Mind of Winter (6 page)

Later, when Holly thought of that woman from Nebraska (although she tried not to), she imagined her still walking. That woman could have made a circuit of Asia several times by now, cradling that mattress in her arms.

And what
of
the Russian aunt, cradling the boy in his soft and delicate sweater? Where were
they
now, these many years later? Holly imagined a boy standing at the center of a long line. He would have a thin mustache, acne, maybe a facial twitch. And the sweater that his Nebraskan mother had knitted for him would either have unraveled long ago or been sold. Holly tried not to think of him, either, because when she did she could not help but think of Tatiana in that line behind him—her hair cropped short, and her shoes comfortable, practical, caked with mud.

“Tragic,” Eric had called it.

“Well, they could have adopted another baby,” Holly pointed out. “There were a billion of them.”

“Well, they wanted
that
baby,” Eric had said, angrily. “Just like we wanted Tatiana. They’d already bonded. They’d imagined a whole life with him.”

“It was time to start imagining again, I guess,” Holly had said, feeling that she would somehow be betraying her own good luck, the fate that had brought Tatiana so effortlessly into her arms, if she admitted that what had happened to the Nebraskans could have happened to anyone. Eric had simply looked at her with what she felt was disapproval, and they never spoke of the Nebraskans again after that.

HOLLY STEPPED OUT
of the shower. The drain made the heaving sucking sounds it always made as it emptied the tub. She stepped onto the lilac rug, wrapped herself in her towel, stepped over to the bathroom window, and looked out.

Snowy day. A surprisingly white one. Usually in this part of the state, with the wind blowing off Lake Erie and then over the decaying auto factories before it fell into their yard, the snow was gray, nothing like the Bing Crosby snowfalls of her youth. Usually that gray snow didn’t shine in the branches, but, instead, just fuzzed up the landscape, which was mostly flatness and emptiness at this time of year, although some dead leaves still held on to the tree branches and here and there a stubborn evergreen would point its arrow at the gray sky.

But this was a
lot
of snow. And it was Christmas-white. This could almost be called a blizzard, Holly supposed, and she thought of Eric on the road home with his parents. She pictured his windshield and the wipers barely keeping up with the white piling up on him. It made for a prettied-up landscape, but the driving would be treacherous.

Again, she thought of her dream, and waking from it, and the need to write something, to make or create or weave something from the materials of her psyche.

But what was the hurry?

Jesus, she’d had plenty of time to write in the last twenty years, and she hadn’t written
then
. She’d had one whole summer off—the summer before they’d adopted Tatty, and what had she done with all that time? Instead of writing she’d rented herself a booth in a local antiques mall and filled it with junk she bought at garage sales, which no one but she herself would ever want. She’d completely wasted the months of June, July, and August—the months for which she’d been awarded a nice little grant from the Virginia Woolf Foundation for a manuscript of fifteen poems she’d submitted to them along with a page detailing how she’d use the money to “take time off from my job to finish my first poetry collection, the title of which will be
Ghost Country
, from the title poem of the collection—an ode to my lost ovaries.”

She’d written not a single line of poetry. Instead, there was not a mote of dust on a single item in Holly’s booth at the antiques mall that summer. She put a thousand miles on the car driving from one estate sale to the next, thrilling herself with surprises:

A ceramic doll she found at a multifamily sale at a trailer park, with ruby flecks for eyes. A last rites box, with a half-empty bottle of holy water tucked into it from an estate sale across the street from a Catholic church. She bought doilies and doorknobs and tiny primitive paintings in tarnished silver frames. But the only thing she sold that summer was the one thing she hadn’t wanted to sell—a wreath woven by some bereaved Victorian mother out of her little boy’s flaxen hair.

The wreath was glued to a portrait of the boy, who looked like an ugly girl in his lacy dress. Under his chin, in a woman’s ink-blotched script, was written
Our Beloved Boy Charles.

Holly had been stunned one day to come into the antiques mall and find that wreath gone. She’d asked the owner of the antiques booth (Frank, of the handlebar mustache, who worked the register there ten hours a day, six days a week) who’d purchased it, but Frank couldn’t remember his customers, ever. And the buyer hadn’t written a check or used a credit card, apparently. There was nothing left but the price tag, which Holly had written out herself, plucked from it, and placed in the cash register to prove the mourning wreath had been bought, not stolen. The $325 had been credited to the rent Holly paid to Frank for the booth.

