“Did you have fun today?” Glenn asks her.
“Yes.”
“Good.” He ruffles her hair, taps the tip of her nose as if his finger is a wand. “Next time we’re going to see Grandma and Grandad, all right?”
“Aw wight.”
“You know I love you.”
“Yes.”
He wants more, but it is enough. He doesn’t want to drive home crying like last time. It’s the antidepressants; they get him going like a yo-yo.
“Okay,” he says, and undoes her belt. “Come out my side, and watch the step down.”
They walk to the door together. She still won’t hold his hand. “You ring it,” he says.
For the second time today he is stunned by the person opening his own door—Annie’s mother, whom he hasn’t seen since helping set up for the Women’s Auxiliary dish-to-pass a month ago. May likes him, he’s always thought, because Annie’s father was a fireman. When Glenn first came to in the hospital, she was there with his parents; she apologized for Annie, which he thought she didn’t have to do.
“Come in,” May says, “it must be getting chilly out there,” and starts to help Tara off with her coat. Tara jerks away, scowling. “Little Miss Independence.”
The house is warm with cooking. Annie’s on the couch watching TV, ignoring him.
“What’s the occasion?” Glenn asks May.
“Your wife thinks I’m starving to death.”
“I do not,” Annie says without taking her eyes off the TV.
“We’re having chicken a la king. There’s enough if you’d like to stay.”
It seems to Glenn that the room has gone silent. Annie looks at them as if they’ve said something wrong in front of Tara.
“I don’t know if I’m allowed.”
“Why not?” May says.
“Sure,” Annie says, “why not? All my other wonderful relatives are here.”
When Glenn asks her out, Annie can’t believe he’s serious. It’s not like him to put her on the spot. She can’t tell if he’s desperate or confident. He looks good.
“Neutral territory,” he says. “Just for dinner, nothing else. Your choice, any place in town.”
“Sounds inviting,” her mother says.
“Let me think about it,” Annie says, stalling, trying to brush it off.
She’s forgotten how well he speaks, how pleasant he can be. She has to remind herself that half of what he’s saying isn’t true. He says he has a new job over at Sullivan’s Salvage, but Mr. Parkinson works there, and surely her mother would have heard from Mrs. Parkinson if it had actually happened. Still, it’s fascinating to watch how he gets himself going, how he cheers himself along. Her mother keeps looking at her to make sure she’s listening.
She isn’t really. She’s still trying to absorb the four of them here at her kitchen table. Usually it’s just her, rushed for time and pleading with Tara to eat. She’s having a hard time admitting that she likes having them—him—here, especially after such a strange day. His suit reminds her of when they were dating and he used to come over to their place for supper. His manners impressed her parents, and his hair. Her mother still hasn’t changed her opinion. Annie knows she blames the separation on her; she’s never stopped defending Glenn. Once, in the only full-fledged argument they’ve had about it, her mother asked, “What did he do?” and Annie could only say, “Nothing. He doesn’t do anything, that’s the problem.” Her mother doesn’t understand. She never says it, but in every conversation they have about her problems with Glenn, her mother implies that Annie is hurting her father, which would be ridiculous except that at heart Annie believes it. She did not want the separation, neither of them did. She wants Tara to have a father, and Glenn can be a good father, but at this time last year he was out of work and resented watching Tara while she pulled the day shift at Friendly’s. It was bullshit. She’d come home and he’d be on the couch, well into his third beer, and the house would be a mess and he’d expect her to get dinner and do the dishes and weekends run out to the laundry.
“Everyone else does it,” her mother said then. “I did it for your father and all three of you kids for thirty years, and I survived.”
“I know,” Annie said, trying to show her she saw her side, but knowing now that she would have to do it alone.
Things have changed since then, Annie thinks, looking around the table. I’ve changed. She watches Glenn trying to smile as he chews his seconds and wonders what she is going to do with him. She has never questioned that he loves her—or not in the way that she wonders about Brock. He’s devoted. That’s the hardest thing to admit, that if she took him back he would do everything he could for her.
