Snow Angels (6 page)

Now, late October, they no longer fought. My father walked, my mother watched TV, and I lay in bed. Deep in the night the house was quiet; my father no longer crossed the hall. Mornings we ate breakfast together, overly polite, resigned. I stood outside at the end of our drive hoping my bus would come. We
seemed to be waiting for something, saving our energy.

I expected the last night would be the same. In bed I listened to my father zipping up his duffel bag, clapping shut the latches of his suitcase. Long after the spooky theme music closed the show, I lay there waiting for my mother to come up, but when she did, it was not to cry or scream or plead with him but to put away the laundry she'd just done.

“I've got socks of yours,” she said.

He thanked her and moved to the bathroom and went through the medicine cabinet.

My mother opened my door, saw that I was awake and told me to go to sleep. “Tomorrow's going to be long,” she said. She wrestled with my dresser until her basket was empty, told me to go to sleep again and left.

I followed her footsteps to the top of the basement stairs, where she tossed the basket down and turned out the light. From the living room my father said something to her. She went in to answer him and then, surprising me, sat on the couch. I could not make out what they were saying. All day I had been thinking that tonight was going to be something big, and this was the last chance. I half wanted them to attack each other, throw a lamp through the picture window so the cops would come. Instead, all I heard was mumbling.
I crept out of bed to my door and leaned an ear against the bright keyhole.

“I know you can't afford to,” my mother was saying. “I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that you can't afford to.”

“I want to,” my father said. “I think it's important for him.”

“I do too, but you know as well as I do that that's not going to happen. It's all right.”

“It's not all right,” my father said.

“Well, that's the way it's going to be.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don't know yet,” my mother said. “Somewhere close, somewhere affordable.”

I had not heard them talk like this, and though what they said was terrifying, how they said it comforted me. I pressed against the cold keyhole with the same unblinking concentration I fixed on “Radio Mystery Theatre” as they discussed our bank account, our car, living expenses, rent. How deeply my parents felt about these things was a secret to me. It seemed they could not stop talking. My father lit cigarette after cigarette. My mother made them each a drink, then another, and another. My legs were hurting me, so I lay down on the floor. The rush of air under the door made me close my eyes. The ice clinked, my father's lighter scraped up a flame.

“We really did it, Lou,” my father said, “didn't we?”

I tried to stay awake, to remember everything they were saying, but it was easily past one and they weren't making a lot of sense anymore. Later I thought I heard them together in the kitchen and—dimly, surfacing for an instant—my mother laughing in the bathroom.

In the middle of the night I woke up not on the floor but back in bed, under my covers. They had not forgotten me, and yet just then I could not allow myself to be grateful to them, for my own sake. I could hear my father snoring, which he did only when he was sick or had been drinking, and I wondered if he had crossed the hall. I put on my nightshirt and opened my door slowly to keep it from creaking. If seen, I would pretend I had to go to the bathroom.

My mother's door was closed, which was normal. The snores were coming from Astrid's room. I stood there defeated in the aqua glow of the nightlight, and then I found that I really did have to pee.

I closed the bathroom door and sat so I wouldn't make so much noise. The seat was cold, and the floor on my feet. I sat in the dark, thinking about tomorrow until my thighs went numb, then gently put down the lid instead of flushing.

My father was still snoring. I thought—melodramatically, because I needed something about this night to be final—that I would never hear him snore like this again. I went to Astrid's door to look in on him, as he had looked in on me so many times.

My mother was in bed with him. The two of them filled Astrid's twin, a trail of clothes on the floor. There were not enough covers, and one of my mother's legs lay cold and exposed, one arm limp as a murder victim's, the wrist delicately bent. I wanted to cover her, to tuck them both in, but didn't dare go near. I leaned in the doorway and wished on them, then went back to my room and got into bed, at last satisfied with the night, hopeful for the morning.

