House Under Snow (6 page)

Roaming the house after Austin’s party, I kept playing that first night we’d made out over in my mind, wondering if I had invented it all.

The living room was dark and I stumbled over a pan of dried paint my mother had left in the middle of the floor. That year, which marked Ruthie’s going to live with Aunt Rose, I had turned sixteen. My mother had sworn off men. For years men had come in and out of our house as if it were some kind of salon. But by the time I turned sixteen, there hadn’t been a single man around. Lilly couldn’t balance how much she required from a man with the disappointment she felt once she had one. When Austin happened into my life, Lilly had had her fill.

“I’m turning over a new leaf,” she said to Louise and me on that snowy, arctic day, after the car that came to take Ruthie to the airport had vanished into the winter storm. “I want no more men in this house.” I was just beginning to appreciate how the presence of the opposite sex could light up a life, give it purpose and meaning. My mother couldn’t see that maybe she had picked the wrong men for her, or that her expectations were out of whack. Maybe she was afraid that Louise and I were going to leave, too, if she didn’t shape up and get her act together. But when I stopped to think about what she said, it made absolutely no sense. It was another one of my mother’s
private conversations with herself that sometimes filtered out, unconsciously from her mouth. There hadn’t been a man around in three years.

Instead of finding some constructive way to prepare for her future, now that she’d sworn off men, she found a new obsession: painting our house. She used Ruthie’s old room for a place to store paint cans and brushes. She hounded me for days with color swatches. In the living room her brushes and rollers were soaking in a bucket of turpentine on top of newspapers. I switched on a lamp and looked at the walls. The far wall was still faded white, contrasting the right wall, which Lilly had painted a disturbing shade of green. And bunched in a ball was an old cobalt blue shirt she had used as a rag. I moved to the couch, laid my head back, and closed my eyes. They burned from the paint fumes.

Shortly after Lilly dropped Steve Kennedy, I came downstairs one Saturday and found my mother still dressed in the clothes she had worn the evening before, curled up in a ball asleep on the couch. After Steve Kennedy she dated Robert McBride. He took us to Euclid Beach and let us ride the roller coaster three times while he made out with my mother on a nearby bench.

On the floor in front of the couch lay a pair of high-heeled black pumps, and Lilly’s silk stockings and red garter belt were slung over the arm of the couch. A bottle of creme de menthe, two cordial glasses, and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts sat on the coffee table. The sticky mint smell of the liqueur hung in the room.

“Mom, Mom, wake up,” I said. Even as my mother slept the unconscious sleep of intoxication, I knew her thoughts
were threaded to the broad shoulders and slicked-back hair of Robert McBride, whom she’d said good-bye to barely an hour before.

Dressed only in a tight black evening dress hiked up to her thighs, Lilly huddled further into the couch.

Louise trailed downstairs rubbing her eyes.

“Something’s the matter with Mom,” I said. I must have been eight by then.

Louise touched my mother’s cheek. She shook her shoulders. Lilly’s body was warm and limber, but when I picked up her hand and let it go, it fell smack down on the couch.

“We better wake Ruthie,” Louise said. The sound of her bare feet stuck to the cold wood floor as she ran up the stairs.

“She’s drunk,” Ruthie said, as soon as she saw our mother in a lump on the couch. “Anna, make some coffee.”

I filled the percolator with ground coffee and water and plugged it in, as I had watched my mother do nearly every day.

Ruthie turned the television set on full volume. Louise sat next to our mother on the couch, pressed her lips into an O, and blew her breath over our mother’s face. “Come on, Mom,” she said. “Get up.”

I brought in a tray with a pot of coffee, a cup, a bowl filled with warm water, and a washcloth.

Louise began to hum
the hills are alive
from
The Sound of Music
. She did that when she got nervous.

“Help me sit her up,” I said.

With some effort we propped our mother to a sitting position against the back of the couch, but her body was as floppy as a rag doll’s.

“Wake up, Mother,” Ruthie said, shaking Lilly’s shoulders.

I dipped the washcloth into the bowl and sponged my mother’s forehead.

“What’s going on here?” Lilly said, in a tiny, cracked voice. She shook her head and practically slapped me in the face as she stretched her arms.

