House Under Snow (2 page)

Austin’s father was out of town on business that weekend. The party was scheduled for the first Saturday night in May. I
had worried about it all week—how I would get out of the house, what I would wear, and then what would happen, once I was alone with Austin.

In front of his house, five cars were parked bumper-to-bumper in the driveway. A caravan of parked cars wound its way down the street and around the bend. It was a warm late spring night. The smell of lilac was in the air. A streak of heat lightning ignited the sky. In the backyard a group of boys huddled around the keg. Bruce Webster was doing the honors of pumping Styrofoam cups full of Miller. The hard-core partiers brought their own mugs. Austin led me to the keg, handed me a cup of beer. His eyes looked wet; sweat beads had begun to form on his face; not even nine o’clock and he was already toasted. He sent heat through my body when he brushed up against me; then he disappeared.

I was drawn to a damaged and wild streak in his character. I liked the wildness about Austin, because it was familiar. My mother had that streak inside her, too. It flared up when a man was around: Her eyes caught on fire. She couldn’t quiet her body. Her knees bounced up and down so that she had to place her hands on her thighs to contain herself. Sometimes I felt that my very being was what kept my own mother alive and grounded in the world, that without me she was like one of those falling stars that dissolves as it crashes to the earth.

Looking back, in some ways Austin and I were the perfect match. We provided what the other lacked. I had learned to allow another person to consume me so much that I could become invisible; Austin needed the open field of unconditional love to survive.

In the Coopers’ garage that night, a joint was being passed.
I looked around for a familiar face. But most of the kids at the party I really didn’t know well. They were seniors from our school. I had convinced Maria to come to the party with me, but after a half hour she took off to go cruising with Todd Levine in his mother’s Lincoln. There was that spring-fever madness in the air. Anything could happen.

From the backyard I could see into the windows of the house. People were in the kitchen, huddled in packs, propped on the granite counters, or standing around the table. The air in the room was a maze of hormones. The sky outside electric. I tried to join a small crowd talking about what they were doing that summer.

“Party! Party!” Danny Keller chanted, as he walked through the crowd, his shirt tied, like a sheik’s headdress, around his head. He gave me the high five, and pushed his can of beer against the slice of skin on my back that showed when I raised my arms to fix my hair. As he brushed past me, he sprinkled my shirt with beer.

On the way upstairs to the bathroom, I passed girls standing on the staircase. They flicked the ashes from their cigarettes into Austin’s father’s flowerpots. I found myself getting angry, as if I already had a stake in the Coopers’ private territory. Nancy Singer and George Weisberg were making out intensely on the landing. After waiting my turn in line, I closed the bathroom door against the party. The sounds siphoned off to static buzzing in my temples. I had never felt comfortable at parties, around large groups of people. I was always the girl who stood in the sidelines, outside of a group, looking on. It took so much energy just to be present. I longed for a time when I could forget myself. Ever since my father had died, a part of me went out of the world and floated, lost and disconnected.
One hand held my mother’s, the other the dark ethereal leaf on a tree you could snap off in a single gesture.

My father, Lawrence Crane, had been a builder. He designed our house in Chagrin Falls, and with the help of his construction crew, dug the basement, poured the cement, and built the frame. They leveled and laid the floors, plastered, Sheetrocked, and stroked on the paint. Lilly had told us the story so many times, I knew it by heart. He was so strong, my mother said, so smart. When she spoke like that, it was to the wind, or the weeping willows. She was swept away by the current of her memory. Lost. Her words were like long sighs.

Our house was the only one in Chagrin Falls with a gazebo in the backyard, she liked to boast, her expression full of pride. When my father died in the spring of 1961, he was standing on a ladder leaning against the gazebo to replace one of the little white lights that he kept lit all year round. One by one, over the years after he died, they had burned out, but no one bothered to replace them. The ladder lost its grip. My father fell, hit his head dead center on a rock, and never regained consciousness. I used to wonder what his last thought was, whether he held it inside his skull, freeze-framed, when all the lights shut down.

