House Under Snow (25 page)

In the middle of my walk in the blizzard, I decided I was going to make it no matter what the cost. I had to be strong now that Ruthie was gone. Maybe because I saw more of the world beyond my home, saw that people even less fortunate
than my mother could piece together a life, my tolerance for my mothers way of living was quickly disappearing.

When I returned home from my walk, Lilly was outside, in an old man’s overcoat, wearing rubber boots and with a scarf wrapped around her head, shoveling out chunks of snow from behind the tires of her buried used Chevrolet. Once Max had left she sold the sports car, bought the Chevrolet, and pocketed the difference to help pay her bills.

“Anna, how in the world did you go out in this winter storm? Where’s Louise?”

“She’s at the pool.”

“In this snowstorm?”

“It’s indoors, Mom. Here. Let me have the shovel.”

Lilly was so out of touch with the world that she hadn’t a clue what was going on with her children. “I don’t think it’s good for her to be swimming so much. Can all that chlorine in her system be good for her?”

“What’s wrong with it? At least she’s doing something productive.”

“Look down the street,” Lilly said. “It’s so untainted.” She brushed back a few locks of hair and scraped them underneath her scarf. “On a day like today you can hear the spirits.”

“Spirits?”

“According to the Hindus, a spirit is captured, bound to the flesh, sorrow, and pain,” Lilly said, as matter-of-factly as if it were her religion. “Spirits begin a pilgrimage away from the material world, desiring never to be captured in the flesh again.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?”

“Sometimes I think I hear the wind talking to me, but then I realize the voices are in my head.” Lilly laughed. “Sometimes I think I’m half in the other world already.”

“Maybe you want to be,” I said. I took off my gloves, and attempted to bring life back to my hands with my breath.

I leaned against the shovel, which was propped against a hard brick of snow. A brittle branch cracked overhead. Our gutters creaked with the weight of the snow. Sparrows scattered in the trees. All around me the landscape was white; an arctic sheen of ice buckled against the side of our house.

“Mom, sometimes I wonder. Do you miss Max?” The question had been on my mind for years—but for some reason I hadn’t known how to ask it. Lilly never mentioned Max. Like everything else, she had wiped him from her mind. But the ways in which he’d humiliated her had formed a hard, brittle crust over her heart. Everything was stationary and static—it was as if, if we looked hard enough, we could see the water slowly crystallize and freeze into the icicles that hung from our gutters.

“I knew when I married Max that it wasn’t right,” Lilly said. She wandered toward the front stoop of the house. “I was trying to punish myself. I didn’t want anyone to take your father’s place.”

“Now you can put it behind you and start over,” I said. It really did seem simple, if only my mother would try to step out of herself. I had ideas that she could go back to school, train for a profession, but then I looked at her staring into the sky as the snow began to fall again. The sun had come out earlier, before the last snowfall, and melted some of the snow hanging over the roof and gutters. A cascade of icicles made a chimelike sound as they fell to the ground.

But it wasn’t simple.

“It’s not letting up,” Lilly said, drifting. “Between you and me, I’d like it to snow forever. It’s so warm and cozy at home when it snows. The world barely matters.”

She pulled nervously on the fingertips of her gloves. “Your father was the only man I’ve really loved. Now I’ve lost Ruthie. I don’t want to lose you and Louise.”

“You haven’t lost any of us,” I said.

Around the time Lilly met Joe Klein, Aunt Rose found a job counselor that was willing to help my mother get a job. For one day Lilly treated herself and went shopping. She came back home with a new beige suit and a red silk blouse she was planning to wear for the interview. But weeks passed, and the suit remained behind its plastic sheath in her closet. Even so, I remained a hopeless optimist. I believed that like the heroic characters in the novels I read, my family would overcome our setbacks.

When late summer came, Joe Klein gave my mother reason to hope again, and I was grateful for the timing. Maybe it was because he didn’t seem to latch on to her sexually, the way her other men had, that my mother felt she could trust him. Still, there was a part of me that wondered: How could a sane man like Joe Klein really fall for my mother?

