White Bird in a Blizzard

by Laura Kasischke

  Fun was the last thing she wanted me to have.

  I go to the kitchen, and take a carton of milk out of the refrigerator.

  MISSING, it says on the back, and there’s a grainy photo of a fat little girl right under the box where the calories are counted. On the side, there’s a boy in a striped shirt. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? he’s asking with a big lost smile on his face.

  I pour myself a glass of milk and take a long sip of it before I again remember that two-year-old in the back of some college boy’s truck, his skin softened, turned to liquid.

  The milk is cool and vaguely sour when I swallow it, gag, spit it into the sink.

  When I look up, my father’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He hasn’t taken his boots off. There’s snow falling in soggy fractions onto the floor, and a trail of it melts behind him.

  MICKEY’S ALREADY DRUNK WHEN SHE COMES OVER WITH two bottles of champagne in a brown grocery sack. My father lets her in, and I hear him upstairs introducing May—the sound of May’s singsong sweetness, and my father’s formal discomfort. Beth and I are in the basement, waiting, sitting on the floor, leaning up against the vinyl sofa. My mother’s birdcage hangs over Beth’s head. We’ve never taken it down—shining, brightly empty.

  “The bird has flown,” Beth says, looking up at it.

  When I called Mickey and Beth that afternoon to tell them I’d finally broken up with Phil, they both insisted on coming over to celebrate. Over the phone, Beth said, “God rest his soul.”

  Mickey’s wearing a leather jacket, and when I hug her, I smell smoke and animal skin. She kisses Beth’s cheek as she slips her jacket off—casual, magnanimous, European. I haven’t seen her since August. Since then, her hair has grown longer, been styled into wisps around her jaw. She’s wearing a black turtleneck, and makeup—burgundy lipstick, black eye shadow, a pale-beige base. With the turtleneck, the makeup, and the hair, she looks less scarred than I’ve ever seen her, and no longer a cheerleader. Mickey looks like a painter now, or a poet. The energy that once secured her spot on the varsity squad despite her unloveliness—that energy has turned overnight into a kind of serious intensity that is, finally, darkly beautiful.

  She smokes clove cigarettes.

  She’s dating a music major—bassoon.

  It sounds like a swan, she says. A very sexual instrument. Once, in his dorm room, she let him tie her to the bed. She’s asked him for a pair of handcuffs for her birthday. They might even move to New York. All this she told me when I called to tell her that Phil and I were a dead issue.

  Tomorrow, Mickey goes back to Madison. The day after that, Beth leaves for Bloomington. And the next day, my dad and May will drive me to Ann Arbor. We’ve decided to spend tonight like old times, getting drunk in the basement and smoking and talking together in our old cocoon, while, above us, my father stomps around in slippers.

  “Jesus,” Mickey says. “I don’t know about you two, but I can’t stand to be back here. It’s like purgatory. Purgatory, Ohio. Haven’t we done enough time here? I can’t fucking wait to get back to school.” She sits across from us on the basement floor, at the edge of the carpet remnant, lights up a clove cigarette, and the smell of the smoke as it fills the basement and our noses is like a garden fire. A burning bush. The smell of a flower arrangement, torched, or the Christmas lights, shorted, igniting the whole tree in a smoldering moment. Mickey’s not wearing a bra under her black turtleneck, and her breasts look autonomous and big.

  Beth is wearing old jeans and a flannel shirt. She’s gained more weight since she went away. She likes to study, she says, but she hasn’t made any friends. A few times, on weekend nights, alone in her dorm room with her roommate gone, she’d thought about what it would be like to be dead, how easy it would be to buy a gun—a small one, with a mother-of-pearl handle. There were pawnshops all over town. She’d considered how hard or easy it might be to hold that gun to your temple, count to ten, just as an experiment, to see how close you were willing to get to death, what ten felt like when you said it: a teaspoon of lead on your tongue, or a brass key to the door you were ready to step through into the colored light, the jagged surprise of a geode when you smashed it, all crystal and amethyst and pretty points inside.

  But she wasn’t sure she wanted to die, at least not yet.

