House Under Snow (16 page)

One Sunday morning Max came home from his golf game with barrels and barrels of Kirby cucumbers filling his trunk and the backseat of the car. There had been a fire sale on cucumbers, he reported. He wiped out the entire merchandise from a farmer who had set up a stand on the highway.

“Lilly,” he said, beaming, “I’m going to show you how to make my famous dill pickles.” Max brought the barrels down the basement, and Lilly cleaned out the sink where she washed out her nylons and lingerie. Max unloaded one of the barrels into the metal utility sink. Lilly, with a pair of blue rubber gloves over her hands, scrubbed the cucumbers with a wire brush.

“These are going to be the crunchiest pickles you’ve ever tasted.” Max smiled. He took me with him to the hardware store and bought crates of mason jars. By the time we got home, my mother had scrubbed only the cucumbers from one barrel.
It looked like an obstacle course in the basement. It was filled with hundreds of cucumbers.

While Max was at work that week, Lilly toiled down the basement.

“The recipe has to be perfect,” she said. “Altering the proportions or diluting the acidity of the vinegar can prevent the pickling process.”

“How do you know what you’re doing, Mom?” I asked. Once Max had brought home the cucumbers, he’d abandoned the project to my mother.

“I called Aunt Rose. She used to pickle in the old country. Now, Anna, stop pestering me. It’s important that I do this right.” Lilly was soaking the cucumbers in a brine solution. Our basement smelled like vinegar.

“Why?”

“Anna, don’t ask silly questions.”

After my mother had the cucumbers soaking in the original barrels in a mixture of white wine vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic, she began the long process of sterilizing the jars and lids in boiling water. Every countertop and the table in our kitchen were covered with mason jars. It was amazing, watching my mother so engrossed in a project other than herself. She ignored the ringing phone. Day and night she was in the kitchen or down the basement, except when Max told her to change out of her dirty clothes so he could take her to dinner.

One day, after the pickles had fermented, Max walked in the door, dropped his briefcase in the hall, put his fingers in a jar, pulled out a plump, pimply pickle, and held it to the light for inspection. He took a bite. “Your mother is a miracle worker,” he said, and laughed a laugh that was filled with forbidden, unknowable things. Max converted the basement closet into a
pantry. He made shelves for Lilly’s jars of pickles. They spent an entire day downstairs, labeling the jars and stacking them on the newly sanded shelves.

During the weekdays
throughout golf season, Max ran the clubhouse, organized tournaments, and gave private golfing lessons. He invested recklessly in the stock market. When one of his stocks performed poorly, he cussed out his broker on the phone. My family had always been frugal. There was a sense that one should hoard things for a rainy day, for the disaster that would eventually catch up with us. The same decades-old white chenille bedspread is still draped over Aunt Rose’s bed in the retirement development in California, and lining her cabinets, the familiar porcelain china passed down from her grandparents.

Max was a man of excess. He wore lime green, yellow, or khaki pants and polo shirts, a different shirt for each day of the week. Each morning he announced what color shirt he had on. “Today I feel bright red,” he’d say, tousling my hair. “It’s going to be a great day, isn’t it, Anna?” Then he’d pour himself another bowl of cornflakes. I had never seen anyone with such appetite. Sometimes I stared at the hardness of his chest underneath the blood-red polo. The colors of his shirts were a contrast to the drab blacks and grays that my sisters and I wore. I could see what my mother saw in Max. How he loved to have a good time, not to dwell on sadness. He lived each day in the present.

On Saturdays and Sundays when it wasn’t golf season, Max and Lilly stayed in bed until almost noon.

“Now she sleeps in the same bed with him,” Louise announced, like some kind of grand revelation, shortly after Max moved in with us.

“What did you think?” Ruthie said. We were all in Ruthie’s room, sitting in a circle and picking dust bunnies off her faded pink carpet. Ever since Max had set our house in motion, we often stayed clustered in our bedrooms. The house no longer felt like ours.

“She’s acting so weird,” Louise said.

“She just wants Max to like her,” I countered.

