When Austin dropped me off the next morning—it was Sunday—I dug in my closet for my waitress uniform, stuffed it in my knapsack, got on my bike, and rode to work. It was sunless. Quiet, except for the chime of church bells. A bird flapped her wings in a tree overhead, the only hint of the ordinary world.
In Dink’s bathroom, before I began my shift, I put the toilet seat down and locked the stall. I sat there, numb and drained, and thought about that glimmer of possibility I had felt in that baby, that small window on a future I would not inhabit. I longed for that moment upon waking, before it is light, before you remember what’s done. All day I worked like a dog. I chatted it up with the customers, made sure to give refills of coffee. It didn’t bother me if they wanted to change their orders. The tips I collected in my apron—as soon as I came home I carefully unfolded each crinkled dollar, counted every quarter—felt like the only essential thing in my life.
I stayed after school, holed up in the library, rain pelting against the windows, and randomly flipped through college catalogs filled with color photographs of sophomores and freshmen conversing on the college green, and tried to imagine myself a coed. To see whether I’d qualify for scholarships or financial aid, I had made an appointment with my guidance counselor. In a carrel in the back of the library, I studied the practice questions to prepare for the SATs. A spider drew a web between the spines of two oversized books. I watched how carefully she protected herself from harm.
My breasts had shrunk back to their normal shape. I looked at them closely in the bathroom mirror each morning for any signs of transfiguration. I touched the lower part of my stomach involuntarily, the way your hand automatically goes to pick at a scab. I knew there were scars, but I couldn’t see them.
On my way home one day, two weeks into October, I ran into Maria, and instead of waving and walking on, I stopped to ask her if she wanted to go to a movie. We smoked a cigarette as we walked home. She didn’t ask about Austin, and I didn’t offer anything. Walking next to her, I felt the stem of my being toughen and root itself further into the earth. And I thought then how much I had missed her without ever really knowing it. About how much of my life I had been missing.
After Max evacuated our lives—there wasn’t a trace in our house that he’d once lived there, not one tie or abandoned sock—I was thirteen. Lilly’s unhappiness hung over the ceilings and eaves. She floated in an unconscious pool where nothing, not the sound of frogs in the yard or the chirp of crickets, could reach her. Some days she got dressed, put lipstick on, and tried to appear happy, but I knew that as soon as we left the house, my mother resumed her life in bed. It was only in the solitary world of the unconscious that Lilly was free—I wondered what it was like to live inside her mind, all the what-ifs and regrets tangled up like intricate twine.
Dirt and dust collected in the corners of the floor near the walls of the house; spiderwebs hung at the edges of the ceiling; the windows were smudged, and the couches in the living room had frayed and yellowed. The walls needed to be painted, our ceilings were marked with water stains from the upstairs toilet leaking; grease dried and hardened on the stove and along the kitchen counters. You could almost hear the sound of the wood as it began to splinter and decay. The image of my mother recoiled against the wall near her bed was lodged inside my brain.
When I came home from school, I turned on the lamp on the nightstand next to my mother’s bed. I could see the veins over her temples, a weave of them I had never noticed before. Lilly was sedentary; hard and unmoving.
After Lilly signed the divorce papers, she withdrew inside herself. She spent days wandering from room to room, picking up a magazine, throwing it down again, attempting to mop the floor, and then leaving a bucket of soapy water in the middle of the kitchen floor and drifting back up to bed. Two years passed by without any change in our mother’s disposition. By the time I started tenth grade, Ruthie was cutting classes and getting high with Mark Zion and Jimmy Schuyler in Hippie Hall. If she wasn’t smoking a joint, she was huddled in the corner making out with Jimmy. She had grown so far removed from us that when I passed her in the halls at school, we looked at each other like strangers. I knew she was getting high a lot, but there was an unspoken sibling code of honor between the three of us that I could not violate by telling my mother. At least a year went by, and Lilly hadn’t a clue that Ruthie was in trouble. One night Ruthie came home with a school of painful-looking hickeys on her neck. Other times, I saw her pressed against Jimmy’s jacket so tightly, it looked as if she were part of his body. She drifted in and out of the house wearing Jimmy’s army jacket; she even slept in it. In the mornings she sat on the edge of the beige tub in the bathroom, smoked a joint, and stared at herself in the wall-length mirror as if she were trying to locate a lock of hair that had fallen out of place.
