll say when a bit of poetry is quoted by the TV news anchor. “Straight C’s!” he smiles, waving his report card at me in the cafeteria at school.

  In the summer, he wanted me to wear nothing but halter tops, and when we met in our backyards, which were separated only by a yellow ditch of daffodils, he’d come up behind me and slip his hands into the top.

  The fertilized lawns throbbed like green glass in the sun.

  “Show me,” I would say to Phil as he drove us to school in his father’s sedan, and he’d unzip his pants, take his penis out, flop it around.

  Phil has been my boyfriend for a year, and in that year we have talked about almost nothing. If he has any original ideas, any personal opinions wafting around like feathers in his head, he manages to keep them mostly to himself. He listens to WKLL, the heaviest of the heavy-metal stations around here, but he’s not the heavy-metal type. He’s never been to a concert, and can’t remember the names of the bands he likes or tell you what his favorite song of the month is called, let alone what it’s about, all that car-crash clutter behind the singing.

  He’s what you’d call a clean-cut kid if you were the type of person who believed in clean-cut kids. No ripped T-shirts. No tattoos. No steel-tipped boots. As suburban as it gets.

  But it’s always in the background as he’s driving, and he nods his head as if he’s listening (“W-KILL!” the disc jockeys scream between songs, sounding juvenile and halfhearted and nonviolent), as if he’s enjoying what he hears, as if it speaks to some part of him that is not the least bit visible to the naked eye, some slam-dancing protozoan part.

  I’ve learned to tune it out, myself, having always worried that if I listened, really listened, to that kind of music, it might fry some delicate tissue in my inner ear and I’d go deaf.

  Phil doesn’t talk much, but it doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted to talk, I could have talked to my mother. For a long time, she was trying to get me to talk—

  “Kat,” she said, “do you love this boy?”

  “Mom,” I said, turning on her. “What business is that of yours?”

  She was standing behind me in the bathroom, looking over my shoulder at the two of us reflected in the mirror above the sink. Just out of the shower, I had a towel wrapped around me, and a veil of steam came between us and smudged our reflections. The humidity smoothed the lines out on her face, and she looked like a foggy me.

  “Well, I can’t stand your father,” she said then, and the bluntness of it was like a rubber bat slugging into a rubber ball.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Tell it to someone else,” and pushed past her into the hall.

  As simply as my mother was here, and then she wasn’t, Phil and I were virgins, and then we weren’t.

  One afternoon when we had no school—my father was at work, my mother wa
s still at the mall—we got into my bed, which was decorated with pansies and piled with stuffed animals that I knocked in one smooth gesture to the floor while Phil stood behind me, thumbs hooked into belt loops, waiting.

  Phil is lanky, and when he stands in one place he rests all his weight on one leg, and this turns his body into nothing but angles and planes, a boy made of scrap metal.

  It was March, and the light that bled in under the window shades was blurred and pale, as if March had gray water in her veins.

  We undid each other’s buttons and zippers under the covers. Neither of us said a word. We stomped our clothes down to the bottom of the bed in a panic of embarrassment and desire, a kind of prone peasant dancing—trampling the grapes, mashing the potatoes. I rolled onto my back, and wondered what I would know next that I’d never known before. Sin? Ecstasy? My own mortality? A glimpse of the cosmos as he entered me?

  But when Phil rolled on top of me, what I had was a sudden knowledge of skin.

  How much of it there is.

  How, like an elastic sock, it’s slipped over all the mystery and liquid that make us live. I could feel Phil’s heart thumping in it, bobbing like a plastic boat in a warm and salty bath, and I could hear that ocean, too, sloshing between his lungs. When he started going faster, getting ready to come, rocking the bed, turning red, he pushed my thighs farther apart with his arms, grimaced horrifically, and the two of us sounded like wet rags being furiously slapped together—

  If it hadn’t been for skin, we would have spilled.

  So, this was what was on my mind that spring and summer and fall into the bitter beginning of this winter—taking up all my time, occupying all my thoughts—as my mother was preparing herself to vanish, buying miniskirts and birds, talking to herself in the kitchen, hissing at me as I passed her in the hall, making confessions I didn’t want to hear. Just as my mother’s body was turning to glass, cracking all along the spine. Just as my mother was about to become nothing but invisible particles of brightness and air, I was becoming nothing but my body.

  Even in the middle of U.S. History, I could smell myself—blood and semen and spit and sweat—between my legs. I’d see him turn a corner in the hallway of our high school, and I would nearly groan with it, imagining the arc of him—hairless and hard, and all that skin—over me in my bed. I’d close my eyes in Psychology and picture my own legs spread, seeing myself from the sky, my nipples pointed up at me, and that teary pinkness waiting for Phil, or God, or something to fill it up.

  Desiring him had made me suddenly desire everything. Some nights I’d dream I was lying on a table in a restaurant—maybe Bob’s Chop House—naked, a sprig of parsley near my feet, maybe even an apple in my mouth, and every boy at my high school, maybe even the men—the principal, the janitors, all of them—were lined up, all of them with hard-ons, looking at me hungrily, with Phil at the end of the line, the longest and hardest and hungriest of them all.

  This was a whole new planet I suddenly found myself living on, wading every day through a sexual river on fire, and the last thing on my mind was my mother—who was slipping out of the physical world just as I slipped in.

