On a Saturday afternoon, the snow starts falling in clumps. From the living room window, we watch umbrellas turn inside out. The sky is the same color as the street: charcoal burned white. “They’re saying it could be the worst storm we’ve had in a century,” Mom says. “Nah,” says Dad. “They’re just trying to goose you up.”
“They” are the weather forecasters who talk over each other on two TVs—one in the library, the other in the kitchen. Cyclone . . . The coast of Florida . . . Winds approximately . . . Hurricane . . . Snowfall up to . . .
Emergency supplies wait on the coffee table. Long candlesticks, two flashlights, Trivial Pursuit.
A brick of meat loaf roasts in the oven. Water bubbles on a burner.
The sky cracks in half. A blue bolt aims at a skyscraper but misses. The dog whimpers and flattens into a black-and-white puddle on the floor. This is not her night.
When the room shudders with blue light, it reminds me of watching through a window at someone else watching TV. How lonely it feels from the outside.
My bedroom window rattles. The wind sounds like a giant insect rubbing its legs together. When I press my palm against the cold glass, it presses back. All the lights are on in the building across the alleyway. Everyone is home together, waiting out the storm or watching it. Even the boy across the way is with his parents, huddled at a round table in his yellow-lit kitchen. He sits with his father, while his mother darts in and out of view, fussing about.
We eat dinner with the newscasters. Gusts seventy to a hundred miles an hour . . . Evacuation plan.
When my father speaks, my mother shushes him and turns up the volume. He waves her off. “I want to hear this,” she explains.
After dinner she asks “Who wants Tasti D-Lite?” and all is forgiven. A frozen low-calorie dessert shop has opened on Lexington Avenue and now our freezer is packed with plastic tubs of an off-white chalklike substance. The flavor choices are eggnog, pumpkin spice, or cheesecake, but they all taste like frostbitten vanilla.
A piece of paper attached by a magnet to the fridge reads Thin tastes better, the motto of a well-known Manhattan diet doctor my parents went to a few years back. Each week after they visited his office, they returned home with a new audiotape of motivational one-liners recorded in a man’s thick Queens accent. Now they spray butter-flavored liquid on their toast and squirt fat-free blue cheese on their salad. They spoon cold white shavings into their bowls and call it dessert.
Life is what happens when you’re making plans reads another piece of paper buoyed by a magnetic pig in a chef’s hat. The words are written in black felt-tip and traced over a second time, as if a mistake has been corrected.
After dinner, Dad is laid out on the sofa intermittently snoring and waking up to flip the channel. I am beside him on a love seat, dressed in my mother’s silk pajama suit, waiting for that moment we were promised, when the lights quit, the refrigerator stops humming, the TV goes dark, and the only people in the whole world are us.
Mom pads to the doorway in her slippers to say she’s going to bed. My father snorts alive, gives a drowsy good night, and goes back to sleep.
“I love you,” she says to me, which means be careful or goodbye or, in this case, good night.
“Mom?” I ask. “What does it feel like to love something?”
She is tired. This is not the kind of question someone should field right after she announces she’s going to bed. But she is up for the challenge, rattling off a bunch of adjectives I’ve heard before to describe a mother’s love. Still, that’s not what I want. I want evidence that love isn’t just a word we substitute for other words, but a sensation. She nods, taking a moment to find a comparison I can grasp.
“You know how you feel about the dog?” she says, answering one impossible question with another.
The dog has a black mask over her eyes and a long white nose. The underside of her body is white as well, and there are brown speckles on her raw pink belly skin.
The way I feel about her makes my teeth mash as if I were flattening bits of her for digestion. I want to pop her with my incisors to make the feeling go away. Recognizing this urge, she keeps her distance. My mother is the dog’s favorite. She reinforces this fact by following my mother out of the room.
When my parents fight, it’s about the dog. She is untrainable and leaves puddles around the apartment when everyone is away. Each one blames the other for her accidents. Someone didn’t walk her enough; someone was too lenient with punishment. My mother hired an animal therapist who said the dog understands what’s right and wrong, but suffers from anxiety. The fear of being bad when she’s left alone.
At a loss, my mother has been known to lock the guilty party in the hallway outside my bedroom in the hopes that solitary confinement is rehabilitative. She’ll close my door and warn me that under no circumstances . . .
On those nights, the dog will shove the black tip of her nose in the space underneath my doorway. A paw pokes through, searching with its hooks for an escape route to dig. I wait for the footsteps in other rooms to subside before opening the door to let her in.
