House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  Shortly after Lilly dropped Steve Kennedy, I came downstairs one Saturday and found my mother still dressed in the clothes she had worn the evening before, curled up in a ball asleep on the couch. After Steve Kennedy she dated Robert McBride. He took us to Euclid Beach and let us ride the roller coaster three times while he made out with my mother on a nearby bench.

  On the floor in front of the couch lay a pair of high-heeled black pumps, and Lilly’s silk stockings and red garter belt were slung over the arm of the couch. A bottle of creme de menthe, two cordial glasses, and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts sat on the coffee table. The sticky mint smell of the liqueur hung in the room.

  “Mom, Mom, wake up,” I said. Even as my mother slept the unconscious sleep of intoxication, I knew her thoughts were threaded to the broad shoulders and slicked-back hair of Robert McBride, whom she’d said good-bye to barely an hour before.

  Dressed only in a tight black evening dress hiked up to her thighs, Lilly huddled further into the couch.

  Louise trailed downstairs rubbing her eyes.

  “Something’s the matter with Mom,” I said. I must have been eight by then.

  Louise touched my mother’s cheek. She shook her shoulders. Lilly’s body was warm and limber, but when I picked up her hand and let it go, it fell smack down on the couch.

  “We better wake Ruthie,” Louise said. The sound of her bare feet stuck to the cold wood floor as she ran up the stairs.

  “She’s drunk,” Ruthie said, as soon as she saw our mother in a lump on the couch. “Anna, make some coffee.”

  I filled the percolator with ground coffee and water and plugged it in, as I had watched my mother do nearly every day.

  Ruthie turned the television set on full volume. Louise sat next to our mother on the couch, pressed her lips into an O, and blew her breath over our mother’s face. “Come on, Mom,” she said. “Get up.”

  I brought in a tray with a pot of coffee, a cup, a bowl filled with warm water, and a washcloth.

  Louise began to hum the hills are alive from The Sound of Music. She did that when she got nervous.

  “Help me sit her up,” I said.

  With some effort we propped our mother to a sitting position against the back of the couch, but her body was as floppy as a rag doll’s.

  “Wake up, Mother,” Ruthie said, shaking Lilly’s shoulders.

  I dipped the washcloth into the bowl and sponged my mother’s forehead.

  “What’s going on here?” Lilly said, in a tiny, cracked voice. She shook her head and practically slapped me in the face as she stretched her arms.

  “Why couldn’t you wake up?” Louise said. Sitting with her legs propped against her chest, she pulled her nightgown down from her knees to cover her bare feet. To save money, during the night Lilly kept our thermostat on low.

  “Because I’m tired,” Lilly said, irritated. “Isn’t that allowed? I’m going upstairs to lie down. I’m not feeling well.”

  Lilly hiked her knit dress to her hips, cradled her head against her shoulder, and shuffled up the stairs to her bedroom. “Don’t get into trouble,” she called behind her.

  I sat on the couch and looked out the window again into the glacier sky. My eyes moved to the grass on the front lawn. It was covered, like a truth you knew was there, but didn’t want to see, with icy dew. I wanted to believe this was just a temporary thing, an accident. That Lilly would get up in a few hours and return to us as our mother, not the mysterious woman who went out at night as if she were expecting to bring back heaven. But I was wrong. That mother we had known seemed so far from us.

  In the afternoon, when our mother woke up, I caught a glimpse of the old Lilly, the one who sat in our house and sighed or daydreamed by the window most of the day, and that gave me hope. After lunch we went out to the yard to play. Lilly was studying her crossword puzzles or staring out the window, watching. When she caught our eyes, she tapped her nails against the glass and gave a wave. Then we showed off for her: Louise was good at handstands, and Ruthie could turn three cartwheels in a row. Lilly liked to watch our gymnastics on the soft lawn.

  It was quiet in the yard, and time went on and on. The day nearly lasted forever. When the sky darkened and Lilly changed into her yellow robe, she opened the screen door and whistled for us to come in. Upstairs, Ruthie supervised while Louise and I washed our hair in the sink and scrubbed our ears, followed by the usual fight over who got to wear the prettiest nightgown. Lilly came upstairs with the bedtime snack, and we were quiet and good for her. We crawled into our cool beds and said our prayers. Lilly sat on the rocker and sang her tired song in the twilight.

