Mind of Winter (20 page)

Before Tatty could close the bedroom door (
slam
the bedroom door) Holly called out, “When I get this cleaned up, we’re going to eat. We’re both cranky!”

The door slammed on the word
both.

FOR SEVERAL SECONDS
Holly stood still, trying simply to swallow, trying to blink back the tears of frustration and rage that were threatening to fill her eyes. Then she turned to the task at hand, squinting her eyes at the splinters of glass on the floor. She tested the vacuum cleaner to see if the battery was charged, and, miraculously and thankfully, it was. She bent over:

It wasn’t going to be easy to vacuum up all this glass. In fact, Holly was quite sure she never would. For years she would be finding little slivers of it in the cracks between the floorboards. She would find it in the most far-flung corners of the house, where she least expected to find it, long after this accident had been forgotten. A better housekeeper would have a whisk broom, and a dustpan, and would sweep the big pieces into that first. But Holly had no whisk broom. There was a broom—somewhere, surely. Garage? But she didn’t know for sure because she never used it. It was quicker and easier, although perhaps less effective, to vacuum the wooden floors with the upright and, when things accumulated in the corners that couldn’t be reached by the upright, to dash around with this handheld, assuming it was charged. There was something about the broom, motorless and primordial, that never seemed suited to any task Holly set out to do. And now, of course, she associated that broom with Concordia.

Black-haired Concordia, who looked so much more like a mother to Tatiana than Holly herself did. Is that why Tatty had loved her so much? The first time the housekeeper came for her weekly cleaning after they’d brought Baby Tatty home from Russia, Tatty had gasped as Concordia walked in the door with her plastic tote filled with sponges and sprays. Then Baby Tatty had rushed the housekeeper at the speed of light, and thrown her arms around her legs. When Concordia, laughing and speaking in baby-talk Spanish to Tatiana, had crouched down to take the child in her arms, Tatiana had clung to her neck, laughing with a kind of delight that Holly had not yet heard from her. And, after that, Saturdays were Concordia Day, and Tatty would sit near the front door like a loyal puppy waiting for her master, and then she and Concordia would play cleaning games all day.

“Seems like we’re paying her to babysit, not to clean,” Eric had said—not critically, for he loved Concordia, too—while watching the housekeeper chase after Tatiana with a broom, singing a nursery song in Spanish.

And then, the accident. The lawsuit. Their expensive lawyer had fended that off handily, but they’d never seen Concordia again. If she’d left that broom behind, Holly had no idea where it was, and simply thinking of it made her want to sit down among the tiny bits of glass and weep—for herself, for Concordia (whose ankle would never, apparently, properly heal because of the kind of fracture she’d sustained), and, of course, for Tatty.

Holly decided to pick up the big pieces first with her hands—and, naturally, immediately she cut her index finger. A drop of incredibly bright red blood snaked down the finger into the palm of her hand before she could stick the finger in her mouth. It didn’t hurt, and when she looked at it, except for the mess in her palm (it was incredible how bright her blood looked to her in the glare from the picture window), there seemed to be nothing but the most superficial of wounds. A pinprick, really, would have been worse. Holly ignored it and continued to gather up the big shards. She carried a few of those, mixed with a little of her blood, to the garbage can under the sink and tossed them in.

The stem of the water glass had snapped into two nearly equal-sized sections, so Holly picked those up and put them on top of the dining room table. Then she bent over with the handheld and vacuumed up all the tiny bits and the glassy dust that could be seen with the naked eye. Still, those pieces and that dust didn’t, in the end, seem to be nearly enough to have composed an entire water glass before it smashed, so she got back down on her hands and knees and felt around on the floor. A bit of blood from the cut on her finger smeared across the floorboards as she did so—and, indeed, some very finely ground bits of glass stuck to her palms, particularly the bloody one. Finally, Holly sat back on her heels, ran the vacuum over the general area, and then stood up and went to the sink to rinse her hands.

