Petroleum is white as far as you can see, the plains endless, disorienting without any markers. We have to shovel every hour or the snow could barricade the doors shut. Snow builds at the edges of windows, the view contracting. Soon there will be no sky. No stars.
Sometimes during long hours with nothing to do, I imagine Robert so fully, I believe I can touch him. One moment I feel the rumble of the plow, but it is the shudder of Robert’s skin as I trace the scar that disappears beneath his shirt. Another moment I hear wind against the windows, but it is Robert whispering in my ear.
Shh, shh now.
He has removed his shirt. He does not have the body he would like to have. He says this. He points to his thin shoulders, his doughy middle, the loose flesh inside the bend at his elbows. And I welcome him, his insecurities, his shame. I welcome his arm that scoops beneath my back and all the way through to the other side. We press our imperfect flesh together, his long, raised scar against my assortment of stones. He clutches my hand, once stuck with pins. He kisses what cannot be made right, but kisses all the same.
And my tears fall because I want this and because a part of me knows my arms are empty. Don’t open your eyes, don’t. I will him here, caressing, holding him gently then forcefully. I beg myself to keep believing, to keep my eyes shut so I am not alone.
I am different than I was that windy night when I first opened the door to Robert Golden. In that one volatile month, Robert had, it seemed, placed his hands against my chest and pushed hard, pushed till ribs cracked, to get my heart beating.
I thought I wanted a life that was predictable, the perfect steadiness of my sixty-five-degree world, with all my supplies lined up in order. That is no longer enough.
I leave my room and wander down the staircase that feels too narrow, the ceiling too near. Pop waits at the table. We still eat our meals together, but they are often quiet. I sit in front of my plate, not hungry. My father, unshaven, smells of whiskey though it’s only lunchtime. We have given up on forced conversations. We have given up pretending we’re fine.
His attempts to apologize to me are clumsy and insensitive.
“You’ll fall in love again,” he says. “How well did you even know him?”
But that was the wrong question. The real question is, How well do I want to know him? And my answer is that I want to know his room, what he keeps on the dresser and in the junk drawer. I want to learn the names of his closest friends. I want to watch a bad movie together and learn which of us is grumpier when we’re sick. I want to sit on the toilet while he brushes his teeth. I want to make up from an all-night argument.
“Pop?” I say.
He looks up and I realize I don’t have the words or the courage to speak of what’s grown between us, how I feel squeezed into a little box of my father’s wishes for my life.
“Never mind,” I say.
And the snow falls and falls.
If I let myself think too long about this small space, I feel a sense of panic—an impulse to run without stopping. The walls are too close on all sides and the air smells too much of ourselves, our sorrow and boredom.
Through a rip in the tinfoil, I see a sliver of winter’s pale sun and am left to imagine the sharp air in my nostrils. I feel desperate to be in all that untrampled space, running so long and so far that I must remove my hat and unzip my coat.
How many days have we been inside? Do I dare count them? Do I dare guess how many more are to come? And without thinking, I’ve stood up so fast the chair falls behind me.
“Mary, what’s going . . . ?”
But I’ve gone, bolted out the door because I’d go mad staying inside a second longer. I flail through our shoveled path, slipping, standing up again, trying to run. Everything ahead and above is so blinding white, I can’t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins. It burns when I breathe. I want to run fast and far but the dead end is just ahead, and before I can slow down, I’ve slammed into a wall.
Frantically, I claw at the outer shell of it, push and kick at the softer snow behind. I need to run faster and farther. I need to see color.
“It hurts!” I yell, and the wind swallows my words.
My cry is primal, raging. I feel a pounding in my ears and hair rising on the back of my neck. In the same moment I hear Pop call my name, he’s wrapped his arms around the outsides of mine and tackles me, both of us falling.
“Don’t you know this is dangerous?” he shouts. “Out in this cold with only a sweater.”
He holds me tight, our cheeks against the snow.
“I hate you,” I say, the wall crumbling into the side of my mouth.
“There will be others to help you forget,” he says.
“I might have gone with him,” I sob.
Pop holds on tight, and I let him—these things we don’t do easily. Faces peer from windows, where towels and tinfoil have been peeled back. Faces watch from their own shoveled mazes. My skin, my eyes sting from the wind.
“We have to get you back inside,” Pop says, helping me stand.
Everything feels numb as he lifts. And it ends like this, walking back without a look between us that would bring reassurance that our relationship will survive. Pop is only thinking right now about keeping us warm, and I am only thinking of my boots stepping in and out of his footprints.
Once through the door, I drag myself on wobbly legs to my room. I sit by the front window and stare at the endless white, my skin burning and itching as it warms. Now and then I hear my father come into the room. He says nothing and leaves again.
