What You Call Winter Read online

  Her family in India was Catholic, Marian explained. But her mother had once gone to Rome and had an audience with the Pope.

  The woman seemed disappointed, but Gordon was clearly encouraged by this news. “The Pope? Well, then, you won’t mind if I ask you something—what’s up with the cows? They can walk on the roads, right in front of cars, wherever they want. I’ve seen it on TV.” He eyed her with sudden keenness. “That happen where you live?”

  There were cows in Santa Clara, Marian confirmed. But there was more to India than beggars and cows.

  “No kidding!” Another bark of a laugh. “I mean, from a strategic standpoint, these people are pretty fucking important. You know what I’m saying. They have the bomb. It’s scary—there’s no telling what will set them off.”

  We’re a volatile bunch, thought Marian, trying to catch Daniel’s eye across the room. The pale-eyed woman wondered if Marian believed in reincarnation.

  “I do!” Gordon winked at Marian. “Why not take a few turns, right? Maybe next time it’ll be you and me.”

  In the house, with the mediator, Gordon was in no winking mood. He stared at Marian, his face hard and set, the rug she had given them beneath his feet. She wanted to shrink behind Vee, and her own cowardice shamed her. Marian thought of her mornings on the kitchen stool, light pouring through the windows and Vee’s voice on the phone; she thought of her secret pride in being chosen to witness this last humiliating spectacle. It occurred to her that she deserved the weight of his stare.

  Gordon dragged his shoe across the carpet and addressed the mediator directly, not bothering to glance in Marian’s direction again. “I’ll take this.”

  For the first few years in Cincinnati, it was Marian who needed Vee. They met before Marian learned to drive. She was struggling back from Kroger’s, two shopping bags pushed into the bottom of Tara’s stroller while Nicole, six years old, dragged on her hand. Nearly a mile in each direction and long past naptime, but Marian had nobody to look after the children. Daniel’s department had sent him to a conference, and after four months, only a few neighbors had rung their bell. The houses stood shoulder to shoulder and guarded their occupants, windows winter-tight, doors sternly shut.

  Nicole began to whine. “Just a little longer, darling.” The sidewalks were rough. The stroller bar hummed beneath her hands, the wheels jerked. Tara had fallen asleep, with her head bumping against a bag of apples, a thin patch of plastic sticking to her cheek.

  A horn blast startled Marian, and she looked up to see that a car had stopped. “What in the world!” a woman had laughed. Her hair bright, her smile wide and open. “What in the world!” As though she’d never seen such a thing as Marian in her plain white cotton kameez, pushing a stroller. But she spoke without the wariness that Marian had come to expect after her first weeks in Ohio, without the suspicious glances at the bindi on her forehead, her children’s skin.

  And without any further conversation, “Come on, I’ll take you. Get in.”

  “I’m just down the road. Really, I can manage.”

  “Don’t be silly! I’ll take you.” She laughed again, and for a moment Marian was transported back to St. Hilary Road, to her mother conducting conversations from the middle of the road. Marian stared at the laughing woman in the wide American street and felt a surge of longing for neighbors whose voices calling from one garden to the next strung their lives together.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  This is what Marian would want her brother to understand: the power of Vee’s frank, laughing gaze, the command of such a welcome. But Jude had never left Santa Clara to live elsewhere. Marian thought of the week her father suffered his first stroke. It was minor, Jude assured her; there was no reason to come. But Nicole was only two weeks old, so Marian was frequently up tending to her at just those hours, she imagined, when her father might be sitting up in his hospital bed to eat the lunch her mother prepared; or waiting for the doctor’s daily visit; or asking someone — whom?—for a glass of water. Was Jude at work? Was anyone there to give it to him? She rocked the baby in a dark room. Eventually Daniel appeared at the door, drowsy and disheveled, to take his turn, and then, before exhaustion overtook her, Marian lay in bed and tried to recall the Bible verses she had memorized as a girl — as though they were a mantra, something to transport her back to the days when her father was strong. The verses came back to her in fragments; she fumbled for missing words, broken rhythms. Sometimes they came in a rush, words tumbling into one another, too slipshod to resemble the tightly woven faith she had known as a child. Pray, pray for Dad, she told herself. But God seemed anchored to that other place, to the bright daylit hours where her father ate and slept—so far away that even the silence when Daniel returned to bed seemed pitiless.

