House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  “If Mom finds out she’ll blame it on Austin,” I said, still trying to convince myself I was doing the right thing.

  “So what,” Louise said.

  “Louise, promise you won’t tell Mom.”

  “You know I won’t, Anna. I’m just worried about you.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” I began to feel nauseous and opened the window.

  “Anna, take it easy,” Louise said. She pulled the hair back from my face. “Sit back. You look pale as a ghost.” Below the tracks, rock crumbled under the motion of the iron wheels. By the time we arrived at the end of the transit line and boarded a bus home, the birds had quieted.

  It was essential for Max to feel idolized, adored, and in control. It pissed him off that he had no persuasion over Ruthie. That even his simple gesture of offering to fix her bike had seemed to her a violation. But, unfortunately, Max was not the kind of man who was able to look past his own hurt pride, and consider that Ruthie’s behavior might have nothing to do with him, that she was simply not willing to give up our father so easily.

  To apologize for slapping her, Max went out and bought Ruthie a brand-new, top-of-the-line ten-speed bicycle. “I didn’t realize the strength of my own hand,” he told her. But Ruthie could not be bought. She kept the new purple bike in the back of the garage and continued to ride her old one.

  The war between them escalated. One day Max asked her to answer the phone. He was fixing a stopped-up drain in the downstairs bathroom. She turned up the volume on her stereo and pretended she didn’t hear him.

  From down in the cool basement, where Louise and I were playing cards, I heard Max yell up the stairs to Ruthie. Lilly was out running errands. “Goddamn it, Ruthie, I said answer the goddamn phone.” His temper shook the house.

  Max stormed up the stairs, opened the door to Ruthie’s room. Louise and I heard a blast from her stereo, then instant quiet, except for the incessant ringing of the telephone, and the sound her body made on the hard wood as Max dragged her into the hall.

  “Next time you goddamn answer the phone when I tell you to, do you understand?”

  “You can’t tell me what to do!” Ruthie hollered.

  “You bet your pretty ass I can,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of your prima donna routine. Who do you think you are?”

  “Ruthie Crane,” she said. “No relation to YOU.”

  “As long as you live in this house, you do as I say, do you hear me, young lady? I’m not standing for any more of your bullshit, understand? It’s about time you girls were disciplined.”

  “Take your hands off of me!” Ruthie shouted.

  The phone rang and rang.

  Ruthie’s screams were piercing. The phone continued to ring until Max kicked the stand where it perched and it fell to the floor.

  When Lilly came home Max was in a foul temper.

  “I’ll talk to Ruthie,” Lilly said. “She’s having a hard time adjusting.”

  “A good slap in the face would teach her a thing or two,” Max said.

  “Please, Max, don’t,” Lilly said. She caressed his back. “She’s just a kid. She needs a little more time.”

  Lilly went to sit in his lap, the way she used to when they’d first gotten married.

  “Get away from me,” Max said. “I don’t feel like it now.”

  “Please give Max a chance,” I heard Lilly plead to Ruthie, after she went upstairs to console her.

  “He’s crazy,” Ruthie said. “Just because you like him, doesn’t mean I have to.”

  “Ruthie, you have to look at it from Max’s side. He’s not used to a house full of girls,” Lilly said.

  Louise and I opened Ruthie’s door and plopped down on her floor.

  “Ruthie, please forgive me,” Lilly said. She tucked her face in the palm of her hand and began to cry.

  “He’s no good, is he?” Lilly said.

  “He’s not so bad,” I countered.

  “Mom, maybe you shouldn’t have married him,” said Louise.

  Lilly wiped the tears from her face with the sleeve of her sweater. “Don’t worry, girls,” she said. “I’m going to make this work. I’m not going to let you down.” She gave each of us a kiss.

  “I have to go,” she sighed. “I have to go make Max happy.”

  After Lilly went back downstairs, we heard occasional loud wails of laughter break the silence in the house. Max was downstairs with a six-pack of Canadian ale and bowl of the big salty pretzels he liked, watching The Red Skelton Hour.

