White Bird in a Blizzard (14 page)

When my mother finally flew at the end of that decade to Las Vegas, at the age of twenty, Zeena met her, according to my mother, with a plastic bag of gifts—a teddy bear, a charm bracelet—as if she were expecting the child she’d left in Ohio to step off that plane, unchanged, ten years later. My mother said she thought Zeena seemed a bit suspicious when she tapped her shoulder and said, “Mom, it’s me.”

“Who?” Zeena asked, the sound of coins slapping slot machines in the airport lobby—tinny, mechanical music.

Later, over margaritas in a casino, sitting at the bar while more machines whirred wildly behind them—nickels, wheels, whistles—Zeena told my mother that she’d never loved my mother’s father, that it was why she left. My grandmother’s eyes were aquamarine in the salt light of her margarita, the color of a couple of rhinestones dropped out of a showgirl’s tiara into dust.

She continued, “I was pregnant, you know. Kicked out of the house. Too young to know what else to do.” As she spoke, Zeena chewed a ragged fingernail, painted red—and, replaying the moment in her mind for many years, my mother would think of that hangnail as a bloody claw caught in her mother’s mouth. An owl’s claw, or a fishhook: Her mother had stuck it in her mouth herself, but she seemed snagged by it, helpless, there in Las Vegas.

“How
is
your father?” she asked, and before my mother could answer, Zeena added, “Now
there’s
a man who knows
nothing
about women.”

My mother never had a chance to answer because they had to hurry. Zeena’s new boyfriend, Roger, was picking them up outside the Lady Luck in his new convertible. They were going to show her the sights. “Bottoms up,” Zeena said, tipping her glass toward my mother’s, “time to fly.”

That last sip of margarita might have tasted like a man’s sweat in my mother’s mouth, and she felt nauseated, spongy. The Friday before, she’d graduated from college, and that afternoon she’d flown across the country. Zeena had sent her the ticket slipped into a card that said “
CONGRATULATIONS
” inside, but on the outside was a drawing of a couple kissing, not a diploma or a graduation cap, and when her father dropped her off at the airport he said, “Now don’t give her any money. She said this was a gift.”

It was the first plane ride of my mother’s life, and looking down on the country slipping under her like something spilled had made her sick. And as soon as she and Zeena stepped together out of the air-conditioned airport, the heat hit her with the weight of a burning wall, and Zeena said, “You know, I’ll have to borrow some money to pay a cab to get us back to the apartment. I spent every last dime on that plane ticket, Eve.” My mother fished around in her purse, and handed her mother twenty dollars. It was one hundred degrees out there in the blank heat of the desert under a flat, colorless sky. As they waited for a cab on the sidewalk, my mother couldn’t stand on both feet for very long, the concrete boiling under the flimsy soles of her sandals. She had to keep switching feet as each one got too hot, and she felt like a bird in her white sundress—a big white chicken stranded in the desert, dancing on sand.

My mother told this story right in front of Zeena at Christmas dinner that year, and as she told it, Zeena laughed. She wore that same unapologetic expression she wore in the snapshot with the roulette wheel.

Even now, Zeena’s hair is blonde. She wears pencil-shaped skirts and thin knit sweaters, push-up bras. Her body is oddly solid, muscled—not like a young woman’s, but like a statue’s—though her face looks every year of her sixty-seven, half of them lived beneath a merciless Nevada sun, washing the sky with toxic light.

But her teeth are narrow and sharp. They are the teeth of a woman who could chew up carpet tacks and spit them out all over the house. It’s no wonder, I think, looking at her, that my mother was the kind of mother she was.

“Kat,” she asked me on Christmas Eve, sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning into me, “do you know where your mother is?”

“Grandma,” I said, sincerely shocked and sounding it, “do you think if I knew I wouldn’t tell you?”

Zeena swallowed that, and it looked like a spoonful of splinters going down.

“I guess you would,” Zeena said. Then she thought. “But your mother was a secretive girl. I suppose you could be, too. You know,” she looked down at her fingernails, which were long and painted mother-of-pearl, “that Detective What’s-his-
shh
called me again a few weeks ago to ask if I’d heard from Eve.”

“And?” I asked.

“And I told him, I said, ‘Pal, you might as well just close the case on this one. Hell will freeze over before that woman comes back. She’s my daughter, and she’s got running in her blood.’”