“I ordered four sets of prints,” Glenn is telling her mother, “one for everyone.”
“Let me pay you. I insist.”
“Yes,” Annie says.
Glenn holds up his hand to stop them. “You can pay for the next set.” He puts his hand on his heart. “These are from me.”
“Well, thank you,” her mother says, impressed again, and looks to Annie.
“Thank you, Glenn.”
“No problem,” he says, “now how about that dinner?
“I’ve got work every day next week,” she says, though her mother knows she has Thursday off.
“Lunch?”
Annie looks around the table; no one is going to save her. She can think of a thousand things she needs to do—work on Tara’s Halloween costume, finish the ironing, clean the bathroom—but none sounds like a good enough excuse. Barb wants her to come over. She thinks of the dented door, the first stale hit of the Winston.
“I’ll watch Tara,” her mother volunteers.
“Okay,” Annie says, as if she’s convinced her, “I guess lunch couldn’t hurt.”
Glenn wants to stay and do the dishes, but Annie says it’s time for him to leave. She has to get ready for work. Though he’s been picturing himself at the sink, washing while she dries, he doesn’t argue. He helps clear, then lifts Tara over his head, turns her upside down and runs around the living room holding her by the ankles. Bomber follows.
“Remember she just ate,” Annie warns.
He drops Tara onto the couch like a bomb, and she laughs, her face puffed with blood.
“I want to ride again,” she demands.
“Next time,” he says. “Daddy’s got to go.”
“I don’t want you to.”
Glenn looks to the kitchen, hoping Annie’s heard, but there’s only May, saving the peas for tomorrow. Annie’s probably getting dressed. He’s seen her in the new uniform once or twice before—a plain gray skirt and white blouse with a maroon apron and plastic nametag. She always looks good to him.
“I don’t want to go either,” he tells Tara, “but I’ll be back. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Give me a kiss. And a hug. Who’s a big bug?”
“Daddy.”
“Say goodbye to Bomber.”
She puts the dog in a headlock and, closing her eyes, buries her face in his fur.
Annie comes in wearing her uniform and black pantyhose, searching for her work shoes—white like a nurse’s. Glenn spots one sticking out from beneath the couch, reaches under the ruffle and finds the other. Annie thanks him and sits down on the couch to put them on. He kneels there between her and Tara and Bomber, and thinks that it is too early, that though he wants to, he’s not ready to propose to his whole family—that they’re not ready to say yes.
At the door he reminds Annie not to forget their lunch.
“How could I,” she says, as if it’s a chore, but doesn’t try to back out. May gives him a kiss. It’s dark out, and wintry, trees tapping their branches. The guywires hum. Bomber marks the stem of the mailbox, then waits for him to lower the tailgate. Glenn waves before getting in. He flips his lights on and they have to shade their eyes. Pulling away, he honks.
He punches in a tape and—what luck he suddenly has—it’s Cat Stevens singing
, Oooh baby baby it’s a wild world. It’s hard to get by just upon a smile. The song seems wise to Glenn tonight, and he cruises past the middle school and down Far Line at half his usual speed, savoring the view of town, the valley shimmering in the cold like embers. His parents will wonder why he’s late.
“The heck with ‘Columbo,’ ” Glenn says, and when the track ends he clicks the program button three times so he can hear it again. He turns it up on the interstate, under the orange mercury-vapor lamps, and croons along with Cat. It ends and he’s about to cue it up again when in the strobing light of a clover-leaf he sees Winnie-the-Pooh lying in the muddy footwell under the dash. He reaches over, driving blind for an instant, and picks it up. By some miracle it’s clean, just a dried patch on one paw that brushes right off. Cat’s started his next song, riding the peace train, going home again. Glenn holds the soft bear to his cheek, presses his nose into the fur and, closing his eyes, inhales.
