White Bird in a Blizzard

by Laura Kasischke

  STARVING ARTISTS’ SALE, the sign on the highway said, and although my mother must have muttered, “That cheap junk, who wants that?” my father insisted they go, and they went. He took one look at Seascape and happily paid the forty dollars to own it.

  Sometimes, I’d run my fingers across that canvas just to feel how thick and sticky the paint in all that choppy water was, the places the painter had gobbed on too much blue. The horizon was ominous and, with some imagination, you could smell salt, dead dolphins, weeds reeking on a beach. A thin line separated the water from the air, and though I hated the painting itself, that line was definite. Incontrovertible. There was absolute emptiness between the sea in that painting and the sky. It was a space that existed simply because nothing was in it.

  “That’s no excuse,” Phil says.

  “Who needs an excuse?” I ask.

  He looks at me. There are snowflakes melting on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes are wide. I see myself in the small blue ponds of them, seeming brighter and sweeter than I am. My face is pouty and young in this reflection. I lean a little closer, looking for myself, surprised at what I see, and wonder what I’d expected: Had I expected to see my mother?

  Phil looks at me strangely, looking at him, and says, “I’m worried about you, Kat. Your face looks frozen.”

  I try to stop smiling.

  He says, “You’re going to crack.”

  ONCE, I SAW A SHOW ABOUT EARTHQUAKES ON PBS. THERE was footage of bridges buckling and families shuffling through the open-air wreckage of what had been their homes, as a professor from Stanford explained in the background how there are huge movable plates under our continents and oceans and drugstores shifting around while we’re watching television, or eating party mix, thinking about other things.

  And even though the families picking through the trash for their belongings were either Turkish or from California, it seemed like a likely event to me. It seemed to me that something like it could happen to us at any time: an earthquake here in the part of the world where there were no faults, where, instead, a thick layer of mud kept our pharmacies and supermarkets and houses stuck.

  Garden Heights is, as I’ve already mentioned, proud of its newness, the sameness of its designs, but the houses in our neighborhood seem like imitation houses. Cheaply made, pieced together overnight with materials that did not come naturally from this world—plastics, pressed woods, drywall.

  The houses are not inexpensive, but they must have been put up hastily. Who knows what they were built on? When I stand in the kitchen, I can hear every footstep my father takes upstairs. When my mother was here, I could hear the hangers clanging in her closet while she got dressed, and every word she said to my father, and even the thin, atomized sound of her cologne as she sprayed it. When I’m quiet, I still can, as if the ceiling is made of onionskin and very flimsy hope.

  Our house, like all the houses on our block, has three bedrooms—mine, my parents’, and a guest room, the door of which is always kept closed. On the rare occasions that door is opened, a cool breath of mothballs rushes into your lungs, as if the past is a guest, trapped in there for years and trying to escape.

  The living room has two green-winged chairs and a floral sofa with a brocade trim, which matches the chairs, and in the den there is a tweed and over-soft couch—which is, I imagine, supposed to be the masculine parallel to the feminine living room. Informal to formal. Comfort to decorum. As though a line has to be drawn between my father’s world and my mother’s. Like the horizon in that Seascape, or the door between the finished part of the basement and the unfinished part.

  The finished part has a pool table no one has ever used, the orange vinyl couch with black patches of gummy tape addressing its old wounds—something left over from my parents’ poor, early married days. On weekend evenings when Phil is busy with his mother, Beth and Mickey sometimes come over, and we drink Boone’s Farm Apple Wine down there, look at those Penthouses. That wine tastes like something sour squeezed out of a May day, and after a few glasses it burns greenly behind the eyes.

  The unfinished part of the basement is our family’s personal wasteland: cement floor with a drain hole like a navel leading directly from our home to the sewer, the Chagrin River, then into the huge, burning cesspool of Lake Erie. Just the washer and dryer—water and air, those elements tumbling their fuzzy stars and flowers with our underwear, our socks, our soggy monogrammed towels—and a horizontal freezer full of meat and cookie dough waiting in wax paper, waiting for Christmas, waiting for my mother to bake. Fifteen cubic feet of limbo.

  As we sleep, that appliance purrs beneath our beds, kicking on and off inside its strange private life like a big, dangerous pet. The great, white, humming brain of our house.

  For sixteen years we have lived quietly in our suburb, with some elegance, some ease, but nothing out of the ordinary. When my mother disappeared, when I said to my father that we ought to call the police, the first thing he thought to say was, “Let’s go to the station. We don’t want them to come over here for all the neighbors to see. Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

  And, of course, he was right.

  My mother would have wanted to disappear without making a scene, without giving anyone anything to talk about. Every day, she worked hard to keep passion and its violence subdued in our house. From room to room, the tasteful carpet, the sturdy furniture, the neutral walls—nothing exotic, nothing bright. Even a little would have been too much, would have stood out, homely, sad, telling the story of her discontent, letting guests know she’d wanted—once imagined—more.

