House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  “Because I’m your mother,” Lilly said. She paused. “Do you think I would have had children, if it wasn’t for your father?”

  The car went silent.

  Lilly backpedaled. “That didn’t come out right. I meant, if I knew I was going to end up a single mother. See what I mean? With all that noise, I can’t even think straight.”

  The rest of the day we were on good behavior. We tried to pick up the clothes scattered all over our rooms, and take our dirty dishes to the sink. As our mother began to droop like a neglected flower if she spent too much time at home, we felt as if we were responsible.

  The lessons continued, and after we had mastered how to float and tread water, Brucie taught us the crawl. One day, when he was correcting a flutter kick, I caught his eyes wandering from my sisters to rest upon my mother’s bare stomach and full bosom, well displayed in her fashionable two-piece. By some sort of telepathy, Lilly’s head tilted to the side and caught Brucie’s eyes, and she waved back at him, her smile still unchanging. My mother was perfectly aware of the spell she had over men, and had perfected a certain look, as if she were sometimes apologizing for it, peering down and then shyly raising her eyes. But in an instant, realizing that she couldn’t possibly play down her effect, she smiled with a grand, open smile. Brucie sized her up the way I noticed some teenage boys looked at older women, testing their sexual power.

  From time to time I ran into Brucie around the neighborhood, but I was embarrassed, quickly said hi, and walked ahead. At night, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, thoughts of Brucie rose to the surface from the underbrush of my mind.

  Toward the end of August, Brucie sometimes stretched out on a towel next to my mother while we continued to play in the water. He was the most beautiful boy I had ever met.

  “Girls,” Lilly called from the water one day. “Make sure you take a rest. I don’t want you getting a cramp.”

  I resented when Lilly tried to treat us like children, and play the concerned mother, when at home she expected the reverse: We were supposed to take care of her I knew what was going on. Brucie was hot for my mother, and she was milking it for all it was worth.

  “Mrs. Crane, I’ve been thinking. I know you’re alone, and, if you ever need anything, let me know. I’m just down the street. I can be over in a jiffy.” By then I noticed that men offered favors to my mother that I suspected married women would have refused.

  “What a dear,” Lilly said. She sucked in her stomach when she saw Brucie admiring her figure. Lilly had an uncanny way of making a man divine her thoughts simply by the way she smiled. When a man, even a boy, gave Lilly some attention, she became transformed from the sunken, withdrawn self I saw when she did her crossword puzzles in front of the TV.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t think of bothering you. I’m sure a boy your age has plenty to keep him occupied.”

  When I got out of the water, Brucie patted me on the head. “You did good today, Anna Banana,” Brucie said. Sitting on the blanket surrounded by rocks and cliffs, I hoped that in a few years he would flirt with me.

  The next week, after swimming lessons, I went to Maria’s house for lunch, but she had come down with a fever and her mother, who spent all afternoon chain-smoking Virginia Slims in the family room, her brain fried from so many rounds of shock treatments that her hands shook, sent me home.

  I walked home counting the slate squares on the sidewalk. A jet flew overhead, leaving a white slash across the heavens. Goose bumps covered my arms. My eyes filled with tears, and a peculiar feeling came over me, like the time I had stared at the back of David Oppenheimer’s head in school, willing him to turn around, and he did, asking if he could borrow a piece of notebook paper. But this time I didn’t know what it was telling me. I climbed the front stoop of our house, opened the door, and walked in.

  I picked up the newspapers and magazines strewn all over the floor and put them away. I smoothed out the sunken cushions on the couch and removed the empty glasses and breakfast bowls from the coffee table and placed them in the sink. I opened the refrigerator, took out the jars of peanut butter and jelly, and clanked them on the counter.

  From upstairs, I heard my mother’s bed creaking. I walked up the stairs to tell her I was home, but loud breathing and laughter coming from her room stopped me on the landing. I sat at the top of the stairs and listened to my mother’s high, silly laugh and then long, deep moans. I stared at the white walls around me, smudged with fingerprints. The bedsprings creaked and rocked. My heart went crazy. I had to take long breaths to calm myself, and to block the sounds from behind my mother’s door. I focused on the white walls until finally I lifted my mind from the throbbing that seemed to have penetrated to the floors of the house and was vibrating inside me.