  Jude knew nothing of such hours; his days and nights were fixed in place. How could he understand the shock of Vee’s horn blast, the gift of her bright face framed in the car window? Kroger’s bags tucked beneath Marian’s sleeping baby, her daughter exhausted beside her, a buckling sidewalk, and suddenly a cheerful voice calling.

  “Come on, get in!”

  Shy, proud, grateful, homesick nearly to death, Marian had obeyed.

  “Just move whatever’s in your way,” the woman said easily, and turned her attention to Nicole. “And aren’t you the most beautiful girl in the world!”

  Nicole smiled, already in love.

  Marian tugged the apples out from under Tara’s arm and looked up swiftly. “Say thank you, Mrs. —” She paused, questioning.

  “Vee, honey. Just call me Vee.”

  The first miserable winter seemed to slide away once Marian met Vee. For the first year, before the money came, Gordon and Vee lived only two blocks away. Vee seldom bothered with telephones or doorbells. “Are you there? Marian, are you there? Let’s go to the movies, let’s learn Chinese cooking, let’s start a book club.” In the middle of December she brought roast duck, French bread, red wine. “Let’s eat with our fingers.” The children sat cross-legged on the floor, greasy-faced, drinking grape juice. Spring came, a gentle, grassy spring, so unlike the streaks of mud and ice Marian had known in Massachusetts. A tree on their front lawn turned out to be dogwood and announced itself in creamy white blossoms. Houses relaxed their tight grip, and they met the Powells, the Resnicks, the Owenses, the Grants. Daniel built a deck. Tara and Mickey drummed on nails with their fat plastic hammers and Nicole turned cartwheels in the yard. Marian sewed ribbon to the cuffs of the girls’ overalls and Vee used a sequin gun on the pockets — an idea from a magazine. “Let’s go to the zoo, let’s go for ice cream, let’s take the kids swimming.”

  “You must come in the summer, Dad,” Marian said brightly on the phone, in that edge of time when her night was her family’s morning. “You’ll like it here.” This was when they still spoke in terms of his visiting, in the years when they were only waiting for this or that before buying his ticket. A bit more time for his leg to improve. A few more months to get a visa.

  One rainy afternoon, Vee asked to try on one of Marian’s saris. “Oh, my God, the colors! This purple, this green!” She pulled hanger after hanger from the closet, slid the silks onto her arms, stroked the stiff gold thread.

  Tara was napping, but Nicole, underfoot, wound a dupatta around her face like bandages. “Look! I’m a mummy!”

  Vee stood completely still while Marian dressed her, her arms held away from her body. The choli blouse strained at the shoulders.

  “Don’t worry,” Marian laughed, tucking the sari at her waist. “You can move, it won’t unwind.”

  “Look,” called Nicole. “I’m a princess.”

  When Marian had finished, Vee walked in small, careful steps to the full-length mirror. “Well? Am I ravishing?”

  The sari was silver and pink, cool pearly colors that Marian seldom wore. “It suits you. You should keep it.”

  “Really? Let’s take a picture! Hang on, hang on, not like
this. Nicole, help me take off my socks! And I need a necklace! Something fabulous, Marian!”

  “I’m a nun,” Nicole informed her, already kneeling, the dupatta draped over her hair. They combed through Marian’s jewelry and Vee found earrings, bangles, a heavy silver choker. She gazed longingly at herself in the mirror. “Someday we should go,” she said, then turned to Marian, looking suddenly shy. “There’s so much I want to see.”

  Nicole snapped the photo, the dupatta trailing behind her like a veil, a rack of her mother’s bangles crashing from wrist to elbow as she lifted the camera. They stood arm in arm, Marian in slacks and Vee in the sari, slightly off center.

  A few weeks before the trip to India, Gordon took the boys to spend Christmas with his parents. Vee came to spend the holiday with Marian and Daniel. She arrived on the morning of the 24th, wearing a dark fur coat, high-heeled boots, and a frosted clip in her hair. Nicole had been looking out for her.

