House Under Snow (21 page)

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 didn’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.

The officer gave Lilly a lift to the hospital. Lilly held the bottom of her womb with both hands, climbed into the back of the police car, and from behind the metal grate, gave us a small, defeated wave.

Max was in
the hospital for nearly three weeks. Lilly dutifully went to see him, with near-heroic devotion. She held her hands over her growing stomach, still believing the baby was her trump card, and while he was convalescing in the hospital, she carried in her arms magazines, cookies, and cakes. She brought pillows from home for his hospital bed, but there was a private sadness perched inside her.

The day Max came home, I didn’t recognize him. He was black-and-blue around the eyes; his jaw was wired closed, and a bandage crowned his head. He turned his head slowly, like a robot would; his face was swollen, his posture rigid, and stitches were sewn across his forehead and along his chin. It was as if he had turned into the reincarnation of his darker self, the mysterious, reckless creature that I had begun to sense underneath his happy-go-lucky nature.

“How are my princesses?” He forced the words out his wired jaw. They sounded flat and hollow.

“Give your father a kiss,” Lilly said, motioning us forward.

“Are you okay, Dad?” I asked timidly.

Max nodded his head, but without his big smile and confident disposition he looked sadly diminished.

After the accident everything changed between my mother and Max. Lilly was reserved around him, less anxious to please him. She now began to demand things she had in the past been afraid to do. Instead of wearing fancy negligees and silk robes, she wore old T-shirts around the house. In the morning she plugged in the coffee pot and wandered back up to bed before Max had finished reading the paper.

“Get dressed,” I said one afternoon when I came home from school to find Lilly still in her robe. I threw her magazines off her bed. “Can’t you at least change your clothes?” I was angry that my mother did not know or even care how to win Max back.

After Max went back to the hospital to have his jaw unwired, he slowly returned to his former activities. When he came home late one night, Lilly cornered him before he had a chance to pour himself a scotch.

“I called your office five times today,” she said. “Where were you? I’m your wife, I have a right to know.”

“Is that right?” Max tore down the basement. We could hear jars breaking and smashing. All Lilly’s pickle jars, one by one, came down from the shelves in the pantry and crashed to the linoleum floor.

My mother screamed down the stairs at him.

“Max, what are you doing! You’re crazy.”

But he came up newly restored. Calm. “I didn’t get married to be cross-examined,” he told her.

As the weeks
of her pregnancy crept on, Lilly had trouble holding down food, and complained of feeling light-headed,
and of cramps. Even though the doctor assured her that everything was fine, Lilly believed something was wrong, and she quarantined herself in bed.

During the week, Max snapped at Lilly if she didn’t have supper waiting for him on the table when he came home from work. At dinner, Lilly and Max rarely spoke. If she complained that she was tired, he said, “Quit your goddamn bawling,” his rage like a cork about to blow. Then he went outside with his putter and practiced his swing. When he came back inside, he grabbed me and tickled me until I screamed. It was the kind of tickling that hurt.

Lilly looked so agitated and worried, I prayed things would soon return back to normal. I was beginning to feel sorry for my mother again, and angry that Max had humiliated her. Maybe I was protecting him for no reason. What good were men anyway? I wondered. Brontë’s Mr. Rochester was a saint, but Max, as far as I could tell, had none of his characteristics.

Max was basting a roast for dinner. Sometimes on Saturdays he liked to spend the day roasting a turkey or simmering an expensive cut of beef. Lilly was upstairs napping, and Ruthie came into the kitchen.

“Dad, can I help you?” she said.

It was the first time Ruthie had ever called Max
Dad
. My stomach tingled.

“Of course you can, sweetheart,” Max said, and kissed Ruthie on the forehead. “You can peel the potatoes.”

Even Ruthie couldn’t bear to see Lilly in so much pain.

After Max had
regained all his strength, he sometimes didn’t come home until midnight or later. Lilly grew increasingly angry.