The Center of Winter: A Novel Read online

  Donna joined me on the steps, and we watched them meander their way up the driveway, waving their hands in animated conversation.

  “I wonder what they talk about,” I said. “Times like this.”

  Donna shook her head. “Lord only knows. How are you, Claire?”

  She didn’t turn her face to look at me. I liked Donna. She was a person I very much liked. She always made me think of the word solid, in her men’s flannel shirts with her hair pulled back into a braid. Until today, I’d never seen her wear a dress, and even now she stood with her feet planted apart, her arms crossed over an enviable bosom in a shirt-waist the color of melted chocolate. She was beautiful in some strange way. She wore no coat and a pair of fleece-lined mukluks.

  “To tell you the truth, honey, I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw her nod. “Least you’re sane, then. I would’ve worried if you’d said you were fine.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said, surprising myself and her. She looked at me.

  “Well, damnation, Claire. Of course we’re here.”

  Kate and Davey approached, Kate tugging at Davey’s hand with the unspent hysteria of a child who has held still for an entire day.

  “Kate, wait,” Davey commanded. He was the most serious child I had ever seen. He addressed Kate almost always as “Kate,” using the informal “Katie” only rarely. He took her very seriously. When they played, he listened carefully to Kate’s plans and then hunkered down on his miniature cowboy boots and said, “Okay. What we’ll do is this.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Schiller,” he began, then seemed to get stuck. Worried, he glanced at his mother. She nodded.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, very formal, very slow. He then walked up the steps and wrapped his arms around my knees for what seemed to him an appropriate period of time. He tilted his face up to me and added, impulsively, “Really really.”

  I bent down and hugged him. “Thanks,” I said.

  He let go. Kate, who had been very patient, said, “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I replied.

  “We’re going in now.”

  “Okay.”

  They tumbled in the door.

  Opa came up the steps. “You coming inside? I wouldn’t, I were you.” “In a while,” Donna said. “Awful nice of you to give us a ride.”

  “Pleasure.”

  He hadn’t been gone but a minute when he returned with two drinks and my coat.

  “Almost five.” He smiled at me and hung my coat over my shoulders. “Now, you keep her out of that goddamned kitchen, is what,” he said to Donna.

  “Will do.”

  “We’ll have supper shortly, when all these fool people leave.”

  “Davey gives you any trouble, you send them on out here.”

  “Nah. We’ll play ’em some poker, keep ’em busy.”

  Donna laughed. “Have your head, you do.”

  The door swung shut and slammed behind Opa, echoing into the empty street. The sun was down. Night hovered just over the horizon, the thick dark hesitating at the edge of town.

  We sat down on the porch swing, and the frozen iron links creaked under our weight.

  “You know what it feels like?” I finally said. “Feels like I’m waiting.”

  Donna said nothing. She took a swallow of her drink and pushed us gently with her toe.

  “That’s what it feels like,” I said. “Like I’m waiting for something to happen. What for? The funeral? The man’s already gone and died. So then what?”

  Donna nodded. “That’s a bitch,” she said.

  “And what now, you know?”

  She nodded again. “More life.”

  “Right. Nothing but more life.”

  She understood perfectly. We sat and drank. Night snuck closer, slid down a little farther over the rooftops, then held itself still, like a child trying to creep out of a room unseen.

  “You know what it reminds me of?” I stopped, half afraid of what I was about to say. “It reminds me of getting married.”

  She let out a short bark of surprised laughter. “Yep. I hear that.”

  “That day you suddenly realize it. Not the day you do it, you don’t know what you’ve done right then.”

  “Lord knows.”

  “But later. What, a year later?”

  “’Bout that.”

  “You realize, Oh my Lord, what have I gone and done.”

  “And there you are,” she said.

  “There you are.”

  “And now what.”

  “Exactly. Exactly.”

  “And now more life.”