When Joe Klein was out of town, my mother built fantasies around him. “He’s got a huge master bedroom,” Lilly said. “What it needs is a canopy. One of those big, romantic, cherry-wood or iron beds with an eyelet comforter and silk sheets. I’m sure Joe Klein wouldn’t bat an eye spending money on silk sheets.”

“What if he doesn’t want to get married again?” I said. “His wife has only been gone a few months. It could take years for him to get over her.”

“Anna, why do you always have to be so negative?” Lilly said, flipping through
Better Homes
.

By mid-October
, the sky, the trees, the row of stores in our town were bleached out, like fabric that had lost its original color. The week after the abortion, Austin called a few times, but I told Louise to tell him I wasn’t home. But that didn’t stop him. One afternoon his car was in our driveway when I came home from school. My heart raced for a few moments, and then slowed.

When I opened the front door, he was on top of a ladder in the hallway, replacing a lightbulb that had been burned out for months in a ceiling fixture.

“Hey, Anna,” he said when he saw me. He perked up. Gave me his signature wink. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Austin offered to change the lightbulb,” Lilly said from behind. “He changed the bulb in my upstairs bathroom and sanded the upstairs doors so they won’t stick so badly next summer.”

My mind flashed to my father. I wanted to stand close to Austin to make sure he wasn’t going to fall. I did not very often consider the reasons my father died. I didn’t believe his life was taken to instill some larger meaning in my character, or make me a better person. I preferred to believe that a person might be taken for no reason other than the random winds of chance, the same forces that could create a brilliant sky after a terrible storm.

Austin put the stepladder back in the hall closet and stood not an inch away from me. He sniffed my hair. My whole body reacted. I was certain my love for my father must have been so
immense that I could not contain it. It free-floated toward a necessary object. How else to explain why, with the brush of Austin’s arm against my own, I weakened.

“What’s gotten into you?” I said.

Austin looked surprised.

“It’s not like you to sign on as my mother’s handyman.”

“Can’t a guy help his girlfriend’s mother without his girlfriend thinking he’s got ulterior motives?” Austin said.

“Who said anything about ulterior motives?”

“Why don’t you two come in the living room? I’ll make us some hot tea,” Lilly interrupted.

“No thanks, Mom.” I spoke softly. I was tired. “I have to get ready for work.”

“Just for a few minutes?” Joe Klein was out of town again, and Lilly was anxious. I looked at the coffee table, where Lilly had placed a bouquet of fresh roses Joe Klein had given her. I looked at the stain on the wood floor, at Austin cracking his knuckles.

“I’m going to be late,” I said again.

“I’ll drive you to work,” Austin offered.

I took the stairs two at a time to get my uniform. When I returned Lilly and Austin were talking intensely on the couch.

“I think it’s terrible that Mr. Cooper won’t support his son’s decisions,” Lilly said as I approached.

Why was Austin telling my mother about his father? He rarely talked to
me
about anything.

“He has his reasons,” Austin said to Lilly. “He thinks I’m a loser.”

“Austin, I’m late.” I grabbed his arm.

“It won’t kill them,” he said.

“I can’t afford to get fired.”

“They don’t deserve you.”

“And you do?”

He had no idea how much I needed my job. When you grow up with financial security, you don’t know what it means to be without it. You don’t realize that without money there is no freedom. As Austin drove me to the diner I gazed at the monotonous road. The sun faded slowly behind a stand of elms. The heating vents in the Mustang blew out hot, dusty air. Five o’clock and it was near dark. The Indian summer had evaporated into the crisp shock of autumn.

“What’s up your ass?” Austin cranked down his window.

“Nothing.”

“How come you’ve been avoiding me? I’m not good enough for you anymore?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I saw you talking to Brian Horrigan yesterday.”

“You were following me?”

“I thought you’d want a ride. When I saw you with Brian I took off.”

“He’s in my Shakespeare class.” I paused. “At least
he
talks to me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He isn’t always ditching me to hang out at the track.”

“So you’re into him?” Austin drummed his hands on the steering wheel. “Does he do it for you?”

