House Under Snow Page 9

  That night at the motel, I tried to tell him how I felt.

  “I don’t want you to be this important,” I said. “It scares me.”

  “Don’t you know I can’t live without you?” When he lifted the hair from my neck and I saw in his eyes that I could hurt him, I reached out and touched his face.

  “What is it about me that you love?” I wanted him to put it into words.

  “Everything about you.” He rubbed his hands along my arms and then over the curves of my body.

  I wasn’t the first girl Austin had slept with—everyone knew that—but he knew he was my first, and I think that was what also got to him about me. It was as if he craved the place that was pure and good at the center of my being.

  I began to talk endlessly about the places we would go together, what we could do.

  He told me to be quiet. My talking was giving him a headache. He kissed my eyelids and rolled on top of me, yanking up my undershirt. No matter how many times we’d slept together, I always wanted him to undress me. A rash of heat traveled up my neck and back. He kissed me again, and I felt myself falling into the warm hollow where, for a minute, I lost sight of the world. I touched the wet curls on the back of his neck and ran my finger along the creases in his forehead and listened to him say his sweet things. And before I knew it there was his touch again in the place so vulnerable it hurt.

  My mother roamed the house in her ballet slippers, pink tights, and a long oxford men’s shirt, covered with dried paint. She was forgetful and spacey; she looked, if not for gravity, as if she might float away. My sisters and I went to the Pick ’n’ Pay for groceries, emptied the garbage, and washed the laundry piled up in mounds in the basement while our mother went through the motions of painting the house.

  Our neighborhood was filled with sluggish, unhappy women who dealt with the ennui of domesticity by pouring a five o’clock cocktail or popping Valium or amphetamines disguised as diet pills. Maria’s mother had woken up the morning we began second grade convinced she saw Jesus looking at her outside the kitchen window when she was buttering toast. The breakdown was followed by several rounds of shock treatment. Other mothers in our neighborhood drank; ate themselves to twice-yearly visits to fat farms; or spiced up their bedrooms with affairs. But the difference between these women and my mother was that no matter how unhappy their marriages, there was the facade of a husband, and generally what came with it, financial security to protect them from sinking into the space where the mind drifts and floats untethered.

  It was the Fourth of July. Austin and I planned to watch the fireworks at the beach on Lake Erie. Louise had left early that morning with some friends for Cedar Point, an amusement park about an hour outside Cleveland, and wouldn’t be back until later in the evening. My mother didn’t have the energy or the wherewithal to get herself out of the house. Dust formed along the windowsills. When I pointed out the cobwebs that collected in the corners of the rooms, even whirled themselves around the wooden spoons and spatulas Lilly kept on the kitchen countertop in canisters, she looked at me like I was crazy. “I don’t see anything, Anna,” she said. “You’re exaggerating.” I knew something was off with her that day, but I didn’t know what.

  Lilly put down her paintbrush and went to the kitchen to fill her watering can. She watered the plants to the sound of Mozart.

  I was in the house alone with Lilly. Louise had scored a summer job as a lifeguard at the community pool and spent most of her afternoons perched six feet over the pool in her lifeguard chair. The year before she had joined the high school swim team—like I did, she needed to find a way to be out of our house. When she wasn’t hibernating in our room, she was submerged in the aqua blue pool, swimming obsessively, as if each stroke brought her closer to a place of safety. She lost weight. She barely ate anything all day, except a slice of toast or part of an apple. You could see every rib and muscle in her body.

  Before school had let out for the summer, once I had taken the bleachers of the indoor Olympic-size pool two at a time, to watch her practice. The smell of chlorine and the humid, wet air seeped inside my clothes, warped my papers and pages from my books. It was beautiful, the way her body slipped into the water with barely a sound, and how quickly she took to it, as if her body had become water. I found it comforting, watching my sister glide back and forth, down one lane and up the other, pushing off with one foot, slapping the aqua blue tiles with her hands. The hollow room echoed back the quick splash of her strokes. I timed her by counting to myself. To this day it still comforts me. The sound of a body in water. I have a video of my sister when she won the state championship freestyle race. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I slip it into the VCR.

