House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  Brian Horrigan passed me a joint. I took a toke. “Where’s Austin?” he asked.

  I was glad word had leaked out that Austin and I were together.

  Skippy and his entourage were doing shots of peppermint schnapps. Johnny and Daniella were practically having sex on the living room couch. On the coffee table Robbie and Steve were doing lines of coke with a rolled-up dollar bill. Steve divvied it out from a vial’s worth that probably cost about as much as my family’s monthly grocery bill. The twins, Franny and Mindy Klinger, were describing their identical summer wardrobes, which they purchased on a shopping trip with their mother in Paris. I was in one of those moods where I questioned the point of existence.

  I cornered Maria as she was coming out of the Larsens’ perfumed bathroom, and begged her to drive me to the track.

  “Now? It’s after midnight.”

  “You owe me,” I said, because I had come with her to the Larsen party so she could see Billy. Maria glanced into the kitchen. Lucy and Billy were making out against the refrigerator door.

  We drove to the track in her father’s Lincoln.

  “Do you think Austin will be pissed off that I’m showing up unannounced?” I asked, and lit up a cigarette.

  “Does he have a reason to be?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” We were stopped at an intersection. I knew Maria wasn’t going to cut Austin any slack now that he was the focus of my attention. But, still, the remark got to me.

  After we parked and walked back to the stables, we found Austin sitting on a hay bale across from Jane Smart, sharing a beer with her. Maria and I looked at each other. Jane’s cheeks were flushed. Turned out they had been riding together that afternoon. Austin had gotten someone to cover for him at the barn. Austin came toward me and lit up like a Christmas tree, half excited and half shocked to see me. But why hadn’t he tried to find me at Skippy Larsen’s party, where I’d told him I was going, instead of hanging out with Jane? He asked me to go riding with him the next day, and there was no way I was going to say no and allow him to take Jane instead.

  Austin saddled up the horses, made a step with the interlocked fingers of both hands, and boosted me onto a horse called Night. Austin assured me that she was calm and gentle. He walked Night slowly around the fenced-in paddock by holding on to her bridle until I got used to the feel of the saddle, the weight of the reins in my hands. Austin showed me how to pull her back, how to coax, and cluck, and give the horse encouragement.

  “They know if you’re afraid, Anna. They sense it,” he said, as if he was talking about himself, as if he and the horses were interchangeable. He promised we would take it slow. We left the paddock and walked the horses down the driveway behind the barns. We entered the field. I relaxed as the sun shone on my back, and gradually I fell into the up and down of the horse’s rhythm.

  But Austin wasn’t satisfied.

  “Not through the trees,” I said. I saw where he was headed. We were halfway across the field before we entered the narrow trail through the forest. The sky that day was as blue as I’d seen it.

  “Trust me. Anna. Jane and I found this trail the other day.”

  “I’m not ready for this.” My voice was quivering.

  “Do you think I would let you get hurt? That I’d let anything happen to you?”

  He kicked his horse with the heel of his boot, turned his horse around, and motioned for me to do the same. But it was too late. I was losing control of the horse. Austin pulled back on his own horse, slowed down, and waited for Night to pass. Then he swatted Night’s rear end with his crop to get her moving.

  The trail, parallel to a running creek, was muddy and thick with forest on each side. My hair caught the bottom branches of a tree. Burrs attached to my jeans. My heart throbbed in my chest and threatened to outsound the rhythm of the horse’s hooves knocking against the ground, spitting up dirt and dust. The trail took us farther into the thick of the woods, over a small ravine, until it seemed we had vanished far into the forest. My legs and buttocks were sore. My fingers, from clutching so tight on the reins, hurt if I opened them, but slowly I began to relax, until a splinter of sun burst through the trees. Light bloomed in front of us, and suddenly we moved into an open field like a beautiful dream, but when Night saw the treeless expanse of grass, she broke into a run. I heard the soft chunks of mud breaking underneath her hooves and felt deep roots below us loosening from the ground.

