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Автор Лора Касишке
White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke
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
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.