  Once Austin had entered my life, I found it more difficult to invest in the idea that my mother could still, perhaps, change the dead-end course she was on. But sometimes I still tried.

  “Mom,” I asked, “why don’t you come with us to watch the fireworks?” I knew she would say no, but it made me feel better to ask.

  “You don’t need an old lady like me tagging along,” Lilly answered.

  “It would be nice if you did something that you really wanted,” I said, following after her while she scrubbed the paintbrushes with turpentine. Occasionally I felt the need to take her pulse, find out what she was thinking. Eventually she was going to finish painting the house, and then what would she do? She was so preoccupied painting that she barely took a shower or changed her clothes.

  “It’s too late for that, Anna. You know, when I was your age, a woman didn’t think about herself, like you and your sisters do. My family would have considered it an indulgence.”

  Lilly stood poised in the middle of the living room. Her hair rested on her shoulders. She flung it back, then took a strand and wrapped it around her finger. Then, ignoring me, she got out her paint chips and pictures of cutouts from her decorating magazines and tacked them to the wall. It was no use to try and talk sense into her. It only exasperated me further. She tacked the paint chips on different walls in each room and obsessed about which color would match the fabric on her sofa and pillows. She preferred colors like mother-of-pearl and alabaster to more traditional shades.

  When I surmised from all the bills stuffed in Lilly’s drawers and the phone calls from bill collectors that we were broke, I confronted my mother. “What’s going to happen to us?” I asked, as she lay in bed. It was the next night after Ruthie attempted to run away. I was in the fifth grade.

  The snow had begun to fall after my sisters and I had spent nearly all afternoon shoveling. On our block the hedgerows, shrubs, and boulders separating one house from another dissolved under the snow. The sky was the color of slush.

  “Anna, what are you talking about?” Lilly replied to my question.

  “How are we going to get the money to pay all the bills?”

  “You sense everything don’t you, angel? You’re my alter ego—my second self.” Lilly sat up and turned on the lamp by her bedside. She reached for a throw at the foot of her bed, and put it around her shoulders.

  “It’s time we had a heart-to-heart.” Lilly made room for me on the bed. “We don’t have any money left.” She paused. Outside, a cascade of icicles fell against the window. “And I can’t borrow another penny. I don’t know what to do.” Lilly’s eyes looked like those of a cat hunkered against a door waiting to come in from the cold. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us.” None of the mothers I knew in our neighborhood worked. My mother, as they had, had grown up to know what kind or color of gloves to wear with a dress; how to accentuate her eyes with makeup. From the time she was seven years old, she knew how to curl her hair. But no one had prepared her to support a family.

  “We’ll think of something,” I tried to reassure her.

  “You don’t understand. I don’t know how to do anything, except make a man want me.” She lowered her eyes. “It scares me to have so much power over a man . . .” She looked off distantly and laid her h
ead against the wall. “And such little control over my own life.”

  “What do men have to do with it?”

  Lilly laughed nervously, almost as if she were crazy. “Why, they have everything to do with it,” she said defensively. “Don’t you understand? It’s a man’s world, Anna.”

  I had the creepy realization that if it weren’t for the favors my mother received from her men we’d be living on the streets. But while my mother primed herself for her dates, she stuffed the bills in her drawer and dodged phone calls from bill collectors.

  “Anna, promise me you won’t tell anyone. If people think we don’t have money, no one will want us.”

  I huddled closer to my mother. Her silky negligee clung to my skin. When I went to touch my mother’s hand, I got a shock.

  “All week I’ve been reckoning something with myself. I’ve made a decision. Your mother is going to get married. I’ll make a good home for my girls, you’ll see. I just hope your father will understand,” Lilly motioned to the blotched ceiling where the paint had long bubbled. “Your father is watching over us, darling,” Lilly said. “He’s not going to let anything bad happen.”