  “Pull her back!” Austin shouted. “Anna, hold tight on the reins and get her under control. You take the lead, goddamn it,” he ordered. “Can’t you for once be in charge?”

  The comment cut into me, but my mind and body were at odds. I wobbled to the side. I clutched my calves harder against the sides of the horse, pressed my buttocks firmer into the saddle, trying to regain my balance, as Night raced through the field.

  When she threw me to the ground, the wind was knocked out of me, but I wasn’t in pain. I simply couldn’t move. It was like the time Lilly crashed into a car in front of us at a stoplight and I went flying back against the seat. For days I had heard the inside of my head rattle.

  Austin hopped off his horse and whistled between his fingers for my horse.

  Night ran back through the field and circled around us. I was flat on my back. When I tried to move, I couldn’t get up. The fall had happened so fast, it was hard to put the events together. I tried to raise my head and realized Night’s hoof was standing on a long lock of my hair. I was facing into the back side of her, my face between her two back legs.

  “I can’t get up,” I said. If she moved an inch, that would be the end of it. My face was that close to her leg.

  Austin coaxed the horse by stroking her mane and slowly moved her forward. I felt my hair come loose. Austin reached for my hand, and helped me up.

  Against his chest, I felt his pulse race in his neck.

  “Anna, you fucking scared me,” Austin said.

  “I’m okay.”

  “But what if . . .”

  “I’m fine,” I said, quieting his lips with my own.

  As day solidified into night, it grew quiet, except for the sound of the cicadas and the crickets. No one was there to hurry home to, no one but us, and in our shadow the heavy breathing of the horses, under the thick white summer clouds, where nocturnal animals were awakening. There were no compromises to be made, no one to please or take care of. The two horses put their necks down to feed in the grass, and Austin’s smell stuck to my clothes.

  Maria blamed me for Billy Fitzpatrick’s lack of attention. It was irrational. We both knew it, but nevertheless, I woke up the morning after Skippy’s party friendless. Maria refused my phone calls. I would have to choose between her and Austin. I would probably have felt the same way, if the situation had been reversed. But I couldn’t change anything now. I had driven into a fog so thick everything slid out of focus and disappeared.

  When I was a child, the two most important people in my life had vanished, first my father, and then my mother, when she lost herself in her dates. Love to me was always sheer, something you could see right through. I longed for a kind of love that was impenetrable, that was tough and enduring.

  By the snowy December the year my mother started her dating career, she was going out almost every night and sleeping all day. She forgot to wake us up for school in the morning, to leave money in an envelope in the milk chute for the milkman, to call the snowplow to dig us out. Sometimes the snow drifted so high that our house looked like an animal burrowing in the ground. My mother lost all sense of time and place; all sense of herself, except for an obsession with her figure. She went on liquid diets; for a week, she ate only three grapefruits a day.

  While Lilly busied herself with her makeup and creams, Ruthie heated cans of Campbell’s soup for supper. Meanwhile, Lilly looked as elegant as royalty, the way she carried herself down the stairs in the late afternoon. Yet there was often little in the refrigerator except a stack of frozen dinners or a doggy bag fro
m one of Cleveland’s elite restaurants filled with gristled filet mignon or leftover slices of prime rib.

  By the time Kent Montgomery came to call, my mother’s flirtations had gone beyond playfulness and she had grown anxious.

  That afternoon, I watched Lilly try on cocktail dress after cocktail dress, complaining that not one looked right. After she finally decided on one, she worried over the color or wave of her hair. She became irritable at these times, snapped at us over small things—if she ran her last pair of panty hose—then begged our forgiveness.

  I pleaded with my mother to stay home. She looked worn down and haggard, like a slab of meat hanging in the butcher shop. With panic in her eyes, she answered, “Don’t you see? I have no choice.” She continued to cream her tired face. Later, when Lilly glided down the stairs to meet Kent Montgomery, I saw her forced smile as she gazed into his eyes, and my heart plummeted.

