The Center of Winter: A Novel Read online

  “No,” I said, louder than I meant to.

  Kate petted my ear. “Mom-mom-mom-mom,” she sang softly.

  “He was fond,” I said, trying to look friendly and sane, “of Mozart.”

  They looked at me sadly, worried. “Anything else?”

  Suddenly I saw him, just a few years younger, leaned back in his La-Z-Boy, his undershirt torn and sweaty from work in the garage, a beer on the TV table to his left. Leaned back like that, eyes closed, conducting an invisible orchestra to the rising swell of Mozart’s Requiem.

  Hearing my skirt shirr. Opening his eyes midphrase, smiling at me. Glancing around for the kids, reaching out his arms. Wrapping his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, looking up at me and whispering, “Listen! Listen!” He closed his eyes again and pointed to a place I couldn’t see.

  That terrifying rapture.

  Mozart would not do.

  Oma, making dinner, leaned her hands on the counter next to the stove, bent her head, and said, as if startled, “Oh.”

  Kate, who was helping, stood on the footstool. She paused in her stirring of cake batter in kind, as if to wait for Oma. A raw roast sat in the roasting rack amid a naked-looking pile of peeled carrots and potatoes, quartered onions. Kosher salt and pepper, rosemary, red wine.

  Oma slapped her hand on the counter once, as if to try the gesture on for size. She did it again, harder. She straightened, placed her hands over her face, and did not move.

  Kate set her mixing bowl carefully on the counter and looked steadily into it, licking batter off the wooden spoon in small catlike licks.

  Now he was definitely dead.

  Now the arrangements were made, and the funeral would be on Friday, and tomorrow the casseroles and pies and bars and salads would begin to arrive, because due time had passed. Tomorrow the women would descend, and say very little, and not mention death, and tape notes to the plastic wrap and aluminum foil that would read, in perfect, identical handwriting, “Heat 20 min. at 325. Freezes well 4 wks.” Now Oma would have to reheat everything, and serve it on Friday, at the reception, so the women would see that it didn’t go to waste, like her son, and that she appreciated, even in her grief, a kindess done, and Oma would have to bake all day as soon as they arrived, to make something to return in the handmade towels in which the women would wrap and knot their pies and cakes and casseroles and bars, the hand-stitched heirloom towels passed down through generations, given at weddings for brides to use when they went to another woman’s house, whether for a meal or for a death, fragile towels that never broke with the weight of what they carried, no matter how heavy the gift.

  Kate dipped into the bowl again and ate a whole spoonful of batter.

  Opa’s chair broke the silence as he stood and led Oma down the hall.

  Kate looked at me. “Can we still have cake?”

  “Did you butter the pan?”

  She nodded and held it up.

  “Is the oven on?”

  She pointed at it. We poured the batter into two pans and put them in. I got her a glass of milk. The roast sat exposed on the counter. I stood, covered it, and put it in the fridge.

  I loved watching Kate drink milk.

  She set down her glass and gasped. “I miss Esau,” she said, milk at the corners of her mouth.

  “Me too.”

  “Can we go on Sunday?”

  I nodded, wondering how I would tell my son that his father was dead.

  Kate stared at the oven with amazing concentration, as if willing the cake to be done. I studied the side of her face. She looked horrible. She started counting down the minutes. “Seven.” Pause. “Six.” Pause. She sat down cross-legged in front of the oven and stared in at the cake. “Five. It’s rising.”

  The buzzer went off and I jumped, choked on my drink. She looked at me, got up, and turned the buzzer off. “It’s done,” she said.

  She stood there, head level with the stove top.

  I realized that now it was time to stand, to check the cake with a clean knife, to blow on it because she wanted it to cool down faster, to turn it, to frost it, to give her a piece on a small plate, with ice cream so the cake wouldn’t be lonely, and a small spoon, and get some for myself so she wouldn’t be lonely, and some milk because you give children milk at least three times a day, with every meal and whenever else possible. She stood there, near my legs, turning as I turned, waiting to lift up her open hands as children are always doing.