There was only so much she would be able to do.

Again, a better housekeeper would—what?

Well, maybe a better housekeeper would know some method for completing this task, some way to be certain there was no glass left on the floor. A damp microfiber cloth? Duct tape? This was the kind of thing that her sister Janet would have known. But Janet was long gone. Janet was as broken and dispersed as their mother’s water glass by now.

No. For God’s sake, do
not
think of Janet, today of all days . . .

It was easier than Holly had thought it would be for one to put people and events out of her mind. Until the few counseling sessions she’d had with Annette Sanders, Holly had thought that the mind had a will of its own, somehow, and ruminated of its own volition. But Annette Sanders had taught her otherwise. She had made Holly wear a rubber band around her wrist, and told her that, every time Janet’s last days or Melissa’s suicide came to mind, Holly was to snap the rubber band and think of something else.

Incredibly, it had worked. All those other therapists who’d tried to help Holly work through the despair and the unconscious sources of all her anguish, to drag them to the surface and observe them in harsh light: Ha! Total wastes of time! What Holly had needed to learn was how to
suppress
her feelings—something human beings had been doing successfully since the dawn of time, the evidence for which was that they’d managed to get out of bed, eat, procreate, despite death’s unknowable horror potentially and inescapably waiting around every corner. Despite the fact that no one could really be sure that he or she would make it through the day, people did crossword puzzles and dug ditches and flossed their teeth. And, unlike the millions of Americans who needed prescriptions in order to do these things without panic or despair, Holly had been taught to do it with a rubber band!

Of course, she hadn’t been writing poems, either, since Annette Sanders had cured her of—

Of what?

Of grief? Fear? The human condition?

Still, it was worth it, wasn’t it? Rilke might not have thought so (
If my demons leave me, my angels will, too
—a quote one of her mentors in graduate school had hauled out every few weeks to warn the student poets—unconscionably?—against the psychotherapy and antidepressants some of them clearly needed), but, Holly felt sure, the cure had nothing to do with her writer’s block anyway. Her writer’s block had to do with how busy and cluttered her life had become with Tatty and Eric in it:

Married life! Family life! Motherhood! Work life! Her writer’s block had to do with how many hours she spent behind the wheel of a car, getting to her office to write her ten million business-manager-memos a day instead of poems, and getting to the grocery store, getting back home, taking care of Tatty and Eric, going to bed to wake up to do it all again the next day. When would she have found time to write, whether she had writer’s block or not?

Perhaps, in fact, writer’s block was a blessing, since her life could certainly not have contained one more activity without shattering into a billion pieces. And Holly didn’t care that (as Eric sometimes shouted at her if she whined too long about having no time to write) some poets had written, and perhaps still wrote, poems on the walls of their jail cells. That some poets were doctors, like William Carlos Williams, or insurance executives, like Wallace Stevens, and absurdly prolific. Sure, freshly written poems had been found in the pockets of the war dead of every war since time immemorial, and Miklós Radnóti wrote his last poems while in a forced labor battalion, despite having to endure beatings by the Nazi guards for it. When the mass grave in which he was buried had been dug up after the war ended, his wife found a book of poems written in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book in his back pocket. The pages had been soaked through with Radnóti’s blood and body fluids, so she had dried them out in the sun.

Many of those poems had been love fragments written to Radnóti’s wife, and in graduate school Holly had memorized translations of nearly all of them, although the only lines she could now recall were
Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever—still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death
or a beetle inhabiting the heart of a rotting tree. . . .

It didn’t help Holly’s writer’s block to think of these poets, or for Eric to remind her of the tales she’d told him of such poets. He didn’t mean to be cruel, but he also didn’t understand what
she
needed in order to be a poet. To be a real poet. To be the poet she’d wanted to be when she was in the MFA program. An American poet of the world, like Carolyn Forché, or a poet of the deepest interior, like Louise Glück, or a poet of love and loss, like Marie Howe, or a poet of humor and irony, like Tony Hoagland (whose poem “Hard Rain” had been the inspiration for her ringtone). Those were the poets she’d set out to be.

