“She drove my father to the edge,” Phil said once, and I pictured Mr. Hillman in the passenger seat next to his blind wife, screaming, hands over his eyes while she drove ninety miles an hour through football fields and forests and backyards strung with laundry flapping on their lines until somehow, miraculously, she slammed on the brakes just before they hit the edge, the place where the world ends, the crater into which Mr. Hillman had flown—through the windshield, smashing through the glass, a sparkling, bloody husband disappearing into the abyss.
For fifteen bright, white years like wet sheets they were married, and had been since high school, when Phil’s father first fell in love with Mrs. Hillman after glimpsing her inside the special ed classroom where she spent her days. An exotic mushroom—something that only grew, all waxy flesh and pale meat, in the light of the moon. He watched her from a distance and must have thought for a long time about what it would be like to kiss a blind girl, to take her clothes off in the dark backseat of his car. Like a goat sneaking up on a milkmaid. Or a bear carrying a virgin into the forest. There was something dirty about it, but everyone would think of you as good for doing what you did, because you loved a girl no one else would want.
But after a decade of that, Mr. Hillman decided his whole life had been a correctable mistake, decided that, since Phil was old enough to take care of Mrs. Hillman, he could leave, become a drifter—a drifter with quite a bit of money, as it happened, as the job he left when he abandoned Phil and his mother was a good one, and he’d been saving money a long time and investing it wisely with drifting in mind.
After that, Phil and his mother left their executive home for Garden Heights, for the expired Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house—a junior executive, which wasn’t squalid, of course, but was not the kind of house they’d moved out of.
Once, early after we’d first started dating, Phil drove me past that house in High Hollow Estates.
“That one,” Phil said, pointing to a huge brick facade. Inside, I could see a black woman moving from room to room. She seemed to be cleaning the air with a rag. “I grew up there,” Phil said, pulling into the driveway, then backing out. “That woman used to be ours.”
A fairy tale with a twisted ending, one in which the sun sets like napalm on the prince and princess as they walk off, sticky all over with fire.
When I come back from the kitchen Mrs. Hillman says, “Look upstairs. Right above us. It sounds like a squirrel burrowing.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Phil says, standing up. “Just sit down, Kat. There’s no squirrels anywhere except in my mother’s head.”
“Phil,” I look at him with my eyes wide, knowing his mother won’t notice, “it can’t hurt to check. It’s probably just my father.”
But it’s not. My father’s asleep on his back on the bed. He’s wearing a sweatshirt that says “U.M.” in big blue letters, like a hesitation on his chest.
LATER PHIL SAYS, “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT. YOU DON’T have to live with her.”
We’re on our way to the Rite Aid in his father’s car to buy the can of air freshener his mother wants. “Glade,” she’d said back at the house after the workmen were gone, “floral.” She handed her pocketbook to Phil and said, “I can smell them in here. Sewage and boots. Take three dollars.”
Phil took an extra ten out of her wallet and slipped it into his.
“I know,” I said, watching the road roll out its rug of slush in front of us. It’s gotten warmer: the usual big January thaw making its annual two-day appearance, duping us into thinking winter’s nearly over when, really, it’s just begun. “But she deserves to be treated with respect, Phil. She can’t help it that she’s blind.”
He glances at me, and the car veers a little closer to the curb. His face is scrunched up, eyes narrowed. I look away, back at the curb, which is painted yellow. A warning.
When I look back, he’s glaring at me. He says, “Do you think I don’t know that?”
Something flutters under my arm then. As if I’ve got a little mouse hidden under it. An artery, pumping. I realize I’m scared. “Forget it,” I whisper into the windshield. “I’m sorry I said anything.”
“Do you think I don’t fucking know that it’s not her fault she’s blind?”
I shake my head. “Of course not,” I say. “I just felt bad for her today.”
