Read Online White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Laura Kasischke
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as if I am carrying a hollow cake with me wherever I go, balancing it on a tray that wants to sail out of my hands like a kite in wind.
What can an analyst possibly analyze out of such a life?
But that’s exactly how it is in the movies: You resist all the lust and tenderness and terror, while your shrink ice-picks at you until your head’s been cracked.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess you helped Mrs. Hillman when her husband left—”
Nothing from Dr. Phaler. Not even a nod. Patient/doctor confidentiality, I suppose. She can’t even clear her throat.
“And, I guess, well, my mother left.”
Now she cocks her head as if she’s heard a flute note in the distance.
A few seconds pass.
She says, “Your mother left.”
I lift and drop my shoulder. The left one. The side of reason, and control.
Or is that the right?
I’m looking at her knees, which are like the flat faces of two owls.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yes.”
“Where did she go?” Dr. Phaler asks.
“That’s an excellent question,” I answer.
T WO
January 1987
“I’ M UP HERE !” I HEAR HER SHOUT .
“Over here!”
“Down here!”
It doesn’t matter. I’m locked in. I pound my fists on the lid of this—whatever it is—until my hands ache. She’s out there, telling me finally where she is, but I’m stuck in this cold, locked box. This void. This square cut out of winter air with a pair of
very sharp shears
.
When I wake up, there’s snow spitting under my window shade, melting mid-bedroom, and I remember opening my window before I went to bed, desperate for fresh air because the smell of her perfume—eau-de-vie—wafting down the hall, leaking up under my bedroom door, had been so strong I thought that I might choke to death on the scent of my mother in my sleep.
I T’S A YEAR TO THE DAY SINCE SHE LEFT — WITHOUT A WORD , without a trace, without her coat, without her purse, without so much as a glass slipper dropped behind her in the driveway, run over, crunched to glittering Cinderella bits.
The first few months she was gone, Detective Scieziesciez would call every few days to ask, again, if we had heard from her, and to assure us that
he
hadn’t. The flyers his people put up all over town—the ones with her photograph, poorly reproduced, grimacing into my father’s camera on Christmas morning—were taken down or blew away in the winter wind. No one even called with some crank clue, some paranoid theory linking my mother’s disappearance to the sighting of a UFO over Lake Erie.
What can you do? It’s a free country. If a grown woman wants to disappear in it, she can. None of the authorities we’ve spoken to has had any authority over this kind of thing, the kind of thing involving women who turn to dust in the suburbs and sweep themselves up. God knows, as the saying goes, where she’s gone. And He’s not talking.
Nor have any of the authorities expressed much concern. When we went to the Bureau of Missing Persons, everyone we spoke to took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote my mother’s name at the top, then wrote “Adult White Female” underneath it, as though that might conjure her up.
If anything, I imagine they felt sympathy for her. Looking up from that blank sheet to my father’s face, down at that emptiness again, they might have been able to imagine her life, and hoped she’d managed to escape.
“We see a hundred cases of missing wives a week,” a missing persons secretary said, laying a hand on my father’s hand, as if it would make him feel better. She had fingernails as long as hooks, a paperback book hidden under her telephone switchboard,
Women Who Love Too Much
, and she snuck it back out before we’d even left her desk. It seemed, that year, that every secretary in every office had that book on her desk, spine broken.
When she smiled good-bye her teeth looked false and bright.
Just once, Detective Scieziesciez came to the house. It was
What can an analyst possibly analyze out of such a life?
But that’s exactly how it is in the movies: You resist all the lust and tenderness and terror, while your shrink ice-picks at you until your head’s been cracked.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess you helped Mrs. Hillman when her husband left—”
Nothing from Dr. Phaler. Not even a nod. Patient/doctor confidentiality, I suppose. She can’t even clear her throat.
“And, I guess, well, my mother left.”
Now she cocks her head as if she’s heard a flute note in the distance.
A few seconds pass.
She says, “Your mother left.”
I lift and drop my shoulder. The left one. The side of reason, and control.
Or is that the right?
I’m looking at her knees, which are like the flat faces of two owls.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yes.”
“Where did she go?” Dr. Phaler asks.
“That’s an excellent question,” I answer.
T WO
January 1987
“I’ M UP HERE !” I HEAR HER SHOUT .
“Over here!”
“Down here!”
It doesn’t matter. I’m locked in. I pound my fists on the lid of this—whatever it is—until my hands ache. She’s out there, telling me finally where she is, but I’m stuck in this cold, locked box. This void. This square cut out of winter air with a pair of
very sharp shears
.
When I wake up, there’s snow spitting under my window shade, melting mid-bedroom, and I remember opening my window before I went to bed, desperate for fresh air because the smell of her perfume—eau-de-vie—wafting down the hall, leaking up under my bedroom door, had been so strong I thought that I might choke to death on the scent of my mother in my sleep.
I T’S A YEAR TO THE DAY SINCE SHE LEFT — WITHOUT A WORD , without a trace, without her coat, without her purse, without so much as a glass slipper dropped behind her in the driveway, run over, crunched to glittering Cinderella bits.
The first few months she was gone, Detective Scieziesciez would call every few days to ask, again, if we had heard from her, and to assure us that
he
hadn’t. The flyers his people put up all over town—the ones with her photograph, poorly reproduced, grimacing into my father’s camera on Christmas morning—were taken down or blew away in the winter wind. No one even called with some crank clue, some paranoid theory linking my mother’s disappearance to the sighting of a UFO over Lake Erie.
What can you do? It’s a free country. If a grown woman wants to disappear in it, she can. None of the authorities we’ve spoken to has had any authority over this kind of thing, the kind of thing involving women who turn to dust in the suburbs and sweep themselves up. God knows, as the saying goes, where she’s gone. And He’s not talking.
Nor have any of the authorities expressed much concern. When we went to the Bureau of Missing Persons, everyone we spoke to took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote my mother’s name at the top, then wrote “Adult White Female” underneath it, as though that might conjure her up.
If anything, I imagine they felt sympathy for her. Looking up from that blank sheet to my father’s face, down at that emptiness again, they might have been able to imagine her life, and hoped she’d managed to escape.
“We see a hundred cases of missing wives a week,” a missing persons secretary said, laying a hand on my father’s hand, as if it would make him feel better. She had fingernails as long as hooks, a paperback book hidden under her telephone switchboard,
Women Who Love Too Much
, and she snuck it back out before we’d even left her desk. It seemed, that year, that every secretary in every office had that book on her desk, spine broken.
When she smiled good-bye her teeth looked false and bright.
Just once, Detective Scieziesciez came to the house. It was
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