It was during the period of this grant that Holly realized that it wasn’t
time
she’d needed in order to write the poems that would finish the collection. What she needed, she decided, was a child. She emptied the antiques booth and began to order books off Amazon about overseas adoption.

THE STEAM FROM
inside the bathroom was sucked out into the hallway when Holly opened the door. Once it had escaped, it disappeared so quickly it was as if it had a will of its own, as if it had been a caged animal waiting for this opportunity to escape.

She had taken a longer shower than she’d meant to. In the mirror in the bedroom, she could see that her face and neck and chest were brightly flushed. She was burning brightly, but softly, as if her skin had been sealed—shiny, poreless. Holly stepped away from her reflection. Now that she had showered, the rest of the day, the
real
rest of the day, had to begin.

What should she wear? Tatiana had gone for festive and sentimental with that hideous velvet dress. Eric had left the house in jeans and a sweatshirt, in which he would probably stay for the rest of the day. Ginny and Gramps would be in black. Whenever there was an occasion to travel or to attend a gathering of any sort, Eric’s parents dressed like Italian peasants at a funeral. Ginny might even be wearing that black shawl of hers. Gramps’s black would be rumpled, threadbare. The two of them would look as if they’d been on a very long journey by ship across the Atlantic, not on a jet from Newark to Detroit.

Once, Holly had suggested to Eric that his parents dressed this way in public in order to be mistaken for poor people.

“Well, they’re
not
rich,” Eric had said. “I have no idea why you would say that.” These words were Eric’s roadblock—his refrain whenever Holly suggested that his parents might have (as she knew for a fact, from snooping, that they did) considerable sums tucked away in a bank in Pennsylvania (a bank chosen, Holly felt sure, so that none of their neighbors would hear any gossip of those vast sums).

So why, then, did this couple in their eighties dress in public like a couple two generations more ancient than they were—as if they were the ones who’d come over on that ship, rather than their parents? Gin and Gramps owned plenty of brightly colored polyester sweaters, which they wore around their condominium. Gramps was a retired high school teacher. Gin had once sold Avon door-to-door. She had a huge collection of poodle pins, most of them garish and pink, many of them plastic, and she was never without one in her own home. So, why, then, did they pretend to be Old World olive farmers whenever they needed to board a bus or show up at a graduation? And what should
Holly
wear, given that she knew what the guests of honor would be wearing, if not why?

Eric’s brothers and their wives—well, it would be a mix of formal and casual, but there would be tremendous effort put into everything, and very careful consideration:

The nieces and nephews would be scrubbed down to the bones. Eric’s three brothers would be in denim mostly, but at least one of them would be wearing a suit coat. Their wives would have flowing sweaters, silk pants. There might even be a cape of some sort. Whatever Holly wore would seem plain in comparison, but she was certainly not going to totter around her own house in high heels. She owned no pretty slippers. She would just have to feel dowdy and flat-footed in her stocking feet.

Holly scanned her closet. Wraparound dresses and dark skirts. Long-sleeved blouses and sleeveless ones. Nothing looked right for Christmas. The Coxes, she knew, would overdo it—a suit for him, a lacy top and Victorian-inspired earrings for her. Their son would be in a button-down with khaki pants.

Pearl and Thuy would be organic—loose, clean, bland in subdued colors—although they’d have Patty dressed up like a Disney princess. Patty was, admittedly, all about princesses, but considering the number of tiaras the child owned (far more than could be reasonably demanded by a four-year-old) Holly wondered if it might be the gender-indifferent Pearl and Thuy who wanted their daughter to be Cinderella. Bless their generous hearts.

Holly pulled a busy jersey dress off a hanger and tossed it on the bed. She’d worn it the other day to Tatty’s choir concert, so she knew it fit nicely.

“Mom?”

Tatty’s voice startled Holly, but she was also relieved to hear it. Tatty wasn’t sulking in her room. There was forgiveness implicit in that.

