House Under Snow (26 page)

I hung up the phone and went upstairs. I was furious with my mother. I had lost faith in the idea that my family could sustain me. Our pristine neighborhood, with its beautiful homes and raked lawns, had little to do with security, comfort, and love. Even the street names—Elm, Maple, Walnut—were neither interesting nor profound. I longed for a place where no one knew me or my history. Where I could reinvent myself. I
was determined to depend only on myself. But that night I knew nothing of what I would become.

I couldn’t sleep
well that fall. I watched the hand on the clock. Once, by the time I fell asleep, it was four in the morning. When the alarm clock blared, I was so tired I could barely pull myself out of bed. Paint fumes snaked through the house. Our mother had resumed her house-painting project. By now, the walls in each room were each a different color. That morning she was scraping the paint from the downstairs hallway, peeling away years of old paint that had cracked, buckled in places, and yellowed. She seemed to believe that if she found the right shade to paint each nook and cranny of our house, she would redeem herself. She knew she had failed her children. She never had to say it. But could she mentally repaint the walls of our rooms for the rest of her days?

“Anna! Louise!”

“Mom, we’re right here.” We had grabbed Pop Tarts from the kitchen and were nearly halfway out the door.

“I’ve ruined my house!” Lilly shouted.

The paint for the living room hadn’t mixed right, and its walls were streaked the color of muddy water.

“It’s ruined!” Lilly said. “Everything’s ruined.”

She looked unbalanced and anxious. She was popping pills again. I could see the vacancy in her eyes, the way she stumbled when she walked. “Nobody wants me. Nobody will ever want me.

In the last few weeks, school had become the focus of my life. I threw myself into studying and books. When I was consumed by my studies, my own worries and inner turmoil
receded like the world at night. I loved history and literature, subjects where I could see the drama of human nature acted out on the page. I was mesmerized by the repetition of sounds, of words, the rich substance I garnered building like layers of protective skin inside my body.

“Girls, please stay home and help me,” Lilly said.

“We’ll help when we get home. We can’t miss school. Go upstairs and get some sleep.” Louise took the paintbrush out of our mother’s hand. “Mom, you look so tired.”

“Don’t you care what happens to me?”

“Of course we do.” I paused. I looked at the mess, at the dozens of paint cans stacked in the room, the spilled paint that had dried on the floor where the drop cloth had come loose. “You need to sleep now, Mom. We’ll help you when we get home,” I said slowly. I glanced at my watch. We were already late. “We have to go now.”

“Austin must be waiting for you,” Lilly said. She was slurring her words.

I tried to remain calm. “Mom, we’re going to school.”

“Please, girls,” Lilly begged. “Please stay home and help me.” Paint was splattered in Lilly’s hair. “I’m lonely, girls.”

“Mom, please don’t do this.” I wanted to try and comfort her, but my body had begun to build up resistance. I forced myself to reach out my hand, but my mother backed into the ladder. It fell against the piled-up furniture, sending a can of paint splashing against the wall. Our cat ran across the room and stood pressed against the front door. As I opened it, he shot past.

“Don’t desert me. Please, girls,” Lilly said. But we couldn’t stay.

We saw her through the picture window as we walked past the front of our house.

“What are we going to do?” Louise asked. She looked at me and gestured toward the window, where we could still see our mother watching us. I thought of Lilly later retreating upstairs to her bedroom, wanting, like a small animal, to dig a hole lined with features and twigs, where she could nest, safe and warm.

When I came home from Dink’s that night, Lilly wasn’t around. The cans of paint were stacked neatly against the wall, and the ladder she had knocked down that morning was now standing upright; the wall she had splattered the paint against was freshly painted an eerie blue-green. Draped over the floor, her white canvases were speckled with fresh paint. I walked into the kitchen looking for her, and in the side window, parked near the garage, I recognized Austin’s Mustang. Since I had cut across the front lawn and entered the house from the front door, I hadn’t noticed it. It had been almost a week since I’d seen him after the day I had blown him off when he drove me to the diner. Sometimes, when Lilly was home, Austin and I used to get high in the gazebo, and I ran out the door, assuming that’s where I’d find him.

I realized how despondent I’d been, because once I saw Austin’s car, I felt awake and alive.

There was no moon that night, only a canopy of stars. It was still warm enough that October that you only needed a light jacket, but the wind carried the decaying smell of autumn. I was familiar with the dark, uneven path to the gazebo, aware of the dips and curves in the grass, the large rocks. Ir the gazebo I knew the places where the white wood was beginning to splinter, where the floorboards creaked. How to scare the bats that liked to rest in the rafters. My body felt queasy with excitement. It was always like that with Austin. No matter what he had done to me, I was ready to be possessed by him all over again.

As soon as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, two shapes slowly came into focus, and then disappeared. I heard my mother’s voice. And then something occurred to me. Maybe it wasn’t Austin after all. Maybe Joe Klein had changed his mind.

I crept closer. I stopped at the big oak tree about fifteen feet from the gazebo. Two thick candles, one on each side of the gazebo, gave off tiny flames of light.

I stopped dead. I stared toward the gazebo.

Then, as I inched closer, I saw, next to one candle, a joint burning in the blue-and-green-tiled ashtray I had made one year for Lilly at school. Usually the ashtray was in the center of the coffee table in the living room. And then I knew, just as I knew the feel of his skin against my hand. I stopped, stunned, like a deer trapped in front of a headlight, not knowing which direction to run.

It was my mother’s laugh, and Austin’s quick-throated breaths, the sound he’d always made as he eased into me. I saw that he was on top of her, on the bench, and she was in his arms with the skirt of her robe hiked up. I saw how small my mother looked under him, pressed against the wooden bench, observed the slow motion of her body. My eyes fell on his arms, propped against the wood. I saw his face as he was about to lose control.

