House Under Snow (24 page)

Louise took one good look at me and said, “What happened? What’s wrong? Anna, you’re scaring me.”

It amazed me that my stomach was still flat as a board, while internally everything about me announced that I was pregnant. “Austin blew me off,” I said. “He can’t handle it.”

“I’ll take you to the clinic,” Louise said. “We’ll get up
early, before Mom wakes up, and we’ll call a cab.” I listened to the whippoorwills in the yard repeating their same tiresome song. I no longer rose to its fine and definite trill, its cry of hunger, as if it were calling out my name. I no longer imagined a future I could unpack like freshly washed clothes from a suitcase and try on and feel instantly hopeful. The calendar had stopped. The dependable trees protecting our roof faded into shadow.

But when I awoke, the first Saturday in October, it was to the sound of a handful of dried mud thrown against the window. I looked outside. Austin leaned against the house, the heel of his cowboy boot tearing a chunk out of the matted-down lawn. The sky was half awakened. “Come on,” he called. “Get dressed. I’ll take you.”

I was so glad to see him, I woke up forgetting for a moment that I was pregnant. I pulled down the flowered seersucker sheet Louise clutched in her fist when she slept, and told her that Austin had come for me, and tried to blot out the scribble of concern in her eyes.

“Let me come, too, Anna,” she said, as she rolled onto her back, fully cognizant. But I shook my head. This was between Austin and me, I foolishly thought, still believing that the intimacy we shared, incarnated in our baby, could ensure his love.

We arrived at the clinic at eight o’clock, and an hour later the doctor had sucked out the little nut I had grown to treasure with a machine that sounded like a vacuum cleaner. The force and quickness confounded me. All those weeks I had carried the emotional gravity of being pregnant, and then, like that, it was over. The nurse gave me a glass of orange juice, graham crackers, pain medication, antibiotics, and something to contract my uterus. There was no look of regret in her eye, no elegiac turn to her lip. How many other girls had she waltzed
through this lonely initiation? She reeled off her instructions by rote, suggesting I have a good meal, preferably red meat, since I had lost blood and needed the iron. Austin took me to the Brown Derby for lunch, as if we had something to celebrate, and I ate a bloody sirloin steak—I’ve never again eaten meat since then—baked potato, and a salad with pink dressing, as ferociously as I could, so I wouldn’t have to think about my empty uterus shrinking. Afterward, I went to the sherbet-colored powder room and threw it all up. My whole body felt like it had been evacuated.

Austin got us
a room at the Skylight Motel, where I noticed for the first time that the bed linen was filled with dust balls and itched, and the ceiling was blotched with water stains. I drew the sheets over my chest and held them tightly in my fist. I slept the rest of the afternoon and when I awoke we silently watched TV. After we shut the television off, I listened to the sound of the ice from the ice maker in the hall outside our room crashing in the bin. I don’t remember if we touched.

When Austin dropped me off the next morning—it was Sunday—I dug in my closet for my waitress uniform, stuffed it in my knapsack, got on my bike, and rode to work. It was sunless. Quiet, except for the chime of church bells. A bird flapped her wings in a tree overhead, the only hint of the ordinary world.

In Dink’s bathroom, before I began my shift, I put the toilet seat down and locked the stall. I sat there, numb and drained, and thought about that glimmer of possibility I had felt in that baby, that small window on a future I would not inhabit. I longed for that moment upon waking, before it is
light, before you remember what’s done. All day I worked like a dog. I chatted it up with the customers, made sure to give refills of coffee. It didn’t bother me if they wanted to change their orders. The tips I collected in my apron—as soon as I came home I carefully unfolded each crinkled dollar, counted every quarter—felt like the only essential thing in my life.

I stayed after school, holed up in the library, rain pelting against the windows, and randomly flipped through college catalogs filled with color photographs of sophomores and freshmen conversing on the college green, and tried to imagine myself a coed. To see whether I’d qualify for scholarships or financial aid, I had made an appointment with my guidance counselor. In a carrel in the back of the library, I studied the practice questions to prepare for the SATs. A spider drew a web between the spines of two oversized books. I watched how carefully she protected herself from harm.