When I do, she moves into the room slowly, guiltily, planting herself down on the carpet and tucking her limbs under her body, nose to tail, forming a tight circle of shame. I pound the mattress, pleading with her to come up on the bed, to be bad, to understand that they’re wrong, not her. But she won’t budge. She wants to make it clear: She is waiting for someone else, someone more important than me, to forgive her.
But tonight she isn’t looking for forgiveness. She was good today, and free to follow my mother into the master bedroom. She flattens out beside my mother’s bed and rests her head on one paw, raising it each time a heavy snowflake smacks the glass. Now her concern is the world exploding outside. Mom is above her, asleep with a People magazine in an A-frame on her chest. On the cover is a picture of David Koresh with the headline “The Evil Messiah.” He looks like Jim Morrison. I pull the magazine off her body and take it into my room.
On another Saturday night around this time, I was at a suite in the Regency Hotel. A boy who liked Bianca was living there temporarily, though we didn’t ask why. A renovation, a divorce, something to do with money and sadness. We brought a six-pack of Rolling Rock and placed it on the coffee table alongside a plastic bag of weed and a plate with a few stale fries half covered by a silver room-service top. As the boy licked a rolled joint, he closed his eyes and his long eyelashes jigsawed together underneath a twisted backward baseball cap. I pictured his tongue on top of mine, and then I pictured holding him while he wept about his sadness into my shoulder.
He pulled Bianca into a bedroom and took the joint with him. I sat on a chair in the living room facing a muted episode of Saturday Night Live and waited until it was time to go home.
“So?” my mother asked later that night, eating a Mallomar in her nightgown at the kitchen table. “Meet any nice boys?”
Then a few days later, when the phone rang, my mother answered it in the kitchen and called my name. “A boy,” she mouthed, trying to restrain a smile. She pitched herself on a stool at the kitchen island and pretended to flip through a catalog, fooling no one.
It was the boy with the lashes. His voice was deeper than I remembered. My mouth became a dried-up scab and my tongue a Band-Aid that peeled off it each time I spoke. He said he lost my number and it wasn’t easy finding it again. He asked me what I was doing. I told him nothing. He said he wanted to see The Crying Game, even though he knew the ending. I said I wanted to see it, too. I took my mother’s diet soda from her hand and she got herself another one.
“Well, why don’t we see it together?” he said and then he made a joke about how we could take along my short friend and buy her a ticket to Aladdin. This is how long it took for me to recognize his mistake.
“I’m the short friend,” I said. “No, you’re not,” he insisted, and I wished he was right. When he asked about the color of my hair, the other line beeped. I clicked the receiver and pushed the swinging kitchen door again to stand in the dog’s hallway. My mother yelled something about me ripping the phone cord. It was Bianca on the other line. When I told her what was happening, I held the receiver with my neck so I was free to dig my nails into my wrist.
“He thinks I’m you,” I said, heaving quick Lamaze breaths to simulate laughter. When I clicked back to the boy, he’d been replaced by the flatline alarm of a dial tone. I let it flatline a little longer so I could say a fake goodbye, and unknotted the phone cord, placing the receiver in the cradle with immense concentration. I wanted to stay a little longer inside that moment and not the next one, when I had to turn around to face my mother. “So who was that?” she asked, her mouth still delighted.
Worse than knowing you’re unlovable is believing, momentarily, that you are not. In the old apartment, I would watch from the bedroom doorway when my sister’s boyfriends came over to pick her up. They’d stand in their overcoats, shaking my mother’s hand. Then they’d take my sister’s hand, and her silver bracelets chimed as she walked out the door. Fairy dust.
When my parents are asleep, I can sit on my bathroom sink and smoke a cigarette out the window. The storm is still alive. It coughs snow in my face through the open window. I pull on a Dunhill, hard enough that it burns. Bianca says I smoke too loud. Maybe so. I wish I was an easier person to love.
A lemony light flickers from a window in the building across the alleyway. Maybe it’s been flickering for a while, and I hadn’t noticed. Through the white scrim, I think I see the boy walking toward the window, though it’s hard to tell if he’s exposed. His whole body looks like a shadow, a black piece of paper cut out in the shape of a boy. There is his torso and his big oval head, tilted slightly. And there is his hand, all five fingers, flat on the glass. The cloud of weather between us is soft and twinkling. I place my hand on the glass, too, and leave it there for a moment.