  When she got home from her date, the front door creaked open. Lilly fumbled with the lock; Kent’s voice echoed up the stairs. He stomped his feet on the front doormat to clean the snow from the perfectly polished leather shoes I had noticed when he had come for Lilly.

  “Shhhhhhh,” Lilly whispered. I heard both of them laugh. The front door creaked shut again. Loose paint from the hall ceiling outside my bedroom fell in chips to the floor. My heart gradually slowed from quick, anxious beats to a more normal pace.

  My mother’s high heels clicked up the steps and stopped outside our door. “I thought I heard you two talking,” she said to Louise and me, opening the bedroom door a crack. “How come you’re still up?” Her voice was slow and thick like syrup. She slipped inside the room and sat down at the bottom of my bed. She stretched out one leg and slipped off its shoe with the other foot; her red polished toenails shone through her nude stockings. Her body was warm and floppy. That’s how she got when she drank. Sleepily, she laid her head down and curled up her body. She let out a long sigh. She was absorbed in something dark and secret.

  “Isn’t Kent adorable?” she asked at last, pushing herself up. She tossed back her head and laughed. “You liked him, didn’t you?”

  “He’s got a beard,” Louise said.

  “I like a man with hair on his face,” she said defensively.

  “Maybe he can come to my school?”

  “What are you talking about, Louise?” Lilly snapped out of her fantasy.

  “For Father’s Day. Missy’s father works for Channel Five,” she said.

  “Let’s not talk about that now,” Lilly said. She reached over to Louise’s bed and squeezed her hand. “I think it’s too premature to ask Kent,” she continued, in her out-of-body voice. “Girls, he has the softest hair,” she said. “Did you see the size of his shoulders?”

  The tortured look on Lilly’s face, so clear earlier, had faded away. She grew soft and wistful. She was under one of her lovesick spells. She laughed a private, no-good laugh. “Kent’s sweet, isn’t he?” she said to no one in particular.

  I didn’t think so. But I was slowly learning that my mother’s moods could be determined, like changing weather, by the kind of man she was with and how he treated her.

  “Tell me the truth,” she continued. “I’m your mother. You can tell me.” Her eyes darted back and forth from me to Louise and back again. “What’s wrong, Anna?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You didn’t like him, did you?”

  “I barely know him,” I said impatiently.

  “Well, he’s very nice,” Lilly snapped. “Besides, he offered to fix the leak in the garage roof.” She dragged her body up, and with her shoes slung over her shoulder by their straps she closed the door behind her.

  After Lilly had gone into her bedroom, I heard the telephone ring. I could hear my mother talking.

  “Kent, is that you? . . . I don’t know, it’s so late.”

  The spring on my mother’s bed creaked as Lilly rose to go into her dressing room. Then I heard the swish-swish from her lace nightgown as she passed our bedroom door on the way back downstairs.

  “Where are you going?” I called through the door.

  “Anna, go back to bed,” Lilly said.

  “But where are you going?”

  “Kent forgot his keys.” Lilly’s voice sounded defeated and tired.

  “If he forgot his keys, then where was he calling from?”

  “Anna,” Lilly said, exasperated. “There’s a hole in the garage about two feet wide.”

  I wished I could travel far into space, like the astronauts who’d gone to the moon. Then my spirit would be safe from the world where my mother lived, with her assorted men and sultry music, her makeup and sexy dresses.

  Throughout the years of my mother’s dating, she often sat at the foot of my bed and quizzed me. I didn’t understand why my opinion mattered so much—perhaps she just needed to hear herself talk. But I didn’t want to hear her. I had my own problems. I would have liked her to help me.

  Soon I would start third grade. I couldn’t concentrate on the math equations on the board that year. I had worried about what my mother was doing in the house all day alone. If Lilly had too much time on her hands, she grew vague and transparent as if you could slip right through her.

  “Robert told me he was seeing other women,” she’d said once. “Anna, is there something wrong with me? I thought we connected. Should I call him?”

