White Bird in a Blizzard (3 page)

He kept that file cabinet locked, but I knew how to open it. Right next to the cabinet, tacked to a piece of corkboard over his tool bench, was a file card with the combination: 36–24–35.

It was like a joke—both the combination and where he kept it, precisely where anyone wanting to open the cabinet would look to find the combination for the lock—and I’d spin those ideal measurements and look at his spread-eagled Bunnies and Pets whenever I wanted.

Sometimes, my friends Mickey and Beth and I looked at them together, slipping an issue out of my father’s file cabinet there in the basement, the place we retreated to whenever Mickey and Beth came over.

Down there, my parents wouldn’t bother us—only, occasionally, come to the top of the stairs to shout something about dinner, or to announce that Beth’s mother had called for her to come home. We could do whatever we wanted in those two rooms—the finished one, which had a gray carpet remnant covering the floor, an orange vinyl couch, a pool table no one ever used, and the unfinished one with its cement floor and white appliances humming in the emptiness. We could smoke. We could drink rum in our diet Cokes. We could look at those magazines, my father’s secret Pets.

“Gross,” we’d say, or, “Oh my God.” But we would hold the glossy pages open for a long time, looking down at whoever she was that month—all those limbs, those wet lips. She’d look like something a wolf would eat, spread out like that, all that edible flesh, or something a hunter had shot out of the sky. When she landed at his feet, he’d jumped back in surprise with no idea what to do next.

But those magazines had nothing to do with my parents’ secret life. That was my father’s hobby, and I didn’t want to think about it. Obviously, he thought no one knew what he had down there, hidden, locked up naked in the basement, waiting for him to sneak down in the middle of the night and take a peek. But in its secretness, it made him even duller, even safer, even less sexual than he already seemed.

Still, if I’d found one, found
Variations
, or
Big Boobs
, in their dresser, a place they shared, that would have been something else. That would have meant that she knew, and approved, or that they looked at them together.

Of course, there was nothing there.

I fished through the second drawer. Women’s underwear. Nothing black. Nothing dirty. I looked in the third drawer, which was full of blouses she never wore. Too frilly, or too sheer, or too plain, but too expensive to throw away, and in the back, a shoe box, which I opened, and inside it a paperback book with a pink cover and raised white letters,
Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide
.

I thought,
Jesus Christ
.

I pictured her scrubbing the toilet, disinfecting.

I pictured her in the kitchen, baking angry batches of cookies.

I saw her in the basement, wringing the necks of my father’s white shirts while a choir of nasty children sang “
Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar!
” in her head.

I saw her in the living room running the vacuum cleaner over and over a four-inch area of carpet, seeing something in there that the huge rattling suction of her machine could not suck up, and pictured her in a bookstore in the mall on a Friday afternoon, circling a rack of books for a long time before she got up the nerve to buy that one and take it to the register.

She would have carried herself with a kind of stubborn dignity, buying that book. As the young clerk slipped it into a paper bag and handed her some change, she’d have looked him straight in the eyes and seen herself in there, wearing a camel’s-hair coat, a black skirt, a silk blouse with bone buttons.

To that young clerk she must have looked like a woman with enough money to be happy (clearly, she paid another woman to manicure her nails, set her hair in smooth curls) staring at her own reflection in his eyes as he slipped this bit of bitter information about her into a paper bag—as if she’d just bought and paid for a rotten part of her own body, a limb that had been frostbitten and was putrid now, a limb the clerk was selling to her in public, in the weak light of the mall.

Pathetic, and absurd, he must have thought as he handed the book to her.

“Have a nice day,” he said.

I put the lid back on the shoe box and closed the drawer.

Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known—their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth.

A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long.

My
MOTHER MOVED TO THE SUBURBS WITH A HUSBAND, AND
she vanished in Garden Heights. Her name was Eve, and although my father’s name was Brock, not Adam, they were one of Garden Heights’s first couples.