The night before Ruthie got busted, I waited for Louise to finish swim practice and we walked home together. The sky was slowly shifting from blue to black. It was usually dusk when my mood would darken, as if the soul were sensitive to shifting light and weather.
“What do you think’s going to happen to Ruthie?” I said to Louise. Before school that day, dressed in a gauze skirt and tie-dye shirt, she’d done a bong in her room. She took a hit before she came downstairs to grab something to eat. We often heard the bubbling of the bong water in her room after she strolled in past midnight, ignoring Lilly’s curfew. Over the past year the pot had stained her teeth; little seeds were buried inside the carpet in her room or sometimes stuck underneath her nails.
Louise and I were in a bind. Worrying about Ruthie felt like the same hopeless conversation we’d had about our mother. The question hung there between us like a long, impenetrable afternoon.
When we got home Lilly and Ruthie were at it again.
“You can’t stay out all night with that Jimmy, and that’s final,” Lilly said. “I’m your mother, whether you like it or not. You’re stuck with me.”
“You’re ruining my life!” Ruthie shouted. She was so stoned that she could barely open her eyes.
She disappeared into her room, and the faint and soothing sounds of James Taylor singing Sunny skies sleeps in the morning, he doesn’t know where to be found vibrated behind her door.
Ruthie’s boyfriend had hair that reached the middle of his back. The shirttails from an oxford shirt hung beneath his sweaters. He took his German shepherd, Nietzsche, in desperate need of a bath, wherever he went. He chained him near the bike racks behind our school. I could hear the oversized dog panting outside our house when Jimmy was with Ruthie, doing God knows what, sequestered behind her bedroom door. As they walked to school, Ruthie’s head was perfectly cradled in Jimmy’s neck as if it were carved into a stone statue.
That night, after we were in bed, I heard Lilly get up and go into Ruthie’s room.
“Why, that little sneak,” she said. “God must be punishing me.”
Ruthie had slipped out of the house to meet Jimmy. I wished that I had a boyfriend who could take me away, as if love were simply a way out, and not a way of being.
Ruthie and Jimmy Schuyler were busted by the police that night. They were round smoking a joint in the parking lot of Dairy Queen. The police confiscated a dime bag of pot from Jimmy’s coat pocket. Later, his bedroom was searched. Turned out he was supplying the entire neighborhood with pot. Since it was Ruthie’s first offense, she was given a warning. Lilly called Aunt Rose, and when Aunt Rose found out Ruthie was smoking pot, she made the decision. Ruthie would go to live with her.
As Ruthie sat in the backseat of the car that came to take her to the airport, Lilly’s face looked as if a little piece had been torn out and then pasted back. Heavy snow spun in the shapes of haystacks into the night and early morning. Ruthie caught the last plane before the blizzard. It was one of those weeks of winter when temperatures in Ohio fell to zero and below with wind chill, and no one went out to work, or to plow, or shovel. It was no matter; our house was always in a state of winter, waiting
for someone to dig us out. Ours was like a house under snow, frozen since the day our father died.
In spite of the snowstorm, Louise was determined to go to the pool to swim her laps. Like an aquatic creature, her body depended on the feel of water to survive. On the way downstairs one morning, we passed our mother’s bedroom door ajar. Lilly slept soundly, her face pale and peaceful, buried in layers of blankets and quilts. If the house was quiet, she’d sleep till noon.
Once Louise had left, I went back to my bedroom as the snow continued to fill the backyard. I could barely make out the gazebo, so covered in snow, but I felt the lost outlines of it and its shadow. The tree branches, burdened with snow, looked as if they’d snap. The furnace kicked on again. The sky was a blue lake of frost.
