House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  After nearly an hour Lilly began to get hysterical. “Didn’t she say where she was going? How could you two let her leave? Do you think I’m having fun when I go out? Girls, do you? It’s hard work,” she said, perhaps remembering all those nights we had pleaded with her to stay home with us. Tears came to her eyes. “Ruthie, Ruthie,” she called out the window as if she were beckoning a poor, pathetic lost dog.

  “I just don’t understand that girl,” my mother said.

  When Lilly pulled back up the driveway to call the police, Ruthie was sitting on the front step of the house in her jean jacket and blue jeans, smoking a cigarette. Her long, unwashed hair fell over her face.

  “Get in the house right this instant, young lady,” Lilly ordered. “And take that filthy thing out of your mouth.”

  From the driveway my eye fixed on the roof of the gazebo, where the wooden rafters came together. The gazebo lights were all lit, like they always were when my father was still alive. Overhead a cloud passed over the moon, and it went dark, racking the sky with hunger.

  Once Ruthie was back in the house, Lilly settled down. She came upstairs with three mugs of hot chocolate on a tray. “Girls, I have a surprise for you,” she said. “I’ve met someone special.” A smile spread across her face. “His name is Max McCarthy,” she said. “Doesn’t he sound presidential?”

  For three years Lilly had pinned her hopes on each man that had walked into our house. By this time we no longer believed her.

  I found a job waitressing at a diner called Dink’s once school let out that summer, and when I wasn’t at work I was usually with Austin. What do we know of ourselves and the world when we are sixteen? The suburban walls of our community shielded us from the Vietnam War, hid the fact that our grandparents and great-grandparents had suffered world wars and concentration camps. Even the racial tension, violence, and poverty in downtown Cleveland seemed, from Chagrin Falls, as if they were happening worlds away. That summer the universe I inhabited narrowed down to my mother, my sisters, and Austin. I rarely ventured any farther than my house, the diner where I worked, or the racetrack. I suppose that was the purpose of the postwar suburbs: to separate and protect us from all that had been lost and return us to the private lives within our families, which once had been ripped apart.

  After Ruthie left, I knew that I also had to figure out what I would do with my life. My friends were taking the SATs to prepare for college. Some of their parents were accompanying them to tour schools. Lilly never mentioned our futures. Perhaps because she could never invent a future of her own, she just imagined we were going to stay home pasted into the house like wallpaper, like she did.

  Instead of focusing on a plan for after graduation, I distracted myself with Austin. I imagined I could simply slip into his life and everything else would vanish.

  It was mid-June. Austin and I had been going out seriously for nearly a month. While Mr. Cooper was out of town on business, Austin took me to his house, and I cooked him practically the only dinner I knew how to make: spaghetti, a tossed salad, and garlic bread.

  “I’m going to show you something,” Austin said. “I’ve never showed anyone, not any girl, this.” He took me down the basement. There, in a separate space off the laundry room where a young boy would play, was a magnificent city made out of blocks, and Popsicle-stick houses, train tracks, cardboard boxes, intricate pipe-cleaner trees and bushes, and cutout shoebox dioramas. Surrounded by papier-mache mountains and towering buildings shaped from modeling clay was a huge lake made from tinfoil.

  “I built this when I was a kid,” Austin said. “It’s a city made out of nowhere. Nothing bad happens here. Children don’t get hurt, mothers and fathers stay together. No one dies. This is practically the only thing from my childhood I brought with me when we moved.”

  I imagined Austin as a small boy, with his jar of paste, crayons, and paints spread out on the floor of his basement working steadily, single-mindedly, so he wouldn’t have to think about his mother and his father not talking to each other.

  “Austin, this is magnificent.” I was completely smitten.

  “This is where you and I can live,” Austin said. “No one can touch us here. No one can harm us.” I knew exactly what Austin meant. He didn’t have to explain any further.