THREE
THE NIGHT BEFORE my father left us, he packed the few things he would need at his new place. My mother kept to the rec room, doing laundry and watching TV, something British on the educational station. It was a schoolnight, a Tuesday, because I was in bed, listening to “Radio Mystery Theatre” on my little transistor. My father by then was sleeping in my sister’s room, beside mine, though sometimes—I knew—he crossed the hall after they decided I was asleep. Through the wall I could hear hangers pinging, the screek and thump of drawers.
I knew there would not be a fight. That summer we had been through the screaming and the crying and the silence. Driving home from the family Fourth of July picnic at my grandparents’ camp, my mother struck my father in the face—just once, openhanded. I had been sneaking Rolling Rock ponies from my uncle John’s ice chest all afternoon, and sat in the backseat, woozy, watching the dotted line scroll out of the dark, so that when she smacked him it seemed fuzzy and unreal. I did not suddenly become sober, only more removed, yet now I saw them clearly, turned to each other while the road poured heedlessly under our car. My father grabbed my mother’s wrists and pushed her against the opposite door. The Country Squire swerved over the line. He needed both hands to right it.
The violence must have frightened them as much as it did me, because for several minutes they did not speak. They did not look at each other or at me, for which I was grateful. Corn flew by in the headlights.
“If you ever touch me again,” my mother finally said, “I’m going to kill you.”
My father laughed once, scoffing at her, and I did not like it. At home they both told me it was late, that I needed my sleep.
In August they fought once or twice a week, when I was in bed. I heard my mother come up from watching TV and then an exchange as she walked past my father to the kitchen. I dialed the volume down on my radio, tried to breathe quietly, but they knew I was listening, and instead of going at it in the kitchen, they stopped as if a timeout had been called and moved their argument to the basement. I waited for my father to return, clumping up the stairs, and then the inevitable clatter of the screen door opening as he stalked out. By then Carlsen’s corn was better than man-sized. My father walked the rutted tractor path around the field, smoking cigarettes. I’d see him out my window, blending in with the rows, a bright dot easily eclipsed.
Now, late October, they no longer fought. My father walked, my mother watched TV, and I lay in bed. Deep in the night the house was quiet; my father no longer crossed the hall. Mornings we ate breakfast together, overly polite, resigned. I stood outside at the end of our drive hoping my bus would come. We seemed to be waiting for something, saving our energy.
I expected the last night would be the same. In bed I listened to my father zipping up his duffel bag, clapping shut the latches of his suitcase. Long after the spooky theme music closed the show, I lay there waiting for my mother to come up, but when she did, it was not to cry or scream or plead with him but to put away the laundry she’d just done.
“I’ve got socks of yours,” she said.
He thanked her and moved to the bathroom and went through the medicine cabinet.
My mother opened my door, saw that I was awake and told me to go to sleep. “Tomorrow’s going to be long,” she said. She wrestled with my dresser until her basket was empty, told me to go to sleep again and left.
I followed her footsteps to the top of the basement stairs, where she tossed the basket down and turned out the light. From the living room my father said something to her. She went in to answer him and then, surprising me, sat on the couch. I could not make out what they were saying. All day I had been thinking that tonight was going to be something big, and this was the last chance. I half wanted them to attack each other, throw a lamp through the picture window so the cops would come. Instead, all I heard was mumbling. I crept out of bed to my door and leaned an ear against the bright keyhole.
“I know you can’t afford to,” my mother was saying. “I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just that you can’t afford to.”
“I want to,” my father said. “I think it’s important for him.”
“I do too, but you know as well as I do that that’s not going to happen. It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” my father said.
“Well, that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know yet,” my mother said. “Somewhere close, somewhere affordable.”