  “Why don’t you help Tara with the cookies ’til she comes?” Marian suggested.

  Nicole scowled, looking remarkably like Marian’s father. “I’m not waiting. I’m just in here.” But she joined Tara in the kitchen.

  Marian lingered near the window. The house smelled of butter, citrus, and pine, but the yard outside was raw and sodden. She wondered what her father would think of the life she had built here: the children, the house, the snow melting in patches on the lawn. Had he ever seen snow? Her mother and Jude had come to visit several times, but after her father’s stroke he was reluctant to sit on a plane for so many hours. His left leg still gave him trouble, he said.

  A movement outside the window caught Marian’s eye, and she saw Vee in her dark coat, the collar thick and high. Her hair bright and twisted up with a clip. The cream-colored Buick, pale as unfrosted cookies. Vee was tugging at the back door, and for a moment Marian thought maybe Gordon had left the boys with her after all, or even just Cody. But no, the door gaped open and Marian saw that the back of the car was filled with parcels wrapped in silver and gold.

  Old snow lined the side of the road, filthy and ice-pocked. Vee leaned gingerly into the car, trying not to dirty the bottom of her coat. Marian thought of the pure white drifts of cotton her mother spread over the branches of an artificial Christmas tree. Marian and Daniel had brought the tree to Santa Clara years ago, the branches laid out carefully in the bottom of a duffel bag. The first year, her father spent an afternoon piecing the tree together and eventually, her interest in sweets and gift wrapping spent, Nicole drifted over to help. She sat cross-legged on the floor, frowning in concentration. Had her father been pleased when his granddaughter joined him, Marian wondered? Neither spoke much, except to announce the completion of another branch. The “needles” were odorless—far too green and the texture of garbage bags—but the “snow” was thick and perfect. “No clumps!” Her mother passed out rolls of cotton to the girls. “And not too thin either. You people with your winters, you should know how it looks.”

  Outside, the snow rose nearly to Vee’s knees where the plows had banked it, dark as factory smoke. She emerged from the car with two large boxes clutched to her chest. For a moment she tottered on narrow-heeled boots, her face bent down to the packages, her body lost in the dark panels of her coat. Marian watched her pick a stumbling path over the snowbank.

  “Nicole,” Marian called, “Vee’s here! Go and help her!” A minute later she watched the scene through her window, soundless and bright: her daughter, pole-legged, half running, half skittering down the driveway to where Vee waited. Vee was no longer struggling. She was transformed again to the friend Marian had always known — gracious and golden-haired, smiling her generous smile, welcoming, even now welcoming, as though this moment with Marian’s daughter in Marian’s driveway was hers to invite Marian into.

  “Daniel, she’s here! Tara!”

  For a moment Marian had tears in her eyes. There was something grand and tragic about Vee, so lovely in her rich, dark coat as she greeted Nicole, and something small and hopeless about the bank of dirty snow. Was she meant to be in this place, this mud and ice, this patch of land just above the straggling hemline of the Ohio River? It had always been Vee’s home—Marian was the one who felt out of place, the one with every reason to question how she had landed up here. “It’s not forever,” Daniel had said when the offer came for a three-year appointment.

  But Marian knew how easily one thing and then another became forever. “Only five years,” she’d told her parents when she left for graduate school in Massachusetts. “It’s not forever.” Daniel was a year ahead of her, and they met at a department coffee. He had a small blue Chevette with fake sheepskin on the front seats. They began to go for drives together. (Dear Mum and Dad, she began again and again, afraid to commit to paper what they must already have suspected. We’ll visit as soon as we can was what she offered them in place of It’s not forever) Later she and Daniel would call the Chevette their first car. They would sit with Vee and her friends in the Blue Moon Saloon, Erie Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio, and laugh about those sheepskin seats. By then Marian had come to enjoy this life she could never have envisioned: the car she had learned to drive, the sharp fall mornings on the sidelines of the girls’ games, the coffees and parties and planning meetings, a world Vee had helped open up for her.