To Pop, I may always be the girl sitting here by the window, watching a world I can’t seem to join, and he may always see himself as the one who couldn’t give me what my mother would have.
My fingers feel the cold glass, while sound moves far away. Wind. Mooing. Flushing. Ringing. Footsteps. Knocking. My name. My name. My name.
My fingers bend, straighten. The blurred room comes into focus.
“Mary?”
My father knocks hard on the open door.
“Mary? Phone call for you.”
I move in slow motion, counting stairs until a thought crosses my mind. Speeding now, I nearly trip on the last step and turn the corner to the kitchen, where the phone sits off the hook.
“Hello?”
When I hear Robert’s voice, the tears fall, salty, to my lips. He speaks before I’m fully listening—something about rain, seagulls, how long it took to catch up at work.
“Did my father ask you to call?”
“I was going to call anyway,” he says.
The phone trembles in my hand as he tells me what’s outside his window. The sound of tugboats. The smell of fish. The taste of salt in the air. And he tells me about the inside of his office, where he is working late and about the computer bugs he discovered.
“My life’s not that interesting,” he says.
“I like to hear about it.”
I tell him how my windows are blocked by snow and we laugh about what we might find underneath it all—the step to the barbershop like broken piano keys, an old faded sign with three remaining letters on it, a once-shiny truck with a scrape along the length of the door and slashed tires.
“Will you come back for it?”
“Eventually,” he says. “Tell me about the ranchers. What are they doing in all that snow?”
I can’t see the ranches from any window, and I’ve been so mad at my neighbors for what I’ve learned about them. But old stories rise to the surface, stories I’ve accumulated over the years from my father or conversations I overheard at the Pipeline, and I tell Robert what I remember.
“In the mornings, and then several times a day, they crack through frozen layers at the watering hole and trough,” I say. “And calves are born between now and the end of March so the cowhands stay close in case they need to get in there and pull.”
“Must be tough keeping them alive in a blizzard,” he says.
“They have to check on the newborns all the time,” I say, “to be sure their slick coats don’t turn into shells of ice. Once I saw a guy driving a newborn around on the floor of his truck, trying to keep it warm.”
My ear, pressed against the phone for so long, feels bruised. Gaps steadily grow between our stories until we’ve run out of words.
“I should probably go,” he says.
“Please stay on the line,” I say.
And we listen to each other breathe.
After I’ve hung up, I walk down the hallway to shut off the lights before bed. My father, passed out in his office chair, must have tried his best to listen to our call. I kneel beside him, my hand on his forearm. Could I do this if he were awake—slide my fingers gently down his arm until my hand is over his?
“Good night,” I whisper to this man who loves and hurts me.
I keep my hand on his a little longer.
After I go to bed, I watch the white windows and the hints of violet that show through. Gradually, they darken to black, the house exquisitely quiet. And then I feel it. A feeble stirring deep-in, beneath the stones. Desire, dreams, the soul that had curled up in hiding, trying to rise.
Robert’s calls aren’t predictable but they come before I fret.
“Phone for you,” my father says, no longer trying to keep us apart.
He leaves the kitchen along with the dishes he promised he’d wash. I don’t think he’s cleaned anything since the blizzard. I put the phone to my ear and pretend we are skin to skin. I love the surprise of our conversations, hearing about a world so different from Petroleum, finding that one story leads to another I didn’t see coming. As he speaks, I quietly load the dishwasher, switching ears whenever one feels too hot or sore. I wash the counters and the spills that have dripped down the cabinets to the floor.
“My father’s driving me crazy,” I whisper into the phone. “You wouldn’t believe the mess he made of the kitchen. We’ve been locked in this house so long, all the stories he tells are ones he’s told before.”
“When he’s gone,” Robert says, “you’d be amazed what you’ll miss.”
I put down the dishrag and sit at the table as he tells me of his mother tiptoeing behind him to drop oyster crackers into his bowl of soup. Or her winded laugh whenever her favorite game show started.
“The opening was funny to her every time,” he says. “I couldn’t see it, what made her laugh. But the sound. The sweet, sad sound of giggling with no air behind it . . .”
I want to see his face and touch my hands to his cheeks.
“Even painting . . .” He stops speaking for a moment, swallows. “The same stupid hobo. You can even miss that.”
“I’ll be more patient,” I say.
“He loves you,” Robert says of my father.
He has said the word love. For the rest of the call, I memorize his whisper of that word.
More and more, when I close my eyes, I dream of a bigger world. I dream of blank pages to fill. My hands long to hold paintbrushes, sticks of charcoal, pencils. Is this fair to my father? I watch him slump over the kitchen table, over his office desk, in the recliner in front of the TV, no more secret phone calls or visits to fill his time. I feel guilty having such dreams when I see the sorrow that shows in his eyes and at the edges of his mouth. But I refuse to crawl back beneath the stones.