Later, I walked into town through the deserted, private streets, off Main Street, past the bank, the pharmacy, the liquor store, over the ramp of the crashing falls, stuffed my hands in my pockets, and walked along the river. I didn’t know what to do with all I was feeling. My fingers began to numb inside my gloves. The trees seemed to have grown tall and erect over the winter months, in their effort to reach more sunlight. A gusty wind echoed through the bare treetops. I trudged through the snow, now up to the tops of my boots. I could barely feel my toes. Two birds tore at a carcass of a dog, no doubt hit by a car. As I drew nearer, they rose up and flew away. With my boot I covered the carcass with snow. As I walked on, in the sky’s whitewash, the birds flew back to feast on the dead.
The bare birches bent and sighed as the wind ripped through them. I listened for the sound of snow falling. All around me everything was dying. It was winter break when Ruthie went to live with Aunt Rose, and when I returned to school after winter vacation to begin the new term, Austin Cooper opened the heavy doors of our school for the first time.
In the middle of my walk in the blizzard, I decided I was going to make it no matter what the cost. I had to be strong now that Ruthie was gone. Maybe because I saw more of the world beyond my home, saw that people even less fortunate than my mother could piece together a life, my tolerance for my mothers way of living was quickly disappearing.
When I returned home from my walk, Lilly was outside, in an old man’s overcoat, wearing rubber boots and with a scarf wrapped around her head, shoveling out chunks of snow from behind the tires of her buried used Chevrolet. Once Max had left she sold the sports car, bought the Chevrolet, and pocketed the difference to help pay her bills.
“Anna, how in the world did you go out in this winter storm? Where’s Louise?”
“She’s at the pool.”
“In this snowstorm?”
“It’s indoors, Mom. Here. Let me have the shovel.”
Lilly was so out of touch with the world that she hadn’t a clue what was going on with her children. “I don’t think it’s good for her to be swimming so much. Can all that chlorine in her system be good for her?”
“What’s wrong with it? At least she’s doing something productive.”
“Look down the street,” Lilly said. “It’s so untainted.” She brushed back a few locks of hair and scraped them underneath her scarf. “On a day like today you can hear the spirits.”
“Spirits?”
“According to the Hindus, a spirit is captured, bound to the flesh, sorrow, and pain,” Lilly said, as matter-of-factly as if it were her religion. “Spirits begin a pilgrimage away from the material world, desiring never to be captured in the flesh again.”
“Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“Sometimes I think I hear the wind talking to me, but then I realize the voices are in my head.” Lilly laughed. “Sometimes I think I’m half in the other world already.”
“Maybe you want to be,” I said. I took off my gloves, and attempted to bring life back to my hands with my breath.
I leaned against the shovel, which was propped against a hard brick of snow. A brittle branch cracked overhead. Our gutters creaked with the weight of the snow. Sparrows scattered in the trees. All around me the landscape was white; an arctic sheen of ice buckled against the side of our house.
“Mom, sometimes I wonder. Do you miss Max?” The question had been on my mind for years—but for some reason I hadn’t known how to ask it. Lilly never mentioned Max. Like everything else, she had wiped him from her mind. But the ways in which he’d humiliated her had formed a hard, brittle crust over her heart. Everything was stationary and static—it was as if, if we looked hard enough, we could see the water slowly crystallize and freeze into the icicles that hung from our gutters.
“I knew when I married Max that it wasn’t right,” Lilly said. She wandered toward the front stoop of the house. “I was trying to punish myself. I didn’t want anyone to take your father’s place.”
“Now you can put it behind you and start over,” I said. It really did seem simple, if only my mother would try to step out of herself. I had ideas that she could go back to school, train for a profession, but then I looked at her staring into the sky as the snow began to fall again. The sun had come out earlier, before the last snowfall, and melted some of the snow hanging over the roof and gutters. A cascade of icicles made a chimelike sound as they fell to the ground.
