House Under Snow (28 page)

“Anna,” Louise said. She dumped her books on her bed. She had just come back from school. “Do you think Aunt Rose has talked to Mom yet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think we should tell her?” Louise said.

I had told Louise what Lilly had done the morning after, when I ran into her at school. We sat on the school green and smoked a cigarette. No more needed to be said. Louise must have weighed ninety pounds. Finally I saw what I should have seen long ago—my sister needed help. When you love someone, see her so closely every day, it’s so easy to delude yourself, not to see what’s staring you in the face. It was clear to both of us what had to be done. From the pay phone at school, we called Aunt Rose and arranged it.

“I’ll tell her,” I said.

“What will happen to her?” Louise asked.

Neither of us had an answer.

I went downstairs to find my mother. Lilly was outside, wearing an old coat and a scarf around her head, sipping a cup of tea. She watched the snow begin to fall over her lawn of autumn-flowering crocuses. In her face was that look of wanting to become one with the landscape, to dissolve. The air carried the smell of someone burning logs in a fireplace, of burned wood and ash.

“I’m over here, Anna.” Lilly threw up her arms. Dusk was just beginning to steal the light from the sky, and Lilly looked almost consumed by it. She breathed deeply, inhaling the smell of wet leaves, grass, trees. “It’s so magnificent. The first snowfall,” she said. “Come sit with me.”

“I can’t now, Mom. I want to tell you something.”

“Hear that?” Lilly said. “It’s a nightingale. It’s such a sad cry. I heard it all day. It was as if she were speaking to me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, because, whatever my mother felt, I was going to feel the opposite. She yawned long and languidly, still as if she were entitled, as if no one else had felt anything or mattered.

“I have to tell you something,” I repeated again. “And then I’m not going to talk to you anymore. I’m not going to talk to you for a long time.”

“I spoke to Aunt Rose this afternoon. She told me you and Louise are going to live with her. I know you’re both leaving me,” she said. “All my children. Gone.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I just wanted you to know.”

“I warned you, darling,” Lilly said. “I told you Austin needed you.”

“You don’t know anything about what he needs. You don’t know anything about me and Austin.”

“It was a mistake,” Lilly said.

“No, Mom.” This time I didn’t turn my eyes away. I wasn’t going to forgive her. “It was more than a mistake.”

“How can you and Louise leave me now?” she demanded.

It was so twisted. In my mother’s eyes, I was at fault for wanting to leave her.

My rage against her was useless. No matter what I felt she wasn’t going to be accountable. It gives you a particular strength, a coldness, having to bear another person’s weakness. It is amazing to me, the burden of love, the weight it must bear.

That day, I
took a walk around the house. I wanted to make sure it was planted deep in my memory. For months my mother’s purpose had been to repair and salvage, to clean the house of everything that lay dormant all those years with fresh coats of paint. The house sparkled with her efforts, but underneath the layers of paint I could still make out the outlines of each painted-over shadow.

She had carefully taken up the canvas from the living room, den, and dining room. Each room had been painstakingly planned, one an extension of the other. Each stroke of paint allowed her spirit to come alive inside her house, until she owned it completely, until there wasn’t a trace of our childhood fingerprints on the walls. Our childhood pictures, paintings—all those she had stuffed in drawers, tucked away.

The walls in the living room were painted a forest green, giving an eerie texture to the room. My eyes followed the walls into the dining room, painted in burgundy. The mauve alcoves, low ceilings, and her carefully tended plants at the windows made the house look as austere as a dense wood.

I felt the trees outside beating their leaves against the roof. The wind, still in full force, whipped and whirled the falling snow in gusts.

That’s how I
always imagine my mother, alone in her sanctuary—like a house cat, shut in, watching a bird perched on the limb of a tree, but afraid to step outside—among her memories, living like ghosts in the creaks and crevices of our house. That day the snow was building a white layer around the house in drifts and swirls, falling over the roof, covering the branches, windowsills, lining the gutters and eaves. I wish I could say she had changed. There was a time I might have written it that way.

