White Bird in a Blizzard (15 page)

“The Savages” our teams are called. Mickey’s job is to urge them on.

But, according to Mickey, the other girls on the squad won’t even sit next to her on the bus as it lurches and wallows its way across Ohio for our team’s away games. That bus, Mickey says, smells like panties.

FDS. Scent: Spring Rain.

As if a cool May afternoon were clamped between those cheerleaders’ legs, its sweet mist rising from their crotches, condensing on the windows of the bus.

Those pretty things will not, apparently, accept Mickey as one of them. Instead, they huddle together, swapping a hairbrush that grows more and more beautiful with silk and gold as it passes.

But, as I’ve said, Mickey could inject team spirit into the heart of a dead man—cartwheeling, scissoring, frantic zeal. Dancing to the flat music of the pep band, she is a morale machine. Arms and legs and voice, the tilt of her head, the sway of her hips, synchronized. More than once, Beth and I have sat together in the brisk wind of a football game and watched our friend go wild with blood lust on the field, leaping, backlit by the pure glare of stadium light and scoreboard neon
—“Ho ho, hey hey, we are going to make you pay
”—and shaken our heads in admiring disbelief. After a close game, Mickey might be hoarse, or even voiceless, for days.

But the acne scars along her jawline and on her chin sometimes burn purple beneath the skin—angry, permanent scars, seething, rising to the surface on damp days, especially in the harsh light of late winter or early spring. I never knew Mickey when she had acne, though I’ve know Mickey for what seems like forever, and she’s always had those scars. Perhaps she was born scarred.

“Make new friends,” my mother used to say when Mickey and Beth left our house together, cutting out the back door like a pair of dull knives. She refused to learn their names. She called them Becky and Mindy right to their faces. “Those two are morbid. What’s the matter with them?” But I’ve never wanted other friends. I
like
what’s wrong with the friends I have.

“You’re beautiful now that you’re thin,” Beth said one afternoon before Christmas. Maybe she was drunk. We were sitting on the old vinyl couch, while, upstairs, my father could be heard in the kitchen, pacing, or marching in place. Mickey had poured a bit of filched gin into each of our diet Coke cans, and I was smoking without inhaling, just letting the smoke smear aimlessly across my mouth and face, roll off my tongue like a bitter cloud, or a big gray comma indicating a very long pause. The basement was cold, oozing with underground life, a clammy womb. There were only two windows in the finished section, and they let in just a little bit of cold prison light that, as soon as it crept in, was soaked up by the paneling and the gray carpet remnant.

“But you still act fat,” Beth said.

I thought about that, looking down at my short corduroy skirt, black tights, soft white sweater. I knew I dressed, now, like a person who was thin. I looked good in the clothes I wore. I’d started to wear lipstick, shave my legs, blow my hair dry so that wisps of it flew around my face, flattering and framing it like the bright plastic face of a doll, but I still felt fat.

“It’s my mother,” I said. “She’s inside me, with a balloon, waiting to blow me up.” And I remembered going to the mall with her before Christmas one year when I was a child. She wanted me to sit in Santa’s lap. I remembered how she handed me over to him, and how his arms felt warm, his lap was soft, and how the eyes lost in all that false beard were glassy, but very friendly. There were carols being sung somewhere above us, and the sound was fragile and full of light, like a glass straw held gently to a soprano’s lips.

“Can I take this little girl home?” he asked my mother, and she snatched me back.

“He liked you because you’re fat,” my mother said.

“She liked me fat,” I said.

“So did Phil,” Beth said.

We are intimate. Beth and Mickey and I talk about only the most personal things—our periods, our parents, our dreams. By now, we’ve snooped into the darkest corners of each other’s homes. Found each other’s mother’s diaphragms under the bathroom sink together—like flimsy UFO’s, or Playtex sand dollars, hinting vaguely of the sea, looking internal, but no more sexual than the plastic scrubbers with which those same mothers washed the dishes. And we were less impressed by the fact that our mothers might actually have sex with our fathers than by the possibility that something might still be generated from it. The possibility that fertility, for our mothers or for us, could go on for that long—little chickadees pecking nests in our uteruses forever.