  A Chinese vase, a rug of embroidered roses, even a peacock feather would have revealed my mother—naked, longing—for the whole world to pity. She knew this because she’d been to houses like that, the houses of women who served European teas, though they’d never been to Europe, and if they ever did go to Europe, they would see it through the tinted windows of an air-conditioned bus, watching the castles and the Alps roll by, too blurred in the distance to appraise.

  There’s only so much beauty women like that can bear. You see them at the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Ocean, Niagara Falls, holding the hands of their bored children—who, having been presented with some wonder of the world are drop-jawed with awe at something altogether wrong: the hot dog that fell on the ground, roiling with red ants, or the retarded man with unzipped pants, or the metal railing that surrounds it, fences the awe itself, keeps the tourists from falling in. They want to make a balance beam of that, to walk the space between death and their safe American vacation, and who could blame them?

  The children are just bored, but it is their mothers who can’t bear to look at the thing itself.

  Not out of fear. No. They’re too far removed for fear. There are signs to tell you when you’re too close to the edge, bronzed lifeguards blowing whistles when you’ve swum too far. There are rangers in uniforms—and, below you, the Maid of the Mist, drifting into the cool kiss of it, then veering back just in time.

  Fear would make sense. But it’s something else. A taboo. An inhibition. A kind of modesty imposed on the natural world by women. Their husbands might be gawking and snapping photos, but the wives call them back to the station wagons and their sandwiches and soft drinks stashed in picnic baskets.

  And the suburbs are full of homes like those, decorated by women like that. It gave my mother a seasick chill to look to the bottoms of their wistful teacups, to smell the rueful, steeping leaves sinking to the bottoms of their hand-painted kettles. The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

  And my father was not an exotic man. He’d never been to war. He’d never sailed the sea. He’d grown up in a suburb like the one we lived in now. A life without crisis, or wildlife.

  Oddly, he owned a rifle, which his father had inherited from his own father, and which he kept in the basement but never used. He seemed, in fact, afraid of
his own rifle. It was kept unloaded, locked up in the same cabinet where he kept his collection of dirty magazines. Like my father’s masculinity, it was useless, and unusable, in the basement beneath our feet. Just something he’d inherited from some earlier era, the manlier man of his father’s father, who must have been a hunter, who must have known how to skin a buck.

  Once, my mother went downstairs to put a load of laundry in the washer, and surprised him. He was holding that rifle in his arms like a child.

  When she saw him, she said, “Put that thing away,” and he did.

  My father was a man who spent his days in an office, doodling, wearing shiny shoes, tapping a pencil on his thigh. All that testosterone surging and spiking like bees in the blood, and not a thing to do with it. On Saturdays, he chased little balls over a long slope of lawn with brilliant clubs, came home red-faced, frustrated, badly beaten, hardly a man at all.

  “Beige,” I remember my mother saying to the painters who stood in our living room one summer afternoon years ago—two fat men in overalls holding brushes. It was June, and the windows were open. Outside, a sprinkler whirred in rusty spinning, and a domesticated dog yelped wildly for a moment, then stopped. Somewhere someone was practicing a flute, playing scales over and over, perfect and shrill, like a kind of obedient screaming.

  “You could try something else, ma’am. Something different. Shell pink. Or a light blue,” one of them offered.

  But she just shook her head.

  PHIL HAS THE NAME OF A SHRINK WRITTEN DOWN ON A PIECE of yellow paper—

  Dr. Maya Phaler: 878–1675.

  He hands the piece of paper to me.

  “My mom’s been seeing her ever since my father split. She says it helps a lot.” Phil says this as he walks toward the stairs to my bedroom. He says, “You need to get your anger out.”

  I follow him, holding my square of yellow.

  Phil lies back on my bed, propped up by the pansy-covered pillows, and he looks, worried, at my ceiling. I sit by his feet and rest my hand casually on his ankle. There, the bone feels hard—a sharp rock slipped into his sock—but he moves it away from my hand as if I’ve pinched or tickled him. Then he rolls over and opens the top drawer of my nightstand, where I keep the cigarettes and condoms and contraceptive foam.

  That foam is like something a virgin might find in her mouth one summer morning at the seashore. It’s immaculate, and smells like nothing.

  But he’s going for the cigarettes, I know—a fresh, soft pack of Marlboro Lights—and he spins the thin cellophane ribbon around the top in one clean movement, like slitting a fish, but he hands it over to me when he can’t get a cigarette out, jammed together as they are, dry and white.

  I scratch one out with my nails and pass it to him. When his fingers touch mine, I snag them and pull his hand to my lips. He has to sit up a little for me to kiss the tips.

  I look into his eyes, and say, “Want to have sex?”

  But Phil glances back at the ceiling quickly and falls again into the pillow, shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I want to talk about this shrink.”

  It’s an excuse, I think, not to have sex, but I let him talk.

