House Under Snow Read online

  It still haunts me. The thought that a woman alone is like a kind of living death—that’s how it felt being my mother’s witness. Perhaps it was better to die, if you knew that in life you could never quiet the anxiousness inside you. Is it possible, I wondered, to be vital without physical touch or love? How long before desire, unfed, becomes dangerous?

  Lilly came home married. I was in fifth grade. She held out her slender arm and turned her hand palm down: a big diamond ring glittered on her finger.

  “Your old mom got married today,” she burst out.

  She’d been shopping for a husband for nearly three years, but her efforts always seemed so airless, it was hard to imagine she’d actually land a man. I never thought my mother would really get married again. It was impossible to imagine how a man would fit into our house. It seemed, since my father had died, to have taken on the shapes and colors of a house that belonged to females: Lilly’s floral prints and throws draped over the couches and beds, our undergarments and nightgowns thrown all over the place, Lilly’s bras and lingerie drying on the towel racks in her bathroom, her makeup and age-defying concoctions occupying all the shelves in the medicine cabinet.

  I remember my mother telling me about the day my father proposed to her.

  “He chose me, Anna. He could have had anyone,” she’d told me. Her parents had suffered so profoundly that my mother felt she could never make it up to them. Except in the marriage she made, the children she bore—these things, she felt, could make their survival meaningful.

  Lilly had often shown me a photograph of my father standing in front of the door to his office. “This was taken the day your father picked up the Lawrence Crane Construction Company sign,” Lilly said. “I was so proud of him, darling.

  “I ironed your father a fresh shirt every morning,” Lilly boasted. “Your father loved to feel the warmth of a freshly ironed shirt on his back.” I could almost smell the hot, humid, burnt smell of Lilly’s iron, hear the tsh, tsh, tsh of the steam catching on the cloth as she spoke.

  “Come give the young bride a kiss,” Lilly coaxed the day she came home married to Max. “Now we’re going to have a man in the house. Aren’t you happy for me?” Though Lilly had told us about Max, we had never met him. Lilly slipped off her pumps, slung them in her hand, and walked up the stairs. We shuffled behind her.

  As the roses and lilies bloomed in our neighbors’ yards, and you could smell the hamburgers and hot dogs cooking on barbecues, hear kids splashing in their wading pools, Lilly disengaged from the half-finished house-painting project, and left cans of half-empty paint, wet rags, and crusty dust cloths in her wake. In the heat of July, she began going through old boxes in the attic. She came down with her arms full of knickknacks and small mementos and arranged them around the mantel of the fireplace in her bedroom.

  That’s where I’d find her. Up in her room for hours. Lilly turned on the phonograph in her room, and while some romantic piece of music—often a complicated piece by Chopin—filled the room, she worked steadily, single-mindedly. Sometimes she lived like a nocturnal animal, staying up all night and sleeping in the day. Around six or seven in the evening, she’d begin her breakfast; for days, she never left the house.

  Through the half-open door, as I passed her room, I spotted her stop what she was doing, go to the window, and look out, as if she were prisoner to her memory. Then she’d shake her head and become absorbed again with the reminders of her past life.

  Swatches of lace and satin went down first, then two candelabras, one for each end of the fireplace. Lilac-colored candles—ten apiece. She hung crystals over the opening of the fireplace, and when the light came in, or a wind, they twinkled. She strung the crystals on a taut piece of string as though she were decorating a Christmas tree. A fresh bouquet of wildflowers from the yard filled a vase or two. My mother had a mad passion for nearly every kind of flower.

  She was building some kind of weird altar in her room: a football, an autographed baseball, a letter sweater, postcards sent to her from far away. She set out a bowl of trinkets, her jewels, and matchbooks from the many restaurants my father had taken her to filled another bowl.

  Once, I found her lying on her bed, in another drug-induced daze, her door wide-open, forgetting her daughters were in the house. But it was worse than I’d thought. She was in some kind of white heat, rubbing her body back and forth against the bed, trying to give herself some satisfaction, comfort.

  When I realized what she was doing, I quickly left the room and pushed the image far out of my head.

  On her altar there were little dolls, a teddy bear, a heart-shaped silver ashtray, a music box, a feathered pen, a necklace with a gold Jewish star, her mother’s sacred menorah. Books, valentines, empty boxes of chocolate. Heart-shaped cards, a silver key ring in the shape of her initial, and a gold locket with a picture of my mother’s mother inside. Even the program from the golf tournament where she had met Max. Lilly had saved them all.

  She had painted her bedroom in a rose hue, and the whole thing gave off an aura of something ancient, out of its time. My eye stopped at a picture of my father that Lilly had placed in an oval silver frame on the center of the mantel. This was the first time there had been a photograph of my father displayed in the house since he died. His pictures were always buried or tucked away in boxes or photograph albums, stuck underneath mattresses or inside drawers.

  Lilly caught me looking at the photograph and said, “Think of all he has lost.” Her eyes softened. “The dead must be filled with incredible longing.”

  The room for a second was so quiet, I could hear the dust settle.

  “Why, Mother?” I asked.

  “What is it, Anna?”

