House Under Snow Page 16

  The woman with the frosted hair uncrossed her legs, took a last sip from her drink, and opened her leather pocketbook, the shape of a long envelope.

  “It’s on me,” Max told her.

  She snapped her pocketbook shut.

  “Anna, I’d like you to meet my secretary, Crystal Martin. She keeps me honest.”

  “You look just like your mother,” Crystal said. Then she turned her eyes to Max. “I’ll see you Monday,” she said, nuzzling up to Max’s ear and practically kissing it. She used a voice meant for men, a voice I knew by then.

  After she’d left Max and his friends continued to knock down more shots, and order refills for me.

  “Max, I’m tired. Do you mind if I go back to the room?” My stomach was feeling queasy from drinking so many Shirley Temples.

  “When are you going to start calling me Dad?”

  “Dad, can I?”

  “Anything for my princess. I’ll have room service send you up a plate of food. Give me a kiss. I’ll be up soon.” He squeezed me to his chest so forcefully I thought I was going to stop breathing.

  I walked upstairs, wishing my sisters were with me. Without them, I felt as if I were missing an essential organ. I longed to look into their faces and burst into giggles over the sound of a fart, or to catch one of them roll her eyes at me the way we did when our mother snuggled up to Max. The part of me that, earlier, had been happy to be alone with Max had disappeared.

  I took off my dress, slipped into my nightgown, and stared at the wallpaper, covered with dogs, rifles, and figures of men dressed in old-fashioned hunting clothes, wearing black riding boots. Above the bed was a stuffed deer’s head. I pulled the covers around my neck and made myself fall asleep.

  I woke near dawn. Max was sprawled next to me, his face buried in the pillow, wearing only his boxer shorts. He smelled liquored up and smoky, so drunk, I guessed, he couldn’t find his own bed. Like the times I used to watch Jackie Gleason sitting next to him on the couch, I was afraid to move.

  Then I felt him rub up against my body. My heart began to pound so loud I thought it would wake him. I held myself as stiff as a corpse. Max’s mouth hung open like a window letting in flies. He began to snore loudly through his nose. He mumbled and turned his head toward me. What if he’d gotten himself so drunk that he could lose consciousness completely?

  I shook him by the shoulders. “Max, are you all right?”

  “Sweetheart,” he moaned. His hand crept up my thighs. “Come here,” he mumbled. “Crystal, sweetheart.” He hadn’t a clue where he was, that it was me, Anna Crane, his wife’s daughter, in bed with him. Max’s body was drenched with sweat and burning hot. He was in another universe. I stared at the wallpaper and counted the little hunting dogs as Max’s body rubbed harder against my leg, his penis hard as wood, burning through my skin like a hot coal. A spray of his hot, warm cum rushed over my thigh. Then Max rolled over, mumbled, and fell into a hard sleep.

  I tiptoed to the empty bed and turned my body into the wall. I told myself he didn’t know it was me. I know he didn’t. But I hated him. For the rest of the night I was kept awake by the coarse pull of Max’s mucus-filled snores, vibrating the bed and rattling my half-finished glass of water on the nightstand.

  By the time Max woke up, I was already showered, packed, and dressed. On the car ride home, I closed my eyes and pretended I was asleep while he sang “Strangers in the Night,” to the tune of the radio.

  When we stopped for gas, Max turned to me.

  “I’m so glad to have you here,” he repeated. “I’ve always wanted to have kids.” He put his hand on my leg. “Ever since I lost my brother, I’ve never really had a family until I married your mother,” Max said. “Can you keep a secret, Anna?”

  I nodded as he dug into the pocket of his khakis to pay the gas station attendant. Outside the window the sky was a pure, translucent white. You could smell the autumn air in your clothes. “I wasn’t sure how things were going to pan out when I married your mother,” Max continued. “But I think we’re going to make it.” I felt as he said those words that they were what he wanted to believe, but not what was true. Maybe secrets are only told when you’re trying to protect the real truth from coming out.

