Free House Under Snow by Jill Bialosky Page B

wondered about the meaning of life until the sound of a lawn mower or the phone ringing drove a wedge into the silence and pulled me out of my thoughts. Upstairs I could hear the drone of the TV in my mother’s bedroom. Her melancholy overtook the air in our home like the smell of rotting fruit. Sometimes I retreated outside and sat in the gazebo reading a book, or laid out in the sun on a lounge chair working on my tan before it was time for me to go to work.
    My mother had swung back to isolating herself in our house the way she had during those years right after my father died. I worried that my mother might decide to stay shut in our house forever. I suppose she could have if she had wanted to. She had enough money to squeak by on from her monthly
Social Security checks, occasional help from Aunt Rose’s pension, and handouts from Nonie and Papa.
    After my father died Nonie and Papa were always after her to take some classes, get an education. But Lilly managed to skirt the issue.
    Every time Aunt Rose came back to Cleveland for her yearly visit, she, too, pleaded with Lilly to get a job or an education. But Lilly always defended herself, saying, “The only thing I know how to do is take care of my family.”
    “But, Mom, maybe Aunt Rose’s right. Maybe you’d be happier if you worked,” I’d say after Aunt Rose left.
    “I don’t have Aunt Rose’s constitution,” Lilly reasoned. “Imagine me, working at a bank.”
    That kind of logic had an awful effect on me. I wanted to jump through the roof. But if you stepped into those waters with my mother, it was as if you had walked into an inner argument she was having with herself. She sucked you in like an undertow, and then spit you out again, carrying her burden.
     
    When Lilly went out on dates, we worried when she would come home or what kind of mood she’d be in once her date deposited her back inside our front door like an opened package. The winter I was in third grade, if I wasn’t at Maria’s house playing Barbies or Monopoly underneath the alcove in her attic while her father worked and her mother chain-smoked in the den, I hung out with my sisters in the yard building snowmen and making snow forts until it got late. We tried our hardest to stay busy, so we wouldn’t have to wonder when our mother was coming back.
    One icy night she had gone out with Kent Montgomery,
and when she was with him we never knew what time she’d be home. When our hands grew cold and our cheeks stung, we went inside and had hot chocolate with marshmallows and slices of toast spread with butter and sprinkled sugar. Then we climbed up to our rooms. I cleared off the schoolbooks, trousers, and balled-up sweaters that were always piled in a heap on Louise’s bed. I untangled the blankets, tucked and dusted clean the flowered sheet. “Why are you such a slob?” I turned to Louise, and scolded. Louise, as a child, was disorganized and anxious. When I looked into her face, I could see the weight of sorrow she carried in her eyes. I knew her body, like mine, missed feeling the hands and warm lips of our father on her; showing a daughter what it meant to be loved. I was only four when my father died. My memories of him were vague, but poor Louise confessed she had no memories of our father at all.
    I helped her pull the sweatshirt over her head and handed her a nightgown. There was dirt in her fingernails, and I made her go into the bathroom and clean them off. Soon we both slipped into bed, but later Louise went to Ruthie’s room and summoned her. Then Ruthie came and climbed into Louise’s bed with her. Before we fell asleep, we waited for Lilly to come back home. When Louise couldn’t sleep, Ruthie read
The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking
. I liked Pippi’s red braids, her skinny legs, brave adventures, and the sound of Ruthie’s voice creating the scene for us.
    When we grew tired of hearing the story, we played a game where we bought three horses and had to name