  The City of Nowhere was our own kind of heaven. It was outside the world of our families; it existed beyond Chagrin Falls, beyond Cleveland, beyond Ohio. It was the world I was ready to venture into, that Austin made plausible. I wanted more from my life than the domesticated world I witnessed as I walked past the houses in our neighborhood, and I imagined that if I followed the tracks Austin had built, and went under the golden gate leading to the city he had fabricated from glitter, paper, and wire, I would find it.

  The city we inhabited existed wherever we went. It didn’t matter if we were scarfing down a pizza at the mall, or making out in an over-air-conditioned movie in the afternoon to escape the heat, or were cruising around in his car getting high. We were willing to venture anywhere just as long as a new history was being set down in the tracks we made.

  That summer there were few places for a pair of teenagers to be alone. At Austin’s house Mr. Cooper was almost always home in the evenings reading the paper or watching TV. After his wife had left him, he’d fallen into the routine of working to fill the emptiness of the day. It was unusual for a woman to leave her husband and kids, and Austin constantly tried to make it up to his father by spending time with him. We felt strange leaving Mr. Cooper alone downstairs while we retreated upstairs to Austin’s room in the attic, but eventually, after we sat on the couch with Mr. Cooper and depleted all the small talk we could muster, Austin gave me the eye and I would follow as he made his way up the staircase.

  “I always gave my mother a hard time,” Austin told me in one of the rare moments when he opened up about his past. “She said I took my father’s side. It’s because I felt so fucking sorry for him. My mother cringed when he tried to touch her. Maybe if I was more sympathetic, she would have stayed.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “It had nothing to do with you.” But I knew his mother’s walking out had made it difficult for Austin to trust anyone. Once he felt a person had betrayed him, no matter what you said, his mind was made up. It was the end. This had happened with Peter Markson, his best friend. He’d started hanging out with Peter almost the day he moved to our town. They were inseparable. Then one day Peter didn’t show up when he was supposed to. Austin and I ran into him later that night with Betsy McCracken draped underneath his arm and Austin cut him, just like that. When I tried to ask Austin what had happened to Peter, he said he didn’t know a Peter. Never had. End of story.

  Once, when we had returned to Austin’s house after seeing a movie, we found Mr. Cooper in the dining room pumping furiously on an exercise bike, the sweat practically jumping off of him.

  “Are you okay, Dad?” Austin said.

  “Your mother called.”

  Austin turned pale.

  “She wanted more money.”

  Mr. Cooper pedaled so fast you could feel the quick wisps of air circulating around the wheels of the exercise bike. Under his breath he muttered, “Fucking whore.”

  “Did she ask about me?”

  Mr. Cooper stopped the bike. He paused. His voice softened. “Not a goddamn word. I’m sorry, son.”

  I followed Austin upstairs. He drifted into silence. I hadn’t considered often enough the repercussions of Austin’s mother’s leaving.

  “Do you want to talk about your mother?” I wanted to say something once we were in the shelter of the cheap-wood—paneled attic room, the architecture of his body solid and sturdy next to mine.

  “I don’t have a mother,” he answered.

  Usually, by the time we made it upstairs, there was still time left over in the evening to lie on Austin’s lumpy bed and make out so long my lips were bruised, my hair matted, my cheeks on fire. I usually let Austin show me a few of his card tricks,
and then guided his hand under my shirt, let him unhook my bra strap. I liked to get him all worked up before it was time for him to drive me home. But that night Austin wasn’t in the mood. The evening was haunted by the ghost of Austin’s mother. We lay on top of his Santa Fe-style Indian blanket and stared at the slopes in the ceiling, listened to the sounds of a swarm of bees who had orchestrated an intricate hive in the crevice outside his attic window, until it was time for him to take me home.

  When we pulled into my driveway, I quickly got out and said good-bye. I made sure there was no way he would be tempted to come inside. I had to have something that was all my own, that my mother couldn’t taint or tamper with.

  When I was sick with pneumonia one winter, when I was ten, Lilly took me out to the gazebo and wrapped me up in blankets. “Fresh air is nature’s cure,” she said. Together we sat under the low, silvery boughs.