  Later that night, before I drifted off to sleep, Lilly came back upstairs and wandered into our room like a restless child. She sat down at the foot of my bed.

  “Is everything okay, Mom?” I asked.

  “Louise was right, Anna,” Lilly whispered, glancing over at her. Louise pretended to be asleep. “I didn’t want to admit it in front of Ruthie because she’s having such a hard time. But I never should have married Max.”

  I didn’t want to hear what my mother was saying. “He doesn’t know how to touch a woman,” Lilly said. “He’s always so rough. My mother never would have approved of Max. She didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t Jewish. Can you keep a secret, sweetheart?” Lilly said.

  I felt a knot form in my stomach.

  “When my mother was in hiding from the Nazis, the priest forced himself on her. He made her sleep with him once a week, after Sunday Mass. My mother whispered the story when I went to sleep at night. She wanted me to make sure I understood how important it was to tolerate a man’s needs.”

  Did Lilly mean that Max was forcing her to have sex with him against her will? I don’t think my mother really understood what she was saying. All I knew was that she’d gotten in over her head with Max, and she didn’t know what to do or how to handle him.

  “My mother never told my father what she’d done in hiding. She was afraid, if he knew, he wouldn’t want her. She told no one. Until she couldn’t keep it quiet anymore.”

  “Mom, you’re not in hiding,” I said. “You can escape.”

  Lilly just looked at me.

  “You have my mother’s eyes,” Lilly said, like there was no fleeing our history.

  Despite my mother’s confession about Max, I had begun to form an attachment to him. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but my mother was functioning. She wasn’t living in a dream world. That night my loyalty began to shift. I harbored fantasies that Max would take me away with him. We’d move into our own apartment, without my mother or my sisters. I hadn’t been around men very much in my life, except for the parade that had come in and out of our house, and Max fascinated me. I liked the way he could take me out of myself, make me forget who I was or where we came from. Even when Lilly tried to distract us or console us, you could still feel the weight of her troubled history in every word she spoke. There was always a dark undercurrent of feeling when we were with our mother.

  When we were younger, Lilly had taken us for long drives in the car. As we drove along the Chagrin River, I smelled the rusted scent of the Ohio wind through the windows. In the winter it was too cold to walk barefoot in the high, scratchy grass, play in the fields, feed an apple or a handful of sugar cubes to the horses that ran in the fenced-in yards we would pass on the way to school; they were mostly under blankets, boarded inside the barns. But no matter what season, there was always the river—I tasted it in the drinking water, felt it in the damp air as I bathed. I felt blessed by it when there was nothing else, and came to think of the river like a lost father—a soul or spirit. I loved the richness of the countryside, the acres and acres of wooded land, the falls and the river; I felt them in my flesh and bones, their freshness crept into the color of my face and folded itself inside the clothes I wore. I used to dream of following the creek, moving through the brush and pine, using a branch as a walking stick, until I arrived at the great heart of the river. On the other side I imagined a secret paradise different from what we could glimpse of the river from the gazebo, built on a sma
ll incline in our backyard, where I kept watch. Sometimes I imagined our white house, with its black shutters, to be a marooned boat, flooded and warped, rocking in a turbulent sea. I’d pretend that my family was stranded, then I’d make up stories about what we did, how we lived, and when we would be rescued. I’d imagine the house, a private sanctuary, floating along the water in good weather and bad, to the other side of the river, where we’d all be welcomed by a tall, handsome man with outstretched arms.

  From the backseat of the car, I watched my mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She always got nervous on the way to Nonie and Papa’s house. To calm herself she filled the drive with small talk.

  “Girls,” she told us, “the Indians came up the river in canoes expecting to find a waterfall the size of Niagara, but instead, they found just the little waterfall in the middle of town, which wasn’t nearly as grand.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” Ruthie asked.

