White Bird in a Blizzard (24 page)

Where would it finally go, I wondered, looking at the overstocked shelves at Sears—all this junk?

Where
does
it go?

For instance, those tires that are always wearing away, going bald on the highway—where is that rubber when it’s no longer on those tires? Does it fade into the atmosphere—gaseous, a breath of rubbery air inhaled, exhaled? Or does it wrap the road in snakeskin like a jacket? Weren’t we driving, every day, over and over our own shed rubber?

Still, Ohio is crammed with rubber factories—Goodrich, Diamond, Industrial Rubber Inc.—making more and more. Where does it go? Those eraser shavings—ten tons of that must be worn away every year in elementary schools all over America. Those children in their rubber-soled shoes should be knee-deep in that pink ash by now. We
all
should be—

But we aren’t.

All this stuff, I thought, looking at it, rubbed away, worn away—friction turning our things to weather and air. Where does it go?

It
has
to go
somewhere
.

The man left with his palm-grip sander in a gray plastic sack that said
SEARS
in maroon letters, and Phil, who had been smiling and standing up straight in his striped tie and white shirt, sagged, then glared at me. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

I stopped smiling. “Well, Phil. Doesn’t it strike you as just a
little
silly: ‘This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy?’” I imitated him, a slow baritone. “Just a bit melodramatic, or something?”

“Sorry to be so ridiculous,” he said and turned his back to me. “I can take a break now, if you want to have lunch. If you’re not too clever to have lunch with an asshole like me.”

“Phil,” I said, following him into the break room. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot that you don’t have a sense of humor anymore.”

He turned around fast.

Behind him, a canteen vending machine whirred, warm, its miniature cans of ravioli and SpaghettiOs waiting. I hadn’t meant to sound so mean. He looked like he’d been slapped.

“Just get out of here,” he said, and a salesman at the break room table looked up from his
Sports Illustrated
with a noodle hanging off his lower lip. Phil made a shooing motion with his hand. “Just go.”

I left.

The automatic doors that led from Sears back to the parking lot hesitated before they opened, and when I walked through them, they tried to close on me, then stopped themselves short before jarring all the way open to let me pass.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I say to Phil now.

“No,” he says. “Let’s just sit in the living room if your dad’s not home.” His feet in their wool socks move nervously over the carpet—nervous, toothless animals. He sits in my father’s armchair in the living room, and I sit across from him on the couch.

“Look,” I say. “We both know this isn’t working out.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “It’s not. You’re too smart for me now, college girl.”

I sigh. This will be harder than I’d hoped it would be, harder than Dr. Phaler would have had me believe. “That’s not it,” I say. “There’s been something wrong a lot longer than that.”

Phil looks like a lifeguard out of work for the winter—wind-tanned, but his hair is turning darker around the roots. For the first time I notice he must be trying to grow a mustache, and I imagine Phil with his bristling, hardware-salesman mustache. The knees of his jeans have begun to wear away, and I try to feel the compassion I used to feel. “Poor little boy with a blind mother,” I remember my mother whispering as she watched him load Mrs. Hillman into a car to drive her to a doctor’s appointment, folding her into the passenger seat in her big winter coat, stuffing her in.

But Phil seems weak to me. I used to imagine a little satin heart with his name embroidered on it in my chest. A pincushion. A souvenir. The kind of thing you might buy in a gift shop, something that says “Las Vegas” or “Be Mine.” But now, there’s a cold, white stone in there instead—as if, during an apathetic kiss, something dead from inside him had slipped into my mouth, and I’d swallowed it whole.

It didn’t used to be like this.

I could still remember dancing with him in the gym: How young we’d been! A sudsy bloodbath of energy. Fat, in my pink dress, I was a sad valentine made by a child, made out of cotton balls, dime-store doilies, and paste—sentimental, pathetic, a little desperate, but sincere. And Phil was stooped but not yet bent, jerking to the music in his blue tux. Whatever burdens he already had, they did not seem permanent.

And all those sweaty nights on the couch, his kisses like blurred stars all up and down my neck. I was still fat. Together we were wading into a tepid lake. Carefully. The mud was soft and as loose as flesh.

But that was a long time ago.

“It’s over,” I say. “You’d better leave.”