I was four years old, Ruthie five, and Louise barely three. I was too young to remember my father exactly, but on the cold winter mornings when my mother was asleep and I was playing in my room, I felt his timeless spirit through the house. Sometimes, now, sitting in my own tiny kitchen, I can feel it, the warm wash of love. But at night, when my sisters and I were alone, and my mother was out, I thought the moon must have
iced over when my father died, casting a cold glow over the house of his dreams. We were left to live in his haunted place.

When I go back home, the house is still all filled up with him. I wonder if that’s why my mother has stayed in it all these years. My mother doesn’t talk about my father anymore, but it floats in the air around her, what his death has cost.

In the Coopers’ bathroom I looked in the mirror on the medicine-cabinet door, and steadied myself against the sink. My hair had grown longer that year, and rode the middle of my back. My round, baby face had finally chiseled itself into a shape I was no longer embarrassed of. I saw the difference, the way boys stopped on the street to look at me. It felt good to have their eyes on mine if it meant I could become remade from one of Lilly’s daughters into a girl someone desired. My mother taught us early how important it was to make sure a man couldn’t live without you. She based all of our lives on that notion.

After my father died my mother, who was only twenty-five, woke up each morning, put on the same white sweatshirt and ankle-length black stretch pants that clung to her thin legs, and tied her hair back with a black string. She wore not a stitch of makeup. This time was when I felt connected to her, when I snuggled up next to her on the couch before bed at night and she dreamily stroked the top of my hair.

My sisters and I played in the deserted winter field at the end of the street and came back with chapped red cheeks and
dirty fingernails to find Lilly sitting cross-legged on the couch watching the snow begin to build outside her window. She held a magazine in her lap, though the pages were rarely turned. The same pained look would be in my mother’s face when, sometimes, with no warning, at the supper table, or standing in the grocer’s checkout line, a memory would seize her and her eyes would cloud up. She’d take a deep breath, will back her strength, and smile at us.

My mother’s grief was mostly unspoken, only a slow, steady throbbing that permeated the body of the house. She sometimes spent an entire afternoon indoors doing crossword puzzles or staring into space. In the morning she made bowls of cereal for us and then watched the day begin, completely unaware that another year had passed since her husband had died. But her eyes were soft, filled with part daylight and part darkness.

After Lilly rinsed the bowls and set them on the rack to dry, she’d prod us upstairs to dress in whatever we could find, and paid no notice when our socks and sweaters began to fade.

Nobody came to the house and nobody called. After my father’s death, we had been cut loose of the world and our connections. When my father’s family was face-to-face with us, we seemed to reflect back what they had lost; our presence was too painful. My mother—she was still a young woman then—was pitied more than loved. We felt as if we were a pack of girls to stay away from. Still, those were days when we were still connected as a family, in the three or four years after my father died. Even though my mother was ensconced in her grief, my sisters and I were a part of it. Nothing had happened yet to hint that we would not be saved.

In those years my mother would sit on the couch all day clipping pictures from magazines and newspapers while the TV ran.
Gilligan’s Island
or the other mindless shows she watched
would be interrupted by a news flash. More troops were being sent to Vietnam; each day thousands of American soldiers were killed. Meanwhile my mother occupied herself with cutouts while my sisters and I played on the floor making flimsy houses out of a deck of cards. She clipped prints, photographs, pictures of certain objects she liked: furniture, gardens, bouquets of flowers, women in exciting, fashionable dresses. She had acquired a peculiar passion for snipping and saving. Soon she had shoe boxes and hatboxes and folders overflowing with samples of things in the world she loved. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “I’m trying to capture something,” and then drifted away again. Before my father died she collected old pictures and postcards she’d find at local flea markets and junk sales and she took them out from the baskets where she stored them. She made scenes of garden parties, blond children playing in the sun, men and women embracing. Sometimes she’d clip African mothers from
National Geographic
. She brought the outside world inside our house so she would never have to leave home.