  “Get me the fuck out of here,” Mickey says.

  “I know what you mean,” Beth says. “My mother told me to clean my room this morning, and I wanted to bludgeon her with a feather duster.”

  Mickey pops the plastic cork on the first bottle of cheap champagne, and there’s the wind of foam and pressure and the seething of trapped, effervescent space unleashed. Then she pours a little for each of us into my parents’ wedding glasses.

  “So, congrats, Kat.” Mickey raises the glass. “Phil’s out of the picture at last.”

  “At last,” I say. “God.” I shake my head, feigning sadness. “What a mess that ended up being.”

  “Or,” Beth says, “as Phil would say, ‘What a vicious triangle.’”

  The champagne chokes me with tartness and bubbles.

  “God,” Beth says, swallowing. “What a dolt he was.”

  “What I liked,” Mickey says, “was the look he got on his face when he was rubbing a couple Big Ideas together,” and she makes the look—a stern, fatherly frown.

  “Not a guy with a fancy interior, that’s for sure.” Beth smirks.

  “Here’s to Phil,” Mickey toasts. “May he never again loaf in vain.”

  “May he never love in Spain.” Beth raises her glass, too.

  My palm is flat against my chest, gasping with laughter, eyes watering, thinking of Phil—how he wore his sleeve on his heart. I remember reaching under him, between his legs, while we fucked, touching his balls. In my hands, they felt loose, and invertebrate, and at my mercy, and I’d thought of a marble Madonna I’d seen once at the Toledo Art Museum. She was holding the world in the palm of her hand, and seemed pleased. There was a thin, mysterious smile on her lips, as if she knew how much power she had.

  But then I remember the look on Phil’s face as he shrugged his father’s coat on, how much taller than me he seemed, how that expression was smug, as though we’d just finished playing a game—a dangerous game, a game played with pieces of broken glass and aluminum bats—and he’d won.

  I drink. I say, “But there was a parting shot.”

  “I hope it wasn’t a shock in the dark,” Beth says.

  “Or a shark in the pot,” Mickey says.

  I’m laughing again. I feel better. Finally, I say, “He told me he thinks my father is keeping my mother up his sleeve.”

  Mickey nods at Beth, then at me, in mock reflection. “Sounds reasonable,” she says.

  “A bird up the sleeve is worth two bushes at least,” Beth says. “Or so they say.”

  We laugh harder, and for a long time. Then, when the laughter’s faded, I lower my voice. I say, “No, really, you guys, he says my father knows where my mother is.”

  “Hmmm.” Mickey strikes a match and lights another cigarette, and her tone changes. “Does that surprise you?” she asks, looking at the tip of her cigarette to see if it’s lit. She drags on it, then says, “Personally, I’ve always wondered about that.”

  Beth nods, looking at me seriously.

  “Really?” I stand up quickly with the unopened bottle of champagne in my hand. “Why haven’t you ever said anything?”

  Beth looks at Mickey, who looks at Beth, and then at me. She says, “I think I did. Once. Right after she left, Kat. But you didn’t seem to want to hear it.” She continues, “I remember asking you if you thought maybe your dad had something to hide, if maybe he knew something you didn’t and wasn’t saying, and you just blew it off. You said he was too transparent to hide anything. You said he’d taken a lie detector test, and they’d decided your father lacked the ability to lie.”

  I stand there with the bottle, and they look up at me uneasily in the silence. Finally, Mic
key pours herself some more champagne. She says, “I’ve been drinking all week. I just hate Garden Heights.”

  “Maybe I should put this bottle in the freezer,” I say.

  I feel groggy, and confused, as if I’ve just hit my head hard on something soft. I hold the champagne bottle like a skinned chicken, by the neck, and go into the unfinished part of the basement, and flip the light switch.

  One bare bulb blazes from the ceiling, a terrible brightness.

  I feel tired, blinded by it, as if I’ve been sleepwalking and have just woken up with a searchlight in my face. I can hear Mickey and Beth laughing in the other room, my father and May talking in a muffled singsong upstairs, but I can also hear myself breathing, and the breath sounds as palpable as wings, or water, in my lungs.