“Well.” Phil looks back at the road now, slowing, turning, seeming satisfied. “Well, a person could spend his whole life wandering around looking for things my mother thinks she hears and smells all over the goddamn house. Ten times a day she’s asking me, ‘Do you smell something moldy? Phil, go look in the attic, I think I hear a bat.’” He imitates his mother’s voice—whiny, childlike, but hard-edged, a cross between Betty Boop and my own mother, whose voice, I realize, I’ve nearly forgotten until now, hearing a bit of it in Phil’s impression.
I shrug. “It didn’t hurt me any just to check around the house. I don’t see what difference it makes to you. She was right last night, wasn’t she? About the plumbing?”
“So what?” Phil stops the car in the Rite Aid parking lot, squeezing between two fat mini vans. “So fucking what?” he asks again, slamming the car door, hurrying toward the store.
I unbuckle my seat belt, open the car door, and step into the parking lot, which is glazed with ice that’s been thawing and freezing and thawing now for two months, and I try to hurry after him, but, under me, the parking lot is slick, shifting in panes of gray beneath my boots, and I start to skid. Slipping, I see the fogginess of that slush rush at me, as if I’ve stepped into the path of a nebulous mirror. “Phil,” I call out, and for an instant I glimpse my own surprised face in that mirror as I fall among the swirling clouds and slop—
In that reflection, I’m wearing a veil of slop. The pavement underneath it stings the heel of my hands, and the hot pain brings tears to my eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asks, turning around, finding me behind him on my hands and knees, looking up, seeming to cry. He comes over but doesn’t reach down to touch me, just hovers, casting a wan shadow. I sit, now, resigned, and the slop starts to seep up through my jeans. I feel it spread through my panties, onto my bare skin, and the tears feel hot, the way it feels to pee after swimming in ice-cold water, the way freezing begins as cold and ends as burning.
“HOW ARE THINGS WITH PHIL?” Dr. PHALER ASKS TEN minutes before my hour’s up. By now, we have entirely dispensed with the pretense of psychoanalysis, the pretense that there is something scientific or medical about these hours we spend together. We no longer sift through the details of my childhood and dreams for trouble. That laborious process bore no fruit—just some dull nuggets, like unsalted cashews: a string of images that were not symbols, memories of childhood birthday parties at which no fun was had, insults endured in elementary school rest rooms. Even the subject of my mother has been for the most part exhausted, except on special occasions, like her birthday or my parents’ anniversary. Instead, we spend my sessions mulling over the trivia of the present, its minor annoyances and daily travails.
It is like gossiping once a week with a friend, except that the gossip is about me.
And, for a hundred dollars an hour, Dr. Phaler is a good dispenser of lightweight advice. She never seems distracted. She monitors her facial expressions for just the right display of detachment and compassion, and she always remembers the names of the minor characters in my life—my chemistry teacher, my friends Beth and Mickey, the assistant principal who caught me smoking in the parking lot and gave me a warning.
Dr. Phaler is like the mother you always wished you had. The mother you would have been perfectly happy to pay a hundred dollars an hour to have. Except that you could never afford such a mother. If you had to buy a mother, you’d end up with some old lady who lived with a dozen other kids in a trailer. Or a mother who’d get sick of you and leave, like the one I had.
“Not good,” I say. “I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?”
“Well,” I say, and look up at the ceiling of her office, which is tiled with white boards. The boards look porous, false, too light to be a ceiling, as if they’ve been pressed from dust and the buoyant, brittle hair of old ladies, as if they’d fly away if someone sneezed, leaving us roofless, exposed to the sky.
“He says he loves me, but we just don’t have anything together anymore. We don’t talk. We don’t hold hands. When I try to kiss him, he gets rigid,” and I see myself up there on the ceiling, projected onto those white tiles as on a drive-in movie screen, kissing Phil, Phil standing up straighter, backing away, as if I am an overly affectionate dog, one that might turn out to be vicious.
“What does he say when you ask about this?”
“He says he’s got a lot on his mind right now. To cut him some slacks. I think he means slack—”
Dr. Phaler laughs. She is familiar by now with this aspect of Phil’s character, his struggle to express himself in clichés, never quite getting the cliché right, and it is a joke between us.