  “Are you really getting married?” I said.

  Lilly nodded.

  “To who?”

  “Max McCarthy,” Lilly said, without hesitation. “Only he hasn’t asked me yet.”

  “Who’s Max?” I asked.

  “Be patient, Anna. I want it to be a surprise.”

  By the Fourth of July, our neighborhood was in full blossom. The maples and oaks canopied the lawns of our community, gardens bloomed with lavender, hydrangeas, and verbena. Lawn sprinklers went on and off to keep the grass from browning, nearly shutting down our water supply. And yet, though I was looking forward to seeing Austin, I didn’t feel like celebrating our country’s independence. There had been a heat wave the last two weeks in June. The interior of our house was so hot that it was hard to breathe.

  “I’ve always wanted to do something grand,” my mother was saying. She took the rubber plant and brought it to the kitchen sink to let the water drain from the pot. She seemed restless and preoccupied. I was trying to think of a way to get past her to go change into a pair of shorts, but she kept talking. “Study art in Italy, maybe the theater. But all of that is for you. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  “What are talking about, Mom? You’re living in a dream world. Art? The theater? Italy? I barely have enough money to buy next year’s schoolbooks.”

  I was spending as much time as I could at work that summer, to avoid spending time with my mother. I tried to take whatever shifts I could manage, sometimes doubling up lunch and dinner. Clara, the head waitress at Dink’s, had a soft spot for me; she made out the schedule each week. I usually made it to work a half hour early to have a cup of coffee with her before my shift started. She talked about her son, Randall, who was in dental school. She gave part of her tips to him every week.

  “What’s wrong with fantasizing?” Lilly continued.

  “I can’t afford to fantasize.”

  “Look at you, Anna,” Lilly said, changing the subject. “Where did you get that lovely dress? It fits you like a glove.” She was referring to a black sleeveless cotton shift I had just bought at the mall. “I can see what that boy, Austin, sees when he looks at you.

  “I know you’re in love,” Lilly said. She eyed me provocatively. The crickets went at it in the backyard. The cicadas clacked. The awning over the back porch knocked and tapped in the breeze. I jumped to answer the phone as soon as it rang, made sure Austin would meet me at Dink’s, rather than at home. I cherished my secret life with him, like the single rose he had given me one night, which I’d pressed between the covers of a book. I tried to ignore my mother’s comment and flew up the stairs to change. Even though I was eager to have Austin see me in the new dress, I wanted to protect it from getting ruined.

  Before I left that night, I looked in on my mother. She was washing dishes in the sink. She was quiet then. Subdued. In the glass I saw my own reflection. We shared the same broad forehead and widow’s peak. Her nose was longer than my own, but I saw the similar arc in our cheeks, and when she went to brush a wisp of hair away that had fallen in her face, I noticed her hand, her fingers delicate and long like my own. I hadn’t realized how much we looked alike and how much it scared me. Her eyes in the reflection looked swollen. Now I wasn’t so sure about leaving her home alone.

  “Do you want me to stay home with you tonight, Mom?” I asked.

  “No, darling. You go out and have a good time.”

  By the lake we planted ourselves on a blanket under the umbrella of stars. Nearly every family from the sprinkle of suburbs around the center of Cleveland were squatted in their yards, next to their barbecues, or in a football field, or on the edge of the lake observing the same ritual.

  The tangled smells of lake water, dried algae, and summer rain were in the air, the promise that the heat would break. As the crowds drifted to find a place on the beach, I followed the curve of Austin’s back with my eyes, intuited the texture of his skin without touching it.

  While we sat on the itchy blanket drinking a cool beer, I held in my mind the momentary feeling of something everlasting, like the eternal pines in the distance. The fireworks exploded overhead.

  Austin got up, said he’d be right back. He was always doing that, running off in secret. I kept looking at my watch as the water lapped against the rocky beach.