We all slept in late the next day. My father did not have time to shave; my mother ran around the house with the buttons of her uniform undone. At breakfast my father would not sit down. He stood at the counter eating his crumbcake over the sink and writing down emergency numbers for my mother. His bags were already piled by the door in the front hall. My mother insisted on making a hot breakfast for me, and I worked at getting down my runny fried egg and toast. She sat across from me, gulping her cup of coffee.

“I'm not going to have a phone until Monday,” my father said. “If you have to get me you can call the super.”

“I'll need the furnace man,” my mother said. “Did you remember towels?”

He gave her a helpless look and headed for the bathroom.

“Take the blue,” she called after him. She took a long draw of coffee, did up her buttons, then looked at me eating. “Do you have practice today?”

“Outside,” I said.

“When do I have to come get you?”

“Five,” I said. Up until then it had been my father's job to pick me up. So she would have the car, I thought. What else had they decided that I didn't know?

My father passed through with a stack of towels and my mother left her coffee to make her face. I wondered if she was going to drive him to work or whether, like her, he would stand with me at the end of our drive, waiting for someone to pick him up. As I was spooning the gluey dregs of my breakfast down the disposal, a car honked outside. My father opened the screen door and waved, then came back inside.

“My ride's here,” he called past me.

My mother came out of the bathroom, tying her hair back so the kids at her work couldn't grab it.

“Arthur,” she said, “help your father.”

I lifted two small duffels and, elbowing the screen open, followed him out. In our drive idled a weathered white Chevy pickup, at the wheel a dark-haired man I didn't know. Even with his doors closed I could make out the bass line of Steely Dan's “Reelin' in the Years,” the closing section Warren and I could do note for note with our mouths. He hopped out to clear a spot in the bed for the bags, and I could see he was wearing the same beige uniform top my father had on. The lozenge above his heart said Glenn, and that was how my father introduced him when we had everything in.

“My boy Arthur,” my father said, and Glenn and I shook hands. His hair was short and neat, as if he'd just come out of the Army, and he had a cross on, a big silver one with Jesus in relief, just starting to tarnish. He seemed embarrassed, sorry we were all part of this. He stayed with the truck while my father and I went back inside.

My mother had her coat on now, and was beginning her final sweep, picking up speed as she located her purse, her cigarettes, her keys. Usually my father and I watched her from the table with guarded amusement,
but today we waited for her by the door as if she were the one leaving.

“I'll call you tonight when I get settled,” my father said.

“That's fine,” my mother said, then turned to me and added, “I may be a little late getting you.”

“Okay,” I said. I grabbed my bookbag and my trombone case from the hall closet, giving my parents the time and privacy to say goodbye.

They did not kiss, as I had envisioned. They just stood there looking at each other.

“I guess this is it,” my father said.

“That's your choice,” my mother said, and looked at the keys in her hand.

“Lou.”

“I can't be late.”

“All right,” my father said.

He did not shake my hand. We followed my mother out and locked the door behind us. My father got into Glenn's truck; as they zoomed off, he waved, and not knowing what to do, I waved back. My mother got into our car and, looking over her shoulder, backed out onto the road. Pulling away, she looked through her window at me, as if unsure she should leave, like someone who has slowed to pick you up hitchhiking and then at the last second thinks better of it but still feels guilty.

I watched our car dwindle, headed off past the Van Dorns'. It was warm for so late in October; you could smell the ground. The unharvested second-growth corn across the road was high and rustled in the wind, inscrutable. Behind me loomed our house, quiet and empty now. I had a key and thought of going back inside and watching game shows all day like I was sick, but my mother was going to pick me up after practice. I put my trombone case down, hung the strap of my bookbag over our mailbox and stood at the end of our drive and, like every day, waited.

A week before Halloween the realtor came up with someone who would rent our house while it was on the market. It was money, my father said; my mother agreed. That Saturday she started boxing everything except the dishes and the TV. We did not have to be out of the house until mid-November, but she'd found a place we could move into the first, a townhouse apartment in a complex a few miles from us. She was excited when she told me, as if we'd gotten lucky. She wanted me to ride over with her and see it. I knew I would not like the place because I knew from my bus route exactly where and what it was, but to please her
I hopped in the car and while we were there I smiled and acted enthusiastic.