  “Let me finish, Ruthie, and you’ll see,” Lilly said. “Your father told me this story once. I want you all to hear it. I have so little of your father to share.” She gazed off for a second as if she were lost in a deep reverie. “When the Indians went back to the reservation to tell the chief of their disappointment, he insisted upon seeing the falls for himself. So they all got into canoes and paddled back up the river. When the chief came upon the falls, however, he was so overcome by their beauty, he let out a cry that rang through the trees, and shook the black leaves and the pines.”

  “You’re making this up,” Ruthie said.

  “The chief made the Indian braves drink from the river until their stomachs almost burst, because he thought they had been blinded by vanity.” Lilly rapped her nails on the steering wheel as she talked.

  “What’s vanity?” Louise asked.

  I watched my mother adjust her shoulders and straighten her back. “Vanity means caring too much about appearances. The Indians didn’t appreciate the humble beauty of the tiny falls. The river of shame,” Lilly said sadly, as if her mind had drifted to something else entirely. “That’s how Chagrin Falls got its name.”

  “It’s easy to feel ashamed,” she said, when we reached a stoplight. “Especially around people who are more privileged. But it’s much more difficult to look for the beauty in things. Come on. Let’s get out and stretch. Follow me,” she said. She pulled the car over and parked. She reached out her arms, lifted her chin, and closed her eyes, as if she were praying to the open sky.

  She was trying to tell us that we shouldn’t feel ashamed at Nonie and Papa’s just because our aunt and uncle had lots of money, our cousins had expensive new clothes and the carefree attitude of those who have never felt out of place and alone.

  “Why do we have to go to Nonie and Papa’s?” Ruthie said. “They don’t care about us.”

  “Because they’re your father’s family,” Lilly stated.

  After the visit she spoke to us again. “Girls, I have to tell you something,” she said, once we were back in the car. “It’s not because Nonie and Papa don’t love you that they rarely call or come see us. When they came over on the boat from Russia, they wanted your father to marry one of the rich girls, like Evelyn Horowitz, whose father owned a dress factory. I was just a poor bank teller’s daughter. Nonie blames me for your father’s death,” she continued. “She’s never approved of me.”

  I didn’t understand how Nonie and Papa could blame Lilly. It wasn’t her fault that our father had died. Sometimes I didn’t know what to believe. I tortured myself, trying to decipher the truth, when there really wasn’t any single truth to be found. Truth was in the eye of the beholder.

  With Max, I could forget that we had this strange, uncomfortable history behind us. As a girl I just wanted to be like everyone else. I craved normality. I didn’t want to feel singled out or special because something bad had happened to my family.

  When Max took us on car rides, he popped in a Frank Sinatra or Burt Bacharach tape. He bellowed and rocked in his seat, and we all started singing with him. As the car filled with our voices, we were taken to a place not compromised, still salvageable, and the sun bounced off the windshield until we could see nothing ahead or behind us.

  On the car ride to the Hunt Club, I remember exactly what Max wore: lime-green pants, a navy V-neck sweater, and polished loafers. “Move over here, sport, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said as he ruffled the top of my hair. “I would never hurt my princess.”

  The day after Lilly had confessed her reservations about Max, I went alone with him on a father-son weekend to his Hunt Club to take part in a hunting trip. As we settled in the car, Max pushed the recliner button so that his seat went back, then turned on his Frank Sinatra tape and began singing. I’m king of the hill, top of the heap—He grinned from ear to ear. I sat pressed against the passenger door and opened the window. The smell of the new leather seats in the long silver Lincoln made me nauseous.

  “When will we be there?” I asked. I was twelve.

  “In less than an hour. The club organizes this father-and-son trip every year. This is the first year I’ve been able to go,” Max said. “Since I don’t have a son, Ed O’Brian suggested I bring one of my daughters.” Max squeezed my knee and beamed. He opened the glove compartment and reached for a flask of whiskey and took a long swig.

  I watched his Adam’s apple move up and down as he drank heartily from the flask.