  “Why have you saved all those things?”

  “To remind myself.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of all that was once mine.” She ran her finger through a lock of hair. “People don’t understand that the relationship with the dead doesn’t go away. Nor the love. It’s just so private now. People think we’ve forgotten. But we don’t forget.”

  Lilly made her mantel ornamental, baroque, like some religious shrine.

  “Mom,” I tried one night, when I had come home to find her still up. “You need to learn to let go. Get rid of this junk.” I wanted to run my hands across the mantel and let it all fall to the floor.

  “Anna, what would you know about it?” She picked up the locket with the picture of her mother inside. “My mother was so sick when she died. She had so little of me,” Lilly said. “When she found out her sister was shot down by a Nazi in the middle of the street where they used to jump rope, she was made ill from all her guilt. Imagine, one of your sisters gone, so you could go on? The people who survive the dead are the ones who are cursed. I was the one that should have died. Not my mother. Not after all she had been through.”

  It had begun to rain outside. I felt the lawn soften.

  “The war took everything out of her,” Lilly went on. “Imagine losing your own sister. Your entire family. I could never make it up to her.”

  “It wasn’t your fault she died.”

  “Of course it wasn’t, darling,” my mother said, in a voice that belied itself as she looked at her mother’s picture in the locket.

  “Summer’s nearly over,” Austin said. August had come already. Dusk folded its last light into the cold Chagrin River. He started the ignition. The car coughed and sputtered until the starter caught. Through the open car window I smelled the exhaust suck out the smell of honeysuckle and lavender. Austin whacked a mosquito on his arm. “Why so sad?” he said, glancing in my direction. He lifted my chin with the tip of his fingers and turned my head toward his. I smiled and planted a kiss on his unshaven cheek. I had to work on changing my mood. “Boys don’t like an unhappy, sad sack of a girl,” Lilly had warned me.

  Before we backed out the driveway, I noticed that Mrs. Sawyer, who lived in the house south of us, was watching me from behind the sheer curtains of h
er upstairs window. Her daughter had committed suicide a few years ago. She was only thirteen. I could never walk past the Sawyers’ house without feeling the weight of Mrs. Sawyer’s grief. I knew she was always watching us, staring from behind a window or screen door when one of us left the house, imagining the shape of her daughter in our girth as we grew older each year. I thought about my own mother up in her candlelit bedroom, and her sadness. A part of me was happy to be leaving with Austin and another part wanted to stay home with her, hoping that my presence might ignite a spark of life inside her, but I also knew if I stayed home it would barely matter.

  As Austin drove beyond the weeping willows and our house receded into the distance, I took the fresh air inside my lungs. I quickly glanced at my reflection in the side mirror of the car and ran my hand through my hair, my fingers catching in a stubborn knot.

  We drove through the brick-lined streets of Chagrin Falls and smoked a joint. Heat rose from the pavement at night, and we kept the windows open for a breeze. The sky fell, and the emptiness that sometimes came with the loss of light, mixed with the joint, made me dizzy. I was relieved to be out of the house and into the August night. Summer was already losing its edge to the beginning of fall.

  The season’s loss was on the trampled-down lawns and dried-out sprays of wildflowers, in the sounds of insects, and the light roll of heat clouds in the sky. I took a couple more hits, and together we blanked out listening to the sound of a car coming down the block, or the screech of a cricket.

  At last I turned my mind back to Austin. He was wearing a black T-shirt. The veins popped up on the inner seam of his arm as he leaned his elbow out the car window. He reached for my hand, lying lifeless on the car seat, as if he knew my thoughts, and I thought how lucky I was. How calm and still the world seemed just then.

  “What does Max do?” Ruthie asked, the day Lilly came home married. She was eleven. Lilly was frantically packing her suitcase. They were going to Niagara Falls for the weekend.

  “He likes to play golf.”

  It turned out that Lilly had met Max in the Chagrin Falls Open Pro Tournament, which she had attended with another date.

  “Where’s he from?” I asked.

  Lilly thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, I don’t know.”

  “How old is he?” Ruthie said.

  “What’s he look like?” asked Louise.

  “What is this? The Spanish Inquisition? I married Max because I’m wild about him,” Lilly trilled. “This is a new day for us. You’ll see. You don’t know what it’s like to have a man love you.” She hugged herself. “There’s nothing like it in the whole world.” Still, a tinge of doubt lingered in her voice, as if she didn’t quite believe what she was saying.

  She married a non-Jew, the enemy, the unknown. None of the men Lilly had dated were Jewish. Perhaps it was her way of preserving the memories of my father: her private, unconscious rebellion.

  I told myself I would ignore my mother when she came home from her honeymoon, but I knew in my heart I wouldn’t. Lilly’s happiness meant more to me than that. Through the slits in the bathroom door, I watched my mother wash her underarms and brush her hair. No matter how hard I wished, I could already see that my mother was prisoner to the man who would soon be living in our phantom father’s house.

