House Under Snow (15 page)

We got out of the car and walked across the flat greens, guided by the light from an almost full moon. The last time I had been to a golf course was when Lilly had taken us to watch one of Max’s tournaments. Austin hopped into a golf cart and turned the key left in the ignition. I slipped in next to him.

In early September he was supposed to be going to Ohio State to be a freshman in college. I still had one more year left
of high school. I felt I ought to talk to him about something important, but I already knew his family story, the kind of music he liked, the drugs he’d tried, his friends. I knew the glint in his eyes when he wanted to touch me. The way he bit his bottom lip when something hurt him.

“What was it like when your father died? It must be hard not to have a father,” Austin said.

I looked at him. I never considered how I must have appeared to him. It made me embarrassed. “I don’t think about it,” I said. “It’s just how it is.”

From within the stillness of the golf course, the city beyond felt artificial and gray. I carefully watched ahead, as if I was navigating, as we went over one slope and down another. The moist air, the crickets in the trees, the smell of the moist lawn reminded me that soon Austin was leaving. I motioned for him to stop the cart. I stepped out and he followed, carrying an army blanket he had taken from the trunk of his car.

Before he spread out the blanket he pressed his sweaty body on top of me in the carpetlike grass so that I could barely breathe and could not think anymore. The humid air carried the scent of the slow decay of summer. On the slope of the lawn, abandoned white and fluorescent yellow golf balls glowed under the starlight.

Austin’s eyes drifted to my breasts and bare legs. I reached out and held the muscles in his forearms, and let his lips touch mine. In the distance was the swish of water going over a man-built waterfall on the ninth green, going down, down, down, in long, smooth curves, down beyond the slopes, beyond the horizon, where the sun had fallen, splintering the sky in shards of color.

Austin opened his mouth to say something, but stopped.

“What is it?”

“Anna,” he began again. “I know we’ve only known each other . . .”

I put my finger against his lips. “You don’t have to,” I said. I was sure he was breaking up with me.

“No, listen to me. There’s something I have to tell you.” The circle of skin in the hollow of his cheek trembled. “I didn’t know until this morning that it had happened. I woke up this morning and pictured you with another guy.” His eyes drilled into mine. “I can’t get it out of my head. If you met somebody else, I don’t know if I could take it.”

I felt that I hadn’t known him at all. The details of his family, his friends, the kind of food he liked, his passion for horses, hadn’t said anything to me really. There was so much more in his mind, thoughts that we never talked about, so much I might never know.

When Max moved into our house, he was a complete stranger. All men were to us. But this one had taken hold of my mother.

Once my mother married Max, her drawers and closets were filled with new clothes, beautiful gold jewelry, long wool coats, and soft, fluffy new sweaters. Lilly no longer needed to spend hours getting ready before they went out to dinner or to the movies. The long, affectionate kisses Max gave her when he came home from work and the way he looked at her set flame to her beauty; around her was the warm feeling of being loved and cared for.

She bustled around the house cleaning windows, scrubbing the old linoleum floors, hanging fresh, new colorful drapes in our bedrooms. She bought flowers for the dinner table each night and hired a gardener to dig a new bed in the backyard.
That spring, Max hired a painter to paint the outside of the house while Lilly ordered workmen to take away the old swing set where we had spent many of our summer days.

I stayed in my bedroom and watched from the window as the men pulled up the rusted red poles, disconnected the disintegrating chains, and took apart the silver slide. After they had gone, I ran downstairs and out to the garbage can to rescue the splintered wooden seats, as if by keeping them I could still savor a part of our lives that was disappearing. I sat outside on the lawn as clouds surged over the trees, over the rows of houses on the block, and watched the setting sun. Watched it fall into the arms of the oak tree. I threw the wooden seats back into the waste can, and wandered toward the gazebo.

I sat on the bench, rested my back against the white rafters, and closed my eyes. The sky was pure and uncomplicated. The morning glories climbed the newly painted white house. Ivy circled the chimney. The laundry drying on the line puffed with wind and then flattened again. My mother’s nylons and slips next to Max’s white boxer shorts flapped in the morning air.