“Come in, hon,” Holly said.

Tatty opened the bedroom door a crack, and then stood with her toes on the threshold, peering in.

“Your phone rang while you were in the shower, Mom.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know,” Tatiana said. “I didn’t answer. It said ‘unavailable.’ ”

Holly stepped behind the closet door to slip off her robe and put on her bra. She didn’t need a bra, of course. She had the kind of breasts that would still be pointing at the sky when she was in a nursing home, or in her coffin (fake ones). But wearing a bra made her feel more “pulled together”—a phrase her mother used to use, complimenting women who were nicely dressed, whose hair had been styled stiffly, and who were not, like Holly’s mother, terminally ill.

“Well,” Holly said to Tatty. “Can’t be too important then. Some robot calling with a credit card offer or something.” She stepped into the dress and pulled the tie around her waist.

“On Christmas Day?” Tatiana asked.

“Well, robots don’t celebrate Christmas,” Holly said. “They don’t have souls, remember?”

Tatiana didn’t smile, although Holly knew her daughter knew what she was joking about. There’d been a period, around third grade, when Tatiana had become obsessed with what
had a soul
, and what did not. Holly had tried to explain the concept of the soul to Tatiana, impressing upon her that it wasn’t science, so there was no real answer to Tatiana’s question, unless Tatiana herself had some working definition of what she meant by
soul.

And, actually, much to Holly’s surprise, Tatiana had such a definition:

The soul was the thing hidden inside the thing, and made it what it was. You could not be, say, an actual parrot without a parrot soul.

“So a soul is inside a body?” Holly had asked.

Well, Tatiana had explained, sometimes the soul could be
behind
the body, maybe, and sometimes it could be
beside
or
beneath
or
above
, but, yes, usually it was inside. A book, for instance, had its soul in the crack between the two middlemost pages. This was typical of foldable things. Like butterflies, who had their souls where their two wings came together.

“So, like, the telephone book has a soul then?” Holly had asked, trying not to look too amused. Her daughter hated to be condescended to. She preferred to be argued with outright.

“Well, that’s what I’m asking,” Tatiana said. “That’s why I’m asking you.
I
don’t
know. I’m
only nine years old.”

“Well, sweetheart,” Holly had said, “I’m forty, and I don’t know either, so don’t feel too bad.”

But Tatiana rarely just let a subject go with an
I don’t know.
Often, it seemed purely willful to Holly. The pleasure and curiosity would have already gone out of the asking, but the asking would go on. A matter of stubborn pride would take over. A combative insincerity would be at the center of the discussion at that point.

“So do our chickens have souls?” Tatiana asked Holly.

“Well, if books and butterflies do, I—”

“I didn’t say they
all
do! I didn’t say all books and all butterflies have souls! I don’t know! I’m asking
you
.”

By then, Holly was exasperated. Tatiana was very young, but she was too old for this kind of illogic. She must have read something somewhere, or seen some inane kid’s comedy drama and was lifting the crappy, bombastic dialogue from it.

“Okay then,” Holly had said, tilting her head, rolling her eyes to let Tatty know that she was onto her. “Here’s a list of things that have souls: People, cats, chickens, and all other mammals. Fish and insects have souls, and lilac bushes, but no other plant life. Some very nice cars, like BMWs and Subaru Outbacks, but nothing made by General Motors. Also, rocks don’t have souls, and robots don’t. How’s that?”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Tatty had said, and shrugged. “I just wanted to know about robots. Thanks, Mom.”

There was no sarcasm in it. Holly had shaken her head at her daughter’s back, not at all sure if she’d won or lost this game. Eric, of course, when he heard about the exchange, had expostulated about how precocious their daughter was, so Holly hadn’t bothered to explain to him that the whole thing had been, actually, not precocious but derivative. Tatty had understood from Holly’s reaction that she was making a little juvenile fool of herself with the questions, so she’d played the only card she had left, which was to shut the whole thing down with a shrug of the shoulders and a pat little answer.
That’s all I wanted to know.
But what would have been the point of trying to tell the doting daddy
that
? That his perfect daughter could occasionally be unoriginal, or manipulative? Unthinkable!