The Center of Winter: A Novel

by Marya Hornbacher

  It’s interesting that two people can sit in a room, doing nothing more than being precisely themselves, and, in each other’s eyes, utterly, generally fail.

  “I’m going to bed,” said my mother, not moving. “Are you coming?”

  It would occur to me, older, that this was an invitation.

  “Not right yet,” said my father, picking up a deck of cards and dealing himself a hand of solitaire.

  And it would occur to me, older, that this was a kindness of sorts, not flatly saying no. Letting a woman get into her nightgown, lotion her hands, fall asleep with a book and the bedside light still on, having forgotten to hope.

  My mother was angry. I stood on a chair by the stove, waiting for a pot of water to boil and listening to her bang.

  “Where’s Dad?” I finally asked. It was getting dark out. No one had been home when Esau and I came in from school. Last I checked, Esau was sitting at the writing desk with his head in his hands, trying to do his homework.

  “How should I know?” she snapped. I got off the chair and walked out of the kitchen in a huff.

  “Katie?” she called.

  I sat down on the couch. Esau was looking out the window and didn’t notice. My mother’s head appeared around the corner.

  “Katie, come help?”

  I didn’t look at her. She sighed and went back into the kitchen.

  “Dammit!” she yelled, and something got thrown. She came out of the kitchen, pulling her apron over her head and throwing it on the floor. She went over to the bar, poured wine into a flowered juice glass, and lit a cigarette. Esau turned half around in his chair. He and I watched her pace back and forth in front of the windows.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Oh, it’s not you. It’s that rat-bastard father of yours. It’s nothing. Never mind.” She sat down in a heap next to me on the couch.

  Esau started to giggle. I could see him biting the insides of his cheeks. He turned around again and put his head down on the desk. His shoulders shook.

  “What’s so funny, may I ask, mister?” asks my mother, starting to smile. He put his hands over his ears, which were turning red.

  “Did you take your medicine today?” I asked, feeling important.

  “Yes,” he said, giggling. “Rat bastard!” he finally shrieked.

  I looked at my mother, shocked. She laughed.

  Esau apologized, and said, “Don’t tell Dad I swore.”

  “I won’t tell him if you don’t tell him I called him a rat bastard,” she said, setting Esau off again. I giggled and picked at the soles of my shoes, looking sideways at my pretty mother.

  The front door opened. “Claire!” my father called. Esau stopped laughing abruptly and looked at his books. My father came into the room and surveyed us.

  “Are you growing a beard?” I asked. He put his hand up to his stubbled face and looked as if he was considering it.

  “Sure,” he said, and turned to the bar. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Nothing,” said my mother, and took a sip of wine.

  My father nodded. “Okay,” he said, and headed into the kitchen. “There’s water boiling over in here,” he called. “Were you planning to cook something in it?”

  “No,” called my mother. “I just wanted to boil some water.” She went over to the bar and brought the bottle of wine back to the couch, wedging it between the cushions.

  “Well, then,” my father said, coming back into the room and sitting down. “We’ll starve, then.”

  “Most likely,” she agreed.

  “Claire.”

  “Yes, Arnold.”

  “Go make dinner.”

  “Make it yourself.”

  My father stood and looked out the window, then turned and pitched his highball glass against the north wall.

  “Claire.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Claire.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m drunk and hungry. And I’m getting annoyed.”

  “That’s a shame. Go sweep up the glass.”

  My mother poured more wine for herself. I realized they were both drunk. I was hungry too. It seemed like a bad time to move, though, so I stayed still.

  “Claire,” my father said, turning on the television, “I’m going to watch the news. When it’s over, I want dinner.” He sat down.

  “Well, you’ll have to make do, then.” She stood up, steadying herself on the arm of the couch. “I’m going out.”

  “No you’re not,” my father said calmly. “You’ll stay right here.”

  She didn’t stop, and suddenly my father was standing in front of her, blocking her way. She moved left, and so did he. Right. They stood still.

  “I can’t make dinner if you don’t move,” she said.

  He moved, and she walked out of the house.

  My father stood there for a second, then followed her out. We heard them yelling in the driveway. Esau and I both bolted for the front door just as my father shoved my mother back through it and into the hall, where she sprawled on the floor.

  My father’s face was red.

  “Rat bastard! Rat bastard! Rat bastard!” Esau screamed, his legs flying at my father’s knees. He seemed to be dancing around my father like a weird little elf, flapping his hands, but his feet were connecting. My mother scrambled away and got up as my father lunged after Esau’s impossible, electric feet. Esau turned and ran, and his bedroom door slammed.

  My father turned and smacked my mother. She barely flinched.

  “Nicely done,” he said, breathing hard. He looked at the door as if noticing that it was open, then went through it, shutting it with strange care on his way out.

  My mother was looking at nothing.

  “Does it hurt?” I finally asked.

  “What?” she said, looking down at me as if surprised to find me there. “Oh. No.”

  We stood there for a moment more. She reached for my hand and we went into the kitchen. She set the chair by the stove again and lowered the heat under the empty pot where the water had all boiled off.

