White Bird in a Blizzard Read Online Free PDF Page B

Here and there, a foot was slipped out of a shoe, tucked up under a thigh.
     
    He could have had one or two of them, I’m sure. The skinny blond. The sweet and slightly giddy one. The one with shapely calves sashaying beneath her pleats.
    Flattered to be chosen, she would have kept it quiet. She’d have met him on the sly, in a motel, black teddy stashed in her pocketbook, diaphragm already in. She’d have done whatever she could to please him in bed, just as she always tried to do his typing with a flourish, file his papers with style.
    Then, back at work, she’d have kept her mouth shut. She’d have stopped lunching with her girlfriends if she had to, started keeping to herself. And when, a few months later, he broke the news that he couldn’t risk it anymore—his wife was asking questions—she might have been generous enough to quit, to find a job in another office, even if it meant a bit less pay, the loss of some fringe benefit she’d grown used to having but could, finally, manage without. And, years later, when she passed him with his wife and daughter on a street in town, she would politely look down at her shoes and walk on.
    But my father was far too simple for this.
    His imagination was limited, and, for whatever reason, it was only my mother he loved.
    I know.
    I know because I was their daughter. Their only child. The product of their marriage. A soft, lopped-off part of it. I saw the looks he sent her, though he hardly spoke to her. (“A man of few words,” my mother would snort at his back when he’d offered a one-word answer to some complicated question she’d asked.)
    Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could lift the lid and precious gems would spill all over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy—an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter.
    There was never any of that in our house either.
    “Evie, what can I do to cheer you up?” he might ask her on a Saturday when she’d spent all day complaining. He meant a movie, a drive, a quart of ice cream. She’d say, “Just pick up your dirty socks. That’s all I want,” and she’d be looking hard at his feet propped up on the ottoman when she said it, her jawbone making vicious little squirrel movements when she closed her mouth.
     
    But the fact that she hated him did not seem to lessen his love for her. When she was late coming home from the mall, he’d twist the snug wedding band around and around on his finger—always conscious of her, not forgetting for a minute that he was married, looking out the window at an unfathomably high and empty sky.
    He had her photo, too, enlarged, on the wall of his office, framed in oak. In it, my mother smirked into the sun at the slippery edge of a river—the Chagrin River, which ran past our subdivision, a famous river:
    Once, between Cleveland and the lake, an oil glaze on that river caught fire like some stripper’s slippery negligee tossed onto the water, and it went smoking through the city and its valley of warehouses, steel mills, refineries, rubber factories—through the suburbs, where the stench and the fames and the flames were politely ignored—and it passed, then, into the country, spitting cinders into the wind, burning itself past the gawking sheep and cows, burning itself down to the great, polluted, viscous, all-forgiving mouth of Lake Erie.
    That afternoon, when I was ten and went to his office with him, two or three times my father stood up from his desk, went over to that photograph on the wall, and looked carefully into it. Then he’d sit back down, seeming thoughtful, and watch the snow fall in soggy fragments of light outside.
    I sat across from him. It was a long afternoon. The light from the window was so bright, we could barely open our eyes. My father tapped his pencil on his thigh, and as he did, it made a rubbery yellow