House Under Snow

by Jill Bialosky

  As far as I was concerned, the world was ordered in two ways. The world of women and men, and the world of women without men. Now that Max lived with us, there was a certain symmetry to our lives. When Max had entered the picture, our world became tame and manicured. At first it was as if I had walked into a museum, I was so transfixed by beautiful objects I was afraid to touch, lest they break and shatter into a million pieces. I knew what it was like now to have balance in a house. To not feel everything was slipping into a pool of emotion. Now I thought I understood the chemistry between a man and a woman, what the combination could do.

  Even though the trip had been a disaster, once we got back home, they seemed closer. Maybe Max had realized how much he needed my mother. Perhaps Lilly felt sorry for Max, once she had learned about his lost twin brother. Regardless, inside the walls of our house was the smell of my mother’s perfume, mixed with the liquor smell from their breath, the damp smell of sex—I felt the warmth of their bodies over my sleep all night long. I stopped trying to shut out their sounds in their bedroom. Now, deep in the night, through the walls, I listened for Max’s snoring, the great dark voice of his sleep that rose and fell in my dreams. The house echoed with the almost horsey gasps of air going through his thick nostrils; his snore was a deep hum, a music box whose song I never tired of.

  As Austin grew more involved in the insular world of the track, and less attached to the world outside, I began to worry. I told myself I had to try harder to understand him. One Saturday afternoon I told him I wanted to spend the day with him at work and arranged for someone to cover my shift at the diner. I sat on a stool in the corner of the stable as he brought in fresh hay for the horses and began to pick his brain.

  “So what’s the goal?” I said. “I mean, what are you trying to get out of this?”

  “What do you mean, Anna?”

  “I mean, is it just to have the fastest horse? To win the most money? I thought it was the horses you loved. But from what I can see, it’s really all about commerce.” I had been studying the owners as they came by, how they studied the program, then cussed out the grooms and trainers if the horse the night before hadn’t lived up to expectation.

  “Sometimes passions don’t make any sense. I didn’t think you’d understand.”

  I thought for a moment. “I just don’t know whether you’ll be happy here in the long run,” I said, listening to the horse in the stall go at a salt lick with his tongue.

  “I might not be. But I have to give it a try. I’m not a shirt-and-suit guy, Anna.”

  Jane Smart poked her head in and said hello. Austin went out to bring in another bale of hay. I overheard the two of them talking outside about getting together to go riding. When I confronted Austin about it later that day, he shrugged it off, but I sensed the chemistry between them. Maybe Austin was right. Maybe the track life wasn’t so bad for him. After all, he was only seventeen.

  That night Austin had money on a horse called Silver Lightning. We sat next to each other and held hands. All that day after I had given up on trying to discourage Austin from staying at the track, I felt closer to him. I watched how seriously he took his job, how patient he was as he rubbed salve on the raw sore on the leg of Midnight Magic, the barn’s prize horse, and then wrapped it with a bandage. He knew the peculiarities of each horse in the barn—which one preferred an apple, or a sugar cube, how gently to tap the whip on a trotter’s back, how to cool a horse down just right before bringing her back to the stable.

  We sat by ourselves away from the crowd, in the dim corner of one of the bleachers. Austin put his arm around my shoulder and told me he was glad I had spent the day with him. “Do you want to make me really happy?” Austin said playfully. He placed his hand on the back of my neck and lowered my head into his lap. During the race, just as Silver Lightning was neck and neck with another horse around the last turn, I sucked him off. Austin dared me. He said it would bring him luck. And he was right. That night, for the first time in a while, he had a winner.

  This is where everything falls into place, like water absorbed into sand. Every story has a point of no return, where something irrevocable happens, where events unfold and spin out of control and determine each character’s fate. In Wuthering Heights it is the moment Cathy marries Linton. For me, it was when I refused to see the signs of trouble that were staring me in the face. I wanted to have control over my emotions, but my body and mind were at odds. I listened to the way the wind spoke to the leaves, to the sound of water rushing over the falls, crushing the pebbles and rock, but I could not listen to myself, because every thought and feeling changed from one moment to the next, depending on what Austin had said or done. I saw nothing I did not want to see. I ignored the intensity throbbing in a boy’s neck, the movement of a woman’s body when she was restless, the repetition in our histories. I decided to see, feel, and hear only what was in front of me, like a horse with blinders on raging toward the finish line. I just didn’t know what I was racing to or from.

  The first week in September, just as school had begun, I woke up in a cold sweat. I developed an acute sensitivity to smells. The sour odor of an open refrigerator brought me lurching to the bathroom. I was nauseous all day. I knew Austin and I should have been using birth control, but we’d gotten careless. I wanted to believe that what was between us—curvy and complicated as an endless road—was so strong that none of the rules mattered.

  I knew about the womb, shaped like a pear, which sheds its lining every month. That blood is food for a baby. I knew that all it takes is one of thousands of sperm to put a pinprick inside an egg, and then the cells would multiply. That September I waited for the feel of my womb contracting, releasing the egg that ripened inside me that month. I waited for the feel of my womb’s lining shedding the way you wait for the wind on a humid day.

  Soon Aunt Rose called long-distance to wish us a happy New Year. It was Rosh Hashanah. Eight days later it would be Yom Kippur. “What do you want God to forgive you for?” Aunt Rose asked. She asked each one of us this question every year.

  There was only one thing I could think of, but I couldn’t dare tell Aunt Rose. Since my grandfather passed away, Aunt Rose had become active in charity foundations. She had a small pension from all the years she’d worked at the bank. Nothing seemed to rattle her solid constitution. But I believed if I told her I might be pregnant, she’d think less of me.

  “Put your mother on,” Aunt Rose said finally. “Maybe this year will be her year. When God closes a door, a window opens. Your poor, poor mother,” Aunt Rose said.

  Before I handed Lilly the phone, I spoke briefly to Ruthie.

  “How are you guys doing?” she asked. “I miss you two.”

  “We miss you, too,” I said. I didn’t think I could confide in Ruthie either. I was afraid to say out loud what was troubling me, what was happening, not only to me, but to my mother and Louise. I was the kind of girl who always hoped to catch someone’s eyes, to hope someone else might fish out what was wrong with me, but never dreamed of offering it. And a part of me still believed that if I could deny what was happening to my body, I could make the nut-sized embryo attaching to my womb disappear. I handed Lilly the phone and went into the bathroom for the tenth time that day to check my underpants for blood.

  On Yom Kippur, which fell in early September that year, I fasted. I thought that maybe if I repented, restored my covenant with God, he’d void the secret buried inside me. But there wasn’t going to be a miracle. If God worked in mysterious ways, his plan hadn’t revealed itself to me, though I tried to look for meaning in the pattern of the stars in the night sky, or the map of fading daisies in the field beyond our house. My period was faithfully regular, and I was already two weeks late.

  The leaves had begun to turn color and were falling off the trees. It was a bright, crisp autumn, late afternoon. Ruthie was fixing her bike in the garage. I was reading in the gazebo.

  “It’s a goddamn beautiful day for baseball,” Max said as h
e came out the back door into the yard. He put his can of beer on the ground. His face looked flushed and puffy, but it wasn’t the kind of red you get from a suntan. Every day, the moment he came home from work, before changing his clothes or saying hello to us, Max took a beer from the refrigerator or made himself a cocktail. He’d continue to drink throughout the evening, sometimes substituting a glass of red wine, or an after-dinner port.

  With a phantom golf club in his hand, he practiced his swing.

  “Let me give you a hand, sweetheart,” Max called to Ruthie, where she was working on her bike.

  “You don’t have to,” Ruthie said, yanking out a lock of hair that had gotten tangled in the spokes of her front wheel. She was in that awkward stage where a girl is no longer a child, but not quite a woman. Her sweater crept up when she raised her arms, and revealed a sliver of her stomach. Her nose was covered with uncountable numbers of freckles.

