House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  When Max moved into our house, he was a complete stranger. All men were to us. But this one had taken hold of my mother.

  Once my mother married Max, her drawers and closets were filled with new clothes, beautiful gold jewelry, long wool coats, and soft, fluffy new sweaters. Lilly no longer needed to spend hours getting ready before they went out to dinner or to the movies. The long, affectionate kisses Max gave her when he came home from work and the way he looked at her set flame to her beauty; around her was the warm feeling of being loved and cared for.

  She bustled around the house cleaning windows, scrubbing the old linoleum floors, hanging fresh, new colorful drapes in our bedrooms. She bought flowers for the dinner table each night and hired a gardener to dig a new bed in the backyard. That spring, Max hired a painter to paint the outside of the house while Lilly ordered workmen to take away the old swing set where we had spent many of our summer days.

  I stayed in my bedroom and watched from the window as the men pulled up the rusted red poles, disconnected the disintegrating chains, and took apart the silver slide. After they had gone, I ran downstairs and out to the garbage can to rescue the splintered wooden seats, as if by keeping them I could still savor a part of our lives that was disappearing. I sat outside on the lawn as clouds surged over the trees, over the rows of houses on the block, and watched the setting sun. Watched it fall into the arms of the oak tree. I threw the wooden seats back into the waste can, and wandered toward the gazebo.

  I sat on the bench, rested my back against the white rafters, and closed my eyes. The sky was pure and uncomplicated. The morning glories climbed the newly painted white house. Ivy circled the chimney. The laundry drying on the line puffed with wind and then flattened again. My mother’s nylons and slips next to Max’s white boxer shorts flapped in the morning air.

  And now, like all the other children on the block, we had to be home at six o’clock sharp for dinner. I loved the new symmetry of order and routine, of knowing what to expect. I had quickly come to depend on it.

  There were strange new meals staring at us from the new china plates. We sat quietly at the dinner table while Lilly and Max flirted.

  “Girls, did I ever tell you the story of the first time I laid eyes on your mother?” Max said. “I was playing in the Chagrin Falls Open . . .”

  “Max had a difficult time keeping his eyes on the ball,” Lilly interrupted. “He leaned over and asked me for my phone number. The nerve of him,” Lilly said, laughing.

  “Golf was the only thing I ever loved passionately,” Max said. “The quick snap of the swing, the grace of the putt, the skill and concentration. Until I met your mother.”

  Lilly stood up and massaged Max’s shoulders. My sisters and I looked down at our half-eaten plates of food.

  Lilly had decided to become a gourmet cook; the kitchen became a complicated storm of cookbooks, exotic spices, new copper pots and pans hanging from an overhead rack. My mother ran frantically around the kitchen before Max came home from work; then she’d dash upstairs fifteen minutes before he’d open the door, to take off her old sweatshirt and put on a cashmere sweater, apply fresh makeup, and return to the kitchen, fully composed.

  At the dinner table Max set the tone. If he was in a good mood, he said, “Girls, this week I’m taking you out to dinner.” When Max wasn’t playing golf, he invested in start-up companies, once partnered in a restaurant. If he lost a deal, or money in the market, he was irritable and moody. “You girls have got to start cleaning your bedrooms,” he’d say then. “I’ve never seen such a pigsty. Get your goddamn shoes out of the hall.” He’d start as soon as he walked in the door. My father never swore. I never heard my grandparents or Aunt Rose say God’s name in vain. Swear words weren’t part of our vocabulary. But we didn’t care if Max swore or told us what to do. It meant someone was paying attention.

  “Oh, Max, stop it,” Lilly said playfully, when he squeezed her knee or reached over and bit her neck. She was never happier than when his entire attention was fixed on her. We finally had a man in our house. I hadn’t realized how much I’d craved it.

  One night I was making small piles of peas along the edges of my plate while Max talked, like I usually did. Max’s hand left the table to reach for Lilly’s knee. Lilly got up and served him another plate of Caesar salad. She filled his glass with wine. “How about another slice of meat?” she asked, as she stabbed a piece of bloody rare roast beef with a serving fork and slapped it onto Max’s plate.