We’ve seen each other’s fathers in their underwear stumbling to the toilet late at night, half awake—gray specters of manliness in middle age, shameful and concave.

“I can’t eat meatballs anymore,” Mickey said one evening in the basement, “since I saw your father without his shorts on, Beth. Your father’s balls look just like my mother’s.” And she waved her hand in the air as if to wave Mr. Warnke’s awful balls away.

“You’ll be sorry,” my mother said. “These are the happiest days of your life, and you’re not going to have anyone but those two Unsightlies to remember them by.”

“I don’t care,” I said, and turned my back, as blank as a lost memory, to her.

And, I think, What does it matter that I’ll never look back at my high school yearbook and recall, fondly, the dime-size faces of my classmates, the camaraderie of those days, the kegs thrown through plate-glass windows on Saturday nights when someone’s trusting parents were out of town, or my name spray-painted red on the east wall of the high school, where those popular kids traditionally immortalize themselves and one another in big, goofy letters in the last months of their senior years: hearts and stars and exclamation points, until the janitor comes and whitewashes another year of popular kids off the cinder blocks with his bucket and brush?

It would be like being a rabbit, being one of those popular high school girls—trembling, ephemeral, just a vaporous urge full of hindsight, hopping. An essence, all bubble, whim, and vim slipped quickly in and out of a sock of bright, pretty far, about to be ripped limb from limb by Time’s stray dog.

Why even assume I’d
want
to be one of them? Besides, my life in this place is swiftly ending. Already my college applications are in the mail. Four of them. Each with a carefully worded personal essay that begins, “I wish to attain the finest education I can, which, for me, means attending——.”

In truth, college has always been the last place I wanted to go. It looms in my imagination as a kind of Emerald City full of sunglass-wearing rich kids with bandannas around their necks in the ice-green light of their Heineken bottles. At the center, an awful little man runs the show. Not a professor: an administrator, like my father. If you saw him, you would gasp in disappointment and sudden understanding.

Mickey and Beth can’t wait to go. Phil doesn’t plan to apply.

I
HEAR MY FATHER PICK UP THE PHONE, WHICH HASN’T RUNG
this early since the morning after my mother left, the morning she called to tell my father she was never coming back. I never actually heard it ring that time, and, I realize now, it’s been months since the phone seemed like a likely way for my mother to contact us. I imagine, instead, skywriting, or telepathy, or a flock of birds in the bathtub as her method, at this point, of sending a message. I smudge the lid of my eye with mascara when I hear the phone ring, and have to wet a tissue to get it off.

Two years ago, when my father first filed the Missing Persons Report, the cops told us to stick close to the phone for a few weeks, told us we might get a call at any time, day or night, that it might be an emergency.

So, we got an answering machine, just in case we were out when the Big Call came, and my father recorded it with the only message we could think of, “No one’s home right now. Please leave a message after the beep.”

But no messages came from or about my mother, except the
shh-shh-shh
of no news.

The smudge on my eyelid looks like a bruise, and the harder I try to rub it off, the darker it gets, so I dot the other lid with mascara, too, and decide to make a determined action of it: black eye shadow. I hear my father say something into the phone downstairs in a throaty morning voice, and he hangs up quickly.

Later, in the car, headed toward the high school, my father identifies the mystery caller. He flexes and bends his gloved fingers around the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. January is turning to water all around us. When it freezes again, it will be dangerously slick. I remember seeing the parking lot of the Rite Aid rush into my face last year, and the sting of it on my palms. “The person who called,” my father says, “was a woman.”

There’s a silence from him then that seems to suck the air in the car into it. I look at the side of his face. My father’s hair is silver now—the color of dirty money. He’s handsome. He does not look weak. When did he stop looking weak?

“Yeah?” I ask, and I know I sound surly. I’m a teenager. I’m not sure where my little-girl sweetness went. Like the weakness of my father, it simply vanished. I woke up one morning and it was gone.

He swallows. “Well. She is a textbook saleswoman I met at the office. She wants me to go to dinner with her.”

I laugh out loud, then cover my mouth with my glove.

“Does that upset you?” my father asks, still looking fixedly into the firing squad in front of him.