“Okay,” he says, standing up. He doesn’t seem surprised in the least. “But there’s something you should know.”

“What?” I ask. Whatever it is, I think, I won’t care. Phil looks dilapidated, shrugging on his plaid coat.

“Your father knows perfectly well where your mother is,” he says.

“Excuse me?” Sarcastic.

“You heard me.” He’s putting his boots on. Reptilian. They’re army green, prehistoric-looking. The slick boots of a swamp dinosaur. Waterproof. Fireproof. “He’s keeping her up his sleeve.”

I sigh and roll my eyes. Typical Phil, I think—mangling his clichés up to the bitter end. I picture my father with my mother slipped into his shirt on a stage in a kind of vaudeville show—aping in a top hat, the whole audience guffawing at the absurdity of this joke.

“What do you mean?” I ask, impatient.

“Ask him,” Phil says, opening the front door, stepping through it. “Don’t ask me.”

I
SIT IN THE LIVING ROOM IN ONE OF THE GREEN-WINGED
chairs for a long time. My father has gone to work. Outside, a plow scrapes through the streets, throwing snow to the side of the road, and the snow sounds soft, physical, a solid wave lapping at the curb, tossed out of the way. I picture a cow standing on railroad tracks, the huge machine of a train on the way, and the muffled, vulnerable sound of that cow in its path.

And then I remember the sound of her voice, which was as much a part of my mother as her body, but disconnected from her, hovering around and above her, as voices do. She had a soft voice, though it was often edged with sarcasm, judgment, displeasure. I picture vowels, wrapped in light, rising from her in clouds, as if something tangible could be made out of sound. I think, If the phone rang now, if I picked it up, and my mother spoke to me through the receiver, would it mean she existed any more physically than she does already, living in my memory, in her silence?

“Have fun,” she’d said, here, in the living room, as I left through the front door with Phil on the night of the Winter Formal four years ago.

“Have fun.” I’d handed her the corsage box he’d brought with him when he’d come to pick me up. The rose that was in it, surrounded by its baby’s breath, was pinned above my breast, and the box was empty. When my mother took it out of my hands, I could see it was lighter than she’d thought it would be, and cold. Phil must have kept it in his refrigerator at home. As I left for my first date, in the living room my mother was still holding that cold emptiness in her hand.

Fun was the last thing she wanted me to have.

I go to the kitchen, and take a carton of milk out of the refrigerator.

MISSING
, it says on the back, and there’s a grainy photo of a fat little girl right under the box where the calories are counted. On the side, there’s a boy in a striped shirt.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME
? he’s asking with a big lost smile on his face.

I pour myself a glass of milk and take a long sip of it before I again remember that two-year-old in the back of some college boy’s truck, his skin softened, turned to liquid.

The milk is cool and vaguely sour when I swallow it, gag, spit it into the sink.

When I look up, my father’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He hasn’t taken his boots off. There’s snow falling in soggy fractions onto the floor, and a trail of it melts behind him.

M
ICKEY’S ALREADY DRUNK WHEN SHE COMES OVER WITH
two bottles of champagne in a brown grocery sack. My father lets her in, and I hear him upstairs introducing May—the sound of May’s singsong sweetness, and my father’s formal discomfort. Beth and I are in the basement, waiting, sitting on the floor, leaning up against the vinyl sofa. My mother’s birdcage hangs over Beth’s head. We’ve never taken it down—shining, brightly empty.

“The bird has flown,” Beth says, looking up at it.

When I called Mickey and Beth that afternoon to tell them I’d finally broken up with Phil, they both insisted on coming over to celebrate. Over the phone, Beth said, “God rest his soul.”

Mickey’s wearing a leather jacket, and when I hug her, I smell smoke and animal skin. She kisses Beth’s cheek as she slips her jacket off—casual, magnanimous, European. I haven’t seen her since August. Since then, her hair has grown longer, been styled into wisps around her jaw. She’s wearing a black turtleneck, and makeup—burgundy lipstick, black eye shadow, a pale-beige base. With the turtleneck, the makeup, and the hair, she looks less scarred than I’ve ever seen her, and no longer a cheerleader. Mickey looks like a painter now, or a poet. The energy that once secured her spot on the varsity squad despite her unloveliness—that energy has turned overnight into a kind of serious intensity that is, finally, darkly beautiful.