  So I did that.

  And she lifted her hands, and while we ate she made me list all the animals with teeth I knew.

  “Is there a shark in the lake?”

  “No. Definitely no sharks. Only in the ocean.”

  “Are we going to the ocean?”

  “It’s a long ways away.”

  “Can we go?”

  “Sometime.”

  “Can I see a shark?”

  “In a zoo.”

  “Will it eat me?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll make sure it doesn’t eat me?”

  “I’ll make absolutely sure.”

  “Can I have more cake?”

  Opa came in, opened his mouth to talk to me.

  “Want some cake?” Kate asked. Opa looked at her as if startled to find her there. “No thanks, Little Bit.”

  “Too bad for you,” she said affably.

  “Claire, could you give the doc a call?”

  I stepped into the hallway with him. He held up his hand. “She’s just fine, now. She’s just a little worn out, you know, with everything. Little trouble breathing, good if she could get some sleep. Just ring him, ask him to come by if he’s in the neighborhood.”

  He turned, then turned back. “And now, you tell him he doesn’t need to be talking.”

  I dialed the phone and cut another piece of cake for Kate while the phone rang. She had dismantled the table clock and was lining its parts up in a row.

  “Doc Peterson? It’s Claire Schiller.”

  “Well, shoot! If I’m not glad to hear from you. How’re you doing, Claire? Really, now.”

  I suddenly wanted to collapse on the floor and scream, but it passed. “Actually, it’s Madge. I’m over there right now.”

  “Well, hell. Sure makes sense. I’ll be right on over.”

  I hung up and watched Kate eat her cake. Past her, out the kitchen window, it began snowing again. What was left of the winter-evening light was a soft blue-gray, like cotton batting, and it looked as if you could reach out and touch it, but for the stark calligraphy of trees etched onto the sky.

  At a certain point in winter, there is a slow-growing feeling that it has just begun and it will never end and there is no way to escape it. The feeling seeps out from the center of your body, somewhere in the heart, and you become aware of the fact that you are nothing but warm flesh wrapped in wool, protected only by wool. It is an almost calm feeling. It is like despair, but it is not pure despair; there remains the quiet, insane hope that if you cannot escape winter, you can befriend it, give it due respect. It is like God. Insofar as you hold out the foolish, childish hope that you can dodge its wrath if not its omnipotent force.

  All the seasons here in the north move toward their own end, except winter, which moves toward its center and sits there to see how long you can take it. Spring twitches impatiently in its seat like a child wanting to go outside, straining toward summer, and summer, all lush and showy, tumbles headlong toward the decay of fall. Fall comes and goes so fast it takes the breath away, arriving in brocades of red and gold and whipping them off in only a few weeks, leaving a landscape ascetic, stunned with loss.

  Outside, in the soft blue-gray dark, the snow fell. A child sat at a kitchen table and pretended her father had not died, because you were there. As long as you were there, she did not need to be afraid, or go outside, and so she was not afraid, of cold or anything else. Death did not kill her off but merely left her maimed, like a shot animal that startles at the noise more than the pain and scram
bles even faster through the underbrush, wide-eyed and sweating at the flanks, not pausing for the ripped and useless leg it now drags behind it as it runs. The animal has three legs left. Terror makes that enough.

  She ate her cake.

  “Do I have to go to bed?” she asked.

  I thought about this. “I guess not.”

  “Ever?”

  “Eventually.”

  “When?”

