House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  After he told me about his plans to work at the track, his face relaxed. He started kissing me again. “Let’s go back to the car,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  In the next few days, when Austin told his father he wasn’t going to college, Mr. Cooper exploded and threw him out of the house. “‘You’re just like your mother,’” Austin mimicked his father when he reported the conversation. “‘The two of you have no scruples. No respect for anyone but your goddamn self.’”

  “I guess he’s just worried about you,” I said. It was night again and Austin had picked me up from work and was driving me home.

  “That’s one way to look at it. The truth is, he thinks I’m a loser.”

  Beep let Austin shack up in one of the larger tack rooms behind the stables. I was happy that Austin wasn’t leaving town. That meant I’d have him with me during my last year of high school. But I also knew that at the track Austin was too easily influenced by the lowlife there. Austin didn’t see the grooms and drivers, who, for the most part grew up in blue-collar families, as any different from himself. When he was with Beep, he began to talk like him, as if he’d never been educated. I didn’t consider then that Austin might be rejecting his father’s wishes out of some distorted sense of revenge.

  After Austin began living at the track that August, he regularly disappeared. Then, out of nowhere he’d show up, crazy to see me. He’d walk into the diner, plunk himself down at the counter, and stare at me while I finished my shift. I might not have heard from him in three days. He’d crumple up the white sleeves he tore off soda straws and leave them all over the counter. Once, he almost got me fired because he wouldn’t stop talking long enough for me to get the orders out of the window during the height of dinner hour.

  He forced me to do things I’d never dreamed I’d be capable of. Once we left a motel room in the early dawn without paying. We walked out of a restaurant with the check crumpled in my shoulder bag. He followed me into the ladies’ room in the back of a bar, locked the stall, and mauled me. At the movies he once figured out a way to get in without buying tickets. Once we made it to the dark seats of the theater, Austin put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed my knee. He liked the rush of it, the power he felt when he was breaking the rules.

  After the movies one night in late August, we went back to the tack room. We sat in the middle of the concrete floor. He lit a candle and opened a couple cans of warm beer he tore from a six-pack. From outside, we could hear the clip-clop of horses walking, the swish of a groom sweeping out the stables, a horse’s long, insistent whine. At the track the trainers walked the horses from the stables into the cleared, open fields where they worked them. You could hear their snorts and sneezes cutting into the thick night air. In my dreams later I could hear it, the sound of horse hooves on soft crumbling ground; then their wildness got under my skin, the dust in my hair and underneath my nails.

  “I want you to show me that you love me,” Austin said.

  “Why?” I said. “You don’t believe me?”

  “You need to show me,” Austin said. Since he’d been working full-time at the track, there was a layer of dirt on his skin and in his work shirts.

  “Strip poker.” He took out a deck of cards.

  I tried to go along with Austin’s mind-fucking games, because Austin seemed desperate that I prove myself to him. I told myself that I had it under control, that I didn’t need to call him on it. He acted like he was trying to pay someone back for an injustice committed against him. At home, when I wasn’t with him, I justified his behavior. I studied Wuthering Heights, the dog-eared pages smeared with Tab stains, trying to understand Austin’s character.

  “I know you’re going to leave me,” Austin said.

  Austin was afraid I was going to walk out on him. If you even mentioned Austin’s mother, his hands tightened into fists. The iridescent light in his gray eyes vanished. But I think it was more than his mother’s leaving that had destroyed him. It was that she did not even care enough to call or write.

  But I never considered that I might be the one to let go of Austin, though the way he’d been acting since he’d decided not to go to school—unreliable, irritable, dirty—had begun to turn me off.

  “Okay,” he said. He held out a fan of cards in front of me. “What do you have? Loser has to take something off.”

  I picked three cards and ended up with a pair of nines.

  “Full house,” he said, with one of his devious smiles.

  I started with my shorts. It was summer, and I didn’t have much on, only a cotton top, a pair of cutoffs, bikini panties, and undershirt. I didn’t wear a bra very often, nobody did, unless your breasts were so big you had to.

  “Three aces,” he said in the next hand.

  I had a pair of tens.

  I never paid much attention to Austin’s card games. They bored me, really. I wanted him to focus on the little mole on my neck or the ankle bracelet dangling against my heel. I tried to distract him by employing mental telepathy.

  He popped open another can of beer and threw the empty one in the pile in the corner with the other empty cans.

  I was in my panties, nothing else. He stopped dealing the cards, and just sat across from me staring at me weirdly. I reached for my tank top. Fear rushed through my body.

  Austin yanked it out of my hand. “Wait,” he said. “I want to just look at you.” I felt his eyes run along my body. And then he started to cry. I cradled his head like you would a small boy’s.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Austin lifted his head from my lap and pushed me away.

  “Who said you could move? Game’s not over.”

  “Austin, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t feel it yet.”

  “What?”

  “How you love me. What you’ll do for me.”

  His face was moist with sweat. He had drunk too much. I could hear it in his speech, the carelessness.

  “Take me home,” I said, and reached for my tank top again. He grabbed it away from me.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I tried to grab the shirt back, but he pushed me down. I fell back on the cement floor.

