Laura Kasischke: Mind of Winter

Eric and Holly had felt almost scandalized about this, as if they’d found out that Mary Smithers was sending Bethany to a nunnery. It was not the way they wanted to raise their child, not in this day and age. They wanted Tatiana to feel she had her own agency, a right to make her own decisions. This was something they’d determined together before they’d even brought her home from Russia, that they would raise their child to be a freethinker and that they would discuss all things freely. They pitied little Bethany, having a mother who didn’t trust her enough to be in the presence of a television. And Bethany had confided in Tatiana that “we don’t have Internet at our house because my parents don’t want me to see it.”

What sort of message did that send? That the outside world was obscene? That you should hide your child from it rather than give her the tools to protect herself?

“Tatiana, you’re at the age when you might have things you don’t want your parents to know about!” Holly had said to her daughter, wishing she didn’t sound as animated as she knew she sounded.

Tatiana didn’t miss a beat. She said, “I thought you said I never needed to keep any secrets from you.”

Holly could no longer recall how she’d responded to that, but Tatiana had never, it seemed, used that hook and eye, and whenever Holly knocked on her door Tatiana said, “God, Mom. Just come in. It’s not locked. I’m not ever going to be doing anything in here you’re not going to be able to witness.”

NOW HOLLY TURNED the doorknob, and pushed her daughter’s door open to find that Tatiana had already changed out of her white tank top and yoga pants into the hideous red velvet dress that Grandma Gin had given to her for Christmas the year before. Eric’s mother was, unfortunately, a seamstress. And a knitter. And for every birthday and for every Christmas she made clothes for her loved ones, and loved to see her loved ones dressed in those clothes.

“Oh, Tatty,” Holly said. “You don’t have to wear that! Grandma Gin won’t even remember!”

“Maybe I want to wear it,” Tatiana said, turning to glare at her mother. “Maybe I love it.”

Holly stepped all the way into her daughter’s room to the familiar clash of scents—the sweet natural smell of Tatty’s hair and skin mixed with the perfumes and lotions she used, fruits and flowers and oils, and something else this morning, something slightly fetid, or rotten. Maybe Tatiana had left a banana or an apple in a drawer? Something fermented. Not putrid, but headed in that direction.

Her bed, at least, was neatly made. On her floor and desk were dozens of photographs of Tommy that Tatiana had printed up from her phone and left strewn and curled everywhere, but that was the only messiness. Everything else was folded, dusted, tucked away—tidying that Tatiana must have done because there were guests coming over. Although Tatty had grown testy and impatient with her parents in the last year or two, she was ever respectful of the other adults in her life, adhering strictly to all the codes of conduct one followed in deference to them—even the ones Holly found ridiculous, like calling Tommy’s father Mr. MacClean after all this time. Holly and Eric had insisted right away that Tommy, and all of Tatiana’s friends, call them by their first names.

Holly made a little circuit around her daughter, looking at the red dress:

The velvet was cheap, heavy—not really velvet. Some kind of polyester Gin must have bought at some thrift fabric shop. She would have bought a whole bolt of it, Holly knew, and made napkin rings or placemats with the leftovers. The dress went down to Tatty’s ankles like some kind of Old World costume. No neckline. Fake pearl buttons up the back. And the shoulders were ruffled. The pattern must have been from the eighties. It was awful.

“Honey, how can you even get into that? You’ve filled out so much since last year—” Her daughter had gone from an A cup to a C in the last twelve months, and they’d had to buy all new bras, and had taken half a dozen of her old tops to Goodwill since then.

“Obviously, I let it out,” Tatiana said, shaking her head.

“What?” Holly asked.

“I let it out ,” Tatiana said. “You know, with scissors, with thread?” She pantomimed sewing, and then Holly looked at the dress. It looked, in its way, flawless. Ginny was all about precision. The clothes she made were ugly and out of fashion, but they were meticulously constructed.

“How?” Holly asked.

“Jeez, Mom. Like I said, with a needle, okay? It’s called sewing! Just forget it. What did you come in here for anyway?”

“I just wanted to say Merry Christmas,” Holly said, wishing she could sound more apologetic, less exasperated. She tried to soften it. “And I’m so sorry we overslept. When Daddy gets back with Gin and Gramps we’ll open presents right away, okay?”

There was a little twitch at the corner of Tatiana’s mouth. It broke Holly’s heart to see it! That was Tatty at four years old being told that she couldn’t go to the birthday party because she had a fever! Tatiana had never been the type to burst into tears. Instead, she bore emotions like—

Like an orphan, like a child who’d been abandoned and who’d understood, fully and early, that life was not fair.

“Oh, Tatty, I wish I’d woken up earlier—” Holly felt it this time, sincere remorse and sorrow.

“Mom, jeez, I’m a big girl.”

Tatiana turned her back, as if on the whole idea that it had mattered—the oversleeping, the disappointment.

But it was Christmas morning! And maybe Tatty had thought this Christmas would be like all the Christmases of those early years—all those mornings that had started at dawn with Tatty’s clammy hands on their cheeks (“Mommy! Daddy! It’s Christmas!”) and the ripping open of presents that were complete surprises. The stockings magically stuffed with little plastic animals and butterfly barrettes. That whole Santa hoax, which Holly had put an end to early, against Eric’s wishes—but, honestly, who thought that was a healthy myth? An intruder, bearing gifts. And then to find out it’s all been a lie, perpetrated by your parents?

But maybe Tatty, this morning, had wanted to relive those early years, and the excitement, but then her parents, exhausted from their jobs and a late Christmas Eve dinner with too much wine and then the rum and eggnog, had practically slept until noon!

“Sweetheart,” Holly said, and stepped over to her daughter. She reached out her arms and took the faux red velvet package of her daughter into her arms. Tatty was stiff, but she didn’t pull away. Holly breathed in the musky citrusy flowery scent of her. Some of that was store-bought, but some of it was just Tatty, the scent she was born with, that sweetness even the garlic around Holly’s neck hadn’t managed to extinguish. To Holly, that baby had smelled as if she’d been plucked from a nest made of viburnum switches in the branches of a balsam fir. It even occurred to her that the nurses might have sprayed the baby with something to cause her to smell like this. Since they’d seemed so eager to sell Tatiana to Holly and Eric—insisting “Never cries! Never sick!” and dressing her in the little cotton dress with the faded daisies, surely the best thing they could find among the orphanage tatters—it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that they might have doused her in air freshener for special effect.

Holly inhaled, and continued to hold her fifteen-year-old baby in her arms. Tatiana didn’t pull away, and finally she softened and rested her forehead on her mother’s shoulder. They stayed that way for several seconds until Holly heard—vaguely, maybe from underneath a cushion or a pillow somewhere—the sound of her own cell phone playing Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and she broke the embrace to hurry after it.