  She came out of the bathroom and sat us down on her bed. “From now on we have to concentrate on making ourselves happy. Enough of these sad faces,” she said. “You girls have to help me.” She looked up at the ceiling, as if it were a direct pipeline to heaven, and said, “Dear God, please forgive me. Please tell me I’ve done the right thing.” She hugged each one of us hard.

  Lilly reached for a bottle of nail polish and handed it to me. As she held out her long fingers, I stroked polish onto her nails. The orange-alcohol aroma filled the room. The curtains billowed against the draft in the window. After I finished one hand, Louise fanned Lilly’s nails dry with a Japanese fan Lilly kept by her bedside. We were our mother’s daughters.

  Suddenly we heard a knock at the door. My heart jumped. Max opened it and walked in.

  “How’s my little women?” Max McCarthy’s voice bellowed through the house like a loud warning from a foghorn.

  “Girls, go downstairs. Go on,” Lilly said.

  We looked at one another. “Go on,” Lilly pleaded. “Go say hello to Max, this instant.”

  This was the first time we’d laid eyes on the man who would change our lives forever. Max stood in the hallway crammed with jump ropes, roller skates, hula hoops, high heels, and snow boots. He wore a dark overcoat and brushed the snow off his shoulders once he’d stepped inside. He carried a suitcase in each hand. The room filled with the wintergreen scent of aftershave. His face was red and sunny, unlike our dark and solemn faces. It was evident he didn’t belong with us; I sensed it right away.

  When he saw the three of us on the landing he put the suitcases down and held out his arms. Later I realized that he never brought anything to our house except what he came with that day. How did his whole life fit into those two bags?

  After Max and Lilly left, I sat back in the chair in my mother’s room and opened her nail polish. Its smell poisoned the room.

  Max had hired a baby-sitter to look after us while they were gone. We missed my mother, but having her gone postponed the anxiety I felt about what it would be like when she returned with Max. Men made me uncomfortable: their loud voices, their callused, roving hands, their unpredictable behavior. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to share our house with Max.

  Our first night alone without our mother, Ruthie opened her sleeping bag and stretched it over the floor between Louise’s bed and mine. I felt my mind and body relax—I lost all sense of place, of who I was—I felt only the most fundamental knowledge of my existence. It was then when I first felt my mind and all its complicated thoughts slip away from me. I closed my eyes and felt myself floating in the realm of everything not of the world. It was heaven, the world of stars and air and darkness.

  That summer night Austin and I spent hours driving up and down the streets as if we were the sole people on earth, as if we inhabited Austin’s City of Nowhere. As we drove past the falls that once powered the mills when Chagrin Falls was a booming mill town, I felt the history, with its well-kept houses and tree-lined streets in the moist air. It was so quiet when Austin pulled into the parking lot of the golf course at the country club.

  We got out of the car and walked across the flat greens, guided by the light from an almost full moon. The last time I had been to a golf course was when Lilly had taken us to watch one of Max’s tournaments. Austin hopped into a golf cart and turned the key left in the ignition. I slipped in next to him.

  In early September he was supposed to be going to Ohio State to be a freshman in college. I still had one more year left of high school. I felt I ought to talk to him about something important, but I already knew his family story, the kind of music he liked, the drugs he’d tried, his friends. I knew the glint in his eyes when he wanted to touch me. The way he bit his bottom lip when something hurt him.

  “What was it like when your father died? It must be hard not to have a father,” Austin said.

  I looked at him. I never considered how I must have appeared to him. It made me embarrassed. “I don’t think about it,” I said. “It’s just how it is.”

  From within the stillness of the golf course, the city beyond felt artificial and gray. I carefully watched ahead, as if I was navigating, as we went over one slope and down another. The moist air, the crickets in the trees, the smell of the moist lawn reminded me that soon Austin was leaving. I motioned for him to stop the cart. I stepped out and he followed, carrying an army blanket he had taken from the trunk of his car.

  Before he spread out the blanket he pressed his sweaty body on top of me in the carpetlike grass so that I could barely breathe and could not think anymore. The humid air carried the scent of the slow decay of summer. On the slope of the lawn,
abandoned white and fluorescent yellow golf balls glowed under the starlight.

  Austin’s eyes drifted to my breasts and bare legs. I reached out and held the muscles in his forearms, and let his lips touch mine. In the distance was the swish of water going over a man-built waterfall on the ninth green, going down, down, down, in long, smooth curves, down beyond the slopes, beyond the horizon, where the sun had fallen, splintering the sky in shards of color.

  Austin opened his mouth to say something, but stopped.

  “What is it?”

  “Anna,” he began again. “I know we’ve only known each other . . .”

  I put my finger against his lips. “You don’t have to,” I said. I was sure he was breaking up with me.

  “No, listen to me. There’s something I have to tell you.” The circle of skin in the hollow of his cheek trembled. “I didn’t know until this morning that it had happened. I woke up this morning and pictured you with another guy.” His eyes drilled into mine. “I can’t get it out of my head. If you met somebody else, I don’t know if I could take it.”

  I felt that I hadn’t known him at all. The details of his family, his friends, the kind of food he liked, his passion for horses, hadn’t said anything to me really. There was so much more in his mind, thoughts that we never talked about, so much I might never know.