  I was overwhelmed by the idea of time. By the notion that there were days after that one. That there was a tomorrow, and another one after that, and eventually we would have to go home, back to that house, and Kate would have to have baths and go to bed and be fed breakfast and handed lunches in brown paper sacks, and that groceries for these lunches would have to be bought, and the trash taken out, and leaks fixed, and that I would have to go to work, and talk to the women there, and eat my lunch with them and smoke my cigarettes with them, and sell cosmetics and brassieres and slips and sweaters and china, and then there would have to be dinner, I would have to make dinner, and it would be just me and Kate at that enormous table until Esau came home, and I would spend the long evenings with her looking at me for something to do, or think, or a way to spend the hours of an evening, which I didn’t know how to spend, and then I would have to go to bed after she had gone to bed because what else was I supposed to do in an empty house with a sleeping child, and I would have to lie in bed not listening—and that was when the grief set in, the sound of nothing to listen for, and I realized I had spent twelve years of my life listening, tracking the sounds of him around the house, lying still in bed, so still I would not disrupt the distance between him and me with the noise of sheets, waiting for him to get his last drink, shuffle his cards, tap his deck against the table and leave it there until the next night, grunt as he stood, creak down the hall, open the door and click it shut with painful care, not waking me up, undress to his shorts and shirt, and, in the slow-motion of drunks who do not want to fall, ease himself into bed and fit himself into my side. Where he would hold his breath until I turned toward him— yes—or did not.

  And then he’d tumble into me or into sleep.

  “It’s snowing,” Kate said. “Can we go outside?”

  I looked at her and nodded. “Get your things,” I said, and she returned wearing her hat, dragging her scarf, snow pants, gloves, jacket.

  I held her snow pants out for her to step into. She steadied herself on my knee. I watched my hands stuff her skirt into the snow pants and zip her in. She watched my face.

  Children, I remembered, mirror the expression of their mother. We stared at each other seriously and without fear.

  Opa turned his back to me so I would not see him toss back a shot of whiskey before pouring himself a double in a lowball glass.

  He crossed the room and handed me one as well. It was a sign of respect, not pouring me a ladies’ single, a nod to the fact that it was night and there was a death and we were all men here, or something to that effect. He settled into his chair and looked into his glass.

  “Is she all right?” I asked him. He nodded and took a swallow.

  “She’s a tough old bird,” he said. “She just needs to sleep it off.”

  He adored her. Loved her to distraction. The first time I saw them, when Arnold and I stepped off the plane in Fargo, I knew who they were. They were the handsome older couple who stood close together, she clutching her white leatherette handbag that matched her shoes, he with his hands on her shoulders, their faces bald with expectation. On seeing us, she burst forward with her arms out and he clucked behind her, pleased with everything, his hands hovering at her back.

  We had just gotten married. I was six months pregnant. She grabbed my wrist and said, in a rush, “Oh, it’s all right. It’s all right now, you’re home. We’ll take care of everything. And look!” she said, throwing her arms up, whacking Opa on the shoulder with her bag. “Look at your, what’s the word, belly! Oh!” And she burst into tears and kissed me all over my face.

  Opa stood grinning down at his tiny wife.

  “Yep,” he said now, looking out the window. “Katie down for the night?”

  I nodded. “I told her she didn’t have to go to bed, but she fell asleep anyway. Tried not to.”

  Opa smiled. “I bet she did.”

  We’d walked through the snow, down to Main Street. She showed me a shortcut through an abandoned lot where a metal FOR SALE sign was obscured and bent by the snow. We walked down the street, the muffled sound of a jukebox and voices coming from the Hi-Top Bar. Otherwise, the street was silent.

  “It’s sleeping,” Kate said, looking up at the empty windows of the butcher and the general store.

  We crossed the street, and she lay down in the snow in front of the church and made a busy-armed snow angel, then got up to make another one by its side. Her arms and legs splayed, she lay there looking up at the sky. It was too dark to see her face.

  “Is Esau coming to the funeral?” she asked.

  I was startled. I didn’t realize she understood about the funeral, though we’d been talking about it in her presence all day, of course, and had gone to the funeral home. What did I think she’d think?

  “No,” I said.

  “Does he know?”

  I wondered if she was getting cold down there, lying in the snow. But suddenly the snow looked so soft, and we were exhausted, and it was so tempting that I gingerly stepped toward her and lay down in the snow myself.

  Together we stared into the sky.

  The correct thing to say, I thought to myself, is—Does he know what?

  But that would be an insult, and Kate, it seemed to me, was a perfectly intelligent person who did not deserve to be treated like a child. Under the circumstances.