My mother had sat us down the night before and delivered a lecture on our table manners. “You eat as though you haven’t seen food in years,” she said. “You don’t want Max to think you’re not well-behaved young ladies, now do you?”

“Oh, I get it,” Ruthie had snapped. “You want us to put on a phony show for him, too. Maybe I should tell Max that you never used to cook before he lived with us. That we lived on Campbell’s soup and peanut butter sandwiches.”

“Why do you have to be so hateful?” Lilly answered. “Why are you trying to ruin my happiness?”

Ruthie stared at Lilly, and then marched out of the room and slammed her door.

I didn’t mind that Max slept with Lilly. I knew their bedroom was their secret place, and what went on in there was what held them together. But there was one thought that kept bothering me. Max now slept at night in the walnut post bed my father had once slept in. But, except for Max’s clothes, there wasn’t one article of furniture, one book or knickknack that belonged to him in our entire house. To us he was a man without a past. Where were his things? Didn’t he own any books, any papers, any souvenirs or treasures? I didn’t trust a person without any need for materials to mark their place
in the world, to remind them of whom they cared for, or had once loved.

In the alley behind the theater, Austin took out a gray velvet box and opened it. He slipped a ring with a diamond chip—the size of the point of a pen—onto my finger. “As long as you wear this ring, you have to promise that I’m the only one allowed to do this.”

He kissed me and as he did so he lifted my skirt and slipped his hands in my panties. I felt his erection build against my leg.

“Not here,” I said, and pulled down my skirt. I was moved by the fact that Austin had given me a ring, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen.

“I have to tell you something,” he said. “Something important.” He looked intense. I thought maybe someone had died. He pressed my back against the wall again and worried his tongue into the hollow of my ear.

“I’m blowing off school,” he whispered. “I got a job fulltime at the track.”

I was stunned. He had talked a lot about how he wanted to learn to be a driver. All summer he had gone on about it, like a tireless monologue, but I’d always thought it was a pipe dream. It was clear to me from the start, that no matter how wild he wanted to be, Austin would get a good education, because his father could afford it, and that one day, years down the line, he’d end up being something conventional, like a doctor or a lawyer. That’s why I could tolerate his working at the track, his gambling and getting stoned—because I knew
that he came from a respectable family. It pissed me off that Austin was going to get his education paid for, and that didn’t even matter to him. I was worried already about my future. I was saving my tips, hoarding away money, long before I knew what for. When he would talk about becoming a driver, I humored him. I never dreamed he’d actually do it. I told myself the idea was just a phase. That Austin would eventually get bored hanging out at the track and come to his senses.

After he told me about his plans to work at the track, his face relaxed. He started kissing me again. “Let’s go back to the car,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

In the next few days, when Austin told his father he wasn’t going to college, Mr. Cooper exploded and threw him out of the house. “‘You’re just like your mother,’” Austin mimicked his father when he reported the conversation. “‘The two of you have no scruples. No respect for anyone but your goddamn self.’”

“I guess he’s just worried about you,” I said. It was night again and Austin had picked me up from work and was driving me home.

“That’s one way to look at it. The truth is, he thinks I’m a loser.”

Beep let Austin
shack up in one of the larger tack rooms behind the stables. I was happy that Austin wasn’t leaving town. That meant I’d have him with me during my last year of high school. But I also knew that at the track Austin was too easily influenced by the lowlife there. Austin didn’t see the grooms and drivers, who, for the most part grew up in blue-collar families, as any different from himself. When he was with Beep, he
began to talk like him, as if he’d never been educated. I didn’t consider then that Austin might be rejecting his father’s wishes out of some distorted sense of revenge.

After Austin began
living at the track that August, he regularly disappeared. Then, out of nowhere he’d show up, crazy to see me. He’d walk into the diner, plunk himself down at the counter, and stare at me while I finished my shift. I might not have heard from him in three days. He’d crumple up the white sleeves he tore off soda straws and leave them all over the counter. Once, he almost got me fired because he wouldn’t stop talking long enough for me to get the orders out of the window during the height of dinner hour.