  I didn’t think so, but I knew she wanted to hear the opposite. My mother seemed to have an endless desire no man could fill. “When we were at the Reinsteins’ cocktail party, he said he loved children. Don’t you think he was trying to tell me something? When a man touches you . . . well, I thought it meant something.”

  After the night of Austin’s party, my body didn’t feel mine unless he was next to me; I felt if he wasn’t in my vision he didn’t exist, or more to the point, I didn’t exist for him.

  That spring and summer there was hardly a place to be alone. Like everything else in Chagrin Falls, my house felt incredibly small. When I wasn’t working or out with Austin, I sat in the living room and in the stream of sunlight I watched specks of dust slowly float into the air, and I wondered about the meaning of life until the sound of a lawn mower or the phone ringing drove a wedge into the silence and pulled me out of my thoughts. Upstairs I could hear the drone of the TV in my mother’s bedroom. Her melancholy overtook the air in our home like the smell of rotting fruit. Sometimes I retreated outside and sat in the gazebo reading a book, or laid out in the sun on a lounge chair working on my tan before it was time for me to go to work.

  My mother had swung back to isolating herself in our house the way she had during those years right after my father died. I worried that my mother might decide to stay shut in our house forever. I suppose she could have if she had wanted to. She had enough money to squeak by on from her monthly Social Security checks, occasional help from Aunt Rose’s pension, and handouts from Nonie and Papa.

  After my father died Nonie and Papa were always after her to take some classes, get an education. But Lilly managed to skirt the issue.

  Every time Aunt Rose came back to Cleveland for her yearly visit, she, too, pleaded with Lilly to get a job or an education. But Lilly always defended herself, saying, “The only thing I know how to do is take care of my family.”

  “But, Mom, maybe Aunt Rose’s right. Maybe you’d be happier if you worked,” I’d say after Aunt Rose left.

  “I don’t have Aunt Rose’s constitution,” Lilly reasoned. “Imagine me, working at a bank.”

  That kind of logic had an awful effect on me. I wanted to jump through the roof. But if you stepped into those waters with my mother, it was as if you had walked into an inner argument she was having with herself. She sucked you in like an undertow, and then spit you out again, carrying her burden.

  When Lilly went out on dates, we worried when she would come home or what kind of mood she’d be in once her date deposited her back inside our front door like an opened package. The winter I wa
s in third grade, if I wasn’t at Maria’s house playing Barbies or Monopoly underneath the alcove in her attic while her father worked and her mother chain-smoked in the den, I hung out with my sisters in the yard building snowmen and making snow forts until it got late. We tried our hardest to stay busy, so we wouldn’t have to wonder when our mother was coming back.

  One icy night she had gone out with Kent Montgomery, and when she was with him we never knew what time she’d be home. When our hands grew cold and our cheeks stung, we went inside and had hot chocolate with marshmallows and slices of toast spread with butter and sprinkled sugar. Then we climbed up to our rooms. I cleared off the schoolbooks, trousers, and balled-up sweaters that were always piled in a heap on Louise’s bed. I untangled the blankets, tucked and dusted clean the flowered sheet. “Why are you such a slob?” I turned to Louise, and scolded. Louise, as a child, was disorganized and anxious. When I looked into her face, I could see the weight of sorrow she carried in her eyes. I knew her body, like mine, missed feeling the hands and warm lips of our father on her; showing a daughter what it meant to be loved. I was only four when my father died. My memories of him were vague, but poor Louise confessed she had no memories of our father at all.

  I helped her pull the sweatshirt over her head and handed her a nightgown. There was dirt in her fingernails, and I made her go into the bathroom and clean them off. Soon we both slipped into bed, but later Louise went to Ruthie’s room and summoned her. Then Ruthie came and climbed into Louise’s bed with her. Before we fell asleep, we waited for Lilly to come back home. When Louise couldn’t sleep, Ruthie read The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking. I liked Pippi’s red braids, her skinny legs, brave adventures, and the sound of Ruthie’s voice creating the scene for us.