It was not a house and not really an apartment either. Since we only needed two rooms, my mother had rented the top half of a duplex in what had once been the dormitories of a failed seminary school. Fox-wood, it was called. The building site had been designed for privacy and meditation; a gravel drive too steep for the bus to navigate in winter disappeared into the woods only to resurface a mile down the road. The developers had kept the name and leveled the chapel. The rubble lay where it had fallen, marked off with stakes painted hunter orange. My mother said the diocese didn't have enough money to keep it running, but the rumors around school involved—predictably—dungeons, orgies and human sacrifice. It was cheap, just a step up from a trailer court. Cars sat up on blocks; muddy toys lay scattered in the grass. Only two girls in my grade came from there—the Raybern sisters, twins—and though they were impeccably neat, they wore homemade calf-length skirts, pleated button-down blouses and belted cardigans as if they were already spinsters. If they had been smart we would have understood them, but they were C students, and therefore weird for no real reason. They sat together near the front of the bus, bony and silent. In the morning
when we were nearing the gate, someone in back would call, “Next stop: Fuckwood,” and when the Raybern sisters got on we would all be laughing.

When I told Warren, he said “That blows” to make me feel better.

“Don't let her throw any of my shit away,” Astrid threatened me from Tennstaedt.

I said I'd try, but it was a hollow promise. Our mother had started with Astrid's room. By the time we talked, she'd already taken a full wagonload of garbage bags down to the Goodwill box in the Foodland parking lot and come back flushed and triumphant. All she had saved were two photo albums, a shoebox of letters and some sweaters she'd tried on to see if they still fit anyone. What I salvaged had been accidental, things I'd stolen over the years and now considered mine—the cooler of her books (Tolkien, Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson), her stash with its sweet meerschaum and strawberry-flavored papers and resin-coated bowls. Now I'd have to give them back.

Room by room the house emptied out. Every day my mother came home from work and put a pot of coffee on, changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and picked up where she'd left off boxing the night before. The strapping tape came off the roll with a ripping sound; her footsteps echoed. I did not like being in the
house with her, and when I did not have band practice I made sure I could put in a few hours at my job, doing food prep and policing the kitchen at the Burger Hut II near school. As the light outside dimmed and the dinner crowd seeped in, I dredged the dark lake of the Fry-o-lator, imagining myself waiting for the bus with the Raybern sisters.

At home my mother didn't have time to cook and we ate frozen food, rinsing the silver, partitioned trays so her kids at work could paint with them. Without my father at the table, I noticed she talked about the children at her work a lot. “We had one die today,” she'd say, or, “Do you remember Monte? He's finally going home.” They seemed to me another family she belonged to which I would never share, and I wondered who she talked to this way about me. We had not started going to Dr. Brady yet; we were still trying to talk to each other.

My father called and dropped by some nights to pack up the garage with all his tools. He was living in a townhouse apartment in a different complex called Lake Vue near the state park. He laughed and joked while we cleaned his wrenches in turpentine and tracked down his missing drill bits, but he was subdued around my mother and would not argue with her. He was agreeable to everything she said, and
helped with the move even more than he would have normally. He rented the truck when the U-Haul place wanted a credit card and my mother didn't have one, and when we took a load of furniture over to his place (the rec room couch spotted with my mother's burn holes, the wicker peacock throne, the fake deco end tables), he let her drive, following behind in the Country Squire.

Halloween, Warren and I had planned on going to a dance in town. It was just an excuse to get a ride in from his mother so we could egg windows and soap cars. Upholding tradition, my mother had filled a big salad bowl with Clark bars. She knew no one would come and had already begun eating them, washing them down with scotch. She was sitting tailorseat on the living room floor with my transistor tuned to the scratchy classical station from Pittsburgh. We'd finished packing the truck that afternoon. Beside her lay our sleeping bags and a pillow each, our clothes for tomorrow folded neatly in piles. I told her I didn't absolutely have to go.