Read Online White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke - Free Book Online

didn’t turn out, Mr. Connors.” My father didn’t understand why. He insisted on seeing the blanks for himself, though it took the clerk a long time to find them in the wastebasket where they threw the bad prints away.
    “Here,” he said finally. “You don’t have to pay for these, of course.”
    “Of course,” my father said, but he stood looking at his envelope of blanks—bright, empty squares without us in them.
    “All that trouble for nothing,” my mother said.
     
    “Dad,” I said, and squeezed his upper arm, which felt surprisingly muscled under his blue blazer, “I just used to eat too much.”
    He nodded. He said, “That’s what your mother always said.”
     
     
     
     
    D R . M AYA P HALER LOOKS LIKE AN ACTRESS PLAYING THE part of a savvy, worldwise shrink, like someone pretending to be an expert on something she doesn’t know one thing about. I think of
Marcus Welby, M.D
.—an interview I saw once in
TV Guide
with the white-haired, grandfatherly guy who played that part, how he’d told the interviewer that people would routinely come up to him on the street and, instead of asking for an autograph, would ask for medical advice.
    Dr. Maya Phaler even has a pair of silver spectacles dangling from a silver chain around her neck. Not like an old lady or a librarian, though. Like an actress, as I’ve said—as though the costume people decided she needed a finishing touch. A psychologist’s prop.
    Blonde. Maybe fifty years old—but California blonde, like Phil. If it isn’t natural, if it’s a dye job, she’s gone to great trouble and expense to get it right.
    Hers is a class act all the way. Even her shoes are dead-on. Psychologist shoes: black, low-heeled, but with tasteful little bows, also black, just above her toes. She’s wearing a two-piece suit the color of key lime pie, and the skirt is well above the knee, revealing slender legs, curvaceous calves—though, just above her right ankle, beneath the beige panty hose, I see a Band-Aid: A bit of recklessness perhaps? A woman in a hurry? This morning she must have slipped in the shower with a razor in her hand.
    “Katrina?”
    I say, “Kat.”
    She’s looking at my insurance card: Although she charges a hundred dollars an hour, I’ll never see a bill. “Anxiety disorder” it says on my paperwork—(Is that what it is when you can’t stop smiling? Didn’t they used to call that joy?)—and it’s covered by the benefits my father gets from the board of education. Full mental health coverage—an attempt, I imagine, to keep underworked and overpaid administrators like my father from going nuts and busting up the place.
    Though, as far as I know, my father has never seen a shrink.
    Nor has my mother—
    Though, clearly, my mother could be anywhere right now, doing anything. She could be visiting a shrink, or at a shrink convention, or studying to be a shrink herself, for all I know. At Harvard. Or Berkeley.
     
    This is the way I’ve begun to think. Every morning I lie in bed and imagine the most absurd place my mother could be.
    This morning, the Shrine circus came to mind, which led me to imagine my mother in sequins, brandishing a whip in a cage of yawning tigers. I pictured her going back to a trailer with a clown after the show was over, helping him take off his makeup with a blob of cold cream on a rectangle of Kleenex.
    But when the makeup was off—that greasy frown—I couldn’t envision a face for my mother’s new lover. It was as if she’d wiped his face
off
with the makeup, and he was looking in the mirror for it as my mother filed her fingernails behind him. A clownish blank.
     
    “Katrina’s a nice name,” Dr. Phaler says, fingering the chain that holds her spectacles. “You don’t use it?”
    “No.” I shake my head too slowly—perhaps I appear despondent. With a lighter tone I add, “My mother wanted to call me Kat. She wanted a cat.”
    Dr. Phaler doesn’t laugh.
    “So, on the phone you said your