  And I did not want to make her say it. Or I did not want to hear her say it.

  “No,” I said.

  Kate and I lay in our row of snow angels, thinking our thoughts.

  We took a hot bath when we got home, and polished off the cake. She dozed off, one eye first and then the other, struggling to stay awake as we sat on the couch in our flannel nightgowns, looking at the TV with the sound turned off.

  Long after she fell asleep, I held her there on my lap because she was small and warm, like a cat.

  “You want I should freshen that up?” Opa asked, standing over me, and I held out my glass, embarrassed that I had finished the drink without noticing.

  “Good heavens,” I said, laughing a little. “Guess I was thirsty.”

  “I should think so,” he said, and handed me another. Sitting down, he said, “Me too.”

  We studied each other.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing.” He took a sizable swallow of his whiskey. “You deserve better than this.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He narrowed his eyes at me. His carefully combed white hair had come free of its Brylcreem rows and was looking a little roosterish.

  “That’s the damned truth,” he went on. “That sonofabitch, no offense to my beautiful wife, had no business going and getting himself dead when he had a good wife and two good kids, is what I think.” He shook his head. “I tell you, Claire, I don’t know what in the hell.”

  He looked at me as if I did. I burrowed farther into the corner of the flowered couch and pulled my feet under the hem of my flannel nightgown.

  “He was sad,” I said. I had difficulty getting the words out of my mouth. I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell him what had happened, what I had said. Why his son had gone and gotten himself dead. But when I opened my mouth to say it, my tongue was dry. I took a swallow of my drink.

  Opa nodded. “I know that,” he said slowly. “I know he was.” He spun the ice in his glass. “I just don’t know why.”

  He fixed his gaze on me. “Now then, I want to tell you something. Right in there,” he said, gesturing at the guest room, “is a little girl so sad she doesn’t even know how sad she is yet. She’s so sad she can’t even be sad yet, that’
s how sad she is. Sad ain’t even a big enough word for what that baby girl is right now”—I looked away as he spoke, realizing that he must have had quite a bit to drink and was breaking a little, and it was good to give a man his privacy and not stare at him when he cried—“because her daddy’s gone and shot his head off. That’s sad.” His voice lost its waver. “Now, his mother.” He pointed toward Oma’s room. “That woman has lost two children—two children— because they didn’t want the life she gave ’em. She’s down the hall in there, and I can tell you, and I confess, Claire, that I am not a godly man, though I am a God-fearing man, I can tell you, she is having a dark night of the soul. That is what she is having.”

  He stood up and looked out the window at the white hill that led down to the wide white lake, all pale blue under the indigo sky.

  “Now all those old biddies are going to come here tomorrow with their damn casseroles, looking to see how she’s holding up. So she’ll have to hold up and she shouldn’t have to, it’s not right. What’s right is for her to be how she is. And they’ll all be looking at you too, don’t think they won’t.”

  He turned to me. “It ain’t fair, that’s all. And I know life ain’t fair, but a man can’t rightly just go an quit it because he’s sad, and leave it for everyone else to clean up.”

  I wondered for the first time if I would have to clean up the bedroom, or if someone else had done it for me. It seemed simultaneously sickening that I might have to face it, and worse still that someone else might have to face what was, in truth, my mess. My husband. My fault.

  I felt my head getting heavy and rubbed my eyes.

  “Now, you know you’re going to be all right.” Opa studied me. I looked back at him, uncertain. “Financially, you’re all right,” he said, and it seemed to give him some comfort to move into this topic, where he was capable of doing something, of making things all right. He was a successful man, and a proud man, and he liked to pay for things and keep his affairs in order, that was his way. That, and his wife, and my children, that was his life.

  He sat down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Arnold had his life insurance, you know, and that’ll be plenty in itself. But then, if you want to keep working, I would understand that, and I know you make good money at the store.” He drank the last of his drink and looked at the glass. “And a’course, you know I’m here to help out any way I can.”