White Bird in a Blizzard (20 page)

When I look up he’s looking at me, head cocked. “I like your little haircut there. Is that what they call a page boy?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper, “but thanks,” and push my bangs out of my eyes.

“And I like your little titties, too,” he says in a different voice, a voice that fills me up with blood. He leans forward and looks hard at me. Where his shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, I see dark hair on his chest. He says, “I want to taste your little titties,” and I look down at my blouse, where my face is repeated over and over again in my gold buttons—hot coins of myself. Not even for a moment does it seem wrong to be here, or do I wonder why I am.

“Maybe I should come and sit over there,” the detective says, and I move over an inch to make room for him on the leather couch, which makes a naked, human sound against my suede skirt. He puts his Heineken bottle down on the coffee table. Before he kisses me, he pushes my blouse a little farther open, looks at my white bra, and says, “Yummy.”

He reaches in and feels my left breast, which is small and light in his palm. He even growls a little, pressing his face into mine.

“I
T WAS EASY
,” I
TELL
M
ICKEY
. S
HE’S WASHING HER HANDS
at the sink in the girls’ bathroom at school. On the mirror above her face, in red lipstick, someone has written “Anne Platt is fucking Mr. Fogarty.” Every morning, the janitor washes it off, but by afternoon it’s always back, and has been since September, scrawled in hard, loopy cursive—

I have no idea who Anne Platt is, but I’ve heard she’s a freshman with enormous breasts. Mr. Fogarty is the assistant principal. His eyes are Aqua Velva blue, and he likes girls. Once, when I got caught smoking in the parking lot before school, I had to go to Mr. Fogarty’s office, where he gave me a pamphlet about lung cancer and winked at me. “Don’t get caught again,” he said.

Now, whenever I pass him in the hallway, he smiles at me and lifts an invisible cigarette to his lips.

It’s never seemed like much of a revelation that some freshman girl, Anne Platt, with big boobs, might be fucking Mr. Fogarty. The real mystery is the other girl, the one who must be sneaking into the girl’s bathroom every single day, writing that sentence in lipstick on the mirror again and again. All that loopy, feminine fury over what? Who could sustain a passion like that for so long? She must have had to skip classes to do it: Between classes, there were too many girls at the sinks to get away with that. Was it jealousy, or outrage, or something else?

Sometimes I wondered if the writer might not be Anne Platt herself.

Mickey hands me a stick of gum in a light green wrapper. “What was easy?” she asks, bending down to tie the lace of one of her shoes. The pleats of her skirt settle around her, and she looks like a pom-pom, dropped.

“The detective,” I say.

She looks up at me. The gum is so minty in my mouth as I chew it, I can hardly inhale. It’s like inhaling the steam off a block of ice, too fresh.

“Oh my God,” Mickey says, standing up.

I nod. I look at myself in the mirror. My face is lost inside
fucking
, as if the word is written in lipstick on my forehead. I fluff up my hair, then look back at Mickey and smile.

“You’re kidding,” she says.

I say, “I’m not.”

“Wow, Kat.” Mickey shakes her head. “I’m truly, truly impressed.”

F
OR A FEW DAYS NOW, THE WEATHER HAS BEEN WARMER
, turned the snow to damp rags—ruined, dirty, christening gowns. Phil is slopping through it on the way to our house in his muddy boots, taking big, slow steps, like a cartoon character stuck in tar—exaggerated, as if the thawed ground is sucking him down. His coat looks old, plaid, and scratchy. It was probably his father’s.

Since graduation last June, since he’s started working at Sears full time, Phil has begun to look more and more like a boy who could be his own father. His gangliness has turned, almost imperceptibly, almost overnight, into an old man’s stoop. Now, when he comes to visit me at college, driving his father’s Dodge four hours north, smoking Marlboros all the way, listening to the frenzy of WKLL, then WKSS, then WZZZ—all those stations playing music that sounds like flimsy, brilliant sheets of tin being drilled together in factories all across the Midwest at once—there are ashes on his collar, and that coat smells like exhaust, pollution, a rest stop.