  “It needs more water,” I said, pointing. She looked. She turned the heat off.

  “I’m not very hungry,” she said. “Are you?”

  I shook my head even though I was so hungry I wanted to chew my fingers. She looked relieved. We sat on the couch and I watched her light cigarette after cigarette, the smoke blue in the glow of the television. She petted my hair as if I was a dog, and ashes fell on her skirt. We watched the news.

  We sat in the thrumming space between my father and my brother. I wanted time to move slowly, to linger here, where my mother was not my own but almost.

  “You’re tired,” she said. Her breath was dry and smooth on my cheek. “Go to bed.”

  I could feel her eyes on my back as I went down the hall to my room.

  I took off my shoes and got into bed in my clothes. I listened to the rustle and murmur of her in Esau’s room, giving him his medicine. She sang softly until his crying slowed.

  I dozed and woke sometime later to the thumping, whimpering sound of Esau having a nightmare.

  I stood outside his door. The house was silent except for the muffled sound of tears in a pillow. I whispered, “Esau.” I knocked hesitantly. I tried the door, but it was locked. I knocked and knocked. I sat down cross-legged in front of his door, knocking. He stopped crying after a while, his breath shivering. I lay down on my side on the floor and kept knocking. I heard him get up, cross the room, lie down on his side of the door. I whispered, “Esau.” He didn’t answer. I heard him breathing; we were only a few inches apart. I held my arm up with my other hand because it was getting tired, and knocked as I fell asleep, feeling the knocks grow further and further apart, rousing myself to keep knocking, drifting off.

  And then I was half awake, my father picking me up from the floor. It was dark, I was cold. I snuggled into my father’s chest, and he brushed my hair away from my face with big, clumsy hands and put me in
to my bed and sat beside it, breathing whiskey breath in the dark.

  My father was huge and irretrievable, like an era.

  He was inseparable from the size of his hands and his belly laugh, and the worried wood of the bar at Frank’s where he sat for hours and days, shouting with the men; he was the sound of the front door slamming and the shuffle of slippers on the floor on mornings white and blinding with winter light. He was the same as his profound, useless, oppressive love of his wife, and his desperate love for his son. He was the amorphous shape of need, a need that grasped at whatever was left: a small girl, easily picked up, of manageable size and always at hand.

  My mother loved us in a way that was both fierce and abstracted, like an animal. We were something that had happened to her, and she lived with it, loving each according to our need and without frills. My father couldn’t forgive her for it and called her cold. He meant it as an insult, of course. I think she may have taken it as a simple statement of fact.

  I sometimes think I see my mother. She is always disappearing around a corner ahead of me, her long camel-hair coat swinging behind her like a door swinging closed.

  I say, when asked, that I hardly remember my father. I remember that sometime that year, he started to fade. And then without warning he was gone, leaving me to wonder if he’d ever been there at all.

  It was late October. No snow that stayed yet, only frost that bit the tips of the tall grass by the lake. I snapped them off as if they were heads. Winter was coming. I could feel it around the corner, lurking like a thing in the closet. Esau only sometimes went to school. Most days I left the house alone in the blue early light and walked to Davey’s house, and together we headed down Main Street, crushing patches of frost-covered grass with our shoes. My father didn’t come home sometimes, or he was always home, heavily home, holding down his La-ZBoy and breathing through his mouth.

  One evening, I went down to Frank’s with my mother after dinner to pay the bill. She pushed open the door of the bar and I blinked in the smoky haze. The bar was full of men whose heads swung up and nodded slightly to us. I followed her to the bar and climbed up on a stool.

  My mother slapped her gloves down on the counter and pulled out her pocketbook. “How much do I owe you?” she asked.

  Frank shook his head. “Let’s call it good,” he said. He smiled at her.

  “Frank, no.”

  “I mean it.” He gave my mother a look and she sighed. He tapped my nose and asked me if I wanted a soda. He glanced at my mother. “On me.”

  I drank a bottle of orange soda through a straw, studying the gleaming rows and rows of bottles behind the bar.

  “What time did he come in here?” my mother asked.

  “Opening.” Frank poured her a drink.

  She looked at it. “How long did he stay?”

  “Mosta the day. Ate something.”

  My mother nodded. I leaned against her shoulder, and she sipped her drink.

  “How you been, carrottop?” he asked me.

  I shrugged, suddenly shy. It felt funny to be here with my mother.

  “Getting prettier all the time. Look just like your momma.”

  I smiled and blew bubbles in my orange soda and got them up my nose. They laughed, and my mother cleaned me up with a napkin.

  We walked home together slowly, looking up at a yellow moon.

  I sat in the La-Z-Boy after school, keeping my father company while he lay on the couch, poking my toe through the hole in my sock. My father’s face was darkened around the jowls. He smelled like the bar and the brown cigarettes he smoked. At night, he stayed up, so that under my door there was a fan of yellow light on the carpet. I could hear him shuffle the cards, slap them down. Then silence. Then the thunk of his drink on the table, his hard sigh.

  He didn’t yell anymore, almost never. But he cried. At night, when he was up, listening for Esau. It sounded like a broken bird.