  THE FIRST NIGHT MY MOTHER’S GONE I DREAM MY SHEETS have turned to snow, and their cold white wraps me in winter like a stillborn baby. The light, the bed, the sheets—it’s as if a pale angel, enormous, is kneeling over me, a colossus of pure marble, as if she is pressing me with her bare-fingered wings back into the womb of January in Ohio—

  I am the small o slipping into the other O, the large empty O that swallows everything whole.

  Maybe it would be sweet there, but I’m not ready to go.

  The walls begin to throb—electric, frozen. They are frost-furred, and contracting. I realize that if I can’t swim to the surface, these walls will embrace me to death—inevitably, but with affection. I struggle for a long time against them.

  When I wake up, my father’s sitting at the edge of my bed.

  “That was your mother who called,” he says, though I haven’t heard the phone ring. “She said she’s never coming back.”

  I raise myself up on my elbows, “What?”

  I ask it without expression.

  He doesn’t answer.

  He hides his face in his hands. “Oh, Kat,” he sobs, “what are we going to do?”

  SHE NAMED ME KATRINA BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO CALL ME Kat. She wanted to call me Kat because I was to be her pet. “Here, Kat. Here, kitty kitty kitty,” she’d call, and I’d come. Sometimes she’d even pat my head, scratch behind my ears.

  Katrina. A kind of fancy cat. A Russian breed, perhaps. The kind of cat that decorates the couch just by sleeping on it.

  So, for a while I thought I was my mother’s pet, and nothing but. When I got old enough to get the joke, I’d even purr for her, crawl to wherever she was sitting and rub against her legs.

  But when I got even older, I’d glare at her in silence when she called me, and stand my ground. She’d hiss through her teeth, swat in my direction with her claws, and laugh. After a while, I couldn’t stand her. The sound of her crossing the living room in slippers made my head ache. And after I fell in love with Phil, just as I wanted less of her, she wanted more and more of me. I would sit across the kitchen table from her in the morning while she drank coffee and stared at me, and I thought, If I look up, this woman will swallow me whole.

  But I was her pet for a long time, despite how quickly the time went by. I remember the sound of her voice, naming everything, when I still knew the names for nothing. Woof, she said, pointing at the neighbor’s dog scratching in our garden. It was big and blond, fur like polished straw, and wore a collar with tags that made silvery music under our kitchen window. It dug and dug. “Let it,” my mother said, even though it was ruining her petunias. “Let it figure out for itself there’s nothing there.”

  Snake, she said as she held me up to the terrarium at the back of the pet store where the air smelled of piss and vinegar and wood chips. The snake was asleep, coiled and breathing, like my father’s garden hose in the garage. I remember there were smudged fingerprints on the glass—round, human designs, perfectly reproduced, lines spiraling into tiny, receding eyes—as if someone had wanted to leave some evidence behind.

  Bird, she said as we were walking out of the pet store and one smashed itself against the bars of its cage in our direction—a pretty fist, white and screeching, something an old lady might wear on her hat to church on Sunday.

  And I remember lying beside her in my parents’ bed one morning after my father had gone to work.

  Frost had scribbled the windows, but I couldn’t read what it said. I couldn’t read at all yet. Whenever my mother opened a book, I had to trust that the story she told me was the one that was written there. And later, of course, when I could read, I’d find out that, more often than not, it wasn’t.

  My mother had a sense of humor.

  For instance, at the end of “Rumpelstiltskin,” the queen does not have to give her baby up to the manic, miniature man who demands it. The reason she’s wearing that beatific cookie-cutter smile is because she’s tricked him, learned his name, and gets to keep her firstborn, not because she’s just given the baby away.

  She has black hair.

  We are laughing.

  It is a nest of feathered pillows here, both of us in white gowns. Silly, she pulls the bedsheet over our heads, and with the morning light streaming in, the sheet is a whole heaven above us, blinding me with brightness, and for a moment I’ve lost her in it. “Mama” I call, and the syllables rise from my mouth like small and cold balloons.

  “Kat,” she says, “here’s Mama,” from somewhere beside me inside the nothing.

  “Mama’s here,” she says, but I am lost in all that white, and have no idea where here is.

  “WHERE COULD SHE HAVE GONE?” I ASK MY FATHER OVER dinner. I’ve broiled a piece of beef I bought this morning at the grocery store, a place I don’t remember having been since I was small enough to ride
in the cart, and I’ve sliced it in half between us. He microwaved two potatoes, which hissed as they cooked. Together we’ve shredded some lettuce into a bowl and tossed black olives into it.

  It’s the first real meal we’ve ever eaten at the dining room table without her, and it tastes good.

  This afternoon, Detective Scieziesciez—whose name is pronounced, despite its hardness, despite the consonants hidden like barbs and thistles in it, simply, shh-shh-shh—called again, as he has every afternoon since we reported her missing, to ask if anything has turned up, changed, or suddenly occurred to us. Any more phone calls from her? Any postcards? Any lawyers serving papers?

  But my father just shook his head sadly on the other end of the line, as if the detective could see him from the downtown Toledo office he works out of.

  “Nothing,” my father said over and over, “nothing. Nothing.”

  Then, hanging up, my father said, “Thank you, Detective Shh-shh-shh,” to the air, staring into it for a while like a man consumed with despair, a man wandering, lost, through a tunnel of despair wearing a gray prison uniform in his gray imagination.

  My father shakes his head sadly now, as he did then, and grimaces at me across the table, a bloody thread of meat snagged in his front teeth. There is a familiar, watery-eyed expression on his face. He shrugs and looks down at his damaged dinner, torn to pieces on a plate.