After Louise and I left that night, I didn’t talk to my mother. Louise, Ruthie, and Aunt Rose gave me occasional reports. I no longer understood what my place was in her life. When I open the newspaper and read about mothers who abandon or harm their children, husbands who murder their wives, I am terrified by how complicated we are, and the terrible weight our pasts exert on our future. What freedom there is in realizing one cannot shape or mold another person. Sometimes I see the outline of a leaf, or the black center of a sunflower and feel the uniqueness of each thing. On occasion now I visit, and sometimes my mother’s out in the garden or tending to her houseplants, and for a brief time I can forgive her.

The first time I called Lilly, I was fully established in my own apartment, where I no longer had to worry about pasting together a life. It was from a place where I knew who I was and understood that what I had built could never be taken from me. For years I had dreamed of creating a home in a place that
had nothing to do with any home I had known. And that’s eventually what I did. I created a home in a city full of skyscrapers and millions of people. Just a few hundred square feet of studio apartment, painted all white, with room for a sofa bed and bookshelves for my books. It had to be small and inexpensive, so that when something needed repair, I could afford to take care of it. I didn’t care if I had to wait tables, bartend, wash people’s clothes, and clean their houses to support myself. I promised myself that I would never be like my mother. Still, in the back of my mind there’s always that threat of an avalanche in the distance, reminding me that everything can be wiped out in a single instance. To quiet the feeling I sometimes have to walk outside in the middle of a snowy day, or stand at the edge of the ocean and inhale as much air as I can in my lungs and hold it there.

I don’t try and change my mother anymore. I no longer wonder what is in her thoughts and prayers. It’s enough to make sure she’s comfortable. I always have my antennae up—we all do—to make sure she can’t hurt us. We visit. We speak. We try and love her when we can.

On the day of my wedding, I plan to wear the antique wedding dress my mother wore when she married my father. Months ago she had it dry-cleaned and sent it to me. It fits as if it were made for me.

The day I
left my mother, I moved to the front window to have one last look. The entire lawn was covered—a snow-dusted field of violet, yellow, and baby blue autumn crocuses my mother had planted. There was no grass, just flower after flower. Many of the crocuses had dried out, though some still
shimmered with vibrancy, even in the cold. And the snow fell on top of the crocuses, covering them so that you could only see the tips of their leaves, the tiny bits of color. My mother was so proud of her crocuses. She had planted them at the end of the summer, when she found out how easy they were to care for. How with a lawn full of crocuses, she wouldn’t have to pay one of the boys down the street to cut the lawn.

“These are autumn-flowering crocuses,” I hear my mother say to me now, just like she did the day after she’d planted them. “If you plant them in late September they will last until October or even November. Just when you think the summer is over, they bloom again. Baron Van Brunow are the dark ones. The dark, lilac-colored ones are called Early Perfection; the sweet purple are Pupera Gradafolia. The most splendid is the Queen of the Blues, the pure lilac ones. They remind me of you, Anna. You’re so strong, darling,” she said, reaching out to me and stroking my hair.

At last the house itself, from a distance, seemed almost invisible in the snow; it stood as if in memorial to something no longer of the earth.

It kept growing colder as the day went on. You could feel inside your throat the snow’s damp mist, in your bones its cold beauty. By evening, before the car came to take Louise and me to the airport, the snow was nearly three inches high. On my finger was the ring Austin had given me that night behind the movie theater. The diamond chip was impossible to see under the dim light, but I felt the weight of the gold strand on my finger. I don’t need to see him anymore. I prefer to remember him as we were together once that summer so many years ago.

The snow softly settled on the roof, on top of the gutters,
the chimney; it draped over the branches of our trees. As the car pulled out from the driveway, our house receded into the frozen whiteness. By dawn the snow, pure and untouched, covered the bushes in front of our house, every crocus, until there wasn’t any green left, any color, not a trace.

For their support and friendship, I would like to thank Helen Schulman, Cheryl Pearl Sucher, and Diane Goodman. Immeasurable thanks to Lelia Ruckenstein, who patiently read more than one draft and offered insightful suggestions and comments. This book improved under her careful scrutiny. Sandra Bragman Lewis had faith in this project even when I didn’t. Thanks to Elizabeth Gaffney for her good eye and perceptive suggestions. I am in debt to my editor at Harcourt, André Bernard, for his care and expertise; to Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency for her wise counsel and conviction; and to Jin Auh. Thanks to Marian Ryan for her thorough copyediting. Thanks to Alice Mackenzie for her expertise regarding harness racing and track life. Lee Abbott read a portion of this book years ago, when I fled the halls of law school for the English department at Case Western Reserve University, and saw something in it worth pursuing. Frederick Busch read an early draft and offered invaluable suggestions. David Schwartz, my husband, stood beside me through it all. Special thanks to my son for his patience. I am forever grateful to them all.