I saw their lips. They were kissing. I saw his hands over hers. I saw the way he looked, heated, almost angry, furious and fast, and determined.

The blue needles of the pine above fell, with a brush of wind, and nettled over them, and a cry went into the wind that was like the sound of someone released, momentarily, of suffering.

And then I took off. I ran through the backyard and into the yard of our neighbors, and I kept on running. I ran down the street and through the neighborhood until I reached the high school. I sat on the steps in front of the building and worked on controlling the sound of my breathing that had accelerated, and just sat there so shocked I couldn’t cry. Then I got up and walked to the pay phone in the school parking lot and called Maria.

I spent the night at Maria’s house. I told her Austin and I had broken up, because I didn’t know what else to tell her, and out of respect she didn’t push me to say more. I curled into the wall of the twin bed next to hers listening to the cold sound the wind makes when fall has come into the air, and pretended I was asleep. But, as it always is when you come upon something so shocking, so unreal you wonder how you’ll survive it, I woke up the next morning the way I always did, only I woke up with dread, and didn’t feel as if I had slept at all. I counted the little panes of glass in each window of the room, and then the number of fringes that dangled from the blanket on the chenille bedspread of the twin bed across from me. I looked at the bulb in the glass fixture on the ceiling and wondered how much pressure it would need to break.

Later I learned
that Austin had come to our house that morning, after Louise and I had left, to give me a ride to school, because he couldn’t stand the fact that I was refusing to see him. And when he discovered I’d already left, Lilly had
cornered him into helping her paint the living room. I don’t like to think about how it started. How, at the knock of the door, Lilly must have come down the stairs, defeated after her outburst that morning, barefoot, still high on pills, dressed only in her silk robe. How they must have teased each other throughout the day. I don’t want to think whether it was my mother who started it. After all these years it’s still so hard to remember it. Afterward I became numb and distant. It was as if a shade had come down on that part of my memory, and whited it out. But eventually even the things we don’t want to remember come to the surface. Every fall, just as the summer is ending, and the air takes on that hair-raising chill, I remember it, the sound of the trees containing the wind, holding it between the branches just before it lets go.

Eventually, I had to remember how my mother had begun to fall into that place where she was responsible for no one. She must have been desperate to make sure she was still desirable. To make sure even her own daughter’s boyfriend would still want her. Perhaps I was naive not to have suspected. After all, my mother had seduced boys before.

Did she lure Austin, I wondered, first with her helpless routine, the way she had gotten the men she had dated to fix her leaking roof, buy her jewelry, or mow her lawn? Did she look closely into his eyes, or did she stare off into the air, all the while willing him to pay attention?

After a long day’s work of painting, he would have been tired. Intoxicated by the paint fumes. I imagine my mother played music for him, maybe one of our James Taylor or Cat Stevens albums, as he scraped down her walls and mixed the paint. As he rolled the roller in the pan, I wonder, did he think he was doing me a favor, that once I saw that he had helped my mother I’d give in. We had rarely talked about my feelings
toward my mother. I had never broken the silent covenant between mother and daughter, had never revealed my mother’s secrets or strange behavior to anyone outside of my sisters. I mentioned Max in passing, but I didn’t dwell on that. Instead, I built a rainforest with big trees and wet, humid air in my mind, where I could wander free, without being suffocated. If there was evil in the forest lurking there, like exotic unknown animals, I always chose to see beauty. Because without beauty or goodness, I did not see the point in living. Having seen my mother and Austin together, I felt for the first time the presence of evil in the world.

I can see my mother smelling the underside of her scented wrists before she came down the stairs. Then, as she poured him a glass of water, I can see her lean in close to him, raise her wrist near his face. I can see the glistening of the sweat on their skin.

Austin always flirted with my mother. He flirted with most women, especially if they were attractive. I used to burn with jealousy when he did it in my presence. Like that time at his party with Rita Fox, or at the track when I saw that killer glimmer he turned on in the presence of Jane Smart at the stables. Sometimes when she wasn’t working, she came by the stables after one of their horses had raced, dressed in white boots and a white leather coat, her blond hair bouncing down her back, and her breasts jiggling in his face. It drove me crazy. Sometimes, if we were in a fight, I used to think to myself, she’s the kind of girl he should be with. A girl who was light and bubbly and obsessed with horses. But I knew Austin had never crossed the line—had never betrayed me.

It was only later, when I began to put the pieces together, that I realized how much Austin needed me, how he couldn’t
stand my pushing him away, and how he felt abandoned again. I could not have imagined, that first day I saw him walking down the halls of our school, that he was capable of cruelty.

For years I hated my mother for betraying me, but she was so lost that continuing to think ill of her would be like hating a small, helpless child. Even when you think you’ve stopped loving someone, one day, watching rain fall against a window, or catching the whiff of the approaching autumn air, it seizes you, the remembered touch of a mother’s hand on your cheek, or the look of adoration in her eye. Maybe you never stop longing for the love of a parent. But I couldn’t forgive my mother then. I couldn’t even look at her. It took years before I would even talk to her on the phone.

I still remember. Because once you know something, it can never be forgotten. His body against hers; pounding into her is how I imagine it. It cannot be gentle. In my mind it has to be cruel.

She would have gone to the kitchen and taken out the bottle of whiskey she used to keep underneath the sink and offered him a drink. Austin was good at making a woman feel special. She would have sat down at the kitchen table with him. Maybe ran her fingers through her hair, perhaps bent down so that her robe would have opened slightly, so that he could see the top of her breasts, the space between them. Suddenly her entire body would have come alive and dangerous as a bare electrical wire. I’ve seen it happen. She would have said something about how tired she was, how she was getting old. And Austin would have reassured her.