Brian Horrigan was so different from Austin. I could find nothing in which to compare them. I wasn’t sure what I felt for Brian, but suddenly the fact that he seemed less complicated, that we didn’t have so much history together, was appealing. Maybe it was his ordinariness that felt attractive. But I let the question hang there.

Austin stared over at me. “When did you get to be such a little cunt?” he asked.

I looked at my hands, folded in my lap. Austin pulled over. As we were talking we could feel the thrust of a small animal, maybe a squirrel, underneath his car. Injured, it limped to the side of the road and moved away into the long grass.

“So it’s true? He’s poking you?”

“Oh, right,” I finally said, disgusted.

He turned his head to the windshield and floored the gas. Once we were in front of Dink’s, he pulled up to the curb and shifted into park. He held me by the wrist. “I’m sorry, Anna.” He took both of my hands. “I know I let you down.” I saw him in my mind standing at the curve of my driveway as he did the first time he came to pick me up. I loved that image of Austin, open and confident, that hunger in his eyes.

“I’ll come by and pick you up when your shift’s over,” Austin said, looking at me vulnerably.

“Tonight’s not good. I’m tired,” I heard myself answer.

“Fuck you, Anna.” He turned his eyes to the windshield and took off. I called after him, regretting what I’d said, but it was too late. But, later, when I saw my reflection in the round mirror of Dink’s bathroom, I liked what I saw.

My mother was
busy in the kitchen. She was baking chicken cutlets. A fresh almond cake was cooling on the counter.

“What’s all this?” I said.

“Joe Klein is coming home tonight. I thought I’d surprise him with a home-cooked meal.”

The rest of the afternoon Lilly spent sequestered in her room. When she came downstairs with her hair curled and nails newly polished, she looked ten years younger. She wore a red A-line skirt that showed off her curves, and a strand of
black pearls around her neck. She packed up the chicken, potatoes, salad, cake, and a bottle of red wine in a picnic basket and exited the house with Joe Klein’s key in her hand.

She came home an hour later, hysterical.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” Lilly sat down at the table. “Is Mr. Klein okay?”

“That bastard,” Lilly said. “He was using me. All those days and nights I listened to him go on about his dead wife. All the pain he was in. Joe is moving to St. Louis. I can’t believe what a sucker I am.”

I was in shock, too. “I’m sorry, Mom. Maybe he just needs to get out of Cleveland.”

“Oh, Anna. You’re so naive. He’s just like the rest of them. I bet she’s in her twenties.” And then, just like that, a picture formed in my head of how Lilly must have appeared to him. A woman who spent all day and night painting her house, who had lost complete touch with the outside world, who barely left her home. While Joe Klein was busy creating a new future for himself in St. Louis, my mother was building a fantasy.

My mother had convinced herself, day after day, that Joe Klein was going to be hers, and this is what had kept her going. I watched her face collapse and diminish.

“What’s wrong with me, Anna?” Lilly said. She looked suddenly tired, and years older.

“
What’s going on
between you two?” Lilly asked me a few days later. Since Joe Klein had taken the wind out of her sails, my mother had spent the days tending to her garden. It was nearing the end of October and since it had been warm all September, Lilly was preparing the garden for the winter.
Sometimes I’d see her kneeling on the ground, garden shears still in her hand, staring at the sky.

My mother told me Austin had stopped by again looking for me when he thought I’d be home from my last class.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Why? What did he say?”

“It’s not what he said. It’s just something I picked up. Are you two fighting?”

“Why don’t you ask Austin? You seem to know more about what’s going on with him than I do.”

My mother looked like the cat that ate the canary.

“I made him lunch, Anna. I couldn’t stand to see him moping around. I was trying to help.”

In a small voice I said, “That’s not your job.”

“He needs you to give him some attention,” my mother said. She was sitting near the corner of the couch with our cat on her lap, stroking him.

“I don’t need you to tell me how to handle my boyfriend, Mom.” Then I thought for a second. “What happened to the job counselor you promised Aunt Rose you were going to see?”

Lilly stared at me.

“She told me I have no skills to get a job,” my mother said. But later that afternoon, when my mother was outside in the yard, the job counselor’s secretary called to say that Lilly had missed her appointment.