  I head for the back of the basement, past the washer and dryer, across the drain hole, into the shadows, to the freezer. I can hear it purring, a contented vibration that hums through the whole white length of it, humming into the cement floor, into the earth under that. My father’s piles of old newspapers, bundled, are tied up tightly, efficiently, with twine on top of them. Years’ and years’ worth of old news. He must have planned to take them to the Board of Education’s annual paper drive one of these years, and forgot, and keeps forgetting, as the piles grow higher.

  I set the bottle of champagne on the floor.

  The bundles are heavy, and yellowed, and the twine cuts into my fingers when I start heaving them off of the freezer. They make a lifeless whoomf as they hit the cement, and the headlines seem strange, hopelessly innocent and outdated, even a little insane, staring up at me.

  U.S. DOWNS TWO LIBYAN FIGHTERS. SURROGATE MOTHER MARY BETH WHITEHEAD SOBS IN COURT. Ronald Reagan’s colon cancer. George Bush looking weary, jogging in Kennebunkport in the rain. And, at the very bottom, a bundle that must have been there since the year my mother disappeared. A photograph of the Challenger making its last, crazy zigzag through the sky as it loses its challenge with space.

  When all the bundles are off, I put the palm of my hand on top of the freezer, and feel the warm motor of it running. It must get hot, working so hard to keep the things inside it cold. I haven’t opened it since before my mother left, and when I try to lift the lid, I can’t. It’s as though something’s holding it closed from inside, or as if a huge, invisible weight is resting on it.

  I try harder, my fingers under the white rubber lip, straining. I can feel the frost on my knuckles, but I can’t lift it, and I quit trying. I pick the bottle of champagne up, start back to the other room, turn the light off as I leave.

  “The freezer won’t open,” I say, still holding the bottle by the neck.

  “Forget it,” Mickey says. She lifts her empty glass for more champagne. “Let’s just crack it now.”

  I sit back down on the floor, handing it over to Mickey, who struggles with the cork as Beth and I look on, holding our breath, waiting for the bright, foaming shot that doesn’t come. Instead, I hear my father at the top of the stairs. “What’s going on?” he shouts down to us. “What are you doing down there?”

  Mickey puts the bottle between her knees and grinds out her clove cigarette in the ashtray, looking surprised.

  “Drinking champagne, Dad. We’re just talking and drinking champagne,” I call up to him. “Why?”

  “I want those girls to go home,” he says. His voice sounds strained. “Right now.”

  Beth frowns at me, puzzled. I shrug. I stand up and head toward the stairs to ask him what’s wrong, but when I get to the foot of them, he’s already gone. I hear him stomp across the kitchen, through the living room, where I hear him say something in an angry tone to May, and she replies, also unintelligibly, in a high, apologetic whine. Then I hear them head together up the stairs.

  “Jeez,” Mickey says, slipping her leather coat back on. “What do you suppose that was all about?”

  LYING IN BED, I THINK OF MRS. HILLMAN WANDERING through her house in the perpetual dark, arms outstretched, feeling her way to the bathroom, the sink, the sofa, the refrigerator.

  Born blind, what if, one morning, she opened her eyes and could see?

  I imagine Phil finding Mrs. Hillman in her bed that morning when she doesn’t get up, doesn’t shuffle down to the kitchen for breakfast. Phil finding his mother lying on her back in her own bed, eyes bulged out of her head, mouth a gaping hole of surprise—

  She’d seen it all too fast, for the first time, and had died.

  Maybe, I think, when you’ve waited a long time to see something, you need to find your way to it in glimpses.

  A tatter of color.

  A sharp triangle.

  A glimpse of smudged light shining off the coffee table on a summer afternoon.

  A leaf, a wing, a swaying branch, a fragment of black trunk, a brushstroke of bird’s nest before the whole tree’s illuminated—shrill, and undisguised, filling your empty eye with its dazzling razors and knives, an explosion of edges and circles and straight lines shivering.

  Green.

  Brief.

  Movement.

  Screaming.

  You’d have to be ready for that.