  After dinner Ruthie came into Louise’s and my bedroom.

  “I wish Lilly never married Max,” she said. “I don’t have a good feeling about him. As soon as I can figure out what I’m doing, I’m getting out of here.”

  “Can’t you see how happy Mom is?” I was worried Ruthie was going to ruin everything. I was nervous around Max, but I was willing to risk the discomfort if it meant my mother was happy.

  Just then Lilly opened the bedroom door.

  “We’re a real family now,” she whispered. She was dressed in a sheer negligee. With ruffled hair and rosy cheeks, she yawned dreamily.

  “Lilly,” Max called from downstairs. “I just uncorked a bottle of port.”

  “Isn’t he something?” Lilly blew us a kiss and rose to leave. After she closed the door, Louise crawled into my bed. She hadn’t done that in years. Everything we had known before had disappeared, except the steadfast shapes of our bodies pressed against each other. Slowly the windows filled with dark funnels of stars.

  Austin traced his fingers over my nose, eyes, mouth, as if he were putting me into his memory. Underneath the stars, on the green of the golf course, where grasshoppers rustled in the shadows, I felt as if I was in my childhood room again, huddled in the dark with my sisters in a place no one could tamper with or touch. I wanted to keep that moment in the Ohio night with Austin forever, so we would never be apart. “I wish we were ten years older,” Austin said. “Do you think we’ll know each other in ten years?”

  Goose bumps went up my arms.

  “Let’s make a pact,” he said. “Seriously. Sit up.” I sat up on the damp grass in front of him. “Give me something of yours, something you’re wearing right now.”

  I groped at my chest for the gold Jewish star Aunt Rose had sent to me for my sixteenth birthday. I unclasped the necklace and dropped it into his open palm. He slung off his wristwatch and handed it to me. “In ten years, no matter where we are, who we are with, we’ll meet here and exchange them,” he said. I felt two things. First, a kind of intoxication, because what he was doing felt so intimate; and second, anxiety, because he was admitting that we would eventually split up.

  Austin grabbed my shoulders and eased me into the open grass. Stars shot across the sky. He kissed me so intensely I felt myself wilt, like nightshade, into the darkness. It was misty outside, the humidity breaking into a kind of rain without rain.

  “Do you think we’re going to break up?” I asked. “That something will come between us?”

  “You never know, Anna,” Austin said. It occurred to me that maybe he was thinking about how one day his mother was in the kitchen packing his school lunch, and the next she was gone. “Just in case something happens,” he whispered into my hair. “I mean, I think we should try and stay together. Don’t you?” I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. I knew that time could change everything, or nothing at all.

  “I’m not planning on leaving,” I said. “We need each other.”

  He pulled me next to him. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “That’s what I don’t like. That I need to be with you, and to wake up next to you.” He looked to see how his words affected me.

  I didn’t know if I should be happy, or afraid, or sad. Austin’s complicated emotions confused and excited me. In the back of my mind, I was always afraid that love was as thin as a rope unraveling.

  Was it emotion, in the end, that led Cathy and Heathcliff to their downfall? Did Cathy really believe that by marrying Edgar Linton she was pro
tecting Heathcliff? Or did she marry Edgar Linton out of selfish vanity? I told myself it was because she was afraid of the dark power Heathcliff had over her. She loved him, but could she wake up in the morning and share the breakfast table with him, and be beside him when they turned the covers down each night? I didn’t like to think about it too hard. Even though I wanted Austin’s love, occasionally a nagging question pushed itself into my consciousness. Aside from being adrift from our families, what more did Austin and I share, outside the heat that radiated between us?

  I decided, as Austin held me, that if I had to describe what love meant, really, not in the abstract or the sentimental or the way I’d imagined it before, that I’d say it was completely irrational, made up of so many opposite emotions, the kind that couldn’t exist without the other: bliss and sadness, courage and fear, adoration and disgust.