“He says kissing just doesn’t do anything for him. He feels numb inside. He complains about his mother a lot, says she’s ruining his life with her whining, that he needs some space.”
“Do you think about ending the relationship?” Dr. Phaler asks, sounding serious, though she is still smiling at our joke.
“For what?” I ask, looking down from the ceiling tile and back at Dr. Phaler.
“Do you mean what for?”
“No.” I shrug. “I mean for what? There aren’t any other boys to date around here—dorks and jocks. I don’t want one of those. And I don’t have a real active social calendar right now. It’s not like Phil’s standing in the way of some glamorous alternative lifestyle I might be leading.”
“So?” Dr. Phaler is playing the fool. “Do you have to stay in a relationship that’s unsatisfactory because no other relationship is available? Wouldn’t you be better off with no boyfriend at all than with one who doesn’t even want to express affection? Kat,” she leans toward me in her chair, looking hard into my eyes, “isn’t that a lot like the relationship you’ve described your parents as having? Haven’t you always said your mother married your father because there was no one else around to marry? Kat,” she continues, glancing at the clock, which is about to run out, “I want you to spend some time this week thinking about your parents’ marriage. Can you do that?”
I don’t bother to answer. Of course, of course. So many connections to be made. So many obvious parallels. Do we really need a Ph.D. for this?
Besides, my time is up.
It occurs to me to tell Dr. Phaler about my fantasies concerning Detective Scieziesciez, how it has crossed my mind that I could make an appointment with him on the pretense that I need to discuss the case of my missing mother, and that this appointment might end with my legs spread on this detective’s desk.
But Dr. Phaler looks satisfied, as if she’s given me a tidy box of explosives to carry with me onto the plane. She stands and opens her door to usher me out, and she smiles sympathetically but says nothing more than “See you next week” as I step out of her office, smile my good-bye politely.
Leaving, I see a young woman, maybe twenty-one, sitting in the waiting room, waiting for Dr. Phaler. This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen her there—as pale and thin as an exhalation. She looks a little shaky, and smells like smoke doused with watery perfume. Bulimic, I imagine: At our high school we have quite a few of those, and I recognize the type. This one looks like a woman perfectly capable of going home and eating four gallons of vanilla ice cream with a big, silver spoon—like eating pleasure itself: creamed, sweetened, frozen, momentary. Then gagging it back into the toilet, washing her face in the sink, rinsing out her mouth, then going straight back into the kitchen for a bag of potato chips—
Those chips would be painful, though.
So many golden sections.
Coming up again, it might feel as though idealism itself had gotten caught in your throat. But it could be satisfying, too. A hard job well done, choking perfection back into the world outside yourself.
Today the bulimic has on too much lipstick, smeared all over her lips as well as above and below them. She glances up from her fashion magazine at me, and her forehead looks cool and damp. And those lips: It looks as if she’s been kissing something painted red while the paint’s still wet, or as if she’s just come back from an emergency room, where she kissed someone bloody.
When she smiles at me, I see the shape of my own smile cut itself into the clamminess of her brow, and I imagine she can see some distorted reflection of herself somewhere on me.
THREE
January 1988
THE GRANDMOTHERS CAME FOR CHRISTMAS, AND ALTHOUGH it’s been a month since they left, I still feel as though I might turn any corner in the house and find one of the grandmothers there—wolf mouth open, arms outstretched, ready to eat me alive.
My mother’s mother, Zeena, and my father’s mother, Marilyn, are crazy about each other. Every morning of their long visit, there they’d be when I came downstairs, sitting on the couch, knees pressed together, hands in a huddle between them, discussing my mother’s disappearance in whispers, marveling at how terribly and well she’s vanished.
Two years. Almost two years.
Grandma Zeena is thin, hard, robust. She looks every inch the woman who, decades ago, left her only child behind in Ohio, moved to the desert, started a bright new life, and didn’t look back. My mother kept a snapshot of Zeena pinned to the mirror over her dresser, and it’s still there. Like everything else, my mother left it when she left us.
