White Bird in a Blizzard (11 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I guess I’m surprised she could hold out this long. I guess if nothing else I thought she’d come back for money, or shoes, or something else she needed.”

“What about you?” Dr. Phaler sets those pale blue eyes on me. “Is it surprising that she could hold out this long on
you?
”

Now Dr. Phaler’s glaring at the floor, at the face of my bad mother projected on her expensive oriental rug. She does not approve of my mother. She is paid to disapprove of my mother. It is what psychologists like her do for a living all day all over this country—express outrage at the failings of our mothers.

But why? Among some species, it’s considered natural enough for a mother to gobble down her young—

A mother gets hungry.

A mother gets bored.

And who could blame her? As a baby, you were fat, and pukey, and dull. You knew only a handful of words, but she spent all day trying to talk to you. You clamped your mouth shut as she fed you, then knocked the spoon from her hands, laughed as it clanged across the floor. You shit your pants when she dressed you up, then screamed as she changed your clothes. You threw your shoe from the car window. You scratched your name in the paneling on the side of the station wagon.

“Do you love Mama?” she asked, and you shook your head
no, no, no
.

Not guilty by reason of insanity
, any reasonable jury could conclude.

“Kat,” she says, “I asked you a question. Aren’t you surprised that she could hold out a whole year on
you
?”

Dear, beautiful Dr. Phaler—

Angel of Naivete.

Angel of Stupid Questions.

For a year her predictability, her belief in the simplicity, the banality, of the human brain has thrilled and astounded and insulted me—

“No,” I say, and shake my head. “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

S
HE’S WEARING A WHITE NIGHTGOWN, STANDING IN THE
doorway of my bedroom. “Kat
,”
she says, “I put my hands in the water, and they disappeared.”

She holds her arms up, the sleeves of her nightgown slip down to the elbows, and I can see that the hands are gone
.

“What water?” I want to know: I’m her daughter. I’m worried about my own hands
.

“The dishwater
,”
she says. “I was feeling the bottom of the sink for a spoon. The water was too cold
.”

I look at my fingers, which are longer than I remember them. They look fragile, and thin. From now on I’ll be more careful, I think.

I look at my mother again.

There’s no blood.

It’s as if her wrists have sucked the hands into their sockets like something stared at too long, sealed up cleanly in two sealed eyes.

P
HIL’S MOTHER SEARCHES THE ROOM WITH HER EAR, COCKING
her head, moving it from side to side. “Do you hear that?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Hear what?”

“It sounds like scratching,” she says, then makes the sound, “
Scratch, scratch, scratch
.”

“The furnace?” I offer, but she seems unconvinced.

“No,” she says. “It’s electrical. Like radio static. But regular. Rhythmical.”

Phil looks annoyed: One good thing about having a blind mother is being able to roll your eyes right at her without getting slapped. Mrs. Hillman’s face is pointed in his direction, but she can’t see his expression—the boredom and total irritation with which he glares at her.

Still, I’m embarrassed for Mrs. Hillman. I look at her feet. Shoeless, in beige panty hose, they look a bit like Cornish hens, or fists—gnarled, with crooked, plucked wings. Her legs aren’t long enough for those feet to touch the carpet as she sits back in my mother’s stiff armchair, which also has stunted wings. She’s a small woman, with drab curls. No makeup. She’s wearing a housedress with big brown flowers on it—who ever saw a brown flower?—as if the garden’s gone stale, all the roses overdone by sun or rusted in the rain, the gardener having long ago defaulted on his obligations.

Perhaps the salesgirls had a big, silent laugh behind the cash register as the blind lady bought that dress.

Mrs. Hillman is nothing like the other mothers in Garden Heights with their chunky gold jewelry, their designer slacks. She’s nothing like
my
mother, who, despite her fondness for Phil, couldn’t stand Mrs. Hillman.

