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

walkie-talkies. There was a lawsuit, and for months on the news we heard the details over and over: The farmer’s wife lost weight, her teeth fell out, his daughter started pulling out her eyelashes lash by lash, biting the backs of her hands to get at the static under her skin. When that daughter closed her eyes, she said she saw sparks. And the barn cats sang terribly in the barn before they died.
    But the cows danced the whole time.
    Perhaps they’d been driven mad, but they danced, and there had to have been
some
joy in that.
I
had never been happier in my life than I was as I danced with Phil that night. It was as if, with Phil—dancing, or fucking, or just driving around and around in the sedan his father left him when he left—I’d finally found something to do with all the nervous tension of that suburb, which surged through the power lines between our houses and street corners like a small girl’s braids pulled too tight, sending an invisible current into the air, a wave of nervous energy rising, falling, rising.
    That tension—I would lie in bed some nights and imagine I heard its volts and sparks swell an invisible river above our roofs, singing a high whine in my ears, boring into my brain like a wiry nail, the whole subdivision ringing in my ears, until my head and neck would ache from the weight of so much strident silence.
    Like that stray voltage, there was something raucous straining under all the politeness, all the quiet—and, finally with Phil, I found a way to move to it, or sleep through it. I bought a pair of running shoes and a green sweat suit, and when I jogged around the neighborhood—which had seemed so stiff, a stage set of a place, all edges and blades—it melted into a liquid blur, a soft backdrop of flaccid facades and sleepy trees. I let myself get thin, running in circles around Garden Heights. I no longer needed the padding. I had sex.
     
     
     
     
    “A NY WORD ?” HE ASKS .
    “Not one.” I shake my head and shut the front door behind him. Snow’s coming down now in fat, gray, dirty-washcloth flakes, and they drape the lawns and trees with sluggish infant blankets. Who could blame my mother for leaving this place? The sky is falling.
     
    And, only a few days ago, I noticed a fine layer of dust on the dining room table—the dust she had devoted her life to dusting away. It was already accumulating in gray layers, and it had only been seventy-two hours since she’d left. When I went into the living room, I saw it there, too, swirling around in the air, settling on the arms of her chairs, the coffee table, a galaxy of dust collapsing from inside itself in slow motion, burying us.
    It was what she’d been doing, chasing dust, all day, every day.
    So I went to the kitchen to get her feather duster with its pink plumes out from under the sink, but when I got back into the living room with it, I had no idea where to start. Dust was everywhere. It was in the light. It was in the air I was breathing. It was graying my hair. I was afraid to use the feather duster, which seemed weightless in my hands. I thought it might make it worse, kick up a whole new storm of dust that would choke or blind me. So, when my father got home from work, I said, “We have to call the Molly Maids. We can’t keep this house clean by ourselves.”
    “I did already,” he said. “They’ll be here tomorrow. They’ll be here every Wednesday.”
     
    “Shit,” Phil says, untying the sturdy laces of his brown boots. “How could she do this to you?”
    “She wanted out,” I say, looking at Phil’s feet.
    When his boots are off, I see holes in his black socks, and each of his big toes looks vulnerable to me, raw on the beige carpet, as if two sacks of skinned mice have spilled, and Phil looks down then, too, as if he’d like to gather up those spilled mice quickly. Then he shrugs.
    “So?” he asks the wall behind me, where a painting of the ocean hangs, all melancholy flotsam and churning