In that photograph, Zeena’s standing to the left of a roulette wheel, smiling. The wheel is wild with numbers and lights, rhinestones and gold letters, and Zeena is getting ready to spin it. The expression on her face is wide open, the face of a clock without hands—free of liability, or fear. Whatever happens, this photograph implies, she’ll still be smiling—not smugly, but with true, untroubled joy.
Perhaps Zeena sent this particular snapshot back to her daughter in Ohio as a kind of apology—one that tried to express how we live, really, at the mercy of chance, the accidents of our own impulses, the toss-up of our individual desires. And now that my own mother has left, I think maybe all those hours she spent at the mirror, fussing and unfussing, buttoning and unbuttoning, putting earrings on and taking them off, she kept that photo of Zeena as a model there beside her own reflection, beside the image she was making of herself.
Grandma Zeena managed to go a decade without seeing her daughter. “Time just flew by,” I heard her say one Christmas to my mother. Zeena had flown in for the holiday then, just as she did this year, and the two of them were in the kitchen, peeling potatoes at the sink. I looked at those two women holding blunt roots in their hands, those women I’d issued directly from, and pictured Time as a mechanical sparrow with a little clock radio in its belly, whizzing back and forth between them.
When my mother finally flew at the end of that decade to Las Vegas, at the age of twenty, Zeena met her, according to my mother, with a plastic bag of gifts—a teddy bear, a charm bracelet—as if she were expecting the child she’d left in Ohio to step off that plane, unchanged, ten years later. My mother said she thought Zeena seemed a bit suspicious when she tapped her shoulder and said, “Mom, it’s me.”
“Who?” Zeena asked, the sound of coins slapping slot machines in the airport lobby—tinny, mechanical music.
Later, over margaritas in a casino, sitting at the bar while more machines whirred wildly behind them—nickels, wheels, whistles—Zeena told my mother that she’d never loved my mother’s father, that it was why she left. My grandmother’s eyes were aquamarine in the salt light of her margarita, the color of a couple of rhinestones dropped out of a showgirl’s tiara into dust.
She continued, “I was pregnant, you know. Kicked out of the house. Too young to know what else to do.” As she spoke, Zeena chewed a ragged fingernail, p
ainted red—and, replaying the moment in her mind for many years, my mother would think of that hangnail as a bloody claw caught in her mother’s mouth. An owl’s claw, or a fishhook: Her mother had stuck it in her mouth herself, but she seemed snagged by it, helpless, there in Las Vegas.
“How is your father?” she asked, and before my mother could answer, Zeena added, “Now there’s a man who knows nothing about women.”
My mother never had a chance to answer because they had to hurry. Zeena’s new boyfriend, Roger, was picking them up outside the Lady Luck in his new convertible. They were going to show her the sights. “Bottoms up,” Zeena said, tipping her glass toward my mother’s, “time to fly.”
That last sip of margarita might have tasted like a man’s sweat in my mother’s mouth, and she felt nauseated, spongy. The Friday before, she’d graduated from college, and that afternoon she’d flown across the country. Zeena had sent her the ticket slipped into a card that said “CONGRATULATIONS” inside, but on the outside was a drawing of a couple kissing, not a diploma or a graduation cap, and when her father dropped her off at the airport he said, “Now don’t give her any money. She said this was a gift.”
It was the first plane ride of my mother’s life, and looking down on the country slipping under her like something spilled had made her sick. And as soon as she and Zeena stepped together out of the air-conditioned airport, the heat hit her with the weight of a burning wall, and Zeena said, “You know, I’ll have to borrow some money to pay a cab to get us back to the apartment. I spent every last dime on that plane ticket, Eve.” My mother fished around in her purse, and handed her mother twenty dollars. It was one hundred degrees out there in the blank heat of the desert under a flat, colorless sky. As they waited for a cab on the sidewalk, my mother couldn’t stand on both feet for very long, the concrete boiling under the flimsy soles of her sandals. She had to keep switching feet as each one got too hot, and she felt like a bird in her white sundress—a big white chicken stranded in the desert, dancing on sand.
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