  As the fireworks burst into flower and rained down from the sky with their falling light, I created a picture in my mind of Austin with another girl, someone he’d bumped into at the concession stand or outside the portable bathroom stalls. He’d been gone a long time. It made me crazy, to imagine Austin with another girl. But I also knew Austin couldn’t stop himself. There was a part of him that needed the jolt of attention a girl’s desire could inflict.

  Before the grand finale began, Austin showed up. He sat down next to me on the army blanket without explanation or apology, and we watched the end of the finale without talking or touching. I listened to the chatter of conversation coming from a nearby group sitting in lawn chairs. A couple sitting next to us were kissing.

  “Where were you?” I finally asked. I realized I was furious.

  “I saw some people I knew.” In the distance Steely Dan sang “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” on a boom box.

  Austin attempted to put his arm around my shoulder as we made our way in between the mazelike path of blankets back to the car, but I disengaged and lagged behind, watching on the ground as my shadow commingled with his, and moved out again. I didn’t say a word the rest of the way home. As we pulled up my driveway, he put his hand on my thigh.

  “Listen, Anna.” I smelled the beer on his breath. I looked past him to regard the stars, the incandescent blinks of light wrapped in a sheet of darkness.

  “Anna,” he said again.

  Just hearing the way he said my name reduced me to a place where I could forgive him. I thought of the coolness of autumn.

  “I was testing you,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “To see whether you’d wait it out.”

  “That’s a sick thing to do. Where did you think I was going to go?”

  “That’s not important. Don’t talk, Anna. Don’t say another word.”

  The first boy I had a crush on was Brucie Johnson. He was the head lifeguard at one of the country clubs, and lived three doors down from us.

  The summer before I was ten, we were getting in the car to go grocery shopping when Brucie Johnson walked by.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Crane,” he said. “You ought to take the girls swimming today. It’s a scorcher.”

  “My girls don’t know how to swim,” Lilly said soulfully. “I wish I could afford to give them lessons.”

  “That’s a shame,” Brucie said. “Hey, why don’t you and the girls meet me at the reservoir tomorrow morning?”

&nb
sp; When we showed up at the reservoir the next day, Brucie was doing a jackknife off the cliffs. His hair was in a ponytail and a rawhide choker circled his neck. He wore a black bathing suit.

  Brucie saw Louise’s talent in the water instantly. Over the summer he taught her how to do the breaststroke, butterfly, and back crawl. I watched his perfect, smooth strokes as he explained how to move our arms for the breaststroke—chicken, airplane, soldier—and kick our legs like a frog. When he finished our lessons, he dried off in the sun and came over to chat with Lilly.

  Our swimming lessons with Brucie continued throughout the duration of that summer. From time to time, during the swimming lessons, Lilly glanced up, raised her sunglasses to the top of her head, and called out to us. Lilly sunned herself to the sound of soft rock on the transistor radio. You could smell the cocoa butter seeping into her darkening skin.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it, Mrs. Crane?” Brucie called to her. His eyes sparkled, the color of a minty sky.

  “Bruce, you make me feel ancient. Call me Lilly,” she said.

  Whenever my mother was out in the world, away from our house, she acted cheerful, as though not to disappoint people. She had a generous, open smile that accentuated the birthmark over the right side of her upper lip. Certain people, like Brucie, drew pleasure simply from Lilly’s company. I noticed that Brucie looked, after a morning with my mother, as if he had caught some of her vitality, and walked away from Lilly as though his battery was now recharged.

  But, after the swimming lessons, once we were driving back home, my mother’s cheerful countenance dissipated. She grew dark and irritated. “Would you girls be quiet!” Lilly said. “I have a splitting headache.”

  Ruthie reached for the knob on the radio and turned up the volume, and Lilly switched it off.

  “My head’s throbbing,” she repeated.

  “Why do you always get your way?” Ruthie said.