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “That hurt. You’re hurting me.” He had his hands around my wrists. He lowered himself on top of me. I could barely breathe. Then he stopped.

  “I’m sorry, Anna,” he whispered. His grip loosened, and I stopped struggling to get away.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I understood how fierce his need for me was. I also understood that he hated himself for needing me. I held him as he fell into the soundless, timeless sleep of a baby.

  After Lilly and Max’s first anniversary, she began to look small and self-conscious beside him. Perhaps she feared he was losing interest. He was spending more time away from home. She let him bully her. She felt she still had to put on a show to convince him that she was worthy of his affections. I saw through my mother’s forced smile.

  One day Lilly cornered me when I came home from school.

  “Anna,” she said. “If you were Max, what would you want from me?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure I’m making him happy.”

  “Mom, you’re worried about nothing.” She was getting on my nerves.

  “Help me think of what I can make Max for dinner. Would you run to the store with me? Maybe I should take up tennis or golf. Anna, get your coat.”

  My mother dragged me all over town while she got her hair and nails done.

  “Let me tell you something about marriage, Anna,” she recited. “You can’t just sit there with your arms crossed. You’ve got to protect it like you would a little baby.”

  When Max came home that night, she insisted my sisters and I go out for a hamburger. She and Max needed a romantic night alone together. Max scooped Louise up in his arms, then threw her on the couch and tickled her until she screamed. “Don’t you dare hurt my angel,
” Lilly shouted playfully from the kitchen. “Anna, fix Max a drink.”

  Louise screamed again. “Max, let her be,” Lilly called out flirtatiously. “My daughters aren’t used to your roughhousing.”

  Now we had to be on guard for their fights. When Lilly and Max fought, they went at it so intensely that it lasted for hours. After they’d made up Max came into the kitchen and solicited our help while he cooked up plates of scrambled eggs, fried ham, and pancakes. Fighting with my mother gave him an appetite.

  “Mom thinks Max doesn’t pay her enough attention,” I said, picking at my hamburger. We three sat around the brown linoleum table at Dink’s and conferred. Lilly and Max were at war again; they had started fighting before we left the house.

  “I don’t care what she thinks,” Ruthie said.

  “He just needs some space,” Louise said. “She gets jealous that he has to go out and make a living. Mom doesn’t understand that he has other interests besides her.”

  “I bet he does,” said Ruthie.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You two are clueless,” Ruthie said.

  We sipped on our milk shakes and picked at our fries until we noticed, once the busboy began vacuuming, that we were the only customers left.

  Max took us out to dinner on Sundays to the Hunt Club for a roast beef dinner. He liked us to dress in identical dresses and parade us in like his harem. Of course, Ruthie was completely disgusted. At eleven, Ruthie felt she was too old to be dressed up as if she was a little kid. But I didn’t mind. I liked the orderliness of routine: clothes picked out for us, my mother at the head of the table next to Max, relishing that she was finally part of a couple. I didn’t care if we were playing some kind of dress-up. My mother beamed. It had been so long since she had sat beside a man she belonged to by law.

  I grew accustomed to Max’s strong personality, his scent—the smell of Irish Spring soap on his skin—and began to trust him. I often sat next to him on the couch in the late afternoons, while he watched The Honeymooners on TV. When Jackie Gleason threatened to send Alice to the moon with his clenched fist, Max laughed so loudly he made me jump. But I stayed very still next to him, afraid that if I moved or made a sound, he would leave the room. I listened as the ice clinked in his glass of scotch, and smelled the warm liquor on his breath. I watched the TV blankly. When Max laughed I looked up at him and grinned.

  “I’m making a leg of lamb with mint sauce for dinner,” Lilly would call from the kitchen—or whatever special dish she was working on. Max was no longer infatuated with or surprised by Lilly’s fancy meals. He had grown to expect them. Sitting next to Max, I could feel my mother, restless and impatient in the kitchen, waiting for Max’s attention.

  Sometimes I developed stomach cramps so severe that I had to lie flat on my back until they passed.

  During the day I slapped down plates of pancakes, sausage, and eggs, and in the evenings in August I went to the racetrack with Austin and bet half my day’s take on his picks. At night I curled myself against him on his thin, rusted cot and imagined I was happy.

  And then, for days at a time, Austin disappeared. There was no phone at the track. It was too far to go on my bike. There was no way for me to get in touch with him. I wrote his name over and over in my journal and drew hearts next to each letter. I rode my bike past his house, hoping I might find his car in the driveway. I almost knocked on the door and begged Mr. Cooper to forgive Austin, just so that he’d come home.

  Finally it was Labor Day weekend. I’d left the weekend open, thinking Austin would eventually call, but it was already Friday and I hadn’t heard from him all week. As each day had passed and it grew closer to the weekend, I’d sworn to myself I would stop seeing him. I couldn’t concentrate. I’d sacrificed my friendship with Maria for Austin, and now I realized how much I missed her. I plotted how I would break up with him. I enacted long scenarios in my head, as if I were writing a play. I composed profound soliloquies where I analyzed Austin’s motivations and actions, and where, through logic and reason, I came out the winner.

