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

water.
    Seascape
it’s called. It’s the only real painting that hangs in our house—a dark ocean my parents bought in a motel lobby in Toledo the year I was born, the year my father got his promotion, the one that turned his youthful energy into a heap of laundry every night at my mother’s feet, the year they moved with me to Garden Heights.
    STARVING ARTISTS’ SALE , the sign on the highway said, and although my mother must have muttered, “That cheap junk, who wants that?” my father insisted they go, and they went. He took one look at
Seascape
and happily paid the forty dollars to own it.
    Sometimes, I’d run my fingers across that canvas just to feel how thick and sticky the paint in all that choppy water was, the places the painter had gobbed on too much blue. The horizon was ominous and, with some imagination, you could smell salt, dead dolphins, weeds reeking on a beach. A thin line separated the water from the air, and though I hated the painting itself, that line was definite. Incontrovertible. There was absolute emptiness between the sea in that painting and the sky. It was a space that existed simply because nothing was in it.
     
    “That’s no excuse,” Phil says.
    “Who needs an excuse?” I ask.
    He looks at me. There are snowflakes melting on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes are wide. I see myself in the small blue ponds of them, seeming brighter and sweeter than I am. My face is pouty and young in this reflection. I lean a little closer, looking for myself, surprised at what I see, and wonder what I’d expected: Had I expected to see my mother?
    Phil looks at me strangely, looking at him, and says, “I’m worried about you, Kat. Your face looks frozen.”
    I try to stop smiling.
    He says, “You’re going to crack.”
     
     
     
     
    O NCE , I SAW A SHOW ABOUT EARTHQUAKES ON PBS. T HERE was footage of bridges buckling and families shuffling through the open-air wreckage of what had been their homes, as a professor from Stanford explained in the background how there are huge movable plates under our continents and oceans and drugstores shifting around while we’re watching television, or eating party mix, thinking about other things.
    And even though the families picking through the trash for their belongings were either Turkish or from California, it seemed like a likely event to me. It seemed to me that something like it could happen to us at any time: an earthquake here in the part of the world where there were no faults, where, instead, a thick layer of mud kept our pharmacies and supermarkets and houses stuck.
     
    Garden Heights is, as I’ve already mentioned, proud of its newness, the sameness of its designs, but the houses in our neighborhood seem like imitation houses. Cheaply made, pieced together overnight with materials that did not come naturally from this world—plastics, pressed woods, drywall.
    The houses are not inexpensive, but they must have been put up hastily. Who knows what they were built on? When I stand in the kitchen, I can hear every footstep my father takes upstairs. When my mother was here, I could hear the hangers clanging in her closet while she got dressed, and every word she said to my father, and even the thin, atomized sound of her cologne as she sprayed it. When I’m quiet, I still can, as if the ceiling is made of onionskin and very flimsy hope.
     
    Our house, like all the houses on our block, has three bedrooms—mine, my parents’, and a guest room, the door of which is always kept closed. On the rare occasions that door is opened, a cool breath of mothballs rushes into your lungs, as if the past is a guest, trapped in there for years and trying to escape.
    The living room has two green-winged chairs and a floral sofa with a brocade trim, which matches the chairs, and in the den there is a tweed and over-soft couch—which is, I imagine, supposed to be the masculine parallel to the feminine living room. Informal to formal. Comfort to decorum. As