He forced me to do things I’d never dreamed I’d be capable of. Once we left a motel room in the early dawn without paying. We walked out of a restaurant with the check crumpled in my shoulder bag. He followed me into the ladies’ room in the back of a bar, locked the stall, and mauled me. At the movies he once figured out a way to get in without buying tickets. Once we made it to the dark seats of the theater, Austin put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed my knee. He liked the rush of it, the power he felt when he was breaking the rules.

After the movies one night in late August, we went back to the tack room. We sat in the middle of the concrete floor. He lit a candle and opened a couple cans of warm beer he tore from a six-pack. From outside, we could hear the clip-clop of horses walking, the swish of a groom sweeping out the stables, a horse’s long, insistent whine. At the track the trainers walked the horses from the stables into the cleared, open fields where they worked them. You could hear their snorts and sneezes
cutting into the thick night air. In my dreams later I could hear it, the sound of horse hooves on soft crumbling ground; then their wildness got under my skin, the dust in my hair and underneath my nails.

“I want you to show me that you love me,” Austin said.

“Why?” I said. “You don’t believe me?”

“You need to show me,” Austin said. Since he’d been working full-time at the track, there was a layer of dirt on his skin and in his work shirts.

“Strip poker.” He took out a deck of cards.

I tried to go along with Austin’s mind-fucking games, because Austin seemed desperate that I prove myself to him. I told myself that I had it under control, that I didn’t need to call him on it. He acted like he was trying to pay someone back for an injustice committed against him. At home, when I wasn’t with him, I justified his behavior. I studied
Wuthering Heights
, the dog-eared pages smeared with Tab stains, trying to understand Austin’s character.

“I know you’re going to leave me,” Austin said.

Austin was afraid I was going to walk out on him. If you even mentioned Austin’s mother, his hands tightened into fists. The iridescent light in his gray eyes vanished. But I think it was more than his mother’s leaving that had destroyed him. It was that she did not even care enough to call or write.

But I never considered that I might be the one to let go of Austin, though the way he’d been acting since he’d decided not to go to school—unreliable, irritable, dirty—had begun to turn me off.

“Okay,” he said. He held out a fan of cards in front of me. “What do you have? Loser has to take something off.”

I picked three cards and ended up with a pair of nines.

“Full house,” he said, with one of his devious smiles.

I started with my shorts. It was summer, and I didn’t have much on, only a cotton top, a pair of cutoffs, bikini panties, and undershirt. I didn’t wear a bra very often, nobody did, unless your breasts were so big you had to.

“Three aces,” he said in the next hand.

I had a pair of tens.

I never paid much attention to Austin’s card games. They bored me, really. I wanted him to focus on the little mole on my neck or the ankle bracelet dangling against my heel. I tried to distract him by employing mental telepathy.

He popped open another can of beer and threw the empty one in the pile in the corner with the other empty cans.

I was in my panties, nothing else. He stopped dealing the cards, and just sat across from me staring at me weirdly. I reached for my tank top. Fear rushed through my body.

Austin yanked it out of my hand. “Wait,” he said. “I want to just look at you.” I felt his eyes run along my body. And then he started to cry. I cradled his head like you would a small boy’s.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Austin lifted his head from my lap and pushed me away.

“Who said you could move? Game’s not over.”

“Austin, what’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t feel it yet.”

“What?”

“How you love me. What you’ll do for me.”

His face was moist with sweat. He had drunk too much. I could hear it in his speech, the carelessness.

“Take me home,” I said, and reached for my tank top again. He grabbed it away from me.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

I tried to grab the shirt back, but he pushed me down. I fell back on the cement floor.

“Goddamn it,” I said. “That hurt. You’re hurting me.” He had his hands around my wrists. He lowered himself on top of me. I could barely breathe. Then he stopped.

“I’m sorry, Anna,” he whispered. His grip loosened, and I stopped struggling to get away.

“It’s okay,” I said. I understood how fierce his need for me was. I also understood that he hated himself for needing me. I held him as he fell into the soundless, timeless sleep of a baby.