  One night that August we went to the movies. Under the spell Doctor Zhivago cast, we walked down the deserted alley behind the theater. I wanted to stay in the cold, bleak landscape of the Russian countryside, Uri’s mustache covered with frost, among the white sheets and pillows of the frozen bedroom, but Austin cornered me up against the cold brick wall and gripped my arms. Something was wrong. When our eyes met it felt like the danger of looking directly at a solar eclipse. Soon he was leaving Chagrin Falls to become a freshman at Ohio State.

  “You’re mine,” he said. “I own every part of you.” He worked his hands, beginning with my face, down my body. “These belong to me,” he said, touching my breasts. He rubbed up against me. He kissed my neck, and underneath my hair.

  “Stop,” I said. He was moving too fast, and he was acting weird. The crowd was still letting out from the theater, people slowly making their way to their cars. But he didn’t want to stop.

  I took his hand and began to lead him out of the alley, back to the car. But he forced me back.

  “Wait,” Austin said. “There’s something I want to give you.”

  In those first months when Max came to live with us, he took charge of our house with such openness and determination to make things work, I liked him instantly. Of course, we no longer had to worry about whether we’d have something besides peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for dinner, or whether my mother would be able to pay the mortgage. The very fact that our fears of survival were alleviated endeared Max to me. But I didn’t know what he was getting out of the arrangement. I assumed he had to love my mother, knowing three young daughters came with the package. I felt it was my responsibility to make sure we wouldn’t rock the boat.

  One Sunday morning Max came home from his golf game with barrels and barrels of Kirby cucumbers filling his trunk and the backseat of the car. There had been a fire sale on cucumbers, he reported. He wiped out the entire merchandise from a farmer who had set up a stand on the highway.

  “Lilly,” he said, beaming, “I’m going to show you how to make my famous dill pickles.” Max brought the barrels down the basement, and Lilly cleaned out the sink where she washed out her nylons and lingerie. Max unloaded one of the barrels into the metal utility sink. Lilly, with a pair of blue rubber gloves over her hands, scrubbed the cucumbers with a wire brush.

  “These are going to be the crunchiest pickles you’ve ever tasted.” Max smiled. He took me with him to the hardware store and bought crates of mason jars. By the time we got home, my mother had scrubbed only the cucumbers from one barrel. It looked like an obstacle course in the basement. It was filled with hundreds of cucumbers.

  While Max was at work that week, Lilly toiled down the basement.

  “The recipe has to be perfect,” she said. “Altering the proportions or diluting the acidity of the vinegar can prevent the pickling process.”

  “How do you know what you’re doing, Mom?” I asked. Once Max had brought home the cucumbers, he’d abandoned the project to my mother.

  “I called Aunt Rose. She used to pickle in the old country. Now, Anna, stop pestering me. It’s important that I do this right.” Lilly was soaking the cucumbers in a brine solution. Our basement smelled like vinegar.

  “Why?”

  “Anna, don’t ask silly questions.”

  After my mother had the cucumbers soaking in the original barrels in a mixture of white wine vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic, she began the long process of sterilizing the jars and lids in boiling water. Every countertop and the table in our kitchen were covered with mason jars. It was amazing, watching my mother so engrossed in a project other than herself. She ignored the ringing phone. Day and night she was in the kitchen or down the basement, except when Max told her to change out of her dirty clothes so he could take her to dinner.

  One day, after the pickles had fermented, Max walked in the door, dropped his briefcase in the hall, put his fingers in a jar, pulled out a plump, pimply pickle, and held it to the light for inspection. He took a bite. “Your mother is a miracle worker,” he said, and laughed a laugh that was filled with forbidden, unknowable things. Max converted the basement closet into a pantry. He made shelves for Lilly’s jars of pickles. They spent an entire day downstairs, labeling the jars and stacking them on the newly sanded shelves.