And now, like all the other children on the block, we had to be home at six o’clock sharp for dinner. I loved the new symmetry of order and routine, of knowing what to expect. I had quickly come to depend on it.

There were strange new meals staring at us from the new china plates. We sat quietly at the dinner table while Lilly and Max flirted.

“Girls, did I ever tell you the story of the first time I laid eyes on your mother?” Max said. “I was playing in the Chagrin Falls Open . . .”

“Max had a difficult time keeping his eyes on the ball,”
Lilly interrupted. “He leaned over and asked me for my phone number. The nerve of him,” Lilly said, laughing.

“Golf was the only thing I ever loved passionately,” Max said. “The quick snap of the swing, the grace of the putt, the skill and concentration. Until I met your mother.”

Lilly stood up and massaged Max’s shoulders. My sisters and I looked down at our half-eaten plates of food.

Lilly had decided to become a gourmet cook; the kitchen became a complicated storm of cookbooks, exotic spices, new copper pots and pans hanging from an overhead rack. My mother ran frantically around the kitchen before Max came home from work; then she’d dash upstairs fifteen minutes before he’d open the door, to take off her old sweatshirt and put on a cashmere sweater, apply fresh makeup, and return to the kitchen, fully composed.

At the dinner table Max set the tone. If he was in a good mood, he said, “Girls, this week I’m taking you out to dinner.” When Max wasn’t playing golf, he invested in start-up companies, once partnered in a restaurant. If he lost a deal, or money in the market, he was irritable and moody. “You girls have got to start cleaning your bedrooms,” he’d say then. “I’ve never seen such a pigsty. Get your goddamn shoes out of the hall.” He’d start as soon as he walked in the door. My father never swore. I never heard my grandparents or Aunt Rose say God’s name in vain. Swear words weren’t part of our vocabulary. But we didn’t care if Max swore or told us what to do. It meant someone was paying attention.

“Oh, Max, stop it,” Lilly said playfully, when he squeezed her knee or reached over and bit her neck. She was never happier than when his entire attention was fixed on her. We finally had a man in our house. I hadn’t realized how much I’d craved it.

One night I was making small piles of peas along the edges of my plate while Max talked, like I usually did. Max’s hand left the table to reach for Lilly’s knee. Lilly got up and served him another plate of Caesar salad. She filled his glass with wine. “How about another slice of meat?” she asked, as she stabbed a piece of bloody rare roast beef with a serving fork and slapped it onto Max’s plate.

After dinner Ruthie came into Louise’s and my bedroom.

“I wish Lilly never married Max,” she said. “I don’t have a good feeling about him. As soon as I can figure out what I’m doing, I’m getting out of here.”

“Can’t you see how happy Mom is?” I was worried Ruthie was going to ruin everything. I was nervous around Max, but I was willing to risk the discomfort if it meant my mother was happy.

Just then Lilly opened the bedroom door.

“We’re a real family now,” she whispered. She was dressed in a sheer negligee. With ruffled hair and rosy cheeks, she yawned dreamily.

“Lilly,” Max called from downstairs. “I just uncorked a bottle of port.”

“Isn’t he something?” Lilly blew us a kiss and rose to leave. After she closed the door, Louise crawled into my bed. She hadn’t done that in years. Everything we had known before had disappeared, except the steadfast shapes of our bodies pressed against each other. Slowly the windows filled with dark funnels of stars.

Austin traced his fingers over my nose, eyes, mouth, as if he were putting me into his memory. Underneath the stars, on
the green of the golf course, where grasshoppers rustled in the shadows, I felt as if I was in my childhood room again, huddled in the dark with my sisters in a place no one could tamper with or touch. I wanted to keep that moment in the Ohio night with Austin forever, so we would never be apart. “I wish we were ten years older,” Austin said. “Do you think we’ll know each other in ten years?”