Garden Heights was an Eden without a past, like the first one—but also without temptation, or snakes, or trees. Our house was built in the middle of a cornfield in a subdivision a few miles from Toledo, and no one had ever lived in it before us, as if God had decided to re-create the world without variety this time.

Newness was the whole idea behind Garden Heights. Newness and sameness. Every house in the cornfield had been built with the same blueprint, and there was even a bylaw that prohibited the building of fences and additions. The point to the place was fitting in, and my father did.

This was a life he liked. Every night, he came home happy. “Evie!” he might say to my mother, “Guess what? I bought a raffle ticket for the board of education benefit, and won a crockpot. Look.”

It was brown with a long, winding cord. For years my mother kept it above the refrigerator. Only once, she let a piece of pot roast shrivel up to shoe leather in it, and after that, she threw it out.

Or, he’d bring home the civic section of the Monday paper, and he’d show my mother his name in it: “Brock W. Connors is to be honored by the Executive Men’s Charitable Foundation for work benefiting the Lion’s Club of northeastern Ohio.”

For weeks, he’d collected pairs of old eyeglasses, gone knock-knocking all over the neighborhood like a child’s corny joke, kept them in cardboard boxes in our coat closet. When I asked him what they were for, he said they were for the poor. When I asked him what good other people’s—rich people’s—glasses were to the poor, he looked at me blankly, then narrowed his eyes, as if I were either very obstinate or very blurred.

In Garden Heights, my father thrived like a rubber plant left in a sunny spot and watered a lot, but my mother didn’t. She was a different kind of plant entirely. A plant that could have borne thistles and juicy, dangerous fruit.

Instead, she planted petunias in our yard, and by July of every year they were dried out. Like complaints, or exasperation. Our house was stuck into some of the world’s most fertile earth—black and loamy and damp—and anything could have grown there. A handful of it was as heavy as a heart, or guilt. As a child, I used to dig it up with a plastic shovel and pretend to bake cakes and cookies, shapeless pastries patted out of gravity.

That dough, that dirt, was as dark as space. For thousands of years, our backyard had been ice, and when the Ice Age ended it thawed into a swampy dinosaur forest, and when the dinosaurs got zapped by whatever zapped the dinosaurs, farmers came and turned it into farmland and country meadows, which were later bulldozed to make way for subdivisions with names like Country Meadows Estates.

Still, they’d find the skeleton of a woolly mammoth in there every once in a while as they were pouring concrete for a strip mall close by—something giant and shaggy that had gotten sucked into the ancient muck—and the sweat and blood and milk of those farmers before us could still be smelled in our backyard. The smell of yeasty manure just under the golf-course smell of lawn.

Anything could have grown there, but my mother grew petunias. I never knew what she wanted, but I knew it wasn’t in Garden Heights, and it wasn’t my father.

She was attractive. She walked gracefully in her high heels—but quickly, without hesitation, like a woman with a crystal dish of butter on her head. Men looked at her when we went into restaurants, staring at her ankles as we waited for the hostess, and my mother would pretend not to notice. But she noticed.

Once I saw a truck of sheep U-turn on our street. It must have been lost on a detour off the highway. I could see them from our front yard in the back of that truck—maybe fifteen sheep peeking out at me between the steel slats of that truck’s trailer.

To keep from falling over as it turned too fast, those sheep had to dance. It was so pathetic, it wasn’t even sad. There they were, being driven to their deaths, trying not to stumble, not to bump into each other, dancing a graceful, desperate dance of politeness.

That
was how my mother looked when men looked at her.

She was getting older, but she was still attractive. When they looked at her, she noticed. And so did my father. He would glare down at his own shoes with their shiny noses.

Maybe he knew, too, that my mother wanted something.

How could he
not
know?

Those men looking at her ankles in Bob’s Chop House,
they
knew.

And every afternoon and evening of those last months before she left, there she’d be, folded in half on their bed or mine, asleep like death, waking finally to the sound of canned laughter after my father got home, rising to the surface of her life like a sick aquarium fish.

