Laura Kasischke - Mind of Winter

IT WAS ERIC on the phone:

“Holly. We’re in the car already. Forty-five minutes from home.”

“Are your parents okay?” Holly asked. “Was their trip okay?”

“Okay,” Eric said, and the tone of it indicated to Holly that something was, actually, not okay, but also that his parents were in the car with him and he couldn’t say what it was that was wrong.

“Okay…,” Holly said. “Should I be prepared for something unexpected?” She instinctively lowered her voice when she asked it, although she knew that both of Eric’s parents were so deaf they’d never be able to hear her through Eric’s cell phone even if he had the speaker turned on.

“Maybe,” Eric said. “Some confusion. Didn’t expect it.”

Didn’t expect it. Holly inhaled and exhaled with her mouth away from the phone receiver so he wouldn’t hear. If it hadn’t been so predictable, and so fucking tragic, she would have snorted at him. She would have laughed. She would have said, “You didn’t expect it. Well, what the hell did you expect?” How long was it going to take Eric to realize how elderly and infirm his parents had become?

Instead, Holly said, “Oh dear. Okay. We’ll just do our best. Just get them home, Eric.”

She punched the end button on her telephone. As usual, the line would not be cut off at first, and Holly had to punch END again and again until the connection was severed. When she put the phone down and turned around, Tatiana was standing on the other side of the kitchen island, smoothing her black hair with one of her elegant hands—long-fingered, nails painted red (to match her dress?). She asked, grimly, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

Holly shrugged. “I don’t know, Tatty. Daddy’s got his parents in the car, and he just said, ‘Confusion.’ They’re getting older, sweetheart. It’s hard for them to travel. But they’ll be here soon, and we can take care of them. I better take a shower.”

Holly smiled at Tatty, who did not return her smile. Christ. Was Tatty, like Eric, going to take offense now at any suggestion Holly made that Gin and Gramps were old ? How long was this denial going to last? Was Holly the only one who could see what was going on here—that this elderly couple should not be traveling alone, should not be living on their own? Was she the only one who’d noticed how quickly and completely things had been going downhill for Gin and Gramps in the last couple of years? She turned in the direction of the bathroom. To her back, Tatiana said, “Merry-juana Christmas.”

Holly inhaled sharply, but she checked the impulse to turn around. She could not turn around. If she did, she would have to face some expression she didn’t want to see on her daughter’s face—disapproval, contempt, dislike ? She didn’t want to see it or to acknowledge it—especially not now, with addled family members and unpleasant colleagues (and friends, good friends, don’t forget them) on the way. She would never have time to get everything ready before they all arrived for Christmas dinner. She still had a shower to take, and a roast to cook, and a table to set, and a bed to be made, and—

And then it came back to her like a bit of breeze stirred up gently by a few cold fingers:

That something she’d wanted so badly to write about when she woke up.

She’d wanted, needed, to write it down because it was the beginning of something she had to understand, or to express, or to unearth, or to face, yet she still hadn’t found two seconds to grab a pen and to be alone to write.

Something had followed them home.

And it had been here in the house with them for thirteen years now. Holly had known it was here! But it was only this morning that she’d woken up knowing that she’d known.

If only she hadn’t overslept. Certainly, now, there was no time to write. But if she hadn’t overslept, would she have had this revelation and this need to write?

In the bathroom, she yanked the shower curtain open. Tatty’s tea tree oil shampoo bottle had fallen from the edge of the tub into the bottom of it, and Holly huffed, bent down, picked it up. It was too big, this bottle, to balance with the others in the porcelain corner. She’d told Tatty they needed to buy the smaller bottle, for this very reason, but Tatty had stood in the aisle at Whole Foods with the two shampoo bottles, one in each hand, and said, “Mom. God. The nine-ounce bottle costs two dollars less than the thirty ounce. Do you know how much money we’re wasting, not to mention plastic ?”

“Tatty, honey,” Holly had said, “we don’t always have to buy the economy size of everything. There’s a little thing called convenience. It’s more convenient not to have a gigantic bottle of shampoo in the bathroom, or an industrial-sized jar of peanut butter in the pantry.”

“Yeah, Mom, and that’s why we’re always running out of things, including money.”

“What are you talking about?” Holly asked. When had she ever said anything to Tatty about money ? Whatever money troubles she and Eric had, they were both in agreement that Tatty was never, never , to be troubled by them. They’d both been far too aware as children of their parents’ financial woes. This would not be their child’s burden.

Still, even as Holly stood in the aisle of Whole Foods denying her daughter the enormous sea-foam-green bottle of organic tea tree oil shampoo, she was also taking it out of Tatty’s hand and putting it in the cart. This, she knew, was not the hill she wanted to die on, not here at Whole Foods, where, she would have liked to have pointed out to Tatty, no one for whom money was much of an issue shopped. Why did they even bother with economy sizes in a place that charged, unabashedly, eleven dollars for certain tiny loaves of bread?

But what did her daughter know about the economy of any of this? She was fifteen. She was clueless. Plus, she’d been indoctrinated by the school system. Tatty would allow herself to die of thirst in the desert before she’d sip water that had been bottled in plastic. Holly wasn’t even sure that she herself had ever even heard the word sustainability until a couple of years ago, but Tatiana chanted it like a mantra, along with the name of its evil twin, Waste.

Holly had just shoved the shampoo bottle into the corner again when it rolled, with the heavy solid sound a human head might make, lopped off, back into the bottom of the tub. This time she picked it up and took it to the linen closet. Tatty would have to fetch it and return it there from now on if this was the kind of jumbo bottle it took to make her happy in this world.

Holly hurried back to the shower, where the water rattled against the shower curtain, warming. No time, no time. The tiles were cold on Holly’s bare feet. She stepped over to the little lilac bathroom rug and picked her nightgown up off the floor, tossed it into the laundry basket. She thought, as she did nearly every time she opened that wicker basket, of Baby Tatty, who, as a toddler, would crawl into that basket and pull the lid down over herself.

It had been a glorious game, one of those family ritual games that become so much a part of daily life it seems impossible that a time could ever come when it would not be played:

“Where’s Tatty? Oh, no, Eric, where’s our baby? I can’t find her anywhere!”

After five minutes of this, the Jet-Black Rapunzel would leap from the wicker basket and scream, “I’m here!”

BUT, THE FIRST time, it had not been funny at all. Holly had gone that morning into Tatty’s bedroom expecting to find her in the Big Girl Bed, with which they’d only a few weeks earlier replaced her crib. Tatiana wasn’t in it. Instead, a Barbie doll, with the covers up to her plastic chin, had her head resting on Tatty’s pink pillow. Her blank blue eyes stared into Holly’s own: