House Under Snow (11 page)

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 off, 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.

That night at the motel, I tried to tell him how I felt.

“I don’t want you to be this important,” I said. “It scares me.”

“Don’t you know I can’t live without you?” When he lifted the hair from my neck and I saw in his eyes that I could hurt him, I reached out and touched his face.

“What is it about me that you love?” I wanted him to put it into words.

“Everything about you.” He rubbed his hands along my arms and then over the curves of my body.

I wasn’t the first girl Austin had slept with—everyone knew that—but he knew he was
my
first, and I think that was what also got to him about me. It was as if he craved the place that was pure and good at the center of my being.

I began to talk endlessly about the places we would go together, what we could do.

He told me to be quiet. My talking was giving him a headache. He kissed my eyelids and rolled on top of me, yanking up my undershirt. No matter how many times we’d slept together, I always wanted him to undress me. A rash of heat traveled up my neck and back. He kissed me again, and I felt myself falling into the warm hollow where, for a minute, I lost sight of the world. I touched the wet curls on the back of his neck and ran my finger along the creases in his forehead and listened to him say his sweet things. And before I knew it there was his touch again in the place so vulnerable it hurt.

My mother roamed the house in her ballet slippers, pink tights, and a long oxford men’s shirt, covered with dried paint. She was forgetful and spacey; she looked, if not for gravity, as if she might float away. My sisters and I went to the Pick ’n’ Pay for groceries, emptied the garbage, and washed the laundry piled up in mounds in the basement while our mother went through the motions of painting the house.

Our neighborhood was filled with sluggish, unhappy women who dealt with the ennui of domesticity by pouring a five o’clock cocktail or popping Valium or amphetamines disguised as diet pills. Maria’s mother had woken up the morning we began second grade convinced she saw Jesus looking at her outside the kitchen window when she was buttering toast. The breakdown was followed by several rounds of shock treatment. Other mothers in our neighborhood drank; ate themselves to twice-yearly visits to fat farms; or spiced up their bedrooms with affairs. But the difference between these women and my mother was that no matter how unhappy their marriages, there was the facade of a husband, and generally what came with it, financial security to protect them from sinking into the space where the mind drifts and floats untethered.

It was the Fourth of July. Austin and I planned to watch
the fireworks at the beach on Lake Erie. Louise had left early that morning with some friends for Cedar Point, an amusement park about an hour outside Cleveland, and wouldn’t be back until later in the evening. My mother didn’t have the energy or the wherewithal to get herself out of the house. Dust formed along the windowsills. When I pointed out the cobwebs that collected in the corners of the rooms, even whirled themselves around the wooden spoons and spatulas Lilly kept on the kitchen countertop in canisters, she looked at me like I was crazy. “I don’t see anything, Anna,” she said. “You’re exaggerating.” I knew something was off with her that day, but I didn’t know what.

Lilly put down her paintbrush and went to the kitchen to fill her watering can. She watered the plants to the sound of Mozart.

I was in the house alone with Lilly. Louise had scored a summer job as a lifeguard at the community pool and spent most of her afternoons perched six feet over the pool in her lifeguard chair. The year before she had joined the high school swim team—like I did, she needed to find a way to be out of our house. When she wasn’t hibernating in our room, she was submerged in the aqua blue pool, swimming obsessively, as if each stroke brought her closer to a place of safety. She lost weight. She barely ate anything all day, except a slice of toast or part of an apple. You could see every rib and muscle in her body.

Before school had let out for the summer, once I had taken the bleachers of the indoor Olympic-size pool two at a time, to watch her practice. The smell of chlorine and the humid, wet air seeped inside my clothes, warped my papers and pages from my books. It was beautiful, the way her body slipped into the water with barely a sound, and how quickly she took to it, as if her body had
become
water. I found it comforting, watching
my sister glide back and forth, down one lane and up the other, pushing off with one foot, slapping the aqua blue tiles with her hands. The hollow room echoed back the quick splash of her strokes. I timed her by counting to myself. To this day it still comforts me. The sound of a body in water. I have a video of my sister when she won the state championship freestyle race. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I slip it into the VCR.

Once Austin had entered my life, I found it more difficult to invest in the idea that my mother could still, perhaps, change the dead-end course she was on. But sometimes I still tried.

“Mom,” I asked, “why don’t you come with us to watch the fireworks?” I knew she would say no, but it made me feel better to ask.

“You don’t need an old lady like me tagging along,” Lilly answered.

“It would be nice if you did something that you really wanted,” I said, following after her while she scrubbed the paintbrushes with turpentine. Occasionally I felt the need to take her pulse, find out what she was thinking. Eventually she was going to finish painting the house, and then what would she do? She was so preoccupied painting that she barely took a shower or changed her clothes.

“It’s too late for that, Anna. You know, when I was your age, a woman didn’t think about herself, like you and your sisters do. My family would have considered it an indulgence.”

Lilly stood poised in the middle of the living room. Her hair rested on her shoulders. She flung it back, then took a strand and wrapped it around her finger. Then, ignoring me, she got out her paint chips and pictures of cutouts from her decorating magazines and tacked them to the wall. It was no use to try and talk sense into her. It only exasperated me further. She
tacked the paint chips on different walls in each room and obsessed about which color would match the fabric on her sofa and pillows. She preferred colors like mother-of-pearl and alabaster to more traditional shades.

When I surmised from all the bills stuffed in Lilly’s drawers and the phone calls from bill collectors that we were broke, I confronted my mother. “What’s going to happen to us?” I asked, as she lay in bed. It was the next night after Ruthie attempted to run away. I was in the fifth grade.

The snow had begun to fall after my sisters and I had spent nearly all afternoon shoveling. On our block the hedgerows, shrubs, and boulders separating one house from another dissolved under the snow. The sky was the color of slush.

“Anna, what are you talking about?” Lilly replied to my question.

“How are we going to get the money to pay all the bills?”

“You sense everything don’t you, angel? You’re my alter ego—my second self.” Lilly sat up and turned on the lamp by her bedside. She reached for a throw at the foot of her bed, and put it around her shoulders.

“It’s time we had a heart-to-heart.” Lilly made room for me on the bed. “We don’t have any money left.” She paused. Outside, a cascade of icicles fell against the window. “And I can’t borrow another penny. I don’t know what to do.” Lilly’s eyes looked like those of a cat hunkered against a door waiting to come in from the cold. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.” None of the mothers I knew in our neighborhood worked. My mother, as they had, had grown up to know what kind or color of gloves to wear with a dress; how to accentuate
her eyes with makeup. From the time she was seven years old, she knew how to curl her hair. But no one had prepared her to support a family.

“We’ll think of something,” I tried to reassure her.

“You don’t understand. I don’t know how to do anything, except make a man want me.” She lowered her eyes. “It scares me to have so much power over a man . . .” She looked off distantly and laid her head against the wall. “And such little control over my own life.”

“What do men have to do with it?”

Lilly laughed nervously, almost as if she were crazy. “Why, they have everything to do with it,” she said defensively. “Don’t you understand? It’s a man’s world, Anna.”

I had the creepy realization that if it weren’t for the favors my mother received from her men we’d be living on the streets. But while my mother primed herself for her dates, she stuffed the bills in her drawer and dodged phone calls from bill collectors.

“Anna, promise me you won’t tell anyone. If people think we don’t have money, no one will want us.”

I huddled closer to my mother. Her silky negligee clung to my skin. When I went to touch my mother’s hand, I got a shock.

“All week I’ve been reckoning something with myself. I’ve made a decision. Your mother is going to get married. I’ll make a good home for my girls, you’ll see. I just hope your father will understand,” Lilly motioned to the blotched ceiling where the paint had long bubbled. “Your father is watching over us, darling,” Lilly said. “He’s not going to let anything bad happen.”