Goose bumps went up my arms.

“Let’s make a pact,” he said. “Seriously. Sit up.” I sat up on the damp grass in front of him. “Give me something of yours, something you’re wearing right now.”

I groped at my chest for the gold Jewish star Aunt Rose had sent to me for my sixteenth birthday. I unclasped the necklace and dropped it into his open palm. He slung off his wristwatch and handed it to me. “In ten years, no matter where we are, who we are with, we’ll meet here and exchange them,” he said. I felt two things. First, a kind of intoxication, because what he was doing felt so intimate; and second, anxiety, because he was admitting that we would eventually split up.

Austin grabbed my shoulders and eased me into the open grass. Stars shot across the sky. He kissed me so intensely I felt myself wilt, like nightshade, into the darkness. It was misty outside, the humidity breaking into a kind of rain without rain.

“Do you think we’re going to break up?” I asked. “That something will come between us?”

“You never know, Anna,” Austin said. It occurred to me that maybe he was thinking about how one day his mother was in the kitchen packing his school lunch, and the next she was gone. “Just in case something happens,” he whispered into my hair. “I mean, I think we should try and stay together. Don’t you?” I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. I knew that time could change everything, or nothing at all.

“I’m not planning on leaving,” I said. “We need each other.”

He pulled me next to him. “Don’t you get it?” he said. “That’s what I don’t like. That I
need
to be with you, and to wake up next to you.” He looked to see how his words affected me.

I didn’t know if I should be happy, or afraid, or sad. Austin’s complicated emotions confused and excited me. In the back of my mind, I was always afraid that love was as thin as a rope unraveling.

Was it emotion, in the end, that led Cathy and Heathcliff to their downfall? Did Cathy really believe that by marrying Edgar Linton she was protecting Heathcliff? Or did she marry Edgar Linton out of selfish vanity? I told myself it was because she was afraid of the dark power Heathcliff had over her. She loved him, but could she wake up in the morning and share the breakfast table with him, and be beside him when they turned the covers down each night? I didn’t like to think about it too hard. Even though I wanted Austin’s love, occasionally a nagging question pushed itself into my consciousness. Aside from being adrift from our families, what more did Austin and I share, outside the heat that radiated between us?

I decided, as Austin held me, that if I had to describe what love meant, really, not in the abstract or the sentimental or the way I’d imagined it before, that I’d say it was completely irrational, made up of so many opposite emotions, the kind that couldn’t exist without the other: bliss and sadness, courage and fear, adoration and disgust.

One night that August we went to the movies. Under the spell
Doctor Zhivago
cast, we walked down the deserted alley behind the theater. I wanted to stay in the cold, bleak landscape of the Russian countryside, Uri’s mustache covered with frost, among the white sheets and pillows of the frozen bedroom, but Austin cornered me up against the cold brick wall and gripped my arms. Something was wrong. When our eyes met it felt like the danger of looking directly at a solar eclipse. Soon he was leaving Chagrin Falls to become a freshman at Ohio State.

“You’re mine,” he said. “I own every part of you.” He worked his hands, beginning with my face, down my body. “These belong to me,” he said, touching my breasts. He rubbed up against me. He kissed my neck, and underneath my hair.

“Stop,” I said. He was moving too fast, and he was acting weird. The crowd was still letting out from the theater, people slowly making their way to their cars. But he didn’t want to stop.

I took his hand and began to lead him out of the alley, back to the car. But he forced me back.

“Wait,” Austin said. “There’s something I want to give you.”

In those first months when Max came to live with us, he took charge of our house with such openness and determination to make things work, I liked him instantly. Of course, we no longer had to worry about whether we’d have something besides peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for dinner, or whether my mother would be able to pay the mortgage. The very fact that our fears of survival were alleviated endeared Max to me. But I didn’t know what he was getting out of the arrangement. I assumed he had to love my mother, knowing three young daughters came with the package. I felt it was my responsibility to make sure we wouldn’t rock the boat.