  But as Lilly continued going out, nearly every night of the week, the times we had our mother with us grew fewer and far between. The men that came and went swarmed together like bees, turning our house into a hive of seduction and betrayal. Lilly rarely treated them any differently from each other. I began to hate the way she primped and groomed for them; how much attention she paid to herself, as if she were a work of art.

  Not only was she out most nights, but she slept in most of the morning, sometimes the entire afternoon, until around four-thirty, when we’d hear our mother’s bedroom door creak open. I dropped whatever I was doing and ran up the stairs, Louise at my heels.

  “Hello, angels,” Lilly said, unaware that we were still in our nightgowns; that the entire Saturday had passed. “Should I make cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, or grilled cheese?” she asked, as if this was all perfectly natural.

  Not only did our mother forget about making our dinner or making sure we were up in time for school, she seemed to turn her back on God. My mother had neglected all the Jewish holidays once our father died. I remembered our Friday-night dinners at Aunt Rose’s before the Sabbath. The smell of the doughy challah fresh from the oven, the lighting of the candles, the prayers all had disappeared. Lilly no longer went to synagogue, not even for the High Holy Days. On Saturday mornings she dropped us off in front of the synagogue, and picked us up after services in the parking lot, sometimes an hour late. I surmised she was angry with God because he had taken her husband away. But, unlike my mother, I sought comfort in the rabbi’s sermons. I let the deep and guttural sound of his voice, which echoed in the hollow synagogue, float over me. The Bible stories of Abraham, and Moses, and the ancient Jews from a lost land having to endure droughts, famines, and plagues meant that we were put on earth for a higher purpose. What the Jews had suffered made what my family had lost seem less important. I thought that maybe if my mother came to synagogue she could learn how to banish her black moods with faith. But my mother was firm on the subject. She said whenever she entered a synagogue she began to cry.

  I wish my mother could have found sustenance, if not in religion, then somewhere inside herself. The only place she found it, briefly, was with men. I noticed how her cheeks looked sunken, her complexion waxy in the morning, and then rosy and full as soon as the sun went down. My friends’ mothers spent the day shopping for groceries, cleaning, preparing long suppers. But in my mother’s spare time, when she wasn’t on a date, she daydreamed, tended to her bath, or slept. I wished for the normalcy of a freshly plowed driveway, the busy sounds of cake mixers, eggshells grinding in the disposal. The hum of a healthy life.

  Sometimes I stared at the gazebo and convinced myself that if I willed it, I could conjure my father there in the icy circle the sun made through the rafters. I imagined us all sitting on the floor, my father with his arm draped around my mother’s shoulder, my mother holding Louise in her arms, all of us dressed in our winter coats. If I closed my eyes and concentrated hard, I could still hear it, my father’s voice, telling us about happiness. About how the trees, and the grass, and the flowers he would plant once the frost had lifted were all blessings, and about how fortunate he was, to be with the woman he loved most in the world, my mother, and these fine daughters. I could hear the words, these fine daughters, and told myself it was enough.

  I was distr
acted by a small tap on the screen of our living room window. At night, in the late spring, the hot air was like a layer separating you from the rest of the world. Nearly an hour, maybe more, since I got home from Austin’s party, I was still downstairs, lying on our couch, doing a play-by-play of the night. I sensed that Austin would come back for me. Even then, before we’d ever made love, it was the way we communicated, in silence, by touch and scent.

  I sprang up and peered outside. My mouth felt dry from the aftertaste of diluted beer. Austin was crouched in the bed of rhododendrons, staring back at me with lustful eyes; I felt a pinch in my chest. I quietly opened the front door, let in a swallow of air.

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “Around two o’clock.”

  “Shhhhh,” I said, when he practically tripped on a bucket of Lilly’s paint, motioning with my eyes upstairs. I didn’t want him to wake my mother.