  I liked it when he was out there, awake. Keeping watch. Nothing could happen to Esau or me so long as he sat guard. It was like God in his pajamas, playing cards. And when he cried, it was as horrible as if God cried.

  My father pulled himself up on the couch and slapped his hands down on his knees. “Well,” he said. “Better get going.”

  There was nowhere to go.

  He looked out the window that faced onto the yard as if just preparing to leave. Night fell earlier now, and we watched it inch lower in the sky. He leaned back into the cushions and looked at me.

  “How’s school, Little Bit?” he asked cheerfully.

  I shrugged. “S’all right.”

  “Keeping your grades up?”

  “I don’t get grades.”

  He looked at me in confusion.

  “I don’t get grades until later,” I explained. “Fourth grade, I think.”

  “Well,” he said, bewildered. “Whaddaya know. That’s a damn shame.”

  I nodded. He took a drink and gestured with his glass. “I mean, how are you supposed to know what’s what, then?”

  “Progress reports.” I had carefully shredded my own all year so far, their steady row of bad marks in red pen fluttering into the creek, the water lifting the ink away like red threads. Last year in kindergarten, I had gold stars and Es for excellent, except in penmanship, where I had a solitary S for satisfactory. I studied my father, trying to tell how drunk he was, and whether I could disclose this tidbit of information in secrecy.

  “I’m unsatisfactory,” I blurted out, feeling brave.

  “No,” he said, looking concerned. I nodded.

  “How do you figure?” he asked.

  “In ‘Stays on Task.’”

  “Really.”

  “And ‘Listens Well.’” My cheeks blazed, and I watched him closely. He looked as if he was mulling this over.

  “And I hit Sara Mortinson.”

  “Hup. What for?”

  “Said Esau was crazy.”

  “Ach. No good telling stories.” He nodded.

  “See.”

  “Course, hitting’s a problem.”

  “She scratched me.”

  He rubbed his stubble with the palm of his hand and squinched his mouth, considering. “Who hit who first?”

  “I forget.”

  “Well then.”

  We sat a moment.

  “I’m going to be a nurse,” I offered.

  He grinned. “Admirable, admirable.” He huffed to his feet and went to the bar. Sitting again, he said, “A regular Florence Nightingale. Lotta blood, you know. Person’s got to be prepared.”

  “I don’t mind blood. I don’t like the hats, though,” I said.

  “No.”

  “I wanted to be a doctor.”

  “So be a doctor.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes at him. “Daddy, girls aren’t doctors.”

  “Hep! See here now. Oh, say now.” He looked at me in alarm. “Who told you that?”

  “Erick Janiskowski.” I pulled the lever on the La-Z-Boy and lurched backward suddenly. Erick Janiskowski was the smartest, ugliest boy in first grade and my personal nemesis.

  “What’s he mean? Well, that’s a bunch of crap, I mean to say! Ha! That boy’s an embarrassment to his family, and I’ll tell you what’s more, missy.” My father sat up, waving his drink. “Just because his father’s the doctor in Staples and they’ve got enough money to choke a horse doesn’t mean a damn thing, is what. Peter Janiskowski’s been asking for it all these years, and his wife thinks she’s all sorts of special and now that ugly little boy serves them right, is what. I tell you what,” he said in a warning tone, leaning toward me. “You tell that boy you can be a goddamn doctor if you goddamn want to be a goddamn doctor. You tell him that.”

  He harrumphed back into the couch, pleased with himself.

  “A woman can do what she likes, these days,” he announced.

  I nodded, a little overwhelmed.

  “Take your
mother, for example.” He swallowed his drink and sighed with satisfaction. “Now, there’s a great lady.” He looked out the window. “Day I met her, I’ll tell you, I thought to myself, Now, this one’s smart as a whip. This one’s a keeper. Heh,” he said, smiling at the thought. “A lady who knew what she wanted and wouldn’t nobody stop her. You meet that kind of lady, you think, I made her up in my head. You know the dumbest thing your mother ever did?” he asked suddenly.

  I shook my head.

  “Married me,” he said, chuckling and getting to his feet. As he shuffled out of the room, I heard him say, bewildered, “Never know what got into that woman.”

  I sat there awhile, then got up and knocked on Esau’s door.

  “What?” he yelled.

  “It’s me.”

  “So?”

  “So let me in.”

  “What for?”

  “Come out, then.”

  “What for?”

  I thought about that. “Let’s make dinner for them.”

  There was a silence, then a shuffling of sheets, and Esau opened the door, looking rumpled. “Okay,” he said, and we went to the kitchen.

  He set a pot of water on the stove and got out a box of macaroni and cheese. I asked, “Were you in bed?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t care. I was just wondering.” I yanked open the refrigerator to get butter and milk. “You’re so mean lately. You can stay in bed all the time, for all I care.”

  He dumped the macaroni into the water and fished out the packet of cheese. “I’m not mean,” he said.

  I snorted.

  “I’m not,” he said, sitting down on the floor and putting his head on his knees. “I’m sad.”

  I looked down at him. “Why?”