My breasts had shrunk back to their normal shape. I looked at them closely in the bathroom mirror each morning for any signs of transfiguration. I touched the lower part of my stomach involuntarily, the way your hand automatically goes to pick at a scab. I knew there were scars, but I couldn’t see them.

On my way home one day, two weeks into October, I ran into Maria, and instead of waving and walking on, I stopped to ask her if she wanted to go to a movie. We smoked a cigarette as we walked home. She didn’t ask about Austin, and I didn’t offer anything. Walking next to her, I felt the stem of my being toughen and root itself further into the earth. And I
thought then how much I had missed her without ever really knowing it. About how much of my life I had been missing.

After Max evacuated our lives—there wasn’t a trace in our house that he’d once lived there, not one tie or abandoned sock—I was thirteen. Lilly’s unhappiness hung over the ceilings and eaves. She floated in an unconscious pool where nothing, not the sound of frogs in the yard or the chirp of crickets, could reach her. Some days she got dressed, put lipstick on, and tried to appear happy, but I knew that as soon as we left the house, my mother resumed her life in bed. It was only in the solitary world of the unconscious that Lilly was free—I wondered what it was like to live inside her mind, all the what-ifs and regrets tangled up like intricate twine.

Dirt and dust collected in the corners of the floor near the walls of the house; spiderwebs hung at the edges of the ceiling; the windows were smudged, and the couches in the living room had frayed and yellowed. The walls needed to be painted, our ceilings were marked with water stains from the upstairs toilet leaking; grease dried and hardened on the stove and along the kitchen counters. You could almost hear the sound of the wood as it began to splinter and decay. The image of my mother recoiled against the wall near her bed was lodged inside my brain.

When I came home from school, I turned on the lamp on the nightstand next to my mother’s bed. I could see the veins over her temples, a weave of them I had never noticed before. Lilly was sedentary; hard and unmoving.

After Lilly signed
the divorce papers, she withdrew inside herself. She spent days wandering from room to room, picking up a magazine, throwing it down again, attempting to mop the floor, and then leaving a bucket of soapy water in the middle of the kitchen floor and drifting back up to bed. Two years passed by without any change in our mother’s disposition. By the time I started tenth grade, Ruthie was cutting classes and getting high with Mark Zion and Jimmy Schuyler in Hippie Hall. If she wasn’t smoking a joint, she was huddled in the corner making out with Jimmy. She had grown so far removed from us that when I passed her in the halls at school, we looked at each other like strangers. I knew she was getting high a lot, but there was an unspoken sibling code of honor between the three of us that I could not violate by telling my mother. At least a year went by, and Lilly hadn’t a clue that Ruthie was in trouble. One night Ruthie came home with a school of painful-looking hickeys on her neck. Other times, I saw her pressed against Jimmy’s jacket so tightly, it looked as if she were part of his body. She drifted in and out of the house wearing Jimmy’s army jacket; she even slept in it. In the mornings she sat on the edge of the beige tub in the bathroom, smoked a joint, and stared at herself in the wall-length mirror as if she were trying to locate a lock of hair that had fallen out of place.

The night before Ruthie got busted, I waited for Louise to finish swim practice and we walked home together. The sky was slowly shifting from blue to black. It was usually dusk when my mood would darken, as if the soul were sensitive to shifting light and weather.

“What do you think’s going to happen to Ruthie?” I said to Louise. Before school that day, dressed in a gauze skirt and tie-dye shirt, she’d done a bong in her room. She took a hit before she came downstairs to grab something to eat. We often heard the bubbling of the bong water in her room after she strolled in past midnight, ignoring Lilly’s curfew. Over the past year the pot had stained her teeth; little seeds were buried inside the carpet in her room or sometimes stuck underneath her nails.