“Why couldn’t you wake up?” Louise said. Sitting with her legs propped against her chest, she pulled her nightgown down from her knees to cover her bare feet. To save money, during the night Lilly kept our thermostat on low.

“Because I’m tired,” Lilly said, irritated. “Isn’t that allowed? I’m going upstairs to lie down. I’m not feeling well.”

Lilly hiked her knit dress to her hips, cradled her head against her shoulder, and shuffled up the stairs to her bedroom. “Don’t get into trouble,” she called behind her.

I sat on the couch and looked out the window again into the glacier sky. My eyes moved to the grass on the front lawn. It was covered, like a truth you knew was there, but didn’t want to see, with icy dew. I wanted to believe this was just a temporary thing, an accident. That Lilly would get up in a few hours and return to us as our mother, not the mysterious woman who went out at night as if she were expecting to bring back heaven. But I was wrong. That mother we had known seemed so far from us.

In the afternoon, when our mother woke up, I caught a glimpse of the old Lilly, the one who sat in our house and sighed or daydreamed by the window most of the day, and that gave me hope. After lunch we went out to the yard to play. Lilly was studying her crossword puzzles or staring out the window, watching. When she caught our eyes, she tapped her nails against the glass and gave a wave. Then we showed off for her: Louise was good at handstands, and Ruthie could turn three cartwheels in a row. Lilly liked to watch our gymnastics on the soft lawn.

It was quiet in the yard, and time went on and on. The day
nearly lasted forever. When the sky darkened and Lilly changed into her yellow robe, she opened the screen door and whistled for us to come in. Upstairs, Ruthie supervised while Louise and I washed our hair in the sink and scrubbed our ears, followed by the usual fight over who got to wear the prettiest nightgown. Lilly came upstairs with the bedtime snack, and we were quiet and good for her. We crawled into our cool beds and said our prayers. Lilly sat on the rocker and sang her tired song in the twilight.

But as Lilly continued going out, nearly every night of the week, the times we had our mother with us grew fewer and far between. The men that came and went swarmed together like bees, turning our house into a hive of seduction and betrayal. Lilly rarely treated them any differently from each other. I began to hate the way she primped and groomed for them; how much attention she paid to herself, as if she were a work of art.

Not only was she out most nights, but she slept in most of the morning, sometimes the entire afternoon, until around four-thirty, when we’d hear our mother’s bedroom door creak open. I dropped whatever I was doing and ran up the stairs, Louise at my heels.

“Hello, angels,” Lilly said, unaware that we were still in our nightgowns; that the entire Saturday had passed. “Should I make cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, or grilled cheese?” she asked, as if this was all perfectly natural.

Not only did our mother forget about making our dinner or making sure we were up in time for school, she seemed to turn her back on God. My mother had neglected all the Jewish holidays once our father died. I remembered our Friday-night dinners at Aunt Rose’s before the Sabbath. The smell of
the doughy challah fresh from the oven, the lighting of the candles, the prayers all had disappeared. Lilly no longer went to synagogue, not even for the High Holy Days. On Saturday mornings she dropped us off in front of the synagogue, and picked us up after services in the parking lot, sometimes an hour late. I surmised she was angry with God because he had taken her husband away. But, unlike my mother, I sought comfort in the rabbi’s sermons. I let the deep and guttural sound of his voice, which echoed in the hollow synagogue, float over me. The Bible stories of Abraham, and Moses, and the ancient Jews from a lost land having to endure droughts, famines, and plagues meant that we were put on earth for a higher purpose. What the Jews had suffered made what my family had lost seem less important. I thought that maybe if my mother came to synagogue she could learn how to banish her black moods with faith. But my mother was firm on the subject. She said whenever she entered a synagogue she began to cry.

I wish my mother could have found sustenance, if not in religion, then somewhere inside herself. The only place she found it, briefly, was with men. I noticed how her cheeks looked sunken, her complexion waxy in the morning, and then rosy and full as soon as the sun went down. My friends’ mothers spent the day shopping for groceries, cleaning, preparing long suppers. But in my mother’s spare time, when she wasn’t on a date, she daydreamed, tended to her bath, or slept. I wished for the normalcy of a freshly plowed driveway, the busy sounds of cake mixers, eggshells grinding in the disposal. The hum of a healthy life.

