White Bird in a Blizzard Read Online Free PDF Page A

“what stinks?” He turned the gas off under the frying pan. “This meat is rotten.” He held the pan up by the black handle, then turned his face to her—curious.
    “Throw it away,” she said. “We have to go out to eat.”
    He tossed the bad hamburger, pan and all, into the garbage can under the sink, then went down to the basement and, a few minutes later called up, “Jesus, Evie, this freezer’s unplugged. The whole thing’s full of rotten meat.”
    Of course: The light had not come on.
    Two days before, she remembered, she’d had to crawl on hands and knees behind the freezer to find a mother-of-pearl button that had popped off one of my sweaters when she pulled it from the dryer, and she must have accidentally knocked the plug from the socket.
    “Plug it back in,” she yelled.
    I came home just as my father emerged from the basement.
    “My God,” I said, coming into the kitchen. “What reeks?”
    “Shut up,” my mother said, hurrying past me. “We’re going out to eat.”
     
    That night, we did go out to eat. Perhaps we had Chinese. Or we each ate a steak at Bob’s Chop House. Maybe we had a pizza at Mariani’s. I sat between them at the table, thinking about Phil, sloshing the ice around and around in my water glass until my mother said, “Stop that.”
    Wherever we were, we’d eat in silence. Just a word now and then about the service, about the noisy children of the other patrons. My father might have asked me how school was going, then nodded his head while I answered in a low, bored voice.
    As a family, we were vague. My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees. My father, on the other hand, was right there, right on the surface of the world, taking it all in too easily—the salad, the beef, the silverware—but there was nothing more to it, nothing in his world you couldn’t see. And I was sixteen, trying desperately to slip into the privacy of my own mind, a place where their questions and faces could not interfere with my thoughts about sex, a place where they couldn’t find me in some fantasy of naked flesh.
    “What are you thinking about?” my father would ask me cheerfully as I sat there between them sawing my steak in half. “You sure seem lost in thought.”
    I’d imagine telling him. The sound of his utensils dropping from his hands.
     
    But, perhaps I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air—looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged.
    I could smell the death between them.
    When my father came up from the basement, he had a look of puzzlement and blame on his face, his surprise at finding something wretched in the kitchen, cooking—something cloying and corrupted, which his wife had planned for supper.
    And my mother’s delicate suffering, the elegant clothes, rumpled. In a few weeks, she’d be that woman with MISSING written above her picture.
    But that night, she was just the suburban wife of someone who’d wanted a simple dinner of macaroni and grease. And she’d cooked him something ghastly and mortal instead.
     
    “What’s that smell?” Phil asked when he came over to see me later that night.
    “Something’s dead,” I said.
    Phil smirked, I remember. “Is it your dad?” he asked.
     
     
     
     
    A ND I KNEW WHY HE ASKED IT . I N MANY WAYS, MY FATHER
was
dead. When I was only ten or eleven years old, I used to ask my father, as a joke, what the world had been like when he was alive—was there television, for instance, were there cars? Of course, I meant, when he was a
child
, and my father got the joke, and always laughed, but there was a bite to the joke, and I stopped making it after a while.
     
    My father was, as I’ve said, healthy. A