  “What do you mean I don’t have to?” Max cleared his throat and walked toward her. “Of course I don’t have to.” He knelt down and pinched the tire with his fingers. “This looks beat. When’s the last time you put air in the tires?”

  Ruthie glared up at him.

  “I’m on to you,” Max said, his voice bouncing off the garage walls. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”

  Ruthie’s dark hair had been tinted red by the sun, and was brushed behind her ears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him.

  “You’re wasting your energy. There’s no way you’re going to sabotage this thing. There’s no goddamn way in hell.”

  Ruthie gave him one of her famous I-can-see-through-you looks.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Max said. “If you don’t want me to be your father, I can accept that.” He paused. “But I think we ought to manage to be friends.” Max waited for a response. When he got only a blank face, he added, “You’re upsetting your mother.”

  “That’s too bad,” Ruthie said. She flung back a lock of her hair.

  Max grabbed her wrist.

  “I don’t ever want to hear you talk about your mother like that. She’s been through a hell of a lot.”

  “You’re not my boss,” Ruthie said. “You can’t tell me what to do. Let go of me.”

  From the gazebo I was watching them as if I had been stopped still in a game of freeze tag. I swatted a fly that was buzzing around my face.

  “No one asked you to live here,” Ruthie said. She jerked her hand away from Max. “This is our house, not yours.”

  I stepped out of the gazebo and walked across the lawn.

  “Is that right?” The red in Max’s face spread, like a complicated rash, to his neck. The muscles in his jaw tightened. “I married your mother, and whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with me. You better learn to like it, is that understood? I love your mother,” Max continued. “Is that so terrible?”

  “That’s between you and her,” Ruthie said. She threw out her chest, which had just recently changed from small, swollen-looking bumps to bosoms, and began to walk away.

  Max kept after her. “I need this like a hole in the head,” he called. “If you think I’m going to stand for this, coming from a snot-nosed brat, you’ve got another thing coming.” Max caught up to Ruthie, grabbed her by the wrist again and twisted it. “Don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you!” he said. “You’re screwing things up, do you know that?” Ruthie struggled to pull her arm away. “What you need is a good kick in the pants.”

  I tried to catch her eye, hoping she’d back off.

  “Let go of me!” Ruthie shrieked. “You’re hurting me.”

  Lilly, in the new yellow sports car Max had bought for her, pulled up the driveway. I was relieved. She stormed out of the car. “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you dare lay a finger on her.”

  “Now I’m going to get it from you, too?” Max took Lilly in with his piercing ice-blue eyes. “No sir. No sirree, bob.” He turned away from Lilly and walked down the driveway toward his car, which was parked on the street.

  Lilly tripped over her heels as she ran after him. “Max, where are you going? Don’t you dare leave.” She tugged on his sleeve to pull him back. Max drew up his arm as if to hit her and then stopped himself.

  “Don’t touch her!” Ruthie shouted. She flew down the driveway after them. Max slapped Ruthie across the face so hard she couldn’t talk.

  Max got in his car and slammed the door. Lilly banged on his car window. “Roll this down. I want to talk to you.” He ignored her. “Max, where are you going?”

  “None of your goddamn business.” He revved the engine. Lilly clung to the car door by its handle as he began to pull away. “Please, Max, I beg you!” she called. She was still standing at the end of the driveway as his Lincoln screeched around the bend. “Don’t do this to me,” she said, more quietly. “Don’t you dare.”

  For days I hid the truth from Austin about the embryo growing inside me, its cells multiplying and dividing secretly, independent of my will. I sequestered myself in my room and spent hours staring out the window, trying not to think about the sensitivity in my breasts, which felt as if they were being pricked from the inside. Instead I thought of Austin and me lying in the grass in the fields outside the track, the little wombs of light from the fireflies coming out in the darkness, blinking on and off like some indecipherable Morse code. But the memory quickly vanished, and I grew anxious again. I paced the carpet in my room, wondering what I was going to do.