  I ran down the stairs and slammed the front door behind me.

  I collapsed on the front stoop. A cool late August wind seeped underneath my shirt, sending a shiver through my body.

  Once, my mother had taken us downtown to the tenth floor of a department store in the Terminal Tower to see Mr. Jingaling and his Magic Keys during Christmas vacation. We had ridden past the dilapidated parts of Cleveland, beyond houses without plates in the windows, where paint peeled off completely, leaving only the faint remains of its pink or green color, past the Show Palace Theater, XXXstasy, Cameo, Capri. The billboards plastered over boarded windows were of naked women dancing. One marquee read BIGGEST ADULT SHOW IN CLEVELAND, and showed dancing girls in black and red bikinis with pompoms over their nipples. I studied the curves on the women’s bodies as Lilly concentrated on the road. What did men like so much about the naked bodies of strange women? I had the urge to dress my mother up in baggy clothes. It frightened me, this fascination men had with stripping a woman bare.

  When I was older, I realized I had rarely been exposed to the way a man might care for a woman in a daily, average way. How he might kiss the back of her neck while she dried the dishes; or tug at the sleeve of her jacket if she stepped off the curb without seeing a car whiz by. The only kind of men I saw growing up were the ones who looked at my mother’s legs too long, or kissed her till she was dizzy.

  I heard the front door open. It was too late to run away. I was rooted to our house like one of the overgrown shrubs neglected in the front yard.

  “Why if it isn’t Anna Banana.” There was only one person who called me by that name. The hairs stood up on my arms. Somehow, if it were Kent Montgomery or Steve Kennedy, I could stand it, but it was Brucie Johnson, the boy who had come to possess my thoughts, who’d been locked upstairs with my mother. Years later we would learn he was killed in the Vietnam War, but what I remember about him is the look of pride on his boyish face when he came out of our house that late summer day.

  Lilly came down the stairs and followed Brucie out to the front step, where I sat. As my mother spoke, I clenched my fists so tight I nearly made myself bleed.

  “Anna, Brucie was helping me put in the storm windows in my room. Isn’t he a doll.” Lilly’s face was dreamy and flushed. But as she looked at me, I saw in her eyes that she knew I understood; and in those eyes I saw the turning away, the numbness.

  Later that day, as I popped a TV dinner in the oven, Lilly petted my shoulder. “What’s wrong, Anna?” she said. “It’s not like you to be so quiet.”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t even look at her.

  “Anna, your old mom gets lonely in this house all day. Is that such a crime? Honey, you understand, don’t you?”

  After I said good-bye to Austin the Fourth of July night, I found my mother downstairs in the living room. She was staring at her own reflection in the picture window, her body moving back and forth to the sound of the radio and wearing my new black dress.

  “Mom, what’s going on here?” I said.

  “I didn’t expect you home so soon, Anna.” Lilly was completely out of it. Her movements were slow and clumsy. She glanced down at herself. “I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to see if it would fit, darling, that’s all
.”

  The dress was something I’d saved for and bought on a layaway plan.

  I went into the kitchen. I suddenly felt ravenously hungry. But after I opened the refrigerator, I noticed a bottle of pills my mother had left on the kitchen counter and next to it an opened, half-empty bottle of wine. My mother was high as a kite.

  After I heard my mother go up to bed, I took the bottle of pills upstairs to show to Louise, but she looked so tired I decided not to worry her. I didn’t want to think anymore about it. Before I got into bed, I noticed that Lilly had draped my new dress over the chair in my room. It reeked of her musk perfume. I threw the dress on the floor and climbed onto my bed and peered out at the dark branches outside my window. I followed the back-and-forth arc of the sprinkler, still watering the backyard in the moonlight, and allowed myself to be hypnotized by the motion. I tried to remember my father.

  I longed to know the simple things about him: his favorite food, what made him laugh, the kind of clothes he liked. My mother didn’t believe in cemeteries or graveyards, or places to honor the dead. After the unveiling, she never returned to my father’s grave. Instead she made a mausoleum for him in our house. I was too agitated to sleep. I got up to go out.

