Mind of Winter (7 page)

Now, however, whenever Tatty tried to start some imitative argument (“All the
other
kids are going . . . !”) Holly would say, “And robots don’t have souls,” and Tatiana’s nostrils would flare, and there would appear that little muscle pulsing at her jaw, and her bluish lids would draw halfway down over her dark eyes, and Holly would just smile, ending the argument, knowing that her daughter knew exactly what she meant:

You’re faking, you heard this somewhere else, you’re just mouthing these words, and I know it.

“I JUST THOUGHT
you’d want me to tell you that your phone was ringing,” Tatiana said. “It might have been important, even if it was Unavailable, even on Christmas Day.”

“Honey, my cell phone gets a call from Mr. Unavailable
every
day. Mr. Unavailable has been trying to get in touch with me ever since caller ID was invented. Sometimes I even get a call from Mrs. Name Withheld.”

“You’re funny, Mom. I mean, you are so, so funny.”

Holly felt stung, but not surprised, that the conversation had gone from sarcastic to nasty so fast. She tried not to rise to the bait. She tried to sound genuine, asking, “Well, Tatiana, who do you think might be trying to call?”

Her daughter said nothing. Holly sighed, and looked away from her to the window. She was surprised to see that the curtains were parted. She didn’t remember doing that. Perhaps it had been Eric, before he left, and Holly hadn’t noticed it until now because the heavy snow that was falling out there was like a second layer of curtains—but made of movement. Chaotic particles. Electrical sparking.

She went to her dresser to find a pair of black tights, and said to Tatty, “Why didn’t you answer my phone, sweetheart, if you’re curious? I never said you couldn’t answer my phone. Answer my phone anytime you want.”

Still, Tatiana said nothing. She was looking up at the ceiling, unblinking, so Holly took the moment to peruse her, and noticed that Tatty was wearing the tiny opals that Pearl and Thuy had given her for her thirteenth birthday. She was going all out, wasn’t she? The opals for Pearl and Thuy, the velvet dress for Gin. It was sweet. Tatiana had always been a thoughtful child—the first on the playground to run to a fight and try to stop it, the first to comfort a crying baby or a whining puppy—but she was growing into a genuinely considerate young woman.

“That’s so nice,” Holly said, looking at her daughter’s earlobes, “that you’re wearing the opals Pearl and Thuy gave you.”

Tatiana immediately touched, as every woman does, whatever part of her was under discussion. Her earrings, her scarf, the necklace at her collarbone. Eric used to swat Holly away from her hair, saying that every time he told her it looked nice she put her hands into it and mussed it all up. But it was hard, if you weren’t facing a mirror, to be sure what was being observed about you if you couldn’t see it yourself. It was natural to try to
feel
it.

“I wasn’t trying to be nice,” Tatiana said. “I like the earrings.”

Holly deflated again. “I wasn’t trying to pick a fight,” she said. “I like that you thought to wear earrings that were given to you by guests we’re having over today. I know there are other earrings you own that you like, and I was trying to point out that it was a nice thing to do to choose those. But, Tatty, I’m sorry if I misunderstood.”

Tatty turned quickly on the heel of her black ballet slipper then, and she was over the threshold before she saw Holly grit her teeth at her daughter’s back.

Holly sat on the edge of the bed, and rolled one leg of the black tights up her leg. She would, she supposed, be punished all day for sleeping in on Christmas morning. Not only would her daughter be in a continuous state of disapproval, Eric’s brothers and their wives would soon be here, full of concern about their parents, which would hold the subtext of blame directed toward Holly that Eric had overslept (which would be Holly’s fault somehow) and been late to pick them up at the airport.

Why must Christmas always be at
their
house? Holly would have happily traveled to New Jersey or Pennsylvania or upstate New York for the holiday. She’d love to spend Christmas Day walking around Tony and Gretchen’s house—inspecting Gretchen’s silverware for sticky remains of some previous meal, holding her crystal up to the light to see if it was greasy. She’d have happily accompanied Eric to his parents’ condominium, for that matter, and cooked dinner there! She’d have happily made arrangements for all of them to meet at a resort in Florida! Or Cancún! Or Bend, Oregon!