  The minute we got home I changed into my blue jeans and walked out back to the gazebo. Behind me, the late-afternoon lights of the house dimmed, leaving it a cloak of darkness against sky and trees. There was no wind. No movement. I didn’t even hear a bird. My soul felt flat. I imagined a blade of grass in an open field slaughtered by the sunlight. What was my relation, I wondered, to my mother, to Max, to my sisters, to this strange world? I didn’t know, but I felt my existence wrapped up with all of them.

  I scratched my arms, and then my legs. I saw that my skin was covered in red bumps and raw patches of sores. I must have rubbed up against some poison ivy. I couldn’t stop scratching. It was as if I had to shed my skin, any memory of that night.

  During the lull after the lunch rush, the morning after I’d been to the clinic, as I was refilling the sugar packets, I thought about how I would break the news to Austin that I was pregnant. I was angry that I felt I had to protect him—after all, he was part of why I was in this situation to begin with. Perhaps there were things about Austin that I knew nothing about. I began to doubt him, to find fault with everything he did. I racked my brains, thinking back to each encounter, trying to figure him out. I remembered how strangely Austin had acted the first time that summer when I introduced him to my mother. She was curled up on the couch doing one of her crossword puzzles when we walked in the house. I could smell the burning odor of chemicals in her hair. That morning she had dyed out the gray in the bathroom sink, leaving an auburn ring around the drain.

  “So this is Austin.” She stood up to greet him, and as she did, smoothed her hair with her fingers as if she were a Clairol model. “The one who’s taking my daughter away from me.”

  She wore a pair of shorts and a tight sleeveless shirt. Her bare toes peeked out from her sling-back, open-toe sandals. Austin ran his eyes along her body, slow and careless, the way all men did.

  “I can see where Anna gets her looks.” He reached out and shook my mother’s hand.

  Lilly perked up.

  “Anna, why don’t you get Austin a glass of iced tea?” Lilly said. “I just made a pitcher.”

  “That’s okay, Mom. We’re not staying.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a cold glass,” Austin said as he flipped through a magazine on the coffee table. I could barely pry him away.

  Once we were in the car, he bombarded me with questions. “What happened between your mother and your stepfather? Did he walk out on her? I just don’t get it,” he said. “The way people think they can just get up and leave. I feel sorry for your mother. It must be fucking hard raising three daughters.”

  “I guess,” I said. But I didn’t want Austin feeling sorry for my mother. I didn’t really like to talk about her past. Once I had mentioned to him that years after my father died, my mother had remarried but the marriage didn’t last. I lit a cigarette, even though Austin hated when I smoked in his car.

  “I don’t know why your stepfather left your mother,” he continued. “He must have been out of his mind.”

  “Same reason your mother left your father, I suppose. Wasn’t your mother having an affair?”

  Austin stepped on the brakes. The car came to a crushing halt. “Fuck off, Anna,” he said. “Unless you want to walk.” Then, without looking at me, he floored the gas. What I didn’t know was that a letter he’d recently written to his mother had come back unopened, address unknown. I found it a few days later in the tack room, between the wall and his bed, where he must have stuffed it, when he got up and went outside to take a leak.

  On the way to the track that night we went to the liquor store. Austin bought a bottle of vodka and a carton of orange juice. In the car he spilled out half of the juice from the carton on the ground and then poured in the vodka. He took
a swig and passed it to me. I took a long swallow. We spent the better part of an hour that way, in the parking lot, passing the carton back and forth, like a tonic. By the time we got to the tack room, I could barely feel the weight of my body. I lay on the cot and watched the room spin.

  “Austin doesn’t look me in the eyes when he talks to me. Have you noticed that, Anna?” Lilly said, when I returned home the next day, queasy and hungover.

  “Mom, that’s absurd.” I felt an almost innate urge to defend him. If Austin was ashamed, he had reason to be, I thought. Austin’s shame, I convinced myself, like Heathcliff’s, came from feeling helpless and abandoned. I didn’t mind it. It endeared him to me, the complex range of feeling.