  A few days after Yom Kippur, I finally confessed to Louise that my period was late—I thought I would go out of my mind if I didn’t tell someone—and she accompanied me downtown to the free clinic to get a pregnancy test. We’d heard that Nancy Newby had gone there to get an abortion. I took out the robin’s egg that I had found months before with Austin, wrapped it in tissue paper, and put it in my shoulder bag for good luck. I was like a mother who keeps her kids’ tiny drawings tucked in her back pocket, as if the thin piece of paper might keep the children from harm. But I didn’t have to wait until the pregnancy test was confirmed. I knew I was pregnant. I knew almost the morning after it happened. The embryo had clutched onto my uterine wall like a desperate hand, unwilling to let go. And yet, like everything else that summer and fall, I tried to push away what I didn’t want to see.

  Meanwhile, my mother was absent from us. Not even the sun filling our living room in midday could coax her out of herself. Lilly occasionally came downstairs to prepare a plate of food, get the newspaper, or inquire passively where we were going, though once we told her, the details slipped from her mind. She took up the painting project haphazardly; then, as if she’d grown bored staring at her color samples, she retreated to the solitary cave of her room. It never occurred to me to ask for my mother’s help. She was so incapable of handling her own life, I didn’t dream of complicating her worries with mine.

  “You should tell Austin you’re pregnant,” Louise insisted. We were on our way home. The downtown smog stretched before us. I listened to the sirens wailing, the low rumble of the Rapid once we’d gone underground, the dull sounds of a car backfiring when we reemerged into the bright light from the subterranean depths. It was early September, but during the day the temperature was still in the eighties, though by then I was tired of it, the heat and humidity, the summer’s lost promise. The birds were restless in the trees, waiting to leave.

  “He should know,” Louise repeated.

  “He can’t handle it,” I told her. The train screeched around a turn. “He’s got enough of his own problems.”

  Austin had been going on drinking binges. He guzzled down beers, bit into a lime, knocked down shots of tequila or peppermint schnapps. He could drink steadily all day, and you’d barely notice he was drunk. Then, at night, he’d crash. Sometimes he slept for twenty-four hours at a stretch. He looked like he was going to jump out of his skin. Since he’d been living at the track, he barely washed his clothes. When I’d fi
rst met Austin, I saw the effort he made to spend time with his father. When he was living at home, he rarely cut classes, was always on time to pick me up. He cared about how he looked and what he wore. I was sorry he and his father were not speaking. I thought that maybe, if his father were in his life again, he might be able to turn himself around. I rationalized that Austin was in a funk. That once the season broke and classes had started he’d get serious about his life and wish he was going to college.

  I put my hands over my stomach, as if I was protecting my baby. I had never done anything exceptional in my life, and carrying this baby, even though I was only six weeks pregnant, felt exceptional. I wondered how Austin would react when he learned I was pregnant. The sun slowly sank into the horizon, coloring the sky with an intensity so original and fundamental, I felt immobile watching it.

  “Well then, maybe we should tell Mom,” Louise continued.

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “What good would that do? I don’t want to worry her.”

  I listened to the sound of metal against the tracks as the Rapid made another turn. I thought of the anonymity of the city as we rode beyond the maze of buildings at the edge of downtown. I thought of all those people who lived in cramped apartment houses, and ate meals in tiny kitchens and didn’t even know one another. Didn’t even feel they had to nod when they passed on the street. I thought of all those men and women dressed in suits on their way home from their offices, sitting with us on the Rapid, and I longed for that feeling of being unknown as I watched the birds skit from tree to tree outside the transit window. I sensed that years from then I’d be able to read the situation I was in. But then I hadn’t a clue what I was doing.

  Louise and I were sitting behind two women whose overflowing shopping bags from Halle’s crowded the aisle. I hungered for the simple pleasure of shopping.