But it wasn’t simple.
“It’s not letting up,” Lilly said, drifting. “Between you and me, I’d like it to snow forever. It’s so warm and cozy at home when it snows. The world barely matters.”
She pulled nervously on the fingertips of her gloves. “Your father was the only man I’ve really loved. Now I’ve lost Ruthie. I don’t want to lose you and Louise.”
“You haven’t lost any of us,” I said.
Around the time Lilly met Joe Klein, Aunt Rose found a job counselor that was willing to help my mother get a job. For one day Lilly treated herself and went shopping. She came back home with a new beige suit and a red silk blouse she was planning to wear for the interview. But weeks passed, and the suit remained behind its plastic sheath in her closet. Even so, I remained a hopeless optimist. I believed that like the heroic characters in the novels I read, my family would overcome our setbacks.
When late summer came, Joe Klein gave my mother reason to hope again, and I was grateful for the timing. Maybe it was because he didn’t seem to latch on to her sexually, the way her other men had, that my mother felt she could trust him. Still, there was a part of me that wondered: How could a sane man like Joe Klein really fall for my mother?
When Joe Klein was out of town, my mother built fantasies around him. “He’s got a huge master bedroom,” Lilly said. “What it needs is a canopy. One of those big, romantic, cherry-wood or iron beds with an eyelet comforter and silk sheets. I’m sure Joe Klein wouldn’t bat an eye spending money on silk sheets.”
“What if he doesn’t want to get married again?” I said. “His wife has only been gone a few months. It could take years for him to get over her.”
“Anna, why do you always have to be so negative?” Lilly said, flipping through Better Homes.
By mid-October, the sky, the trees, the row of stores in our town were bleached out, like fabric that had lost its original color. The week after the abortion, Austin called a few times, but I told Louise to tell him I wasn’t home. But that didn’t stop him. One afternoon his car was in our driveway when I came home from school. My heart raced for a few moments, and then slowed.
When I opened the front door, he was on top of a ladder in the hallway, replacing a lightbulb that had been burned out for months in a ceiling fixture.
“Hey, Anna,” he said when he saw me. He perked up. Gave me his signature wink. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Austin offered to change the lightbulb,” Lilly said from behind. “He changed the bulb in my upstairs bathroom and sanded the upstairs doors so they won’t stick so badly next summer.”
My mind flashed to my father. I wanted to stand close to Austin to make sure he wasn’t going to fall. I did not very often consider the reasons my father died. I didn’t believe his
life was taken to instill some larger meaning in my character, or make me a better person. I preferred to believe that a person might be taken for no reason other than the random winds of chance, the same forces that could create a brilliant sky after a terrible storm.
Austin put the stepladder back in the hall closet and stood not an inch away from me. He sniffed my hair. My whole body reacted. I was certain my love for my father must have been so immense that I could not contain it. It free-floated toward a necessary object. How else to explain why, with the brush of Austin’s arm against my own, I weakened.
“What’s gotten into you?” I said.
Austin looked surprised.
“It’s not like you to sign on as my mother’s handyman.”
“Can’t a guy help his girlfriend’s mother without his girlfriend thinking he’s got ulterior motives?” Austin said.
“Who said anything about ulterior motives?”
“Why don’t you two come in the living room? I’ll make us some hot tea,” Lilly interrupted.
“No thanks, Mom.” I spoke softly. I was tired. “I have to get ready for work.”
“Just for a few minutes?” Joe Klein was out of town again, and Lilly was anxious. I looked at the coffee table, where Lilly had placed a bouquet of fresh roses Joe Klein had given her. I looked at the stain on the wood floor, at Austin cracking his knuckles.
“I’m going to be late,” I said again.
“I’ll drive you to work,” Austin offered.
I took the stairs two at a time to get my uniform. When I returned Lilly and Austin were talking intensely on the couch.
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