White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke
for Bill
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK BILL ABERNETHY, LISA BANKOFF, JENNIFER BARTH, AND ANTONYA NELSON FOR HELPING ME WRITE AND REWRITE THIS NOVEL; ED AND JUNE KASISCHKE FOR MANY YEARS OF ENCOURAGEMENT; AND LUCY AND JACK ABERNETHY, MY CHILDREN, FOR LOVE.
ONE
January 1986
I AM SIXTEEN WHEN MY MOTHER STEPS OUT OF HER SKIN ONE frozen January afternoon—pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance—and disappears.
No one sees her leave, but she is gone.
Only the morning before, my mother was a housewife—a housewife who, for twenty years, kept our house as swept up and sterile as the mind of winter itself, so perhaps she finally just whisk-broomed herself out, a luminous cloud of her drifting through the bedroom window as soft as talcum powder, mingling with the snowflakes as they fell, and the stardust and the lunar ash out there.
Her name is Eve, and this is Garden Heights, Ohio, so I used to like to think of my mother as Eve—the naked one, the first one—when she was in the Garden, poisoning the weeds with bleach, defoliating the trees, stuffing their leaves down the garbage disposal, then scouring the sink with something chemical and harsh, but powdered, something dyed ocean blue to disguise its deadly powers for the housewives like my mother who bought it, only dimly realizing that what they’d purchased with its snappy name (Spic and Span, Mr. Clean, Fantastik) was pure acid.
The blue of a child’s eyes, the blue of a robin’s egg—
But swallow a teaspoon of that and it will turn your intestines to lace.
This Eve, like the first one, was bored in Garden Heights. She spent her afternoons in the silence of a house she’d just cleaned yesterday from bottom to top, and there was nothing left for her to do beyond planning the nothing of the future, too.
Sometimes, when I came home from school early, I’d find her asleep in my bed. She’d be dressed as if she had somewhere to go—black slacks, a lamb’s-wool sweater, pearls, dark hair set in smooth curls—folded onto her side, not a single light on in the whole house. But that afternoon, something else happened.
What, I can only imagine.
I imagine her standing at the bedroom window watching the sky toss its cold litter of snow on the lawn, thinking about loss, or love, or lust, bored again, then exploding like a bomb of feather-duster feathers, or melting into the wall to wall—a milky, evaporating shadow on the shag.
When my father gets home from work, she is gone completely. When I get home from school, he is sitting in the living room with his suit still on, hands turned up empty on his lap.
We wait all night for her to come home, but she doesn’t.
We don’t eat dinner. We don’t know how.
My sheets feel frozen when I get in bed, and I can hear my father snoring in their bedroom.
I realize now that I knew nothing about my mother except that one day she was here—making dinner, cleaning the house, scowling around with that feather duster—and the next day she wasn’t.
BUT WHAT COULD I HAVE DONE ABOUT MY MOTHER? WHILE she was metamorphosing right in our own home—changing, reshaping, going crazy, or sane—I was becoming sixteen. I thought her trouble was just menopause, or boredom, and by the time I might have said or done something, I was sixteen, my blood like a little creek flooded suddenly with hormones, a babbling brook that had become hot, and high, and dangerous.
I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I’d never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them—something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light—and it was as though I could hold the life force itself in my hands.
Whatever my mother was up to, I didn’t care.
Phil, the boy next door, is tall, and blond, and actively stupid. “Fuckin’ A,” he’ll say when a bit of poetry is quoted by the TV news anchor. “Straight C’s!” he smiles, waving his report card at me in the cafeteria at school.
In the summer, he wanted me to wear nothing but halter tops, and when we met in our backyards, which were separated only by a yellow ditch of daffodils, he’d come up behind me and slip his hands into the top.
The fertilized lawns throbbed like green glass in the sun.
“Show me,” I would say to Phil as he drove us to school in his father’s sedan, and he’d unzip his pants, take his penis out, flop it around.
Phil has been my boyfriend for a year, and in that year we have talked about almost nothing. If he has any original ideas, any personal opinions wafting around like feathers in his head, he manages to keep them mostly to himself. He listens to WKLL, the heaviest of the heavy-metal stations around here, but he’s not the heavy-metal type. He’s never been to a concert, and can’t remember the names of the bands he likes or tell you what his favorite song of the month is called, let alone what it’s about, all that car-crash clutter behind the singing.
He’s what you’d call a clean-cut kid if you were the type of person who believed in clean-cut kids. No ripped T-shirts. No tattoos. No steel-tipped boots. As suburban as it gets.
But it’s always in the background as he’s driving, and he nods his head as if he’s listening (“W-KILL!” the disc jockeys scream between songs, sounding juvenile and halfhearted and nonviolent), as if he’s enjoying what he hears, as if it speaks to some part of him that is not the least bit visible to the naked eye, some slam-dancing protozoan part.
I’ve learned to tune it out, myself, having always worried that if I listened, really listened, to that kind of music, it might fry some delicate tissue in my inner ear and I’d go deaf.
Phil doesn’t talk much, but it doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted to talk, I could have talked to my mother. For a long time, she was trying to get me to talk—
“Kat,” she said, “do you love this boy?”
“Mom,” I said, turning on her. “What business is that of yours?”
She was standing behind me in the bathroom, looking over my shoulder at the two of us reflected in the mirror above the sink. Just out of the shower, I had a towel wrapped around me, and a veil of steam came between us and smudged our reflections. The humidity smoothed the lines out on her face, and she looked like a foggy me.
“Well, I can’t stand your father,” she said then, and the bluntness of it was like a rubber bat slugging into a rubber ball.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Tell it to someone else,” and pushed past her into the hall.
As simply as my mother was here, and then she wasn’t, Phil and I were virgins, and then we weren’t.
One afternoon when we had no school—my father was at work, my mother was still at the mall—we got into my bed, which was decorated with pansies and piled with stuffed animals that I knocked in one smooth gesture to the floor while Phil stood behind me, thumbs hooked into belt loops, waiting.
Phil is lanky, and when he stands in one place he rests all his weight on one leg, and this turns his body into nothing but angles and planes, a boy made of scrap metal.
It was March, and the light that bled in under the window shades was blurred and pale, as if March had gray water in her veins.