When my father turned the television off, there would be nothing but the sound of flat and endless heaven above and beyond our house. Wind in a parking ramp. An empty tin can held up to an ear. It must have been unbearable. If I was off somewhere with Phil, there wouldn’t even be the sound of the radio playing in my bedroom.

And then my father would climb the stairs. Loose change in his pockets—silvery, a tin bucket of forks and knives, as if a janitor were jangling his cold ring of keys toward the bedroom as winter dusk descended, earlier and earlier every night—

A man with a handful of dull bells, getting closer.

“What’s for dinner, Evie?” he’d ask, and she’d roll over to look at him through her hair. His face would be lit from above. He’d switched the ceiling light on, and it blacked out his eyes and cast shadows from his sharp features down his face, as if it were cracked.

“What?” she asked, pushing her hair out of the way so he could better see her annoyed expression.

“What’s for dinner? It’s six o’clock.” He was wearing a flannel, afterwork shirt, but he’d still have on his dress pants and his shiny black shoes, as if relaxation were something you only needed to do from the waist up.

These two decades, my father had also stayed slim. His face had aged well. He looked younger than fifty, staring down at her, but also as preserved and eternal as some frozen-faced saint painted on the wall of a chapel during the darkest Dark Age days. Pale. Uninquisitive. A painted saint gazing without judgment, or interest, at centuries of women passing by, bearing candles, or babies, or flowers in their black habits, lace veils, go-go boots, and girdles.

My father was the kind of man, like one of those expressionless saints, who sees a woman—naked, or roped in pearls, tied to a stake, or shedding tears of blood—and thinks, I wonder what’s for dinner.

“Go away,” my mother said. “I’ll make dinner in a minute.”

If he realized then that she hated him, he pretended not to notice.

Without another word, he left.

My mother could hear him in the den, changing channels on the television with the remote control again.

She rolled to her side and swung her feet off the bed, and perhaps the numbness of them surprised her on the bedroom rug. There was a mossy taste, lush and sun warmed, on her tongue—as if, in her dream, she’d eaten a butterfly.

Briefly, she might have thought of arsenic, though she didn’t even know what it was, exactly, or where one bought it. But she might have imagined my father at the dinner table, hunched over his stew, turning blue, looking up at her with a pleased smile, muttering, “This is good,” before he died.

It was just a thought.

Wives all over Ohio probably had them.

But the idea of murder was no more serious than the kinds of fantasies in which a suburban housewife imagines herself slapping a bad waitress, or punching a meddlesome librarian in the stomach: She is polite, she’d never do it. Instead, she might wad up a piece of gum and stick it under a chair, hoping the librarian would find it there years later and have to scrape it off with a knife.

Still, there
was
desire, there
was
poison in the air. Every night, my mother read the obituaries in silence, and I imagine she was comparing the ages of the deceased to my father’s.
A lot of men die in their fifties, leaving behind a great many grieving wives
.

But my father was so robust, it must have been hard to imagine. He did not seem at all like the kind of man who might die “unexpectedly, at home” or “after a long battle with colon cancer.” It might take
gallons
of arsenic to kill him, or years and years spent watching him across the dining room table, wrestling with his colon as it decayed.

One night, only a few weeks before she disappeared, my mother went down to the basement freezer to find something to feed him, her stockinged feet cold on the cement floor.

That night, the freezer light did not come on when she opened it—burnt out, she thought—but there were the usual two good steaks. A cutup chicken—twisted, yellow limbed, a little human. A pound of ground sirloin on a square of Styrofoam.

She took that out, brought it upstairs to the kitchen, and put it in the microwave for five minutes while she tossed some salad into bowls and filled a pot with water to boil pasta. She was wearing pearls, and a neat brown skirt, a soft beige turtleneck—perhaps she’d gone to the bank that afternoon to deposit my father’s check—all a little rumpled from hours of sleeping in them.