  We laughed for a long time. Night tripped over the telephone wires and fell heavily into the streets as we laughed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, catching her breath and squeezing my knee. “And then you look at them, sitting there.”

  “Sitting there.”

  “And that’s all they’re gonna do, then. You got babies crawling up your legs and they’re sitting there. They want dinner, and what, that’s it, forever. Dinner and babies.”

  We crowed.

  “Hell, I’ll tell you,” she said, shaking her head. “Start to think they are dead, just sitting there dead with the television on, and then you start to wish they were dead, just so something would happen. Not really, but it crosses your mind, from time to time. My mind, at least, can’t speak for yours. But then, shit. Whaddaya do then, right?”

  I tipped my head back, trying to get some air. I felt as if I’d gotten the wind knocked out of me. “Right,” I finally breathed. “What then.”

  “Leave a big hole in your life, no matter how you cut it. No matter what we say.”

  I pictured all of us sitting in the living room, a hole cut out where Arnold was.

  “Holes,” I said. “There’s holes all over the house. Where he sat down. Where he played cards, at the table.”

  She took a swallow. My drink was gone. I wanted another one.

  “Hole in the bedroom,” I said, staring out across the street.

  “Yep,” she said after a pause. “One there, for sure.”

  In the dark I felt her glance at me. I stared steadily ahead. The neighbors across the way were sitting down to supper. The yellow light shone on the snow, a long square. A squirrel skittered across it, weightless, and disappeared into shadow again.

  “I was thinking about that this morning,” I said. “Last night. Whenever.”

  “Slept much?”

  I shook my head. “I was up last night talking with Elton. Listening. I’d rather listen to him talk than me, Lord knows. And I can’t—” I gestured toward my mouth. “I can’t find the words.”

  I laughed lightly and winced. In the laugh I heard my mother’s laugh, the fragile southern bell of her pained laugh. I straightened on the porch swing.

  “So I was thinking,” I said, feeling a little off center, as if I had to remind myself what I was thinking even though it was the only thing I could think about. “The bedroom. In my head. It looks like a hole, in my head. It’s like I’m picturing it”—I held my hands up, cupped at the sides of my face, feeling my voice rise—“like a tunnel, down the hallway, and it ends in this hole. This nothing. This stupid, empty space.”

  Silence hung, and then was swept away by a small cold breeze. Embarrassed, I wiped the spit from my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, shit, Claire,” Donna said in disgust. “You got a hole in your life. Say what you need to say.”

  I didn’t need to say anything for a minute, I guess. I watched the woman across the street push back from the table and go into the kitchen. I watched her lean her hands against the sink and look out the window, her face tired, and it seemed for a second as if we were face to face. Maybe she’d gone to the kitchen to get something and paused because she wanted to be alone for a minute. Maybe she was tired of him talking to hear himself talk. Maybe she was tired of his silence.

  “But see, lo
ok,” I said, gesturing at the woman with my glass. “He’s not dead, is he? She’ll turn around, and there he is, holding her place. He’ll be in bed, holding her place, her place there, all heavy and breathing.” I broke off, not knowing what I meant.

  Donna looked at me. She took my glass, stood up, went in, and came back out with two more drinks.

  “Oh, honey,” she sighed. She sat down carefully, making sure I had a grip on my glass before she let go. “Let’s get drunk.”

  We watched the woman pull herself up to the table and put her napkin on her lap.

  The next day they buried my husband.

  I say they buried my husband because I did not. I may have killed him, but I did not bury him in the ground.

  There is something about a coffin. It is a big, long box.

  It is the first thing you see when you walk into the church. It is the only thing you see, the only thing you are aware of, besides the lilies. You are sickened by the scent of lilies, which, despite specific instructions, are everywhere. Everywhere.

  Each of you present loses awareness of the other. There is no time now, there are only a few minutes left, and each of you must go inside your own grief alone. First you begin your walk down the aisle. Then you disperse like a shattered atom.