  During the weekdays throughout golf season, Max ran the clubhouse, organized tournaments, and gave private golfing lessons. He invested recklessly in the stock market. When one of his stocks performed poorly, he cussed out his broker on the phone. My family had always been frugal. There was a sense that one should hoard things for a rainy day, for the disaster that would eventually catch up with us. The same decades-old white chenille bedspread is still draped over Aunt Rose’s bed in the retirement development in California, and lining her cabinets, the familiar porcelain china passed down from her grandparents.

  Max was a man of excess. He wore lime green, yellow, or khaki pants and polo shirts, a different shirt for each day of the week. Each morning he announced what color shirt he had on. “Today I feel bright red,” he’d say, tousling my hair. “It’s going to be a great day, isn’t it, Anna?” Then he’d pour himself another bowl of cornflakes. I had never seen anyone with such appetite. Sometimes I stared at the hardness of his chest underneath the blood-red polo. The colors of his shirts were a contrast to the drab blacks and grays that my sisters and I wore. I could see what my mother saw in Max. How he loved to have a good time, not to dwell on sadness. He lived each day in the present.

  On Saturdays and Sundays when it wasn’t golf season, Max and Lilly stayed in bed until almost noon.

  “Now she sleeps in the same bed with him,” Louise announced, like some kind of grand revelation, shortly after Max moved in with us.

  “What did you think?” Ruthie said. We were all in Ruthie’s room, sitting in a circle and picking dust bunnies off her faded pink carpet. Ever since Max had set our house in motion, we often stayed clustered in our bedrooms. The house no longer felt like ours.

  “She’s acting so weird,” Louise said.

  “She just wants Max to like her,” I countered.

  My mother had sat us down the night before and delivered a lecture on our table manners. “You eat as though you haven’t seen food in years,” she said. “You don’t want Max to think you’re not well-behaved young ladies, now do you?”

  “Oh, I get it,” Ruthie had snapped. “You want us to put on a phony show for him, too. Maybe I should tell Max that you never used to cook before he lived with us. That we lived on Campbell’s soup and peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “Why do you have to be so hateful?” Lilly answered. “Why are you trying to ruin my happiness?”

  Ruthie stared at Lilly, and then marched out of the room and slammed her door.

  I didn’t mind that Max slept with Lilly. I knew their bedroom was their secret place, and what went on in there was what held them together. But there was one thought that kept bothering me. Max now slept at night in the walnut post bed my father had once slept in. But, except for Max’s clothes, there wasn’t one article of furniture, one book or knickknack that belonged to h
im in our entire house. To us he was a man without a past. Where were his things? Didn’t he own any books, any papers, any souvenirs or treasures? I didn’t trust a person without any need for materials to mark their place in the world, to remind them of whom they cared for, or had once loved.

  In the alley behind the theater, Austin took out a gray velvet box and opened it. He slipped a ring with a diamond chip—the size of the point of a pen—onto my finger. “As long as you wear this ring, you have to promise that I’m the only one allowed to do this.”

  He kissed me and as he did so he lifted my skirt and slipped his hands in my panties. I felt his erection build against my leg.

  “Not here,” I said, and pulled down my skirt. I was moved by the fact that Austin had given me a ring, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said. “Something important.” He looked intense. I thought maybe someone had died. He pressed my back against the wall again and worried his tongue into the hollow of my ear.

  “I’m blowing off school,” he whispered. “I got a job fulltime at the track.”

  I was stunned. He had talked a lot about how he wanted to learn to be a driver. All summer he had gone on about it, like a tireless monologue, but I’d always thought it was a pipe dream. It was clear to me from the start, that no matter how wild he wanted to be, Austin would get a good education, because his father could afford it, and that one day, years down the line, he’d end up being something conventional, like a doctor or a lawyer. That’s why I could tolerate his working at the track, his gambling and getting stoned—because I knew that he came from a respectable family. It pissed me off that Austin was going to get his education paid for, and that didn’t even matter to him. I was worried already about my future. I was saving my tips, hoarding away money, long before I knew what for. When he would talk about becoming a driver, I humored him. I never dreamed he’d actually do it. I told myself the idea was just a phase. That Austin would eventually get bored hanging out at the track and come to his senses.