I would like to thank the Western Reserve Historical Society Library for supplying research on the history of Chagrin Falls and to Starling Lawrence for his insight about colchicum, the fall crocus. And if Emily Brontë were alive, I would thank her for writing
Wuthering Heights
, a novel that has continued to enchant me.

1. Themes of abandonment—whether by death or design—run throughout this book: Lilly is abandoned by her mother, her husband, and finally her children; Austin is abandoned by his mother and rejected by his father; Lilly emotionally abandons Anna and her sisters. How are these themes carried out, and how does abandonment affect the life of each character?
   
2. Anna’s memories of her early childhood include regular observation of the Jewish holidays and traditions. After her father dies, though, Lilly rejects the faith. How does this affect Anna, in light of the stories Lilly tells about the death of her mother’s sister and parents during the Holocaust, and the death of Lilly’s mother, after living with her own survivor’s guilt?
   
3. When Lilly marries again, she marries an Irish Catholic. Consider the differences between Max’s behavior and world view and that of Lilly and her daughters. Why does Lilly marry outside her faith? How does this decision affect her daughters?
   
4. After her husband dies, Lilly’s whole identity is in question—she lived for (and, possibly through) her husband. On
   [>]
   , Anna observes, “[Lilly] needed a different kind of love to make herself feel alive.” How does this manifest itself in Lilly’s behavior toward her daughters? How does this observation—and Lilly’s behavior—affect Anna’s own sense of identity? How does it affect her relationships with the various men in her life—Austin, Max, and the memory of her father?
   
5. Anna’s childhood occurred during the 1960s and ’70s, the Vietnam era. What effect does this have on her, and how much of Lilly’s behavior is reflective of those influences?
   
6. Throughout the novel, Anna describes Lilly’s habit of cutting out hundreds of magazine images and storing them in boxes. What is Lilly doing with these pictures, and why does she do it? Does this behavior foreshadow her deteriorating mental state? What does the novel say about grief and its aftermath?
   
7. When Anna and Austin go horseback riding, Anna’s horse gets spooked, races off, and then throws her. Austin, frightened that Anna’s been injured, and also frustrated by her inability to help herself out of the situation, asks, “Can’t you for once be in control?” What does he mean by this, and how does it seem that Anna is out of control in other areas of her life? Why is Anna so seemingly passive at the outset of her relationship with Austin? How do her feelings change as the book progresses?
   
8. As Anna and Austin’s relationship develops, Austin shows her a model he’d built as a child, one they refer to as his “City of Nowhere.” What does the City of Nowhere mean to each of them, and why do they fantasize about living there?
   
9. On
   [>]
   , Anna observes, “I knew at an early age that you couldn’t live peacefully in isolation.” What does she mean by this? How did this realization affect choices she made in her adult life, and her relationships with those around her? Anna may be the only character in this novel, however, to have reached that conclusion. How are the other characters isolated—her mother, sisters, Austin?
   
10. When Lilly builds the shrine in her bedroom, Anna asks why her mother has saved these particular objects. Lilly tells her, “People don’t understand that the relationship with the dead doesn’t go away.” This seems to have both positive and negative ramifications for Lilly and Anna as individuals. What does Lilly’s statement mean as it relates to each of them?
    
11. At the conclusion of the novel both Lilly and Austin betray Anna. How does Bialosky foreshadow that climactic scene? Did you find it believable that a mother would hurt her daughter so cruelly? Why does Austin betray Anna?
    
12. On
    [>]
    , there’s a reference to the novel’s title—“Ours was like a house under snow, frozen since the day our father died.” What does Anna mean by this? Snow appears frequently throughout the novel—how does the author use this metaphor?
    
13. Throughout the novel, Anna refers to Emily Brontë’s
    Wuthering Heights
    and compares herself and Austin to Cathy and Heathcliff. What parallels can you draw between Brontë’s characters and Bialosky’s?
    
14. How did you react to Bialosky’s use of flashback to convey Anna’s story? What effect did that have on you while reading the book?