  “A tree is protected by its bark, and you, my sweet, are armed with my everlasting love.” I was attached to the depth of beauty her eye saw in the winter trees, frozen grass, the bleak, infectious world.

  “My mother used to dress me up in fancy dresses and tell me how beautiful I looked,” Lilly told me.

  I looked down at my chewed fingernails.

  “When my mother was a few years older than you are, she hid from the Nazis in a priest’s cellar,” Lilly continued. “The priest told my mother’s parents that he only had room for one of their two daughters. My mother was chosen because she was more beautiful. She later found out that her sister Edith was killed by the Nazis the next day. My mother used to whisper that story in my ear at night before I went to bed. So that I would never forget that I had been blessed. She made me believe I would never need anything more than to be beautiful.”

  I didn’t say anything. When my mother talked this way, there was nothing to say. I remembered the story Aunt Rose had told Lilly, that Lilly’s mother died because of the suffering she had endured in the war. If suffering had killed my grandmother, what would happen to my mother?

  “Aunt Rose told me that when I was a little girl she used to come to our house and find my mother in tears. She never got over the death of her sister.”

  “What happened to your mother’s parents?” I asked.

  “When she made it to Switzerland, she discovered that they’d been taken to the camps. My mother was the only survivor. I know what loss is,” Lilly said hoarsely. “All I’ve known is how to love the dead.”

  “Don’t you love any of those men you go out with?”

  “I wish I did,” my mother said wearily.

  “What about us?”

  “Of course I love you,” Lilly said. “You’re my children.”

  Lilly stepped out of the gazebo. She reached above her and broke a small branch from the tree there. “I’ve been in mourning all my life.” Her face looked toward the thick pleats of the afternoon sky. “That’s where my heart is,” Lilly said. “Look here, Anna.” She came back inside the gazebo and sat beside me on the bench. She peeled the black bark off the branch with her fingernails. There lay the white wood, revealed, shiny and damp beneath. “Love can do this to your heart,” she said softly. “It can be like a blade whittling your heart clean for you until there isn’t anything left.

  “Don’t tell anyone our secrets,” she added. “Cross your heart. People won’t like us if they know we’ve suffered. They’d only pity us. Look at the weeping willow, Anna,” she said. “When I’m missing your father, I think about those long arms weighed down by so many leaves. I think about abundance. How long it lasts, even when you can no longer see or feel it.” She held out her arms as if she were embracing the air. “Sometimes all I need is to be outside, with my lovely daughter, underneath the trees. It’s the rest of the world that takes the life out of me.”

  Like my mother I found comfort in a certain kind of feeling that would overcome me when I looked at a cornflower blue sky, or a simple wildflower, or a complicated tree. But the feeling wouldn’t last long before I’d be flooded with anxiety. I knew at an early age that you couldn’t live peacefully in isolation. There would always be a window to hold your nose against and wish that what was behind it was your own.

  Austin never came right out and asked me to be his girlfriend. It was just understood after the night of his party that we were together. Austin and I worked out a scheme when we wanted to spend the night together. I told my mother I was sleeping at Maria’s house, though by then Maria and I weren’t even talking.

  Austin picked me up and we drove out to the track. He had befriended one of the trainers, a guy in his thirties named Beep, who always wore the same plaid work shirt and cowboy boots no matter how hot out it was. His front teeth were stained with nicotine. He let Austin use his windowless cement tack room off the stables, and it was there that I let him inside me, amid the sounds of horses snorting and people walking back and forth from the paddocks to the barn, in the dirt and dust and hay.

  It’s funny how we enter people’s lives and then realize we’ve walked into a deep and long history that shapes and gives form to our every moment. Once Austin graduated and began spending most of his time at the track, he began to change. After my shift at the diner, he picked me up in his noisy Mustang and popped open a beer from a six-pack he kept under the seat, and we’d drive out to the track. He began hanging out with Beep in his free time and placing bets on the races. We’d get there almost every night toward the end of June for the last few races. If Austin was winning he was high with adrenaline, but if the horses didn’t perform to his expectations, he chewed the inside of his cheek and kicked the fence circling the track. Even if Austin wasn’t betting, he always had a horse picked out, and if the horse didn’t do well he took it personally, like he had made a bad decision. He seemed to put his whole life into it. I was jealous of it, Austin’s commitment to anything beyond me.

