Laura Kasischke - Mind of Winter

But they needed to enter only two or three stores to understand that there wasn’t:

In that town there were nothing but bars, food stores, rows and rows of barracks-like apartment complexes, and a sprawling smoke-cloaked factory, in which something no one could describe to them was being manufactured. And the orphanage. There was certainly no place to buy flowers, or chocolates, or even cooking sherry. There were, instead, shelves and shelves and shelves of vodka, ranging in price from thirty rubles to forty thousand—and Holly and Eric agreed that a bottle of vodka was not at all what they wanted to give to the employees of the orphanage where Tatiana would be spending the next three months without them.

And, unnervingly, despite the factory and the rows of apartments, all the available vodka and all the children who had been born and dropped off at the orphanage, there seemed to be very few people in the town. The only vehicles parked on the streets were a bus that seemed to be made mostly of rust and two Zaporozhets, which looked like toy cars on roller skates (but cared for, it seemed from their gleaming cleanliness, lovingly). There appeared to be no men at all in town—although the few women, mostly young, were wearing short skirts and panty hose in the freezing cold, and jackets with fur collars and cinched waists, clearly intended for show, not warmth. These young women had pale faces, wore bright red lipstick, did not look at Eric and Holly when they passed them within inches on the sidewalk.

Perhaps if she’d bothered to glance down at their feet that day, Holly thought now, she would have seen that they wore boots like these on Tatiana’s feet—boots that looked like they’d been made for institutional prostitutes, women who had a job to do, who needed to look as if they were sexual, but not as if they were glamorous, or spoiled, or used to bothering with fashionable, useless things. The kind of boots, perhaps, Tatiana’s first mother might have worn.

“THEY’RE AWFUL, TATTY,” Holly said. “Those shoes.”

“Why?” Tatty asked, looking down then, too, cocking her head a little, as if amused by what she was wearing on her feet.

“Well, first of all,” Holly said, “they’ve certainly seen better days.”

“Haven’t we all?” Tatty said. Again she laughed, and Holly looked from the shoes to Tatty’s face, and considered her daughter’s expression:

Was she being sarcastic?

It was hard to tell because Tatiana’s mood seemed so lightened from the one she’d been in only half an hour earlier. It was as if her daughter had come out of the bathroom with not only her blistered fingers bandaged, but also a new personality. It was like a metamorphosis—this shrugging, this laughter, this banter. Holly would have liked to have believed, as she had originally, that this was the old Tatty—but had Tatty ever been like this? Had she ever, really, been this lighthearted?

Certainly, Tatiana had, as a child, been eager to please, and been frightened of offending—but had it ever been easy to make her laugh? Certainly not since she’d grown out of childhood—not for her parents, anyway, although Holly had certainly heard Tatiana laugh and joke naturally enough with Tommy.

“Have you heard from Tommy?” Holly asked, remembering that Thuy had suggested that the bad mood might indicate that something had happened between Tatty and Tommy. If that’s why Tatty had been so quarrelsome earlier, maybe her lighter spirit meant that she’d gotten a text, a few minutes earlier, and now they’d made up. Kids were in such constant contact with one another these days that the whole world could change in half an hour, and there would be no way for the adults in the household to keep track. In Holly’s day it was a lot harder to quibble, and harder to reconcile. For one thing, the phone had to ring and to be answered in order for an argument to be started or ended. “Have you said Merry Christmas to him yet?”

“No,” Tatty said. “My phone’s dead. It was on when I went to sleep, and I never plugged it back into the charger.”

“Poor Tommy!” Holly said, trying to make a joke of it. “Do you two ever go more than twenty minutes without a text? He must have been trying to reach you all day. Is anything wrong?”

Tatiana shook her head. She looked slightly pleased with herself, Holly thought, as if she’d played a trick on Tommy, and Holly went back to Thuy’s hunch that there’d been an argument. An argument, and now Tatty was playing games with him. Hard to Get was the name of this particular game. Holly herself had played it quite a bit as a teenager.

“So you’re not going to charge up your phone then, and text Tommy?”

“No,” Tatiana said. “I don’t think so.” There was no indication in Tatty’s tone of anything at all. Anger. Sadness. Bitter pleasure. She turned around then, and Holly couldn’t see if she was smiling or scowling, and Holly remembered, once more, that they hadn’t eaten, either of them, all day.

“We need to eat something, don’t we, Tatty? We haven’t eaten at all today. Soon it will be after dinnertime, and we never even—”

“I’m not hungry anymore,” Tatty said. “Later.”

She was heading back to her bedroom, or to the bathroom, with deliberate and obstinate steps. She was walking the way Holly recalled the Russian guards in the airport in Moscow walking from one end of a gate to another, neither hurrying nor taking their time, as if they knew exactly what you were up to and could haul you off for it whenever it pleased them. Holly felt her annoyance return.

“Hey, Tatty,” Holly said to her daughter’s back. “Go get the handheld vacuum, will you? In the basement? So I can clean up the glass.”

“Okay,” Tatty said, turning on her heel so quickly it was as if she’d anticipated the request. “Where in the basement?”

“I don’t know,” Holly said. “Plugged into the charger next to the Ping-Pong table I hope.”

“Ping-Pong?”

“Yes,” Holly said.

Tatiana snickered:

It was an actual snicker. As if she knew perfectly well that the vacuum was nowhere near the Ping-Pong table. “If you say so, Mom,” she said. “What does it look like?”

This time Holly was the one who laughed unpleasantly, mostly through her nose. She said, “Well, first of all it looks like a handheld vacuum cleaner. In fact, it looks like our handheld vacuum cleaner!”

Tatiana nodded her head, as if this hadn’t been a joke, and she turned then, heading back to her room instead of the basement. She was willfully ignoring Holly’s request! Had this new, better mood all been a nasty joke? Was it all a ploy to provoke her?

“Tatty!” Holly shouted at her daughter’s back.

“ What? ”

Tatty turned around as she growled the word, placing her hands on her hips. Her teeth actually appeared to be gritted, and her eyes were huge . They were the huge baby-eyes of Tatty (Tatty/Sally!), that first Christmas—and, looking at them, it occurred to Holly for the first time that maybe it hadn’t been Tatty’s face that had changed, but her personality. Maybe her eyes had appeared so large when Holly first held her because she was scared, or hopeful, or—?

Or what?

Who or what had that little girl been that she no longer was? Holly glanced instinctively from her daughter’s glaring face in the hallway to the close-up of her daughter’s eyes peering up at her from the iPhone in her palm, and she thought, suddenly, heart-stoppingly:

They were different eyes!

They were similar, of course, they were recognizable—but the eyes in Holly’s palm were not the wild-animal eyes Tatty had fixed on her now. They were a different daughter’s eyes. This daughter from two summers ago, standing in front of a waterfall, smiling beside her father, was not the girl standing and blinking at Holly now.