Sometimes I stared at the gazebo and convinced myself that if I willed it, I could conjure my father there in the icy circle
the sun made through the rafters. I imagined us all sitting on the floor, my father with his arm draped around my mother’s shoulder, my mother holding Louise in her arms, all of us dressed in our winter coats. If I closed my eyes and concentrated hard, I could still hear it, my father’s voice, telling us about happiness. About how the trees, and the grass, and the flowers he would plant once the frost had lifted were all blessings, and about how fortunate he was, to be with the woman he loved most in the world, my mother, and these fine daughters. I could hear the words,
these fine daughters
, and told myself it was enough.

I was distracted by a small tap on the screen of our living room window. At night, in the late spring, the hot air was like a layer separating you from the rest of the world. Nearly an hour, maybe more, since I got home from Austin’s party, I was still downstairs, lying on our couch, doing a play-by-play of the night. I sensed that Austin would come back for me. Even then, before we’d ever made love, it was the way we communicated, in silence, by touch and scent.

I sprang up and peered outside. My mouth felt dry from the aftertaste of diluted beer. Austin was crouched in the bed of rhododendrons, staring back at me with lustful eyes; I felt a pinch in my chest. I quietly opened the front door, let in a swallow of air.

“What time is it?” I said.

“Around two o’clock.”

“
Shhhhh
,” I said, when he practically tripped on a bucket of Lilly’s paint, motioning with my eyes upstairs. I didn’t want him to wake my mother.

I stood with my back to him. He lifted the hair up from my shoulders. I was still mad about Rita. I remembered watching the way Steve Kennedy looked at my mother with that same hangdog look, and then how quickly he vanished. “What are you doing?” I quipped. “Why do people think they can just touch you?”

“I shouldn’t have come, is that what you’re saying?” Austin turned me around and searched my face.

I wasn’t an extraordinarily pretty girl, but I knew I would do. There was vulnerability in my eyes and shyness in my walk, but I wasn’t timid enough not to invite a boy’s attention. I had brown eyes and long, wavy hair a boy could twist through his fingers. My signature pair of silver hoop earrings dangled from my earlobes. I thought I wore my desperation on my face where everyone could see it.

As Austin looked into my eyes, then reached for my hand, I felt the hollow place I imagined his mother left in his heart like an opening in a tree, the kind a scared animal wanted to burrow inside for the long, bleak winter.

Outside, a late-night storm pressed against the sky. Wind whipped up the hot, muggy air and cut through it like a knife. It sent a chilling, owl-like sound through the house. The sound of rain against glass.

“No, I wanted you to come,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here.” I moved back to the living room, toward the couch, and closed my eyes for a moment. In his presence I felt the world stop.

“Sit down,” I said forcefully. Now I would tell him what to do. What
I
wanted.

“Anna?” Austin moved closer. “Do you want me to leave?”

“I just don’t understand why you’re here.” I arrogantly ran my fingers through my hair. Of course I knew. “How was the party?” It came out harshly.

“It’s still going on,” he whispered. “It’s just that once you left, I didn’t want to be there anymore.” He moved to the couch next to me. His blue jeans were faded, and worn at the knees. “How come you wanted to leave?”

I was speechless. How could I confess that it was because I felt irrelevant and blank without the thumbprint of his attention?

“Okay, so now comes the part where I have to pry everything out of you? You know what your problem is? You walk around thinking you’re better than everyone. You could have at least tried to have a good time.”

It wasn’t that I thought I was better than anyone. He had read me all wrong.

“How would you know about it?”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“I know everything about you. I got the goods.”

His shirt hung out from his jeans, and was open at the neck. His chest was the color of porcelain and sweaty, same as his face. And after he’d made that comment about me, his eyes registered an emotion I hadn’t interpreted before: I saw how vulnerable he was.

“I said something wrong,” I said. I touched his face. “I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re here.”

He shrugged in that offhand way that boys do. He didn’t hold anything against a person for long. Or at least I thought so. “So do you forgive me?” he said.