She smokes clove cigarettes.

She’s dating a music major—bassoon.

It sounds like a swan, she says. A very sexual instrument. Once, in his dorm room, she let him tie her to the bed. She’s asked him for a pair of handcuffs for her birthday. They might even move to New York. All this she told me when I called to tell her that Phil and I were a dead issue.

Tomorrow, Mickey goes back to Madison. The day after that, Beth leaves for Bloomington. And the next day, my dad and May will drive me to Ann Arbor. We’ve decided to spend tonight like old times, getting drunk in the basement and smoking and talking together in our old cocoon, while, above us, my father stomps around in slippers.

“Jesus,” Mickey says. “I don’t know about you two, but I can’t stand to be back here. It’s like purgatory. Purgatory, Ohio. Haven’t we done enough time here? I can’t fucking wait to get back to school.” She sits across from us on the basement floor, at the edge of the carpet remnant, lights up a clove cigarette, and the smell of the smoke as it fills the basement and our noses is like a garden fire. A burning bush. The smell of a flower arrangement, torched, or the Christmas lights, shorted, igniting the whole tree in a smoldering moment. Mickey’s not wearing a bra under her black turtleneck, and her breasts look autonomous and big.

Beth is wearing old jeans and a flannel shirt. She’s gained more weight since she went away. She likes to study, she says, but she hasn’t made any friends. A few times, on weekend nights, alone in her dorm room with her roommate gone, she’d thought about what it would be like to be dead, how easy it would be to buy a gun—a small one, with a mother-of-pearl handle. There were pawnshops all over town. She’d considered how hard or easy it might be to hold that gun to your temple, count to ten, just as an experiment, to see how close you were willing to get to death, what
ten
felt like when you said it: a teaspoon of lead on your tongue, or a brass key to the door you were ready to step through into the colored light, the jagged surprise of a geode when you smashed it, all crystal and amethyst and pretty points inside.

But she wasn’t sure she wanted to die, at least not yet.

“Get me the fuck out of here,” Mickey says.

“I know what you mean,” Beth says. “My mother told me to clean my room this morning, and I wanted to bludgeon her with a feather duster.”

Mickey pops the plastic cork on the first bottle of cheap champagne, and there’s the wind of foam and pressure and the seething of trapped, effervescent space unleashed. Then she pours a little for each of us into my parents’ wedding glasses.

“So, congrats, Kat.” Mickey raises the glass. “Phil’s out of the picture at last.”

“At last,” I say. “God.” I shake my head, feigning sadness. “What a mess that ended up being.”

“Or,” Beth says, “as Phil would say, ‘What a vicious triangle.’”

The champagne chokes me with tartness and bubbles.

“God,” Beth says, swallowing. “What a dolt he was.”

“What I liked,” Mickey says, “was the look he got on his face when he was rubbing a couple Big Ideas together,” and she makes the look—a stern, fatherly frown.

“Not a guy with a fancy interior, that’s for sure.” Beth smirks.

“Here’s to Phil,” Mickey toasts. “May he never again loaf in vain.”

“May he never love in Spain.” Beth raises her glass, too.

My palm is flat against my chest, gasping with laughter, eyes watering, thinking of Phil—how he wore his sleeve on his heart. I remember reaching under him, between his legs, while we fucked, touching his balls. In my hands, they felt loose, and invertebrate, and at my mercy, and I’d thought of a marble Madonna I’d seen once at the Toledo Art Museum. She was holding the world in the palm of her hand, and seemed pleased. There was a thin, mysterious smile on her lips, as if she knew how much power she had.

But then I remember the look on Phil’s face as he shrugged his father’s coat on, how much taller than me he seemed, how that expression was smug, as though we’d just finished playing a game—a dangerous game, a game played with pieces of broken glass and aluminum bats—and he’d won.

I drink. I say, “But there was a parting shot.”

“I hope it wasn’t a shock in the dark,” Beth says.

“Or a shark in the pot,” Mickey says.

I’m laughing again. I feel better. Finally, I say, “He told me he thinks my father is keeping my mother up his sleeve.”