  When it comes to talk, Phil isn’t much. He’ll pause, look soulful, pound a fist on his knee when he really means something, and you can see he means something, but what it is, well, that’s often lost in a fog of generalizations and half-finished sentences. Listening to Phil talk is a bit like watching golf on television. You see he’s got the moves, nice clubs, appropriate outerwear. You can tell when the sun’s in his eyes. You can see the pressure’s finally getting to him. But no matter how carefully you watch, you’ll never see him hit the ball, and you’ll never see it land.

  This has never bothered me. Like my father, Phil is simple, and his inarticulateness goes with this like a sprig of parsley on a Salisbury steak. His monologues are full of vivid and amusing misstatements, the mangling of cliches. Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, “My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too.”

  I imagined Phil’s mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil’s food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich.

  Another time he said, regarding his father’s late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn’t help, it would just make the checks even later. “It’s a vicious circus,” Phil said.

  When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation—the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling—might help, he said, “I’m virtuously certain it wouldn’t,” looking martyred and older than his years.

  First Phil bites his lip. Then he smokes. Then he says, “This is too much for you to deal with, you know, alone. This is, your mom taking off. It’s a heavy thing, you know. You need someone to talk to about this load.”

  I wait. When he doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Is that all?”

  “Yeah,” he says. There is a rope of smoke around his fist. He looks at it.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’ll call the shrink. Want to have sex?” I don’t want to talk to Phil about my load. I want his skin to expand and contract like a human sack over mine.

  He shakes his head no.

  He moves his foot away from my hand completely, and I look down at my own feet, bare on the white carpet, peeking out of footless black tights.

  Since I hit 122 pounds last month, I’ve started wearing Flashdance clothes. Little, loose skirts. Canvas shoes and bodysuits. A few weeks ago my father looked at me in one of these new outfits. He’d come downstairs while I was making toast for breakfast, the kitchen smelling like smoke and Wonderbread, and my father said, “Kat, you’re not doing anything, you know, to make yourself thin?”

  “I jog,” I said. I shrugged, smiled.

  But he looked worried, his face as long as a horse’s looking at my ankles, and I realized he must have seen a show about bulimia or anorexia. He must have thought I was gagging up breakfast after he dropped me off at school. Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. I remembered how, one summer, he’d taken a whole roll of photographs of my mother and me. “I want to show off my pretty girls at work,” he’d said, and my mother had agreed to pose with me in the backyard.

  He had us stand with the sun in our eyes, squinting into his camera, and kept motioning us backward, to get us in the frame, until my mother finally got mad and said, “I’m not moving again.”

  He took picture after picture.

  But the film came back from the camera store blank.

  “I’m sorry,” the clerk in the camera store said, “your photos didn’t turn out, Mr. Connors.” My father didn’t understand why. He insisted on seeing the blanks for himself, though it took the clerk a long time to find them in the wastebasket where they threw the bad prints away.

  “Here,” he said finally. “You don’t have to pay for these, of course.”

  “Of course,” my father said, but he stood looking at his envelope of blanks—bright, empty squares without us in them.

  “All that trouble for nothing,” my mother said.

  “Dad,” I said, and squeezed his upper arm, which felt surprisingly muscled under his blue blazer, “I just used to eat too much.”

  He nodded. He said, “That’s what your mother always said.”

  DR. MAYA PHALER LOOKS LIKE AN ACTRESS PLAYING THE part of a savvy, worldwise shrink, like someone pretending to be an expert on something she doesn’t know one thing about. I think of Marcus Welby, M.D.—an interview I saw once in TV Guide with the white-haired, grandfatherly guy who played that part, how he’d told the interviewer that people would routinely come up to him on the street and, instead of asking for an autograph, would ask for medical advice.

&nb
sp; Dr. Maya Phaler even has a pair of silver spectacles dangling from a silver chain around her neck. Not like an old lady or a librarian, though. Like an actress, as I’ve said—as though the costume people decided she needed a finishing touch. A psychologist’s prop.

  Blonde. Maybe fifty years old—but California blonde, like Phil. If it isn’t natural, if it’s a dye job, she’s gone to great trouble and expense to get it right.

  Hers is a class act all the way. Even her shoes are dead-on. Psychologist shoes: black, low-heeled, but with tasteful little bows, also black, just above her toes. She’s wearing a two-piece suit the color of key lime pie, and the skirt is well above the knee, revealing slender legs, curvaceous calves—though, just above her right ankle, beneath the beige panty hose, I see a Band-Aid: A bit of recklessness perhaps? A woman in a hurry? This morning she must have slipped in the shower with a razor in her hand.

  “Katrina?”

  I say, “Kat.”

  She’s looking at my insurance card: Although she charges a hundred dollars an hour, I’ll never see a bill. “Anxiety disorder” it says on my paperwork—(Is that what it is when you can’t stop smiling? Didn’t they used to call that joy?)—and it’s covered by the benefits my father gets from the board of education. Full mental health coverage—an attempt, I imagine, to keep underworked and overpaid administrators like my father from going nuts and busting up the place.

  Though, as far as I know, my father has never seen a shrink.

  Nor has my mother—