“
Hell
no,” I say. “Why shouldn’t you go out with women, Dad? I’m thrilled you scored a date.” I even touch his hand on the steering wheel: that’s how much of an open-minded and supportive eighties kind of kid I am.

My father laughs a little to himself then, and it sounds like the laugh of a panicked man on a packed elevator, the needle dropping too fast, but not fast enough to scream yet: He still has to keep his cool.

“Good,” he says, lightening up. He’s wearing a tan coat over his blue suit and a red wool scarf around his neck.

“She’s nice,” he offers, tossing one hand in the air in my direction, as if throwing confetti, and I recognize my moment—this intimate space we’re in and its potential for personal profit. Don’t all teenage girls come equipped with radar for this?

“But, Dad,” I say, “if I don’t like her, do I get to give you as much shit about it as you give me about Phil?”

He checks the rearview mirror, puts the car into park in front of the high school, and sighs. Then he looks at me and says in a docile voice, thick with tongue, “I guess I should quit giving you what-for about Phil,”—making quotation marks in the air around “what-for”—“is that what you’re saying?”

I raise my eyebrows and hum, “Mmm-hmm,” and try to sparkle at him as I give him a quick kiss good-bye and bound out of the car.

I realize now that I’m playing the part of a vivacious daughter with a stern, worried, widowed father—although my quite-alive mother could very well be waiting for us right now back at the deserted ranch.

Would she care if, when she came back, my father had a girlfriend?

Was my mother a jealous wife?

Had she ever been? Had my mother ever had that feeling I used to have when I’d see Phil leaning up against his locker, some other girl—maybe Bonnie Pinter, who never wore a bra, whose lips were always wet and parted in a kind of permanent blow-job invitation—giggling into his face?

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he’d say when I accused him of flirting with her. “She’s a hose bag.”

But I’d feel as if someone had stuffed my throat with cotton. I couldn’t stand to think of him thinking of someone else. I could turn a corner in the hallway of that high school and see him standing in the glare, talking to Mickey, just Mickey,
my best friend
, and find myself riding that downward slope in my stomach, like a child on a tricycle, out of control, rolling down a hillside while something inaudible screamed inside me.

Had my mother ever felt like that?

When my father takes off his glove to wave good-bye, I see he’s taken off his wedding ring. Just yesterday, at the dinner table, it was there.

I
FEEL SURE THAT MY MOTHER WAS NEVER JEALOUS, SURE SHE
did not think for one moment that another woman could take an interest in my father. To her, he must have seemed like the last man on the face of the earth any woman would want. Isn’t it why she left in such a hurry, didn’t even bother to take her purse?

Getting stuck with him wasn’t even worth money, or credit cards, or lipsticks to her.

But
he
had been a jealous husband.

Once, at his golf league’s end of summer picnic, my father drank three beers too fast before the hot dogs were done and, flushed, sweaty, longing to brag to his buddies about something—all of them richer men and better golfers—he’d blurted out, apropos of nothing, “My Evie hasn’t gained a pound since we got married.”

The other wives at this picnic gasped, feigning admiration, hyped-up envy, when all they really felt was dull loathing for my father, his boorish bragging, his drunken flush, and for his wife’s slender body, sighing at her, “Oh, you make me sick,” as if it were a compliment as their horny husbands looked her over slowly, and the hot dogs sizzled in their skins, and a mirage of fertilized heat hovered above the green. My father’s cleats glinted in the sun, which set itself like a big red face in the west. Annoyed, my mother chewed a sour ice cube out of her vodka tonic and shot a look in my father’s direction like a spray of silver thumbtacks in the air.

But what my father noticed was the looks the other men sent her, not the one she sent him. He wanted to brag, but he didn’t want them to covet. He didn’t understand why they would. Didn’t they know she was his? He wasn’t a religious man, but he knew all about
Thou shalt not stare at thy neighbor’s wife
, and wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be polite.

And what were women to my father anyway? Hadn’t he always been the kind of man who sees a rolling pasture, forty acres of wildflowers and red-winged blackbirds flitting from cattail to cattail in their brilliant epaulets, and thinks what a nice golf course it would make, where he would lay the sandtraps, what it would be like to ride those mowed, green hillocks in a cart?