By the time he gets to Ann Arbor, Phil has passed through some of the dirtiest places on earth—gray weather hanging over the highway, heavy with grime, and it’s settled on him, in his hair, which is too long now. The flip at his collar, too blond, the yellow-blond of a school bus. As Phil and I pass by the girls on the hall in my dormitory, they look at him sideways, as if he is a spy from another world, the world we’ve exited, at least for a while—the world of the suburb, the parent, the mall—or as if he might shed that dull world, walking, as if the stagnation of the place he’s driven up from were a virus in his tears, in his blood.

All weekend, Phil will drink beer in my room, play heavy metal too loud on the stereo next to my bed. He’ll look uncomfortable in the cafeteria with his guest ticket and a white plate of Swiss steak on a tray. He’ll go to the library with me while I study, sitting slumped in a reading chair, looking at a magazine, then looking up, scanning the students with no expression on his face.

My roommate doesn’t like him.

He doesn’t look like a college boy.

“What does he plan to do with his life?” Cindy asks.

Cindy’s from Oak Park, Michigan. Her father is an ophthalmologist. Her hair is red—deep, autumn red—and she’s decorated our room with posters of Baryshnikov, arty black-and-white photographs of the dancer in tight tights, arms outstretched like a masculine bird. You can see the bulge that is his balls and penis stuffed into those tights—that stilled masculinity, that muscular dancing.

Sometimes, studying, I look up at Cindy’s posters and feel a flush of blood spread across my chest.

When he came to visit the first time, Phil looked closely at those posters and said, “Gross.”

“He’s got to take care of his mother,” I tell her.

“So?” she says, chomping gum.

Cindy plans to be a genetics counselor and wastes no time on excuses. To her, everyone’s destiny can be plotted out on a graph of X’s and Fs. Some of us should never have been born. She dates a graduate student from the school of natural resources, who believes our natural resources will soon run out, and twice she’s tried to fix me up with his friend, Aaron, who wears hiking boots and bandannas and spends his summers on a research boat off the northern shore of Lake Michigan, looking at muddy weeds under a microscope.

At first, we didn’t hit it off, but on our second date, just before I left for Christmas break, we drank a lot of warm, imported beer, and when Aaron kissed me good night, our tongues flitted wet and silky into each other like the coincidence of fish in a large, murky lake, accidentally touching.

I know he is the kind of date I should have. Not Theo Scieziesciez. Not Phil. Someone to make plans for the future with.

But the future bores me.

I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic.

I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.

“Someone called for you,” she says from her bed in the dark one night when I get back to the room with Phil.

“Who was it?” I ask.

Phil stands in the doorway, waiting: We try to wait until Cindy’s gone to sleep before coming back to the room to sleep. Phil takes the edge of the bed near the wall, farthest from Cindy. In the mornings, when we wake up, she’s usually gone.

“It was
Shh-shh-shh
,” she says, sounding groggy but annoyed. I’ve told Cindy about the detective, about my relationship with him, and also told her that I don’t want Phil to know. Later, he and I will have a small, dry argument about it. She’s aware of this.

“He sure calls a lot for someone who hasn’t managed to do one thing about your mother’s case in two and a half years, don’t you think?” Phil will say, but he’ll drop it as soon as I get defensive, as if he knows there’s more to this than he wants to know.

The day after the night Aaron and I kissed, Phil came to pick me up and bring me home.

As soon as I got home, I called the detective. “I’ve got a cold beer waiting for you in the fridge Saturday night, sweetheart,” he said, as he always says.

What was I doing, I wondered, with all these men? I thought how, if you removed their hearts from their bodies and set all three out on a table, you couldn’t tell one from the other. So what was I doing, suddenly, with all three of them at once?