  “Where are you going, Anna?” my mother called after me.

  “Just out.” I closed the door behind me. I had no idea.

  I rode my bike around the brick streets of Chagrin Falls. Without realizing where I was going, I found myself in front of the gates to the Chagrin Falls Cemetery, where my father was buried. I thought about the dead bodies buried in those graves, and the souls that must be moving in the air around me. In the trees I thought I heard the sound of an owl. A feeling of long nostalgia folded into the metallic sky.

  There was one memory of my father I had carefully preserved. It was the day my grandfather, my mother’s father, had died. I remember how my father came into our rooms, took Louise in his arms, gathered Ruthie and me, and sat us on Lilly’s bed. I could hear my mother weeping, her chest heaving up and down.

  Lilly buried her face in her pillow. “Take them out of here!” she screamed when she felt the embrace of our presence around her. “I don’t want them to see me like this.”

  I remembered my father’s soothing voice.

  “This is your family, Lilly,” he said or at least, that’s what I imagined he might have said. He reached for Lilly’s hand and forced her to look at each one of us, as if, for a second, he believed she hadn’t loved us. “This is why you’ll wake up each morning, how you’ll endure,” he said. He turned Lilly’s face to his, and when she tried to turn away again toward her grief, he took her back and calmed her. Lilly fell into his arms.

  A year later, after my father had died, day after day I remembered that moment. Once it was his faint smile I held on to; another time his dark eyes; his wavy hair, the secure grip of his hand on my wrist. But that night, standing at the gates to the cemetery, I understood that all those nights I had talked to my father in my head, he hadn’t heard me. I knew there was no point attempting to locate my father’s grave. I finally put to bed a painful lie. Nobody was going to help us. I rode my bike back through Chagrin’s wilderness, and before heading back home, stopped at a pay phone by the drugstore near our corner and called Austin.

  We had worked out a code when we needed to speak to each other late at night when Austin was still living with his father. I’d ring once and then hang up, and call again, and Austin would answer on the first ring. I felt that anxious feeling in my body. That if I didn’t see Austin, I would die or go mad.

  The first time we went to Nonie and Papa’s house after my father died, I was five or six. During the first year, we never left our house except to go to school or to the store with our mother. Lilly was tired all the time and mostly, when she wasn’t looking after us, she needed to sleep. Lilly once complained that after the unveiling at my father’s gravesite, the visits from our relatives and friends grew fewer and far between.

  When we knocked at the door to our grandparents’ house, Nonie opened the door and demanded, in her garbled English, that we give her a hug.

  She and Papa had come over on the boat from Russia after the war. They had changed their name from Kranansky to Crane, afraid that a Jewish-sounding name would mark them. Nonie was short and round and wore her hair in tight curls around her head.

  “How could it have happened?” Nonie said. “These small children.” She burst into sobs.

  In our grandmother’s house we were quiet and withdrawn.

  My sisters and I gave one another a look. We soon got used to Nonie’s remarks. Every time we’d see her, even years after, it would be the same. You would have thought that my father had just died. We were always a reminder of what she had lost, and she couldn’t see us as individuals, couldn’t see beyond her missing son. But we couldn’t blame her.

  “Nonie, please,” Papa said.

  “Why did God choose to punish us? Haven’t we suffered enough?” Nonie exclaimed.

  In Nonie’s house, that first time without my father, I watched my mother slowly take off her coat. With her head raised, as though it took all of her strength to stay composed, she smoothed the wrinkles from the black skirt clinging to her small hips and entered the room. My father, who, I thought, must have once hooked his arm in hers to escort Lilly from room to room, was now a shadow next to her. Grief, I learned, was private, like a forbidden secret. And we girls were nothing but a reminder to my father’s family of the past, a nightmare they wanted to erase.

  After my father died my sisters and I had unconsciously slipped into the role of Lilly’s protector, asking our mother about her day when we came home from school, helping zip her into dresses, accompanying her to the market and the dry cleaners, kissing her before bed.