“I know the new neighbors,” I said one evening, trying to sound casual. Mrs. Lefkowsky, who’d lived next door to us all the years we’d lived in Garden Heights, had died. It was winter then, too, and a damp snow had begun to fall outside—big, white flakes in the pewter blue 5
P.M.
sky. My mother was coming in from outside, and I could see that snow behind her when she opened the front door and stepped into the living room, a blanket of it covering Garden Heights with a camouflage of purity. Some of it was in her hair.

Next door, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s porch light was on, but, of course, no one was home. She’d been dead for a month. The shades were pulled in each of her square windows, as if to separate the dark emptiness on the outside from the dark emptiness inside. Snow had buried her front steps, too—cloaked the roof in white corpse hair, and I remembered my mother’s bitter adages about snow, quotations taken from her own mother:

The farmer’s wife in heaven is plucking her white hen.

Or,
God is beating his angels again
.

I thought of our dead neighbor, Mrs. Lefkowsky, wearing a pair of skeletal wings in a frenetic afterlife. God going after her with his fists. A flurry of spine and feathers, which turned silver, then grizzled, as they hit the ground.

We hadn’t liked her much, or thought about her often—Mrs. Lefkowsky. She was just the Daffodil Lady, the Widow Next Door. And then she died, and her daughter, along with her stubby husband, pulled up in a U-Haul and hauled her things away. My mother and I watched them from the kitchen window one Saturday afternoon. They were bundled in down jackets, stumbling across the front yard as they struggled with an olive green army trunk between them.

That trunk looked so heavy, I wondered what could possibly be in it. Salvaged bricks? Gold doubloons?

When that trunk slipped between them, it tore a gaping hole in the daughter’s jacket, and a breath of feathers flew out. From the kitchen window it looked as if the daughter’s body were a mattress full of fluff, hacked up. I could see her husband pick them out of his eyes, knock them out of his hair, spit them into the wind like a dry, choking snow.

My father was sitting in his La-Z-Boy with an ankle up on his knee, shaking his plaid slipper. “They’re having some trouble over there,” my mother said to him. “Maybe you should offer to help.”

My mother had worried, after Mrs. Lefkowky’s house was emptied out, that it might be sold to someone of poor quality, someone who might put plastic garden ornaments in the yard, someone with sticky children. So I was eager to give her the good news about Phil and his mother. She’d just come from the dentist, of whom she’d spoken highly for years, and often, and she was smiling.

Apparently, Dr. Heine was an attentive dentist. He polished my mother’s teeth like miniature windows, gagging my mother pleasantly with his fat fingers, leaning over her in a silent and intimate embrace, mingling his minty breath with hers. When she opened her mouth wider, his white shoulder pressed into her neck. “Beautiful,” he said, fingering her gums. “You must take good care of these babies.”

My mother would swallow with her mouth open and try to smile, as if he were strangling her with her consent, with her blessing choking her to death. Then he’d hold a mirror up so she could see her teeth for herself, and she looked gorgeous in that mirror—flushed, lovely, dark hair subtly mussed, a bit disheveled. “See you in six months?” Dr. Heine would ask, and there was a throaty touch of longing in his voice.

Once, after an appointment with him, my mother seemed so satisfied at dinner, sang Dr. Heine’s praises so eloquently, that my father finally got up from the table and stomped up the stairs.

“Your father’s jealous of my dentist,” my mother said as if I hadn’t noticed.

“So who are the new neighbors?” she asked, slipping her coat down her arms, feeling the coat closet for a hanger. The living room was brightly static with TV light, and, in it, I might have looked blue faced, drowned to her. I was still chubby. My hair was straight and brown, cut in a bit of a page boy. My eyes were blue:
good coloring
, at least. When and if I melted off some of that fat, I’d have that good coloring, and those good bones, which I got directly from her.

“Phil Hillman, and his mother,” I said. “They’re moving into Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. Phil is in my class. Phil Hillman.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“He told me today. He told me they bought the house next to ours.”

“How did he know where you lived?” I could see it puzzled and bothered her that a boy knew where I lived. For years, she’d thought of herself as an ocean, and me as a small boat in it.

I shrugged. I said, “He said he saw me in the yard.”

“Do you like him?” she asked, turning her back to me, hanging up the coat. “Not a thug or something?”