Louise and I were in a bind. Worrying about Ruthie felt like the same hopeless conversation we’d had about our mother. The question hung there between us like a long, impenetrable afternoon.

When we got home Lilly and Ruthie were at it again.

“You can’t stay out all night with
that
Jimmy, and that’s final,” Lilly said. “I’m your mother, whether you like it or not. You’re stuck with me.”

“You’re ruining my life!” Ruthie shouted. She was so stoned that she could barely open her eyes.

She disappeared into her room, and the faint and soothing sounds of James Taylor singing
Sunny skies sleeps in the morning, he doesn’t know where to be found
vibrated behind her door.

Ruthie’s boyfriend had hair that reached the middle of his back. The shirttails from an oxford shirt hung beneath his sweaters. He took his German shepherd, Nietzsche, in desperate need of a bath, wherever he went. He chained him near the bike racks behind our school. I could hear the oversized dog panting outside our house when Jimmy was with Ruthie, doing God knows what, sequestered behind her bedroom door. As they walked to school, Ruthie’s head was perfectly cradled in Jimmy’s neck as if it were carved into a stone statue.

That night, after we were in bed, I heard Lilly get up and go into Ruthie’s room.

“Why, that little sneak,” she said. “God must be punishing me.”

Ruthie had slipped out of the house to meet Jimmy. I wished that I had a boyfriend who could take me away, as if love were simply a way out, and not a way of being.

Ruthie and Jimmy
Schuyler were busted by the police that night. They were round smoking a joint in the parking lot of Dairy Queen. The police confiscated a dime bag of pot from Jimmy’s coat pocket. Later, his bedroom was searched. Turned out he was supplying the entire neighborhood with pot. Since it was Ruthie’s first offense, she was given a warning. Lilly called Aunt Rose, and when Aunt Rose found out Ruthie was smoking pot, she made the decision. Ruthie would go to live with her.

As Ruthie sat in the backseat of the car that came to take her to the airport, Lilly’s face looked as if a little piece had been torn out and then pasted back. Heavy snow spun in the shapes of haystacks into the night and early morning. Ruthie caught the last plane before the blizzard. It was one of those weeks of winter when temperatures in Ohio fell to zero and below with wind chill, and no one went out to work, or to plow, or shovel. It was no matter; our house was always in a state of winter, waiting for someone to dig us out. Ours was like a house under snow, frozen since the day our father died.

In spite of the snowstorm, Louise was determined to go to the pool to swim her laps. Like an aquatic creature, her body depended on the feel of water to survive. On the way downstairs one morning, we passed our mother’s bedroom door ajar. Lilly slept soundly, her face pale and peaceful, buried in layers of blankets and quilts. If the house was quiet, she’d sleep till noon.

Once Louise had left, I went back to my bedroom as the snow continued to fill the backyard. I could barely make out the gazebo, so covered in snow, but I felt the lost outlines of it and its shadow. The tree branches, burdened with snow, looked as if they’d snap. The furnace kicked on again. The sky was a blue lake of frost.

Later, I walked into town through the deserted, private streets, off Main Street, past the bank, the pharmacy, the liquor store, over the ramp of the crashing falls, stuffed my hands in my pockets, and walked along the river. I didn’t know what to do with all I was feeling. My fingers began to numb inside my gloves. The trees seemed to have grown tall and erect over the winter months, in their effort to reach more sunlight. A gusty wind echoed through the bare treetops. I trudged through the snow, now up to the tops of my boots. I could barely feel my toes. Two birds tore at a carcass of a dog, no doubt hit by a car. As I drew nearer, they rose up and flew away. With my boot I covered the carcass with snow. As I walked on, in the sky’s whitewash, the birds flew back to feast on the dead.

The bare birches bent and sighed as the wind ripped through them. I listened for the sound of snow falling. All around me everything was dying. It was winter break when Ruthie went to live with Aunt Rose, and when I returned to school after winter vacation to begin the new term, Austin Cooper opened the heavy doors of our school for the first time.