Now, with Tatty back in her room, Eric of course would say, “Go write a poem now! What’s stopping you?”

He had no idea. He had no idea how much she wanted to do that. But she couldn’t sit down and write a poem. A poem had to
come to her.
She couldn’t
go to it.
And no poem had come to her for a decade and a half.

Fine. She was not a poet. She could admit that now. If she were, the poems
would
have come. She was not a poet like the ones she’d admired, or the ones who’d been in that MFA program with her. Even the fellow students who’d never published a word (which was most of them)—Holly knew that they were still out there writing. That they were scribbling in their studies somewhere. That they managed to find poems while they were shopping at the mall, working at mindless jobs like Holly’s. They were even managing to scribble on their lunch hours, or in the car while they waited for their kids’ ballet classes to be let out. They could not even be discouraged by rejection. If they could not get their poems published in journals, they published them on websites they started themselves. Holly had seen those poems on those websites, and, she couldn’t help it, had felt contempt for that self-advertising, that commitment by those poets to an art that had abandoned them. She hated, didn’t she, that they continued to write, and to write, and to write?

Well, that was never going to be Holly’s path, was it?

For Holly it had
always
been futile, hadn’t it? She was fallow ground. She’d always allowed herself to believe that there
could
be something there—given the right amount of time, the right pen, the right desk—but she never got those things, because those were things she would have had to dig for with some tool she would have had to invent herself. Impossible. “Just sit down and write!” her husband would say, but Eric would never be able to understand this frustration, her frustration, the clear sense Holly had that there was a secret poem at the center of her brain, and that she’d been born with it, and that she would never, ever, in this life, be able to exhume it, so that to
sit down and write
was torture. It was to sit down with a collar around her neck growing tighter and tighter the longer she sat.

It was
the
collar:

When, at twenty-five, they’d told her at the Campion Cancer Center that (of course) she had the gene mutation they’d tested her for, Holly felt that collar being slipped over her head and put around her neck. The lovely red-haired oncologist had held her hand and said, “I really believe, Holly, that if you want to live to see fifty, maybe even thirty-five, or thirty, you need to have your breasts and ovaries removed.”

They’d told her to take at least six months to think about it. Take six months to think about whether you wanted to die the way your mother and sister had. As if it would really take six months to choose between that fate or living to see fifty, or thirty?

Still, Holly
had
taken the six months—the longest six months of her life. They’d been a lifetime, those months. She’d been a woman at the top of a tower during that half a year, surveying the land in every direction for thousands of miles. That land was flat, and familiar. There were gardens full of cabbages. And the weather never changed. A lukewarm drizzle all night and all day. She could see her mother’s and sisters’ graves out there, from that tower, and she could also watch the children she wasn’t going to give birth to playing on rusty, dangerous playground equipment. But she could see that she was out there, too—growing older, without disease, without passing her mutation on, and, except for this collar, for the rest of her life, nothing would be any different than it had been before:

That fifty-year-old woman she otherwise would never be—Holly would pass that woman on the road. That woman would be driving a ghastly little car, and Holly would drive past her until she could no longer even see in her rearview mirror.

She’d even quit
reading
poetry, except for happy nursery rhymes to Tatty.

THEN, HOLLY REMEMBERED
the inspiration she’d woken up with:

Something had followed them home from Russia.

As she’d known it would, that sentence had grown to mean nothing to her now. Now she needed to get on with things. Now she needed to put the roast in the refrigerator, so it wouldn’t rot, so that it could be eaten tomorrow, when the storm had passed. Now she should again call Eric. And she also wanted to talk to Thuy—although she imagined her friend curled up on the couch, Patty between herself and Pearl, watching something on TV.
It’s a Wonderful Life
? Or
Miracle on 34th Street
?