  In my grandparents’ house that day, I tried to stay close to my mother. I knew she felt uncomfortable. As my grandmother asked questions about how we were making out, I watched my mother’s eyes wander to the window.

  “You don’t look so good,” Nonie said. “Lilly, you look tired.”

  Lilly smiled. “I’m fine,” she said.

  Later, when I came out of the bathroom, I heard Nonie in the kitchen, where she had gone to get supper started. I heard her talking softly to my grandfather.

  “Lilly doesn’t look well,” she said. “Gladys Weisberg had a nervous breakdown after her husband died.”

  “She’s fine,” Papa said. “You worry too much.”

  I returned to the living room and looked at my mother. She was staring out the window.

  Outside, the first snowfall of the year had begun to whiten the landscape. I drew a picture in my mind of the house in Chagrin Falls when my father was still alive—the five of us netted and webbed inside the walls of our home. There was a perfect quiet. Nothing wavered or trembled or threatened to break loose. I imagined so hard, I could almost feel my father then, his warm touch.

  During one visit to my grandparents’ house when I was older, I made the connection for the first time that I was in the same house my father had grown up in. I walked into the guest room that had been his old room and saw his high school football trophies on the bookshelf. I wanted to be locked away forever in my grandmother’s house with her ancient shawls hanging on hooks in the foyer, her prayer books and menorahs from the old country lining her bookshelves. Then my father was the god I prayed to at night, the star I believed was shining over me. In my grandmother’s house, I felt the warm breath of my father fill the room.

  Before we left, that first night at my grandparents’ house after my father died, Nonie took me and my sisters aside and thrust a crisp twenty-dollar bill into our hands. She later gave us money every time we came to visit her. When we got home that day, Ruthie took her twenty-dollar bill and threw it into the toilet bowl.

  “What are you doing?” Louise said.

  “We don’t need them,” Ruthie said.

  And one by one we followed, and watched as the three bills ci
rcled the toilet bowl and disappeared.

  As I grew older I learned that my father’s family would always feel sorry for us. Not out of spite or lack of love, but purely because of the tragedy we were plunged into, and for the truth: If you look long and deep into my eyes and the eyes of my sisters you will notice something askew—floating lost and unattached.

  After I called Austin I rode back home from the cemetery. Austin picked me up in front of my house a half hour later. It was after midnight. Everything quiet except for the pestering summer flies banging and twisting against the screens. I climbed into Austin’s lap in the front seat of his car, and with my back pressed against the steering wheel, I held him. The important thing was that he was there when I called him. We watched the full moon emerge from underneath a cloud before we said good-bye.

  “Mom, what are those pills for?” I said to Lilly the next morning.

  “What pills?” Lilly said, playing dumb.

  “These,” I said. I held up the vial of Valium.

  “Anna, they quiet my nerves, darling. They help me sleep.”

  “You need to get out of this house,” I said. “Maybe that will help your nerves. Mom, don’t you want to go out again? To see people?” Why couldn’t she take a class, do volunteer work, take an interest in something outside of her own life? I didn’t know how to help my mother. I could barely get her to go to the grocery store, and yet I knew she needed help.

  “Nobody wants me anyway. Even if I did,” Lilly said, looking at her reflection in the glass. “That part of my life is over. You know I tried, Anna.”

  Did my mother really believe that she was no longer desired? She was only, the summer I turned sixteen, in her late thirties.

  Lilly sighed. “A woman like me is used goods,” she said. “Don’t worry, Anna. I don’t care anymore. Really I don’t.”

  But sometimes, when my mother didn’t know I was watching, I saw her in her room, holding up one of her sleek dresses to her body, regarding herself in the mirror with the look of a woman who knows she’s still desirable. And then another expression would flood her, the one she had on her face when she looked at a field of wildflowers, or our lawn covered with snow. Like my mother, I was dreamy and romantic. But unlike my mother, I feared my dreams and fantasies. I forced myself to be productive. I rearranged the clothes in my drawers. I lined up my books in alphabetical order in my bookshelf. I counted the tiles over and over in the bathroom until I was convinced I had gotten it right.