  “I have a lot more experience, Anna,” Lilly continued, in the all-knowing voice she adopted when she attempted to be maternal. She picked at the chipped nail polish on her fingers.

  That night Austin and I had plans to go pool hopping with a group of friends and, as if to exacerbate my mother’s suspicions about Austin, he stood me up. I waited in the living room, leafing through a magazine, ears listening for his car. I tried to hide my anxiety, but my eye kept darting to the window every time a car sped by.

  After some time my mother came downstairs for a cup of tea.

  “You can’t let him treat you that way,” she told me. She knew what was going on without my having to say a word. It was close to midnight. “Don’t answer when he calls. Let him think you’re doing something else. A man knows when a woman wants him too much.”

  “It’s not like that between us,” I snapped. “He’s not like Max.”

  “He’s going to take advantage of you, Anna,” Lilly warned. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  I told myself before clocking out that now that I had my own problems to figure out, I had to be harder on Austin. I was tired of thinking about him. I sat down in the booth in back of the diner and counted my tips.

  There was this game Austin and I liked to play. Under the dim light of a candle, we sat on the cot in his tack room and fantasized about how we were going to make our escape from Chagrin Falls. Austin undid the end of the long braid in my hair, as if coaxing the mane loose on a horse’s back.

  “I’m going to Kentucky,” Austin would say, “and work on a horse farm. That’s where they breed the best trotters. And after you graduate you’ll come out and go to school out there.”

  I’d always been fond of reading. The characters in novels felt closer to me than my own relatives or friends. I would imagine I was inside Emily Brontë’s head on a foggy moor or wrapped inside an elegant, velvety room in one of Henry James’s pristine mansions. I had consumed Ruthie’s philosophy and poetry books. Once her boyfriend Jimmy had been sent away to boarding school, she would spend hours in her room reading passages from The Stranger. Knowledge will save you, Miss Hockenberry, my high school English teacher, had told us; I ingested books and savored them like a tonic. Miss Hockenberry repeated the last lines of the Frost poem we were reading: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood /. . . . / and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” I imagined Miss Hockenberry’s life had been structured around the ideas behind those words, and I was going to be the same way. I wanted to devote my life to something beyond myself, to follow a path unlike all I had known, even if it meant I had to consult a Ouija board in order to find my direction.

  “I’m going to Paris,” I said. “I’m going to study at the Sorbonne, and you’ll come and live with me, and cook for me.”

  We laughed.

  “Is that all I’m good for?” Austin said. “To be your cook?” He tackled me on the bed. “I think I’m worth more than that, don’t you?”

  The tack room was damp and hollow. From the crack underneath the door, we could smell the horses and, if there was a summer wind, the steam from hot dogs turning on their spits in the concession stand. I felt alive and buoyant in that tight, filthy box of a room, even if I had to walk halfway across the stretch of barns to get to the girls room. The track became my second home. My mother stopped questioning me about my whereabouts—so different from other mothers. I stayed away as much as I could.

  I watched the girls who cleaned the stalls and trained the horses. They had lockers in the girls room, where they’d go after a long day to shower. They’d boast about the horse they had rubbed, or what driver they were grooming for. Then they’d sit around at night drinking beer and whiskey. Sometimes someone would go out and get a pizza. One girl must have been sixteen or seventeen. She was eight months pregnant and still hosing down the stalls. I didn’t know whether she had a boyfriend, or any family. I wondered what would happen to us if Austin decided to stay at the track and learn to become a driver. After a good race, freedom and possibility, like an urgent rain, pressed against the cement walls of the tack room, but if the horses Austin trained weren’t racing well, it was a different story. I feared, as we spent most evenings together, that I would no longer feel Austin’s love for me.

  There was another game we played, in the dark, without even the bare flame of a candle; we’d lie beside each other, not touching. The point of the game was to try and seduce each other without touching.