  But Vee? Marian looked at her and thought beaches on the Riviera, casinos and nightclubs—places made, as Vee was made, for money and pleasure. Nicole, she realized, looked at her and thought Cincinnati. With what longing she thought it, with what raw young need: America! Marian watched them, framed in the window: her daughter, adoring and coat-less in the cold; the mound of Christmas gifts left in the car; Vee in her fur and slender heels, her bravado nearly as sustaining as courage.

  Vee kissed Nicole, tumbled the packages into her arms, looked up to the window where Marian stood, and waved with her whole arm, as broadly as her coat allowed.

  “Let me tell you something, sweetheart.” Vee peered at Nicole, her eyes wide, her voice solemn. “Never settle. I’m telling you this as your friend. When it comes to men, never settle.”

  It was Christmas afternoon. As usual, Vee embarrassed Marian with her extravagance.

  “Oh, well, I don’t have daughters to buy for!” Vee lifted a sheet of Nicole’s hair away from her face. “You have a beautiful face, sweetheart, beautiful cheekbones. You need to show them off.”

  Nicole blushed and clipped her hair back with the rhinestone barrette Vee had just given her. Vee had also bought her a pair of Guess! jeans with zippers on the ankles, the Ford Models Guide to Beauty, a makeup kit, and her first razor.

  “Here.” Vee handed Nicole a cloth bag. “Here’s some of my old makeup to practice with. The colors are all wrong for you, but at least you’ll get used to putting it on.” She caught a glimpse of Marian’s face and held up both hands. “I know, I know. She doesn’t need it. You really don’t, sweetheart — your bones! But it’s fun and”—turning to Marian — “she has to learn sometime.”

  “On special occasions,” Marian said. “And not too much.” She watched as Vee fastened a small plastic cape around Nicole’s neck and kept a mental tally: eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. “I don’t think she needs that,” she said when Vee pulled out her blusher. “She has enough color, don’t you think?”

  Now Nicole sat on the edge of the tub, her skirt pulled up, her bare legs covered with lather.

  “Always use shaving cream, never soap. Soap dries your skin.” Vee handed her the razor.

  Marian’s arms were folded against her chest, as if to hold herself back. “Are you sure you want to do this? Once you shave, you have to keep going.”

  Nicole looked pained. “Mom, I told you.”

  “I know, I know. All the girls do it. Shelley laughed at you in the locker room.” She smiled ruefully at Vee. “In India we wax. That’s still what I do. It’s so much easier, darling, you only have to do it once a month.”

  “She heats it on the stove,” Nicol
e told Vee. “The wax smells gross.”

  Marian lifted a shoulder in acquiescence and Vee nodded to Nicole.

  “Okay, sweetheart. Start at the ankle, very gently. Long, smooth strokes. Up to the knee … that’s right. A light touch.” She was kneeling by the tub, watching the progress of the razor. “I mean it, now. You should never, ever settle. Boys are going to come after you. Maybe not right away” — she paused as a drop of blood beaded on Nicole’s ankle — “but eventually. Just you wait. And then, the important thing is, don’t settle. I did, and look where it got me.”

  “Vee —” Marian shook her head slightly, frowning.

  “Of course your mother knows this better than anyone. I mean, she waited, didn’t she? She waited for just the right person, and then she followed her heart, no matter what anyone else thought. It’s so romantic—they practically eloped!”

  Marian sensed her daughter’s discomfort. Nicole, she realized, did not like to think of her parents in such terms.

  “I know your dad might not seem like the most exciting guy, but believe me, the exciting ones can be a real dead-end.” She turned to Marian, rolled her eyes. “You know he bought a powerboat?”

  “Careful, darling, you’ll gash yourself!”

  “No, I won’t!” But small nicks bloomed along her leg.

  Vee took her hand and guided the razor. “Just promise me you’ll always listen to your mother. She knows a good man when she sees one.” Nicole concentrated on her knee; Vee pressed on with a stagy wink in Marian’s direction. “Listen, sweetheart. I need to ask you a favor. A big one.”

  “What?”

  “While I’m gone, Gordon’s gonna have the boys for a week. In the house.” She turned to Marian, eyebrows raised. “Nice, right? His place isn’t ready.”