Laura Kasischke - Mind of Winter

“Tatiana.”

Holly said her daughter’s name quietly the first time, but when her daughter lunged at her, she screamed it:

“Tatiana!”

Tatty grabbed at the knife in Holly’s hand, spitting the half-chewed meat out in her mother’s face as she did, as Holly managed to swing away and to throw the knife over her daughter’s shoulder. It clattered into the sink behind Tatiana, and Holly took hold of her delicate wrist and held it fast. And then everything seemed to stop:

They both stood still in the kitchen, breathing hard, neither of them saying a word. The only sound was their heavy breathing—except for what might have been, beyond that, the very light, sandy silence of snow falling on top of more snow. And, Holly thought, could she perhaps hear Tatiana’s heart in her chest? Or was that the sound of her own heart?

The two of them stood like this for a long minute—so still it was as if a spell had been cast on them. Tatiana was not struggling to release her wrist from her mother’s grip. Perhaps it was clear to her that her mother, the larger and stronger of the two of them, was not going to let go. She went very stiff, instead, and then she sagged, seeming to admit her defeat.

“What’s the matter with you, Tatiana?” Holly finally asked, in a voice that sounded so calm she hardly recognized it as her own. “Tatiana, what’s wrong with you?”

Tatiana said nothing.

She closed her eyes, and Holly could see how beautifully and naturally blue her daughter’s eyelids were. Until Tatiana, Holly had never seen anything like it. She used to stand over Baby Tatty’s crib and gaze down at her daughter’s closed eyes, and marvel.

She’d adopted a china doll! Or she’d somehow found, as if under a cabbage or in a nest near the chimney, a child so glorious in every detail that she couldn’t be of this world. She had to be special. She might have supernatural powers, be immortal! Such a child would have to live forever!

Of course, she didn’t. She wasn’t perfection. No one was. But that was fine:

“Perfection is terrible,” Sylvia Plath wrote in a poem. “It can’t have children.”

And this fact, that she wasn’t perfect, revealed itself so gently as Tatiana grew older that, rather than being a disappointment to Holly, it made Tatiana even more magical. She wasn’t, for instance, the first child in her kindergarten class to learn to read, but when she did Tatty was so wildly enthusiastic and so proud of herself that she read everything. She sat buckled into the child seat as Holly drove her to school and shouted out every word she saw that she could read:

Stop! For! May! See! Sale! One! Buy! Buy!

Holly tried to praise her after every word, but if she was distracted somehow and forgot, Tatty would reach up and touch Holly’s shoulder with her little hand (the soft, pawlike hand of a five-year-old!) and say, “Mommy? Did you hear?”

Those hands!

They’d been sticky, sweetly sticky, no matter how clean they were. On weekend mornings Tatty would climb into Eric and Holly’s bed and pat their faces until they were awake. Tatty would climb out of her own bed with her eyelids and lips ruby-blue, her hair a rat’s nest. It would take Holly half an hour to brush the tangles out.

Tatiana’s hair tangled. She tore pages out of books. She refused to eat dinner some nights, and then would wake up in the middle of the night hungry and crying. Her teachers said that she sometimes fell asleep on the playground at recess, slumped on the swing set, instead of playing with her friends. She’d never mastered fractions, and she had no interest until she was eleven years old in learning to tie her shoe. She lost her breath when she ran up the basement stairs. She sometimes caught colds that lasted for weeks. She wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t immortal. And, Holly thought, she was even more perfect because of it:

When Tatiana took ballet lessons, she wasn’t the most talented dancer, but she was the one who looked happiest to be dancing. She would look around her at the other tiny ballerinas, smiling encouragement at them. And she’d pulled herself up out of the indoor public pool after her first swimming lesson and shouted what her teacher had said to her, for all the other mothers in the steaming and echoing chamber to hear: “Mom, I am like a fish !”

“Every day your daughter makes me happy,” the secretary at JFK Elementary said to Holly. Miss Beck was an enormously obese woman whose hair was as long and black as Tatty’s.

“There’s no child here sweeter than she is. There never has been. There never will be.”

Everyone had loved Tatty. Everyone had said how beautiful she was, how thoughtful, how special.

“Tatiana,” Holly said. She loosened her grip, but she did not let go of her daughter’s wrist. She said, “Tatty, honey. Please. You can tell me anything. I have always told you that. Please. Just tell me what’s the matter. Please.”

Tatty opened her eyes, stood her ground, let Holly stare into the eyes, but she did not seem to be staring back. Her eyes looked blank, as if they were turned inward—but they also appeared suspicious, as if Tatty were somehow looking beyond Holly’s mind, seeing through the back of Holly’s skull to something that was lurking behind her. Now that Tatiana had spat out the meat, her jaw was clenched, and her lips, now cerulean blue, remained sealed. When Holly smoothed a hand down her black hair, her daughter stiffened at the touch.

“My God,” Holly said—and now that the whole awful day seemed to be nearing some kind of culmination, her anxiety actually seemed to lift. There was something terrible happening, something terribly wrong with Tatty, some secret her daughter had been keeping. Now there could be no going back to slammed bedroom doors, and denial. Now it was here in the room with them, and it was dreadful, yes, but it was no longer dread. Dread was the slow approach of the injured cat dragging its hind legs across the yard. Dread was when, after listening to her mother wail behind a closed door, there was silence. There had been dread in that silence because there was still the opportunity to refuse the facts. It had, of course, been dreadful when her sister had come out of their mother’s bedroom then and said, “Holly, honey. Come in here and kiss Mommy good-bye. She isn’t suffering anymore”—but this was not nearly as terrible as dread. Mommy’s eyes were closed in relief.

Now Holly was ready. She could face whatever it was. The dread had passed with the denial. She said, “Say it, Tatty. Tell me. I love you. I loved you from the first moment I saw you. I will always love my Baby Tatty.”

Holly wasn’t surprised that the words didn’t change Tatiana’s expression. She hadn’t really expected that they would. Tatiana was beyond the reach of such sentiments at the moment. Holly let go of her daughter, and Tatiana stepped away. She looked from her mother’s face to the blizzard beyond her. After that, she glanced at her hands, greasy and bloody from the meat, and then she wiped them down the front of her black dress, and then looked back at Holly, smirked, and said, without emotion, “That wasn’t Baby Tatty . ”

“What do you mean?” Holly tried to control her voice. It was too loud, wasn’t it? Her heart began to pound again, audibly. Anyone, she thought, in the house—maybe even outside the house—could have heard her heart pounding.

“You are so blind,” Tatiana said.

“What are you talking about, Tatty?”

“You were so in love with me, with my big dark eyes, and when you came back you never even asked where I was.”

“What?” Holly asked.

“You came back to get me and you never asked where I was.”