White Bird in a Blizzard Read Free Page B

knees on their gray carpet and looked under the bed. Nothing there. I opened the top drawer of the chest. Socks, a shallow dish of cuff links, a handkerchief with
BC
, my father’s initials, on it.
    What had I wanted to find?
    Some sign of their secret life.
    A condom wrapper? A dirty magazine?
     
    I knew where my father kept those—the dirty magazines, I mean: in a file cabinet in the unfinished part of our basement beside the horizontal freezer full of yellow chicken limbs and slabs of steak gone pale with cold—a chest full of frozen hearts—and his tool bench, with his bright and expensive tools, which had the dustless look of things not used.
    He kept that file cabinet locked, but I knew how to open it. Right next to the cabinet, tacked to a piece of corkboard over his tool bench, was a file card with the combination: 36–24–35.
    It was like a joke—both the combination and where he kept it, precisely where anyone wanting to open the cabinet would look to find the combination for the lock—and I’d spin those ideal measurements and look at his spread-eagled Bunnies and Pets whenever I wanted.
     
    Sometimes, my friends Mickey and Beth and I looked at them together, slipping an issue out of my father’s file cabinet there in the basement, the place we retreated to whenever Mickey and Beth came over.
    Down there, my parents wouldn’t bother us—only, occasionally, come to the top of the stairs to shout something about dinner, or to announce that Beth’s mother had called for her to come home. We could do whatever we wanted in those two rooms—the finished one, which had a gray carpet remnant covering the floor, an orange vinyl couch, a pool table no one ever used, and the unfinished one with its cement floor and white appliances humming in the emptiness. We could smoke. We could drink rum in our diet Cokes. We could look at those magazines, my father’s secret Pets.
    “Gross,” we’d say, or, “Oh my God.” But we would hold the glossy pages open for a long time, looking down at whoever she was that month—all those limbs, those wet lips. She’d look like something a wolf would eat, spread out like that, all that edible flesh, or something a hunter had shot out of the sky. When she landed at his feet, he’d jumped back in surprise with no idea what to do next.
     
    But those magazines had nothing to do with my parents’ secret life. That was my father’s hobby, and I didn’t want to think about it. Obviously, he thought no one knew what he had down there, hidden, locked up naked in the basement, waiting for him to sneak down in the middle of the night and take a peek. But in its secretness, it made him even duller, even safer, even less sexual than he already seemed.
    Still, if I’d found one, found
Variations
, or
Big Boobs
, in their dresser, a place they shared, that would have been something else. That would have meant that she knew, and approved, or that they looked at them together.
    Of course, there was nothing there.
    I fished through the second drawer. Women’s underwear. Nothing black. Nothing dirty. I looked in the third drawer, which was full of blouses she never wore. Too frilly, or too sheer, or too plain, but too expensive to throw away, and in the back, a shoe box, which I opened, and inside it a paperback book with a pink cover and raised white letters,
Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide
.
    I thought,
Jesus Christ
.
    I pictured her scrubbing the toilet, disinfecting.
    I pictured her in the kitchen, baking angry batches of cookies.
    I saw her in the basement, wringing the necks of my father’s white shirts while a choir of nasty children sang “
Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar!
” in her head.
    I saw her in the living room running the vacuum cleaner over and over a four-inch area of carpet, seeing something in there that the huge rattling suction of her machine could not suck up, and pictured her in a bookstore in the mall on a Friday afternoon, circling a