  THE SNOW HAS MELTED, AND THE MUD HAS COME TO LIFE: Trees and tulips, muskrats and possum are sucking up out of it with a sluggish sound, like some beast giving birth to a whole world—the sound of lactation, phlegm, and swimming, while in the muck something swampy and furred licks its blind young with a long sloppy tongue.

  In the garden, there are hundreds—thousands—of baby snakes, sexual and twisting, stickling at wet nests of broken eggs and the fresh shoots of new leaves in the branches over my head, still damp and curled into fetal fists. I’m barefoot, looking up at the sky, which has begun to shed a fleshy, gray rain, then down at those snakes, eating their own tails now, when suddenly I notice my mother.

  She’s under me, clawing herself slowly out of the thawing ground. Naked, writhing, she’s being born, sitting up, and it’s her hair I notice first, strung with the sludge of January, melting. Then she wipes the mud from her eyes, looks up at me, and says, “I’m glad to be alive.”

  When I wake up, May, wearing a white nightgown, is standing in the dark of my bedroom doorway. I realize I’m drenched in sweat, and naked. In my sleep, I’ve pulled my flannel nightgown up over my head and thrown it to the floor. The sheets and blankets have been stomped down to the end of the bed—shed. May’s mouth is open wide, looking at me, and I am screaming and screaming and screaming.

  IN THE MORNING I HEAR MAY TALKING TO MY FATHER IN the kitchen. She says, “Something’s terribly wrong.”

  My father grumbles, guffaws. “She has a nightmare,” he says sarcastically, “and there’s ‘something terribly wrong.’ Haven’t you ever had a nightmare before?”

  “Not like that,” May says, hushed and serious. “Not like that.”

  “Well, I have,” he says, dismissing her. “Plenty.”

  I hear something slam. Maybe he’s pounded his fist on the kitchen table. “I told you not to sleep over with Kat here. I told you.”

  May starts to whine. “I don’t see why you’re so upset. I’m just expressing concern about your daughter.”

  He’s shouting now. “My daughter does not need your concern. You are not Kat’s mother.”

  “You’re right,” May says, resigned. I hear hangers in the coat closet. She’s getting her coat. She says, “I have to go to work. Call me tonight if you still want me to drive Kat to Ann Arbor with you tomorrow. Otherwise, I won’t bother you.”

  “Good,” my father grunts.

  “Oh,” May says.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing,” she says, and I hear the front door slam behind her.

  “DID YOU ASK YOUR DAD WHAT THE FREAK-OUT WAS all about the other night?” Beth asks over the phone. She’s leaving for Bloomington this afternoon. Mickey left for Madison yesterday without calling to say goodbye.

  “This morning he said, I kid you not, ‘I won’t have girls smoking
in my basement,’” I tell her.

  “What?” Beth laughs. “We’ve been smoking in that basement for five fucking years, and he knows it.”

  “I know,” I say. “I told him that, but he just walked out the front door, got in the car, and drove off to work.”

  “Weird,” Beth says, drawing the word out.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. I can smoke myself into a stupor if I want to. I can smoke my way to oblivion and back.”

  “Yeah,” Beth says. “But not with me and Mickey. Not in your very own basement. Not in Garden Heights, Ohio.” She sounds sad, like someone who doesn’t want to be where she is, but knows she’ll never be back.

  “Well, all third-rate things must come to an end.”

  “Or,” she says, sounding cheerful again, “as Phil would say, ‘All’s swell that ends swell.’”

  When she hangs up, I keep the receiver at my ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone until the recorded voice of the operator comes on and says, “Please hang up and try your call again.”

  That voice sounds far away, echoing across the miles, like a woman who has been living at the end of a tunnel for a long time.

  Then there’s silence.

  “Beth?” I say into the phone, but she’s gone.

  I PACK MY CLOTHES AND SHOES AND BOOKS. IT’S AFTERNOON. I leave for Ann Arbor in the morning.

  This time, I’m taking more things back with me than I brought home. I’m taking things I thought I’d leave: my photo albums, my jewelry box, my summer shorts, a straw hat I bought long ago with a big plastic sunflower on the brim—a hat I wouldn’t be caught dead in now.