  There is the coffin, a long, dark box, and inside the box is your broken husband, and the lilies are crawling down your throat, closing in as you go, gagging you with their sticky pollen, their fake spring, their cheap dime-store perfume.

  Your child clings to your hand and begins to whimper like an infant. You are viscerally aware of her, or more, of it. She is not a person, but a thing that is yours, ferociously yours, another part of your body, resisting forward motion, a damp and whimpering limb. This is reassuring. As you walk down the aisle, she clings to your leg like ivy, like a curled fetus, and you drag her along, she is trying to climb up you, back inside you, and this too is reassuring, as if it should be this way, has always been this way, the disgusting wet fertile rot smell of the lilies and the child pawing at your skirt, your crotch, as you slog up the aisle toward the box wherein your husband lies, dead and ever present, rotting and growing, and the thick air of the church makes it an effort to walk, and faces with eyes in their heads turn toward you in some vaguely bridal ritual until you reach the front pew, where you sit and watch the edges of the lilies’ petals brown and curl in the human heat.

  In a box, under a sagging pile of lilies, lies your husband. He stares straight up at carefully, pointlessly quilted satin and a pile of lilies.

  No. He cannot stare. He has no head.

  I bent my own and pressed my lips onto the top of Kate’s skull.

  I wanted to leave, but it seemed the minutes were passing without my permission, and they only went in one direction, and you could only walk into the church once, and then out only once, and Kate was on my lap, and Oma and Opa were blocking my way out of the pew, so no matter what I did, this was going to happen, like when I was giving birth, that first contraction when suddenly it’s not an idea anymore, it’s going to happen, like that, exactly like that, they were going to bury him.

  And I felt that if I moved at all, I would become detached from Kate, and then I would die.

  Kate turned toward me, her face twisted into a knot, and refused to watch. There was nothing to watch. She pressed her body against mine, wrapped her legs around my waist, laid her face between my breasts, whimpering. She pressed her small skull bones into the soft flesh hard enough to hurt, nudging and shifting, trying to find a place she liked.

  She found it, the spot she’d always used when she was falling asleep, milk drunk, after I’d nursed her. She settled in and tucked a curled fist under the breast she faced. Her breathing slowed slightly. The light through the stained-glass windows shone on her cheek so that she looked like a painted harlequin doll. I closed my eyes.

  The service began. I realized at some point that I was looking out a stained-glass window on which St. Christopher held up his hand in blessing—safe journeys, was that him?—and turned my head forward so as to seem to be paying attention. My attention was on Kate’s breath. She breathed into my neck, shallow breaths, tiny, as she had when she was a baby, dreaming. I remembered watching her, in this kind of stillness, wondering what she dreamed. Looking up at Esau, then just six and still as cheerful a child as they come, gloating in my luck, terrified by the fragility of their bones.

  There is no protecting a child, my mother told me once, waving her hand at me as if to wave me away. She’d leaned back, I remember the purple velvet settee, the tattered luxury I’d grown up with, the kind that seems to say, “We are above new things.” I’d brought only a few dresses for my visit, all carefully chosen, all wrong. I could see it in her face, they were all wrong, the fabric cheap and small town.

  I was trying to repair something with her. I was telling her about the children; I’d brought pictures. See, I wanted to say, look at how perfect and strange they are. Look at what strange, perfect things I have made. Impulsively, I told her about the terror, the terror that took hold of me when I woke in the morning and as I sat up late at night, unable to sleep. I can’t even remember the last time I wasn’t afraid, I said, laughing, sounding afraid even then, even to myself, half hysterical in her presence, as I always was. Embarrassed by myself, tall and excitable and lacking in grace, nothing like her. Like your father, she always said, with disgust so thinly disguised it was barely a sheen on the surface. The children came, I said, laughing inappropriately, and I’ve been afraid ever since.

  “Oh, God, Claire,” she drawled. She looked me over. “There’s no protecting a child.”