  In late June, on a Friday night, Austin put a thousand dollars on the last race. I had no idea where he got the money, and I didn’t think it was my business to ask. Maybe I was afraid to. You could only go a certain distance with Austin before he’d go silent and cold, and tighten up like an expressionless statue.

  There was a feeling of desperation in the air; the crowds fired up, bystanders at the edges of their seats or pacing the platform near the fence.

  The music between the races blared over the loudspeakers, and the dusty ground trembled underneath us. I watched the horses circle the track warming up for the next race while Austin studied the program.

  As the horses got out of the gate, Austin was pumped. I watched him pressed up against the metal fence. I stood back, the ground littered with tickets, lit a Marlboro, and prayed for a winner. I knew that if he won he’d sweep me in his arms and tell me I was his good-luck charm. He’d take my hand and squeeze it. We might go to dinner. I was so tense my hand absently crushed the plastic cup of warm, flat Coke I’d been sipping. As the sky traveled from gray to lavender to black, I felt as if I was its sole witness.

  I can picture Austin now, so vividly, and yet it’s been years since I’ve seen him. He’s still in my dreams, the recurring one where I’m trying to hold him in my gaze—I believed I could heal him—and his eyes are burning into me. His sculpted face is browned by the sun, aged not one bit, and I can see those hands, chapped and dry, with thick, hard nails. In the dream Austin and I are together, even though I’m involved with the man I’m going to marry. I’m willing to risk that all—and then Austin humiliates me. There are so many versions, but each one ends the same. Even now, no matter how I have tried to keep him out, Austin is still a ghostlike presence in my mind.

  That Friday night, after the horses had made the second turn, Austin’s horse—Perfection or Electric or Wild Turkey, I don’t remember, though then I said the horse’s name over and over like a mantra—came up neck and neck with the horse in the lead. Austin ran up to the fence, nearly climbed it to see how his horse held back, and then he broke away. He tore up the ticket, and stomped of
f, not once looking behind for me. He knew I would follow. Under his breath I heard him say, “I’ll kill him, the motherfucker,” talking about Beep, because Beep had given him the tip.

  In the dark night, in the airless tack room, I tried to console him with my body. He became calmer then. He lit a joint and got stoned. I saw what the touch of a hand on a boy’s neck or along his chest could do.

  The next night he convinced me to try and sneak into the Skylight Motel outside of town. I stayed in the Mustang while he went in and got the room. I’m not sure why my mother didn’t try to keep me at home at night. Maybe she thought if she were me, young and in love, she’d want to stay out all night, too. It was just something we never talked about. After that first night at the hotel it became a habit. If he won big we’d go to the Skylight. We’d go first to the Brown Derby for steaks, and then back to a room that had a big, clean bed and good television and smelled of lemon-scented disinfectant and stale cigarettes. To me the dumpy motel room was no less luxurious than a room in a faraway, gilded mansion.

  The first night at the motel, I lay awake all night, figuring I’d know when Austin had become real for me because then I’d be able to at least close my eyes. I hated to fall asleep and be away from him. I watched the fluorescent hands on the bedside clock. In their light I stared at his arms for hours and watched the blue veins pop out. I was glad that his chest was practically bare of chest hair—because that was the kind of boy I desired. The kind that looked boyish, not jaded and slick like Lilly’s men. All night I was dying to wake him and with my hands, lure him back inside me. I liked having sex—but it was the closeness, the fierce force of it, that I craved. Sometimes, when I couldn’t lose myself, I detached from my body and was like a third person in the room watching our awkward attempts to satisfy each other. But I didn’t mind.