I swallowed.

I thought of Detective Scieziesciez’s back, his trench coat. Sometimes at night I’d still think of him. His rough face pressed between my legs. I’d imagine him pulling up in his dark car, as he did that one day, busting through the front door of our suburban home with his gun drawn, sweeping me up in his arms, throwing the frilly bedspread to the floor in one clean sweep. “Everything here looks perfectly normal,” he’d say, as he’d said then, but this time he’d be yanking my panties down to my knees as he said it.

I was hoping I’d get to see Detective Scieziesciez again at least once before he closed my mother’s case, and I hoped my grandmother hadn’t said anything to make the chances of that any slimmer than they already seemed.

Marilyn appeared in the doorway then, a red dressing gown loose and frilled around her ample hips and the big, generous, water balloons of her breasts, blocking the light from the hall. Unlike Zeena, Marilyn is soft—a garden of petunias after a long, hard, humid rain. Her hair is red. (“Not just dyed,” my father would say, “that hair is dead.”) She has been a widow longer than she was married, and loves everyone to distraction. Over and over she’ll say, “I love you,” or “I
loved
him,” eyes tearing up, “I just loved the
hell
out of your grandpa Sam”—who’d died one day of a stroke while Marilyn was frying pork cutlets, just dropped over on the kitchen floor as though someone had snuck up behind him and pulled a drawstring too tight around his neck—or, “I loved the stuffings out of every one of my sons.” By the time she’s done, you are embarrassed about how few and little you’ve loved, how stingy you’ve been with your affections.

“You’re
so
much like your mother,” Marilyn said. “It’s uncanny. The resemblance. It gives me the chills. I just
loved
your mother.”

She shuddered, to show us.

Outside, there was the sound of humming—power lines, or jets, or Santas cruising over us in their electric sleds.

T
HE PHONE RINGS IN THE MORNING AS
I’
M GETTING READY
for school, pulling black tights up to my waist, doing a little dance in the bathroom to get them on.

Before I lost weight, I’d wear whatever was clean in my closet, whatever I could squeeze into, whatever I imagined my mother would not complain too much about when I emerged from my bedroom into her line of vision (“Jesus, Kat, you’re not going to wear
that
?”).

But since I’ve been thin, dressing myself in the morning has gotten harder. The night before, I lie in bed and imagine myself in various combinations of skirt and sweater, and then in the various poses I might be seen in wearing them—leaning over the drinking fountain in the hall at school, slurping that water the temperature of body fluids, a tepid stream of something human and nauseating in my mouth. Or sitting behind my desk in Great Books, legs crossed at the ankles while Mr. Norman drones on and on about
Paradise Lost
.

Mr. Norman wears horn-rimmed glasses and weighs only about a hundred pounds, but his lectures make Satan seem sexy and slick, like someone Mr. Norman himself might secretly admire.

Listening, I imagine Satan and Detective Scieziesciez waiting for me in a silver Thunderbird in the high school parking lot, smoking cigarettes, waiting to see what I’m wearing that afternoon.

God knows there’s no one else at my high school to dress up for, no one who matters, no one who would look at me twice even if I walked down that gray corridor stark naked. Phil wouldn’t notice, and my closest friends, Mickey and Beth, aren’t exactly fashion plates themselves. At Theophilus Reese High, by twelfth grade, you are whoever you’ve been until then. Your lot’s cast early. Your lot. Your caste.

And, back when it mattered, back when the beautiful kids had been sorted from the homely, I’d been fat. Now, no matter what I weigh, until graduation day, I will be Fat.

But lately I’ve noticed men—some of them older than my father—watching me walk in and out of restaurants, watching me walk from my mother’s station wagon, which is mine now, into McDonald’s, or the library, or the mall. “Is this yours?” a man in an expensive black suit asked me one afternoon last week as I stood in line at the drugstore with a package of tampons. He was out of breath and holding a limp red mitten in his hand. I shook my head, looking at it. That bloody hand, extended.

“Oh,” he seemed disappointed, and then chagrined. “Well, then, would you like me to buy you a sandwich somewhere?”

It was pathetic, and we both laughed. I handed the cashier my tampons, and even she looked shy. “I can’t,” I said.