But, it seemed, having had Christmas at Eric and Holly’s the first year they were married meant that Eric’s family would have Christmas at Holly and Eric’s forever, even if Holly was so disrespectful and irresponsible that she hadn’t even woken her husband up on Christmas morning.

Holly didn’t put shoes on, or her perfume, or her earrings, or even her watch. She went straight out to the kitchen in her stocking feet, where she found Tatty holding, and peering into, the iPhone Holly had left on the counter. A cool blue glow rose from the screen of it, and it turned Tatty’s skin to a color Holly didn’t like—the color of a sick girl, or a drowned girl.

Tatty had a beautiful complexion, which could have been called porcelain. Except that porcelain was whiter than the color of Tatty’s skin, which was more the color of crayfish bisque—or at least the crayfish bisque Holly’s mother used to make before she grew too ill to cook such things. A little grayer than bone. Creamier than ivory. Cream with a drop of violet mixed into it. In certain light, and in certain photographs, there was a tint of pale blue to Tatiana’s face—a little deeper near the temples, under her eyes. Sometimes her lips looked as if she’d just come in from the cold, deep end of the pool.

It was the most beautiful complexion Holly had ever seen. Elegant. Mildly exotic. But institutional light didn’t suit it, nor did the glow of the iPhone. “Put that down,” Holly said.

Tatty looked up, opened her mouth, unhinging her jaw slightly, and huffed. She put the cell phone down on the marble top of the kitchen island, and then gestured to it, and said, “I
knew
you’d be pissed. You always say, ‘Go ahead and answer my cell phone,’ but I so much as
pick up
your cell phone and you’re
all over me.
”

Holly shook her head. She was so tired of this teenage tone of voice, these reflexive accusations. How long was this phase of Tatiana’s existence going to last? “Jesus, Tatiana,” she said. “Take it down a notch, would you? I wasn’t
all over you.
I just—”

“No. You just reflexively reprimand me these days, that’s what! I can’t do anything right.”

“Look,” Holly said, picking up the cell phone between them. “We don’t have time for this. Did Unavailable call back?”

“No.”

“Well, if and when that happens, just answer the phone. That’s that. If the phone rings, answer the phone. Until then, you have your own phone, and please leave mine on the counter where I can find it if Daddy calls.”

“I was
at
the counter while I was looking at it.”

“Fine, okay, sweetheart. You win. I’m sorry. We truly do not have time for this. I need to start cooking, or we won’t have anything to eat.”

“God, Mom. You should’ve started cooking two hours ago,” Tatty said. “Every year you start cooking at, like, eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Well this year I overslept! Okay? This year I slept in! Shoot me, Tatty! Just put me out of my misery! Please!” Holly turned, and forced a laugh out of her lungs to try to dilute the sound of her rage, and also to spare herself the indignity of having lost her temper, but her heart was pounding hard in the soft spot at the base of her neck, which made her feel like some sort of underwater creature. As if she had some panicky gill there. She could hardly swallow. She was about to instruct Tatty in what she could do to help hurry the Christmas dinner preparations along, instead of complaining, when, on the counter where it lay, her cell phone began to sing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

Holly turned. Tatiana was looking at the phone without touching it. “Is it Daddy?” Holly asked.

“No. It’s Unavailable,” Tatty said.

“Well go ahead and answer it if you want to, sweetheart.”

But Tatiana just stood and stared into the phone. She’d sat down on the stool next to the kitchen island, so that now her feet dangled four inches from the floor in their little black slippers, exactly the way they used to when Tatty was three and a half feet tall and sat behind Holly in her car seat as Holly drove her to day care.

Christ. Holly felt so sad. She’d chastised her daughter, who was now afraid to touch her cell phone. And poor Tatty looked worried. Her eyebrows were arched so that they formed an upside-down V on her forehead. They were dark, a little bushy, Tatty’s eyebrows—but that was fashionable now, and Tatty’s facial features were so elegant that no eyebrows could have taken away from that. Still, someday Tatty would probably want to pluck them, and the idea of that also made Holly feel sad. Being female was so hard. Always having to rearrange yourself, to pluck yourself and whittle yourself and deprive yourself and inspect yourself in order to feel comfortable in this world. Bob Dylan continued to rasp out the lyrics—
And where have you been, my darling young one?
—and her daughter just kept looking into the phone. Again, Tatiana’s face took on that awful hue—the silvery blue of a fish tossed up on a pier—and she made no move whatsoever to answer Holly’s phone.