  “I’m on top of you now,” Austin would say. “I’m whispering in your ear, my tongue is inside now. I can hear what you’re thinking. I’m licking you.”

  “My hands are on your back,” I’d tell him. “I’m kissing down each bone of your spine.”

  We went on like that for hours, until we couldn’t take it anymore. The point was to see who would give in first. Who would have to grab the other person, because it hurt too much not to.

  “We’ve moved to a Caribbean island,” I said to him a few days after the trip to the free clinic in mid-September, stroking the inside of his arm. “All we have to wear all day long are bathing suits and shorts. We get jobs at one of the resorts, and go to the beach all day. And make love.” I paused. “And then I’m pregnant, and we decide to have a baby.”

  I shot him a meaningful look. He turned around and stared at me.

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” He balled up the single sheet on the cot in his hand.

  I nodded.

  “Anna, how did that happen?”

  “What do you mean, how did it happen? How do you think it happened?”

  “I thought we were being careful.”

  “What difference does it make now? It happened,” I said. “You don’t have to worry. I’m taking care of it.”

  My eyes turned from his and rested on the Northfield Track poster taped on the cement walls. In the half light of the candle, you could barely make out the figure of the horse, bold and beautiful, a study of power and desire.

  I wanted him to tell me to keep the baby. I didn’t care if it meant we had to stay in Cleveland. But when I looked into his eyes, he looked back, and shook his head.

  Not long after the duck-hunting weekend, Lilly sat us down and told us she and Max were having a baby. In Lilly’s arms was the kitten Max had brought home for us one day. “A baby is sacred,” Lilly said. “It’s made out of the love between a man and a woman. This baby is a blessing to our family. Why do you look so worried? It will be our very own living doll.”

  “Congratulations, Mom,” I said dutifully. Even though I was too old to be babied, I still longed for my mother to hold me in her arms and stroke my hair, but Lilly sat there, oblivious, stroking our kitten.

  Around this time Max began going out of town on business. Once, when Lilly hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days, she called his secretary. But she only got a recording. “Crystal must be on vacation,” she sighed. She waited up all night for Max to call—I could hear the restless springs on her bed every time she turned—and was anxious and needy the next day.

  I resented knowing something so formidable about my mother and Max’s private life, and not knowing exactly what it meant. Did Max’s flirting with Crystal Martin that night at the Hunt Club mean he did
n’t love my mother anymore? I didn’t know then whether my mother had the constitution to withstand Max’s indiscretions. She seemed to need Max’s undivided attention. Should I have told my mother that we had run into Crystal at the Hunt Club that weekend? I felt as if I were carrying around an explosive I had to be careful not to agitate, and silence seemed the best way not to.

  That day I was on the porch step reading Jane Eyre. I’d read the pages over again the entire fall. I imagined myself growing up in an orphanage, sleeping on a cot with other orphan girls, and then falling in love with a blind man. I pictured myself driving away in a carriage to become a governess, and suddenly I knew I’d miss having staring contests with my sisters when we couldn’t fall asleep at night, or raiding the refrigerator if we were hungry.

  A police car pulled up the driveway.

  “Is this the McCarthy residence?” one of the officers asked, when they came to the door.

  Lilly nodded.

  “Ma’am, your husband was in a car accident last night. The Ohio Highway Patrol found him just outside of Cincinnati.”

  “A car accident?” Lilly repeated.

  “He was pretty banged up. His car veered into the guardrail off Interstate Seventy-one and spun out of control. Miss Martin got a couple of fractures in her leg, and some facial scratches. They’re lucky they’re both alive. They flew your husband in this morning to the Cleveland Clinic. They’re operating this afternoon.”

  “Why didn’t someone phone me last night?” Lilly said.

  “Your husband was unconscious, and Miss Martin didn’t mention a wife and children,” the officer said.

  The wind went out of Lilly. You could practically blow her away.

  Not only was she shocked by the accident, but she just found out that Max had been having an affair.