He looked at me for a few seconds before he said, “You’re an awfully attractive woman,” and then he left, winking over his shoulder as the automatic doors jolted open nervously for him, and the cashier stuffed my package into a plastic sack. “Some men . . .” she said, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

He’d only been gone a moment before I’d forgotten what he looked like, or why I hadn’t wanted the sandwich he wanted to buy.

Being noticed is new, and every day I have to prove to myself it can be done again to believe it ever has. In my imagination every night, I pan around the room I will be in the next day like a little Tinkerbell, viewing myself from every angle, appraising myself from the front, the back, above, below—a whirring electric eye.

Of course, by morning I’m afraid to wear anything at all, and it takes hours to get ready for school. By the time I’m done, there’s a stripped heap of clothing on the bedroom or bathroom floors, as if the girls who’d been wearing those outfits had dissolved, sweaters and skirts dropping out of the air where they’d been.

A lot of trouble. For what?

But in the morning, at our lockers, outside the vinegar glare of the gym, Beth says, “You look great, Kat. I like your sweater.” Of course, it wouldn’t matter what I was wearing, or how I looked in it, Beth would say that: It is Beth’s role. Like an usher in an auditorium, handing out programs, saying, “Enjoy the show,” Beth is there for me. Even when I am bitter, or premenstrual—cramped, depressed, snapping at Beth—she will tell me I look good, smell good, did the right thing.

Still, I can tell when she really means it, and lately she really means it. Lately, everything I wear looks right. The janitor calls me, “Hey, kitty-cat,” purring as he moves his mop around and around on the floor.

“He’s got the hots for you,” Beth says, gesturing at the janitor, who has a limp, who has the name, or the word, “Dick,” embroidered above his heart.

I’ve known Beth since third grade, since she and I were fat girls together standing in the snow at recess, watching the other girls jump rope. We were both too fat to be invited to join them, so after a while we had to talk to each other. Those girls would jump faster and faster in a blur of limbs and clothesline while we waited in our big rubber boots for the bell to ring and call us back into the warmth of Mrs. Mulder’s classroom.

Finally, out of sheer boredom, we invented a game of our own, which had to do with the teeter-totter. We’d go up and down, up and down, chatting amiably, but then one of us, the one who was down, would casually slip off the end and let the other one, the one who was up, crash back to earth.

The object of this game was to slide off your end of the teeter-totter when the other least expected you to—perhaps in midsentence, smiling—in order to heighten the terror and thrill of suddenly plummeting through air, pure gravity, a fat girl with wings shot out of the sky.

The first time Phil and I had sex, I remembered that game with Beth. The jovial anticipation of danger and pain, looking all the time into her inscrutable face as she looked into mine.

Although I’ve lost thirty pounds, Beth stubbornly remains sixty pounds overweight. She has become a bit of a celebrity at school—admired, but not liked: an object of envious pity. Beth’s claim to fame is the steel trap of her brain. She’s won every math award the state of Ohio has to offer, and her bedroom walls are papered with certificates and plaques and letters of congratulation signed by one of the governor’s aides. Even when she’s simply eating a fruit pie in the cafeteria, that brain is chewing up the computable world and its reams of ticker tape.

“Kat,” she said to me once when I told her how many pounds I’d lost, “that’s 489 ounces. 32.7 milligrams. 457 liters of fat,” or something like that.

“Jesus Christ, Beth,” I said, “shut up. I don’t want to know that. What makes you think people want to know stuff like that?”

I sounded like my mother as I said it.

Beth looked sad, with her bland face, her light brown hair. It is the same face she wore long ago, back on the teeter-totter. Little girl pudginess. A bit desperate, painfully clever, and stuffed up with secret rage.

The third of us is Mickey.

“The weird sisters,” my mother used to call us, or “the three blind mice.”

Like me, Mickey’s lost weight, left the fat-faced girl we met in seventh grade behind her like a bad date, ditched. She’s a cheerleader now, having snagged one of those coveted positions with all its myth and pomp and prestige despite being unpopular and acne-scarred.

Though they must not have wanted to give it to a girl like Mickey, the selection committee simply could not have denied her a place on that squad. Even Miss Beck, the cheerleading coach, with her perky smile and high cheekbones, all cream and peaches, must have had to admit that Mickey
is
cheer, pep, the fighting spirit of pride—the personification of it.