  When we pulled into the lodge a family of deer sprang over the fence of the parking lot into the fields. I listened to the sound of their footfalls until they’d made it to safety. After we had changed into our hunt clothes, I set off with Max and his three friends, Fred, John, and Ed, and their sons. I was dressed in jeans tucked into black rubber boots, and a red-and-black CPO hunting vest with a hunt cap to match, which Max had bought for me at the club’s supply store before we headed out. Max wore a rough jacket of beaten brown leather with a leather strap slung over his shoulder where he carried his shotgun, and boots that reached his knees.

  He handed me the duck call and said, “Here, sport, this is your territory—you be in charge.” He pulled down the brim of my cap. I felt proud next to him. I felt his hand pat my head, grip my shoulders.

  We walked for what seemed like miles, deeper and deeper into the trees, until we came to the part of the woods where there were tall, strangling reeds and the ground was soft and muddy. The clouds hung down in the dirty, overcast sky.

  Among Max and his friends and their sons, I felt lonely. The boys grew restless. “Where are those damn ducks?” they kept asking, watching the ominous sky.

  Overhead I heard a clatter. Two large Vs of geese traversed the sky.

  From the other direction three ducks came in close to the ground. The men raised their shotguns. The ducks came down, one after another.

  I listened to the thump, thump, thump and imagined pieces of their souls falling bit by bit, like feathers to the ground. The boys squinted at the sky and shouted loudly, after each crack of the gun.

  How was it possible that the ducks were dead, when an instant before they’d been free to roam the large sky? I stayed back as the men fetched the birds. A swarm of mosquitoes circled like a dark halo over my head. I admired the strength and nonchalance of Max and his friends. Men, from my perspective, did not grapple with feeling, sort, dissect, obsess, as I did; men took action. When Max walked into our house at the end of the day, my sisters and I stopped fighting over what TV program we wanted to watch, and Lilly, who had been chatting with Aunt Rose long-distance, immediately hung up the phone. Max was a man of limited conversational gifts, but when he spoke he was definite and decisive. We stood back and waited passively for Max to take charge.

  And yet, being with Max, I wanted nothing more than to be strong and in control. I had seen firsthand what kind of life was in store for anyone passive and without purpose.

  The hunting troop stopped at Squaw Rock—another smoke. Max said it was a ritual they followed after eac
h hunt. The huge rock, large enough to lean against, bore carvings of birds, animals, and Mother Eve guarding the serpent. Max said that the etchings on the rock were the hand of an Indian, before the white man had inhabited the wilderness of Ohio. A particular Indian brave had wandered from camp to the banks of the Chagrin River, where he’d met an Indian maiden to whom he gave his heart. The sculpted rock was his valentine.

  “I might just do the same for your mother,” Max said. He laughed so loud the leaves shook on the trees. It made me happy to think that Max was thinking about Lilly.

  “Come, here, Anna,” he said. “Boy, it’s good to have you here.” He gave me a big squeeze.

  When we got back to the lodge, Max told me to go upstairs, shower, and change. He was going to the bar to have a couple of beers with the guys. “Put on that pretty new dress I bought you,” he told me, like I was his date. He planted a kiss on my forehead, and a feeling of warmth traveled through my body. I felt as if I were the object of someone’s pride. I tried to enjoy myself, even though my fantasy of being alone with Max wasn’t working out the way I imagined it.

  I picked the dried leaves and mud off my boots in the little bathroom off our small room with its two double beds. I took a long time in the shower. When I looked in the mirror after getting dressed, all polished and primped, I wished only to be in my dirty jeans, work shirt, and work boots.

  Max and his friends were drinking shots of whiskey and chasing them with beers when I came downstairs. Max sat next to a tall woman with a pile of frosted hair on top of her head and a pair of pastel earrings dangling to her neck. He straddled his arm against the bar and leaned over her as he talked. She wore a tight sweater set that stuck to her body like static.

  When Max caught a glimpse of me, he put down his glass and whistled between his two fingers. “A Shirley Temple for the young lady,” he ordered. I sat on the bar stool next to him.