  Then Friday, on my way to work, I ran into Brian Horrigan. He asked me to a movie with him Saturday night, and I took the invitation as an omen, as if he could see just by looking at me that I was losing Austin. For the first time I regretted turning Brian down.

  In the late afternoon Louise came home from practice, her hair still wet. Her swim team had already started its workouts. Her body was long and thin. There was a time I’d been jealous of it, how she could eat and never gain a pound, but seeing how thin she was that day, I felt worried.

  She looked at me, sprawled out on my twin bed, and delivered a lecture.

  “Look at you,” she said. “Look what you’re doing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m tired of watching you mope around waiting for Austin to call.”

  I hadn’t realized it was so obvious. I was embarrassed she was calling me on it.

  “You should talk,” I said. “You’re the one we should be worried about. Look how thin you are.” I took my sister’s problems as a personal betrayal. “How come you’re not going out with anyone? I know Todd likes you. What are you afraid of?”

  “I don’t think you should be giving advice on boys.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “At least I have something I care about,” she said, meaning swimming. “You’re pathetic.”

  “It’s better than pretending not to need anyone,” I shot back. But her comment stung. I told myself that when Austin called, I would blow him off. Louise and I rarely quarreled, but that night we turned our faces to opposite walls and went to sleep without talking anymore.

  As if I sensed he would come, I awoke as the light of dawn pressed against the window. From beneath the cracked shade, I made out Austin’s Mustang in our driveway. He tapped at the windowpane of our front door. I flew down the stairs, still in my nightgown, and let him in, and we moved to the couch. “Come here,” he said. “I want to hold you.” I drew gentle circles with my finger on his back and told him I was glad he’d come. I didn’t understand why Austin went so hot and cold, but the inconsistency in his character was a puzzle I was determined to figure out. I rationalized Austin’s behavior, even though it was scaring me.

  As we lay on the sofa, I tried to forget I was angry, but then I smelled liquor on his breath and the acrid stench of marijuana smoke in his hair. “Where were you?” I was suddenly fired up.

  “Working.”

  “How come you didn’t call?”

  “I talked to you the other day.”

  “It’s been almost a week.”

  “Anna,” Austin said, his fingers gripped in my hair. “I’m here now, aren’t I? It can’t just be about you,” he said. “I’m on my own now. I have to make some money. Can’t you understand that?”

  My mind went blank. All the profound and elegant ways I’d imagined I would tell him off had faded. I let him continue to touch me, just so I could go down with him to the black pond, a kind of oblivion, where time for a second stopped.

  On their second anniversary Max flew the family to Miami Beach to meet his mother. That he had waited two years to do this should have registered, but I was oblivious to how a man’s history could shape him in the present.

  Mrs. McCarthy remained seated on a leather chaise longue while the maid showed us in. She wore a pink Chanel suit that clung to her tiny, emaciated frame. Her cigarette dangled from a gold cigarette holder. When Max bent over to kiss her, she took a meditative drag from the cigarette and gave him her cheek. His very presence seemed to disappoint her.

  “Max, you’ve got yourself quite a handful,” she said, looking us over from top to bottom. Max tried to make her laugh, but everything he did, down to the way he swirled the scotch in his glass and paced the floor, annoyed her. I caught his eye and smiled at him. I felt sorry for him. Everything about his mother’s house, from the nautical pattern on her dishes, to the form
al Chippendale furniture, to the lime and rose colors of the pillows and wallpaper, was different from the world I had been raised in.

  “What have I done?” Lilly asked, after dragging me with her to the bathroom.

  I watched in the mirror as she carefully arranged her hair with her fingertips.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I was furious with my mother. Didn’t she see that Max needed her to be supportive?

  “Before you get married, promise me you’ll meet his mother first, Anna. You can tell everything about a man by his mother. Don’t make my same mistakes, darling.” Lilly dotted on fresh lipstick and blotted her lips with a Kleenex.

  “It’s not Max’s fault,” I said. “He didn’t choose her.”

  “I suppose you feel that way about me, too,” Lilly said.

  I looked away.

  After we returned to the living room, Max’s mother pulled out her photo album to show Lilly the rest of the family.

  “Who’s that?” Lilly said.

  “Johnny. Max’s twin.”

  Lilly looked surprised.

  Max took another sip from his drink and looked out the window.

  “Max never told you?” Mrs. McCarthy asked critically. “The boys were bumper hitching. A truck sideswiped them. Johnny was killed instantly.” Mrs. McCarthy poured herself another glass of scotch. Her thin body was so brittle, it looked as if she might snap.

  “I’m sorry,” Lilly said. She reached over and squeezed Max’s hand.

  I was relieved when Mrs. McCarthy stood up and announced that she’d better start on supper.

  I pushed my mother forward to encourage her to follow Mrs. McCarthy through the pink parlor into the kitchen and offer some help. It annoyed me that she hadn’t thought to do it herself. The point was, whatever I thought about Lilly’s and Max’s marriage, I was worried that she was going to ruin the only stability we’d known since my father died.