“He’s great,” I said. “I like him a lot.” I paused. I wanted to say this gently, knowing what I knew about her, about what I meant to her. “He asked me out. Next Saturday. We’re going to a dance.”

My mother turned toward me again, and her mouth swung open in a small hole of surprise, but she managed to turn it into a yawn. “Well, well,” she said casually, indifferently. “Well,” she said, as if she’d only half heard me, as if, after hours on a treadmill, she’d just stepped off.

My mother inhaled the little
0
with her yawn, then exhaled it over my shoulder, but her heart was beating hard. I could see that. I might as well have dragged her to the freezer by her hair, stuck her face right into it and made her breathe those rolling clouds of frost. In there, she might have seen her own face in a dentist’s hands—a blurred plate, the features she was so pleased with dissolving as she stared.

My mother came over to where I sat on the couch, pushed the straight brown bangs off my forehead, ran a finger from my brow down to my chin, passed her thumb across my lips, which were an exact duplicate of her lips—but smoother, younger, sweeter. “Well,” she said, “you’re the girl next door now, I guess. Pretty romantic.”

I shook my bangs back. “We’ll see,” I said. “It’s just one date.”

“Fat girls have to be pragmatic,” I’d heard her say once about a cousin of my father’s, a fat girl who’d married a crippled man. She’d said it as though she were talking about that cousin, but I knew she was talking about me.

Still, it was my first date, and I was her only child, her younger self, all she had, had ever had, was ever going to have—her life, going on without her, going out with a boy she hadn’t met, to a dance she wouldn’t be at, next to a movie she hadn’t seen, and she might never see.

Already, she was starting to vanish.

I hadn’t even gone on that date yet.

I was still fat.

I was still a virgin.

But my mother could already see what would happen next:

She pictured my twin bed with its starched sheets empty. She pictured me in a bridal gown. She pictured me in a supermarket pulling a child of my own by its fat arm past the fruits and vegetables. She pictured me in a white coffin wearing a lace dress, my face like a wax mask, and a delicate spray of baby’s breath in my clenched fist.

But something wild was going on in that coffin. She looked closer. I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn’t me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life?

And then she realized—

That
was her.

Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.

Perhaps she gasped when she saw that.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, P
HIL AND HIS MOTHER MOVED IN, AND
my mother was the first person who went over to say hello.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m Eve Connors. Next door.”

A woman slipped her thin hand out the storm door, and the hand passed sleepily through the chill mist without direction. My mother had to catch it in midair. She pressed it into her own hand and felt it give—small-boned, with thin, cool skin. “I’m Gina Hillman.” Then, “Come in.”

There was a bit of humidity in the cold, a current of warmth running under it, and that current smelled like thawed water, old leaves, atomized ocean—as if a huge fan, pointed in our direction, had been turned on off the coast of Florida, and, by the time the wind kicked it up and billowed it to us here in our northeastern pool-table pocket of Ohio, it had accumulated the odors of the other states: the fish hatcheries, the sheep farms’ eely wool, the stripped mountains and muddy football fields of Kentucky, the light blue haze of ditto fumes left over from the sixties that still hovered over hundreds of elementary schools between us—that chafed smell of paper, factory waste, the rheumy, old-lady smell of lace, dank and sweet, a fine drizzle of it in our faces. The telephone poles stood out stiff and black against the haze-white sky, like crucifixes minus Christs.

“I’m happy to meet you,” Mrs. Hillman said, ushering my mother in.

My mother had never been in Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. It was oppressive. The ceiling was beige, and claustrophobically low. The carpet was worn away in patches, as if someone had stood in the same few spots, night after night for years, pawing at the ground like a horse for hours before moving on to another spot.

It was a shabby replica of our own house.

And the new neighbors had bad furniture, too, as bad as Mrs. Lefkowsky could possibly have had—scarlet curtains, vinyl lounge chairs, a coffee table as long as a coffin, with anchors adorning each end. There was even an afghan on the overstaffed sofa with an embroidered replica of the Liberty Bell.