Now, Phil’s crossing the shallow daffodil ditch between us: Nothing even close to blooming there. Maybe this year it won’t. Maybe Phil’s finally trudged through them so much, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s bulbs have given up, gotten the word, heard the ruthless boots above them, and decided to stay underground.

My breath on the bedroom window makes a humid, quickly evaporating kiss out of Phil, just a circle on the glass where the imprint of my lips has kissed away his face.

M
Y FATHER SEEMED PROUD AND RELIEVED THE DAY HE AND
his girlfriend, May, drove me up to college.

“Good-bye, good-bye!” he waved from the front seat of his new car—a black Cadillac with leather seats. Riding to Ann Arbor in it had felt like hanging in the air from long elastic bands. Sixty miles an hour’s worth of world rushed by, and it was nothing but a liquid blur.

I imagine my father bought the Cadillac to impress May, who is exactly like her name—a petite container of spring that could explode any moment in a frenzy of petals and baby birds, screaming. She might have giggled uncontrollably on her first ride in my father’s new Cadillac.

May’s a good girlfriend for my father, I like her—who could not like May?—but being in her presence for more than an hour makes me feel ditzy, agitated, a bit slaphappy, and very tired. As we converse pleasantly, I feel my voice rise higher and higher in pitch to match hers, as if we’ve both been breathing helium, gasping at weightless white balloons as my father sits in slim-lipped silence between us, seeming pleased.

At one time, May was married to a textbook salesperson like herself. “But he was always depressed,” she said. “He never wanted to
do
anything.” Her hair is ash-blonde and bobbed above her ears. Permed tightly, it stands up all over her head, as if, at the beauty parlor, she got zapped with a cattle prod and it made her perkier, but nervous.

She’s a lot younger than my father—only thirty-four—but seems maternal, in a childlike way, and eager to pick up where my mother left off. The day they left me at the University of Michigan, she had a lot of advice about college, about boys, about life. After we’d hauled my boxes to the room I would be living in (Cindy wasn’t there yet, and it was blank faced—all linoleum, just two thin mattresses on metal frames, two battered desks, and a sink that echoed
boing boing
as it dripped), May said, “Don’t take drugs. But if you do, make sure you know what you’re taking. Someone slipped me some angel dust in college, and I’ve never been the same.”

It explained a lot.

I imagined May in college—studious, sober, and unsentimental—before the angel dust incident, during which she’d sprouted wings, burst into frenetic flapping, been launched into the sky like a divine bottle rocket, and glimpsed the face of God—pure sweetness and sparkling light, like a lungful of air freshener on a cool spring day—before settling back to earth, altered forever.

“Good-bye!” my father said and waved. In his new Cadillac, they buoyed away.

The first few weeks at college, I thought things had changed—that, leaving Garden Heights, leaving my frilly bedroom and my mother’s stiff armchairs, her lipsticks still lined up on the bathroom counter where she’d left them, that
I’d
finally left my
mother
, rather than the other way around.

But then the dreams began again—my mother in a white coffin, my mother in a snowstorm at the morgue. Or I’d dream I was walking with Phil across the icy Rite Aid parking lot, watching my feet, then see her face float up under my boot. In one dream, May came to me in my bedroom back in Ohio and said she’d found my mother in the cardboard container of a TV dinner. In another, Detective Scieziesciez looked up from between my legs, where he was giving me a dream orgasm—the kind you never reach, the kind you wake up still wanting—and said, “By the way, your mother called my office. She’s in a bank-deposit box in another town.”

In the middle of every dream, I’d wake up screaming, and Cindy would be standing over me in her boyfriend’s
SAVE THE WHALES
T-shirt, biting her nails. “Jesus, Katrina”—she likes to call me that because it’s more ethnic, more interesting than Kat—“What’s wrong with you?” she’d ask. In the morning, she’d look at me carefully, as if I might crack right down the middle like a plaster statue, badly cast, and step out of my body.