White Bird in a Blizzard Read Online Free PDF

good-looking man. But the kind of dullness he wore like a badge—(“I’m a simple man,” he would say to my mother when she complained that they never went anywhere, never ate anything but steak and potatoes, and he’d say it as though it were the thing about which he was proudest, something commendable, something my mother might not have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out)—also embalmed him, ran in his veins like that gray March rain.
    Every morning, he would mix a spoonful of vegetable fiber into a glass of water, stir it around and around, clunking his tablespoon against the side of the glass until that water was the color of dullness itself, and then he’d gulp it all down in one deep swallow that seemed to go on and on—
    “Ah!” he’d sigh. “That’s good,” setting the empty glass down hard on the kitchen counter.
    It was a laxative, and kept him regular, and he appreciated that.
    Occasionally, after drinking this dull cocktail, he’d exhale a long, slow fart, and my mother might throw her dish towel down and mutter, “Jesus Christ, Brock.”
    She hated those farts.
    He’d smile, big and happy, and say, “Excuse me!”
     
    When I was ten years old, my father took me with him to his office at the Board of Education. Perhaps I’d had no school that day. Maybe I’d asked to go. Or was it his idea? Was there something there, at his office, he wanted me to see?
    What I saw stunned me then. It mystifies me now:
    My father was loved by women.
    Old women and young women. Fat and thin. Married, single, serious women, and empty-headed flirts.
    To get to his office, we had to walk down a long, gray corridor of women. I was a child. I would have been holding my father’s hand. He would have been wearing shiny shoes, a black suit. Even then, he was gray at the temples, but his features were chiseled out of solid rock—not at all like a man with the kind of job he had: a job telling women what to do. Ruggedly handsome, my father spent his days at the end of a telephone with a felt-tipped pen in his hand, doodling onto a legal pad.
    I’d seen those doodles.
    Stars. Pyramids. Bull’s-eyes. Once, a pair of women’s shoes with a woman, drawn only up to her ankles, in them. Above her ankles, just air.
     
    Still, my father had the features of a French legionnaire. An aristocrat. A mystery writer. A painter of abstractions. Give him a series of hats—a black beret, a turban, a sailor’s cap—and you could have had your classically attractive anyman: sailor, artist, sultan. Instead, he was simple. Friendly. A school administrator. As he passed the secretaries who were at his disposal with their beige panty hose, soft breasts behind soft sweaters, toes pinched into skinny shoes, my father glistened.
    “Good
morning
, Mr. Connors,” a woman with a file folder in her hand said, fanning the folder in our direction, opening her eyes wide. “Is this your
daughter
?”
    “No.” My father raised his dark deadpan eyebrows at her. “Mindy, I’d like you to meet my new secretary, Kat.”
    Every time my father said this, and my father said this all day, a woman would open her slippery red mouth as wide as she could to laugh.
     
    What’s wrong with this picture?
I thought, remembering the puzzles we puzzled out in kindergarten—
    Three dogs and a toaster:
Which one doesn’t fit
?
    At home, my father’s corniness would be met with grimaces from my mother, pain spreading itself across her face as if she’d been poked in the small of her back by a very hot pitchfork, or she’d shake her head. She might say, “Oh, please,” or leave the room—or, if they were in the car together, look out the window blankly, saying nothing.
    But here, his corniness was charming. Back in their break room, over cups of instant coffee and sandwiches slipped out of plastic bags and a haze of cigarette smoke winding exotic, haremlike, around them, those secretaries must have talked about my father like a pleasant, shared master.