When she felt particularly blue, she’d snip black-and-white photographs of catastrophes. A woman who had lost a son in a boating accident; a picture of a family mourning a plane crash. Sometimes she’d clip articles from the obituaries. I watched her make this paper menagerie of dreams and nightmares, which was stuffed and folded at night’s end, and tucked under the couch.

One day Lilly slept until late afternoon. She finally came downstairs to find us transfixed by the television. President Kennedy had been shot. My mother grew hysterical. She crumpled a Kleenex in her hand as Walter Cronkite reported the tragedy. The day of President Kennedy’s funeral Lilly was still beside herself. She opened a new box of Kleenex and hunkered down
in front of the television and watched the processional. Her eyes were glued to the screen as Jackie stepped out of the limousine holding the hands of her two small children. “That poor woman,” Lilly said over and over, as if she were guardian of Jackie’s fate.

When I picture those years when my mother was a widow, it’s like this: my mother in her bedroom fast asleep all day, or working on her cut-outs, Ruthie staring out the window, her long braids wrapped around her head in contemplation, and Louise and me playing tic-tac-toe in the cellar.

The summer before
I entered second grade, something changed. My mother seemed to realize that we could no longer live in seclusion, that the world expected more from us. Maybe my mother was getting bored, clipping and sorting all day, stuffed in our house like dirty, used-up socks in a drawer. Maybe she simply needed to be touched by another person besides her daughters to feel vital again. Nevertheless, once she stepped out of our isolated cocoon, nothing was the same. It was no longer just the four of us bundled together like a package.

My mother had decided she had to do something to change our lives. At first, she changed her cutout world. One day I was watching her, as usual. The purple light of dusk had crept through the windows. I looked down from the couch at my mother’s newest composition. The entire living room floor was laid out in elaborate festive party images. I remember the cutouts of men and women dancing, and a long buffet table covered with a lace cloth. On top were crystal wineglasses filled with champagne. In the center of the scene was a grand
piano topped with a lilies-of-the-valley bouquet. Up above sailed colorful butterflies and powder-white clouds. Paper doilies cut in the shape of furniture were carefully arranged around the garden on my mother’s imaginary canvas. By this time I never questioned what she was doing day after day, alone in the house; that in her grief she had become eccentric.

As I looked closer the scene came more strikingly into focus. While it was impossible to remember every detail from the cutout world she was creating, there was one image I’ll never forget. My eyes rested in the right corner on a black-and-white photograph: It was a picture of my father and mother cutting a three-tiered wedding cake. All that evening she lingered with a pair of scissors in her hand, sipping cups of tea and reflecting, as though she were trying to savor her memories of her wedding, my father, her happiness, to store them in a place she’d never lose them.

My mother grew up in East Cleveland, on a block where houses were two and three stories high and lined one beside the other. It was a community of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. Lilly told us stories of how her father’s friends used to play cards in the basement while Aunt Rose made big meals of stuffed cabbage, borscht, noodle pudding, and sweet and yeast breads for everyone who happened to stop by on a Sunday. Aunt Rose and my grandfather were siblings. My mother was eight years old when her mother, Dora Rosenberg, died of a brain aneurysm. Afterward, no longer able to live in the house his wife had inhabited, my grandfather and mother moved into
Aunt Rose’s two-family. Aunt Rose became my mother’s second mother.

Sometimes in the evenings Lilly would stretch out on the couch and take down her photo album, which seemed sacred to her, like a bible. In one picture my father and mother are inside Aunt Rose’s house. My mother is dressed in black loafers and stretch pants, leaning against my father. Her hair is irregularly parted, and her eyes are burning with happiness. It’s one of the few photographs of my parents together.

Before my father died, we used to go to my great-aunt Rose’s house every Friday night for the Sabbath.

“Hi, Daddy,” Lilly flirted with her father, as if she was still a young girl, the minute she opened the heavy storm door to their house. When we walked in the door, my grandfather was usually sitting in his leather recliner smoking his pipe. The cherry scent of his favorite tobacco was on his breath, and the prickle of his six-o’clock shadow scratched our cheeks when he hugged us. If we listened we could hear the sounds of Lilly and Aunt Rose already chattering in the kitchen.