  I stood with my back to him. He lifted the hair up from my shoulders. I was still mad about Rita. I remembered watching the way Steve Kennedy looked at my mother with that same hangdog look, and then how quickly he vanished. “What are you doing?” I quipped. “Why do people think they can just touch you?”

  “I shouldn’t have come, is that what you’re saying?” Austin turned me around and searched my face.

  I wasn’t an extraordinarily pretty girl, but I knew I would do. There was vulnerability in my eyes and shyness in my walk, but I wasn’t timid enough not to invite a boy’s attention. I had brown eyes and long, wavy hair a boy could twist through his fingers. My signature pair of silver hoop earrings dangled from my earlobes. I thought I wore my desperation on my face where everyone could see it.

  As Austin looked into my eyes, then reached for my hand, I felt the hollow place I imagined his mother left in his heart like an opening in a tree, the kind a scared animal wanted to burrow inside for the long, bleak winter.

  Outside, a late-night storm pressed against the sky. Wind whipped up the hot, muggy air and cut through it like a knife. It sent a chilling, owl-like sound through the house. The sound of rain against glass.

  “No, I wanted you to come,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here.” I moved back to the living room, toward the couch, and closed my eyes for a moment. In his presence I felt the world stop.

  “Sit down,” I said forcefully. Now I would tell him what to do. What I wanted.

  “Anna?” Austin moved closer. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “I just don’t understand why you’re here.” I arrogantly ran my fingers through my hair. Of course I knew. “How was the party?” It came out harshly.

  “It’s still going on,” he whispered. “It’s just that once you left, I didn’t want to be there anymore.” He moved to the couch next to me. His blue jeans were faded, and worn at the knees. “How come you wanted to leave?”

  I was speechless. How could I confess that it was because I felt irrelevant and blank without the thumbprint of his attention?

  “Okay, so now comes the part where I have to pry everything out of you? You know what your problem is? You walk around thinking you’re better than everyone. You could have at least tried to have a good time.”

  It wasn’t that I thought I was better than anyone. He had read me all wrong.

  “How would you know about it?”

  “About what?”

  “About me.”

  “I know everything about you. I got the goods.”

  His shirt hung out from his jeans, and was open at the neck. His chest was the color of porcelain and sweaty, same as his face. And after he’d made that comment about me, his eyes registered an emotion I hadn’t interpreted before: I saw how vulnerable he was.

  “I said something wrong,” I said. I touched his face. “I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re here.”

  He shrugged in that offhand way that boys do. He didn’t hold anything against a person for long. Or at least I thought so. “So do you forgive me?” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For ignoring you at my party.”

  I pushed away the image of him and Rita together, at least for the duration of the night. Instead, I felt the dark heat of him, of the wild and partly drunk boy beside me on the couch.

  Austin propped his head against the sofa’s arm; he slouched so he was half lying down, his legs hanging over the cushion. He reached for me. I folded myself into his arms, felt the baby fluffs of hair at the back of his neck.

  “I saw you talking to Brian Horrigan,” Austin said. “He’s got the hots for you.”

  “Does that surprise you?” I tasted the salt of sweat on his skin.

  “Fuck, no,” Austin said. “But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  I fit myself against him like the last piece to a puzzle, forgetting Lilly was upstairs. He was warm and damp. He opened my arms, and unbuttoned my blouse. I traced the blue vein up to the inside of his elbow with my finger and back down again; pressed my finger against his pulse. Again, the spatter of rain against the window. The caw of birds just before dawn.

  “I know you. I know what I love about you,” he said. He rolled me off the couch with him, onto the carpeted floor. “Isn’t this enough?” Austin said, kissing me again. “Let’s not ever fight. Can’t we be happy?”

  Happiness was a word that had no meaning, I had decided, years before, without ever knowing it. I had watched, and felt, even when I wasn’t watching, how my mother’s dates fed her with scotch and sweet talk, and saw how the force of their presence for that short time made the rest of the world disappear. Happiness was not the issue. I simply wanted to vanish into the other misty and distant world, never wanting to be pulled back.