I had not heard them talk like this, and though what they said was terrifying, how they said it comforted me. I pressed against the cold keyhole with the same unblinking concentration I fixed on “Radio Mystery Theatre” as they discussed our bank account, our car, living expenses, rent. How deeply my parents felt about these things was a secret to me. It seemed they could not stop talking. My father lit cigarette after cigarette. My mother made them each a drink, then another, and another. My legs were hurting me, so I lay down on the floor. The rush of air under the door made me close my eyes. The ice clinked, my father’s lighter scraped up a flame.
“We really did it, Lou,” my father said, “didn’t we?”
I tried to stay awake, to remember everything they were saying, but it was easily past one and they weren’t making a lot of sense anymore. Later I thought I heard them together in the kitchen and—dimly, surfacing for an instant—my mother laughing in the bathroom.
In the middle of the night I woke up not on the floor but back in bed, under my covers. They had not forgotten me, and yet just then I could not allow myself to be grateful to them, for my own sake. I could hear my father snoring, which he did only when he was sick or had been drinking, and I wondered if he had crossed the hall. I put on my nightshirt and opened my door slowly to keep it from creaking. If seen, I would pretend I had to go to the bathroom.
My mother’s door was closed, which was normal. The snores were coming from Astrid’s room. I stood there defeated in the aqua glow of the nightlight, and then I found that I really did have to pee.
I closed the bathroom door and sat so I wouldn’t make so much noise. The seat was cold, and the floor on my feet. I sat in the dark, thinking about tomorrow until my thighs went numb, then gently put down the lid instead of flushing.
My father was still snoring. I thought—melodramatically, because I needed something about this night to be final—that I would never hear him snore like this again. I went to Astrid’s door to look in on him, as he had looked in on me so many times.
My mother was in bed with him. The two of them filled Astrid’s twin, a trail of clothes on the floor. There were not enough covers, and one of my mother’s legs lay cold and exposed, one arm limp as a murder victim’s, the wrist delicately bent. I wanted to cover her, to tuck them both in, but didn’t dare go near. I leaned in the doorway and wished on them, then went back to my room and got into bed, at last satisfied with the night, hopeful for the morning.
We all slept in late the next day. My father did not have time to shave; my mothe
r ran around the house with the buttons of her uniform undone. At breakfast my father would not sit down. He stood at the counter eating his crumbcake over the sink and writing down emergency numbers for my mother. His bags were already piled by the door in the front hall. My mother insisted on making a hot breakfast for me, and I worked at getting down my runny fried egg and toast. She sat across from me, gulping her cup of coffee.
“I’m not going to have a phone until Monday,” my father said. “If you have to get me you can call the super.”
“I’ll need the furnace man,” my mother said. “Did you remember towels?”
He gave her a helpless look and headed for the bathroom.
“Take the blue,” she called after him. She took a long draw of coffee, did up her buttons, then looked at me eating. “Do you have practice today?”
“Outside,” I said.
“When do I have to come get you?”
“Five,” I said. Up until then it had been my father’s job to pick me up. So she would have the car, I thought. What else had they decided that I didn’t know?
My father passed through with a stack of towels and my mother left her coffee to make her face. I wondered if she was going to drive him to work or whether, like her, he would stand with me at the end of our drive, waiting for someone to pick him up. As I was spooning the gluey dregs of my breakfast down the disposal, a car honked outside. My father opened the screen door and waved, then came back inside.
“My ride’s here,” he called past me.
My mother came out of the bathroom, tying her hair back so the kids at her work couldn’t grab it.
“Arthur,” she said, “help your father.”
I lifted two small duffels and, elbowing the screen open, followed him out. In our drive idled a weathered white Chevy pickup, at the wheel a dark-haired man I didn’t know. Even with his doors closed I could make out the bass line of Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years,” the closing section Warren and I could do note for note with our mouths. He hopped out to clear a spot in the bed for the bags, and I could see he was wearing the same beige uniform top my father had on. The lozenge above his heart said Glenn, and that was how my father introduced him when we had everything in.
Snow Angels Page 4