“Oh, come on,” Holly said, and picked it up, hit the green answer bar with her thumb. “Hello?”

But the call had already gone to voice mail, and if there was a way to interrupt voice mail and answer the call at this point, Holly hadn’t learned it. She’d only learned how to use about half the features of this phone. It was like the brain, the way the experts claimed a human being only used about 10 percent of what was available up there. Steve Jobs, like God, had given her much more to work with than she would ever be able to make use of.

She put the phone on the counter again and cocked her head at Tatty, determining that she was not going to ask her why she hadn’t answered. It was, obviously, punishment for Holly’s having told her to put down the phone a few minutes earlier. Holly did not want to get into a defensive position again, especially since it
had
been irrational, which Tatiana knew full well and could call her on in a flash. Holly had asked her daughter to put down the phone because she didn’t like the color it was turning her daughter’s skin as she peered into it. There was certainly no explaining
that.

“No one’s going to leave a message,” Tatty said. “They never do.”

“No,” Holly said. “They don’t. They never do. They’re robots who want to sell things to people. They don’t like to talk to other robots.”

Tatiana jumped down from the stool so quickly then that for a second Holly thought she’d fallen, so she hurried instinctively toward her daughter. But Tatiana held up a hand as if she had to hold her mother back, as if Holly had planned to strike her, not help her.

“You don’t know,” Tatty said, shaking her head. “You have no idea who’s calling.”

“I realize that,” Holly said. “I don’t
know
, because you didn’t
answer
. If you’d answered the phone, I would now know who it was who called.”

“You told me not to answer!”

Holly took a step back and threw her hands in the air. “I
what
?”

Tatiana muttered something.

“What? What are you talking about, Tatiana?”

Tatty’s dark eyes searched the space just to the right of Holly’s shoulder, not looking at her directly, but not looking away from her, either. Her profile looked like a marble sculpture. Pale and polished and a little cold.

“I’m not going to continue this absurd argument, Tatty,” Holly said. “You didn’t answer the cell phone to spite me. Either that or you didn’t want to be bothered to talk to the robot, either.”

Tatiana turned and began to walk from the kitchen island to the family room, to the Christmas tree in the corner—its branches drooping under the weight of all the ornaments and the strings of lights. The whole scene—the tree, the lights, her daughter in her Christmas dress—looked wan to Holly in the glare pouring through the picture window, which was now just a scrim of snow outdoors. Who knew how long it might take Eric to get back from the airport, or where his brothers and their families were by now as they attempted to converge on the house from the various hotels they’d spent their nights in? God help her if she had to entertain the Coxes very long without any help. At least Thuy and Pearl and Patty lived only a few miles away. Surely they would have no reason to be late, no matter how much snow was falling.

The Christmas lights drowned themselves in their own dull brilliance as Tatty peered into them, looking curious, the way she’d peered into Holly’s cell phone, as if something either wonderful or terrible might be hiding in there.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart? Let’s not fight. I love you so much. It’s Christmas, and we have a
lot
to do.”

She waited for her daughter to turn around. When she did, Holly thought, she would take Tatiana in her arms. She would hold her until she warmed and softened in her embrace. They would start the day again.

But Tatty didn’t turn around. Instead, she said something under her breath, which Holly chose to ignore, and as it became clear that she could stand there all day waiting, and Tatiana was not going to turn around, Holly herself turned around, went to the refrigerator, and opened the door.

The refrigerator was so crammed full from her shopping trip the day before that Holly had to step backward to see the contents fully. The roast was what she was looking for, but in order to get to it she would have to swim through eggnog and sparkling juice (Eric’s brother Tony didn’t drink) and champagne bottles (his wife most certainly did) and whipping cream and fruit salad. The roast was at the very back, still wrapped in the plastic bag in which she’d brought it home from the grocery store the day before.