  I realized the funeral was nearing its end. Kate seemed to sense it too, and, as if in protest, repositioned her head against my breast and tucked herself into me as far as she could. I winced, breathed deep to make a hollow of my rib cage, and drew her in.

  They picked up my husband and carried him down the aisle.

  It was a warm day, icicles dripping from the eaves of the church as we stepped out into the blinding sunlight, thick piles of wet snow falling from slick branches. From the steps I watched them put the coffin in a gun-colored hearse. The minister stopped and said something to me. I stared at him over Kate’s body. I wanted the sun to go away. I wanted a thunderstorm to roll in and crack open the sky and cause a flood. I blinked at the minister, who took his hand off my shoulder at last.

  I put on a pair of sunglasses as we rode over in the car, and felt hidden. I wanted Kate to say something.

  “Katie,” I whispered into her neck. She made no response. I squeezed her so tightly she pushed at my arm with one hand, very nicely, and tucked her hand back into my chest. I felt better. I could feel Opa in the front seat trying to think of something to say. He opened his mouth and took a deep breath several times, glancing at us in the rearview mirror, and then stopped. Finally he let out a slow sigh and drove.

  Fields and more white fields. Sugar beet and corn, soybean, sunflower, cattle land, roiling under the frozen ground beneath feet of snow. I loved the split-wood fences at property lines and the telephone poles that stayed up God knows how, a procession of tilted crosses that ran north-south along the county roads.

  The first time we drove this way, I was in charge of the radio, and country music played on every station except one, on which a Lutheran minister droned. It was summer and the sunflowers craned their necks to face south.

  “Is it all this flat?”

  “Yep,” he’d said with a satisfied smile. “Here to the Rockies, not counting the Black Hills.”

  I whistled through my teeth, impressed.

  Another field rolled by. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Sugar beet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What it sounds like.”

  I grinned out the open window.

  I felt him look at me. “You like it?”

  I nodded.

  “Think you could stay here awhile?”

 
; I laughed and held up my hand. “Where’m I going?”

  That is a graveyard, I thought.

  We were parked.

  Cemetery was a nicer word. But there were gravestones, gray ones, others black with age, the names so old they’d worn off. Some had lichen, moss. Esau had learned about lichen. Do not pull up lichen; it takes them a hundred years to grow. Also, bears like lichen, so leave them for the bears. No, there are no bears in town. There were graves with flowers and graves with dead flowers and graves with nothing at all.

  Time did not pass for a little while as the four of us sat there listening to the car tick. Then Opa said, “All right now.”

  Still no one moved. At the edge of the graveyard, there was a gathering of people in dark coats and hats, looking toward the car, the men with their hats removed. There was a minister. There was a grave, and a box. All of it meant for us. Like a birthday party, I thought.

  I looked down at Kate. She was gazing steadily out the window at the very same place.

  “All right,” Opa said, quite certain this time, and he got out of the car. He came around the other side and helped Oma out, making sure her shoes were steady on the ice, and then opened my door. It was good that he did, because I found I couldn’t move.

  He went to take Kate, whose whole body seized as she let out a chilling scream. I closed my eyes. Please don’t let it be like this, I thought. Opa lifted his hands away as if burned. “It’s all right,” he said in a low voice, to her, me, himself. “All right.”

  Stop saying that, I wanted to yell. We will stay here in the car, I wanted to say. It isn’t all right right now. We are all right where we are. We are not all right.

  In my confusion I suddenly got out of the car and found myself walking up the hill. Faces came into focus and I wanted to spit at them. I stared at people. They looked away in sympathy, which was worse. Kate’s body was clenched so tightly around me that my eyes widened in pain and my whole body shook. I kept going, unable to stop, my legs pumping with blood. I wanted to carry Kate home. Donna caught my arm and pulled me to her side, and that was all right. That was all right. I stopped. Then I was standing there staring at a hole in the ground.