  “I’ll make you feel better,” Austin said, as if he were comforting a child who had awakened in the middle of the night from a nightmare. “Close your eyes.” He gently moved his fingers over my face, closing my lids as if they were a doll’s. Like a kind of sly sorcerer, with his soft breath, he had the power to make me disappear into his earth-cool dark room; possessing my body, the way men do.

  I knew when something out of the ordinary was about to happen, just like Aunt Rose used to tell us she could sense a storm coming because her arthritis began to act up; I felt it hovering like a heat cloud. The sun seared bright with possibility, but inside our house my mother was cooped up, obsessing about the color of paint she wanted for each room.

  In the days after Austin’s party, I played the night over in my head like a scene in a movie: the minute I heard his knock on the window of my house, the sandpapery feel of his lips against mine. It was as if a door had creaked open, just slightly, exposing the white crest of his soul. When the phone rang I practically leaped out of my skin.

  One morning I awoke early and found blood splattered against the window. A bird had flown into the pane, broken its neck, and fallen onto the windowsill. It was a bad sign, I thought. I was like that then. If it was raining the day I was supposed to take a history test, I was sure that meant I would fail. I read my horoscope every morning and analyzed its meaning as if I were deconstructing the allusions in a Shakespeare play. I opened my underwear drawer and took out the robin’s egg wrapped in tissue that Austin and I had found one day when we were getting high in the woods behind his house, rubbed it as if it had powers, and prayed.

  Austin cleaned the stalls at the harness track a few days after school and on weekends. I knew when he’d been in the stables; the stench of the manure in his clothes and in his hair was a dead giveaway. But it was something besides his love of horses. The track life was different from the upper-class world he had grown up in. Most of the guys I knew were into sports and partying. Austin’s passion for horses made him different.

  “When you first start training a horse, you can’t control her,” Austin said the first time he took me to the track and showed me the horses he cared for. “It’s like developing a relationship. She has to learn to trust you. Once you develop the trust, she’ll do anything you ask. It’s that strength and po
wer in a horse’s body that gets to me,” he continued, as he reached out his hand and let one of the horses eat a handful of oats from his palm. “When a horse is in her rhythm, she’s on fire.”

  He was employed by a man named Howard White, who owned a slew of racehorses. Once school ended Austin worked in the barns full-time. When he wasn’t at the track, he sometimes rode his own horse, which he boarded at a stable off County Line Road in Chagrin Falls. Austin rode with Jane Smart, one of the girl grooms who worked in the barns. Jane had dirty blond hair, greasy near the part, and a face cut like a diamond. Sexuality seeped from her pores.

  One Saturday Austin was working at the track. Even though I had no interest in hanging out with Skippy Larsen and his entourage that night, I told Maria I’d go with her to Skippy’s party. Maria and I had the reputation at school as being joined at the hip. For my tenth birthday she had given me a friendship necklace, with one of those hearts perfectly split in two. We each wore one half, tucked into our blouses, close to our skin. But since I’d begun seeing Austin, he became my heart’s cool and silent keeper.

  Shortly after we arrived, the party spun out of control. Maria and I made our way to the keg, passing a joint back and forth between us. A neighbor called the police; the party broke up for a while, then resumed, full force, once the cops had left.

  I went outside on the patio to smoke a cigarette. The night was mute, no hint of birds in the backyard, not a sound from a cricket; just the bare world at night gazing down on me like a loving father. My arms and legs had that pins-and-needles feeling, that numbness I got when I was buzzed.

  Most of the evening Maria was perched on the top of the kitchen counter sucking up to Billy Fitzpatrick, who was one of six brothers. Three of the Fitzpatrick brothers played on our high school hockey team. Maria had lusted after Billy for as long as I could remember, but Billy was hanging out with Lucy Brownwein, who had thick red hair and perfectly sculpted breasts. Early that year we had learned that Billy’s brother Josh was diagnosed with leukemia and would not make it to Christmas. How could Josh, with his soft, curly brown hair and dark eyes, who at sixteen was already an amazing artist—his self-portraits bedecked our art room walls—wake up one morning and learn that he had months to live? While the rest of my friends seemed content to flirt and gossip, I stared at Billy wondering what it was like to know your brother was going to die.