I hated seeing that laundry hanging in their backyard.
But then it started to rain, and Mrs. Hillman made him take it all down and bring it in again.
Mrs. Hillman is dogged, obstinate, a woman like a log. Perhaps she has to be, being blind. If she didn’t insist on the correctness of her perceptions of every single thing, who would ever believe her perceptions, ever, of anything?
“She drove my father to the edge,” Phil said once, and I pictured Mr. Hillman in the passenger seat next to his blind wife, screaming, hands over his eyes while she drove ninety miles an hour through football fields and forests and backyards strung with laundry flapping on their lines until somehow, miraculously, she slammed on the brakes just before they hit the edge, the place where the world ends, the crater into which Mr. Hillman had flown—through the windshield, smashing through the glass, a sparkling, bloody husband disappearing into the abyss.
For fifteen bright, white years like wet sheets they were married, and had been since high school, when Phil’s father first fell in love with Mrs. Hillman after glimpsing her inside the special ed classroom where she spent her days. An exotic mushroom—something that only grew, all waxy flesh and pale meat, in the light of the moon. He watched her from a distance and must have thought for a long time about what it would be like to kiss a blind girl, to take her clothes off in the dark backseat of his car. Like a goat sneaking up on a milkmaid. Or a bear carrying a virgin into the forest. There was something dirty about it, but everyone would think of you as good for doing what you did, because you loved a girl no one else would want.
But after a decade of that, Mr. Hillman decided his whole life had been a correctable mistake, decided that, since Phil was old enough to take care of Mrs. Hillman, he could leave, become a drifter—a drifter with quite a bit of money, as it happened, as the job he left when he abandoned Phil and his mother was a good one, and he’d been saving money a long time and investing it wisely with drifting in mind.
After that, Phil and his mother left their executive home for Garden Heights, for the expired Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house—a junior executive, which wasn’t squalid, of course, but was not the kind of house they’d moved out of.
Once, early after we’d first started dating, Phil drove me past that house in High Hollow Estates.
“That one,” Phil said, pointing to a huge brick facade. Inside, I could see a black woman moving from room to room. She seemed to be cleaning the air with a rag. “I grew up there,” Phil said, pulling into the driveway, then backing out. “That woman used to be ours.”
A fairy tale with a twisted ending, one in which the sun sets like napalm on the prince and princess as they walk off, sticky all over with fire.
When I come back from the kitchen Mrs. Hillman says, “Look upstairs. Right above us. It sounds like a squirrel burrowing.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Phil says, standing up. “Just sit down, Kat. There’s no squirrels anywhere except in my mother’s head.”
“Phil,” I look at him with my eyes wide, knowing his mother won’t notice, “it can’t hurt to check. It’s probably just my father.”
But it’s not. My father’s asleep on his back on the bed. He’s wearing a sweatshirt that says “U.M.” in big blue letters, like a hesitation on his chest.
LATER PHIL SAYS, “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT. YOU DON’T have to live with her.”
We’re on our way to the Rite Aid in his father’s car to buy the can of air freshener his mother wants. “Glade,” she’d said back at the house after the workmen were gone, “floral.” She handed her pocketbook to Phil and said, “I can smell them in here. Sewage and boots. Take three dollars.”
Phil took an extra ten out of her wallet and slipped it into his.
“I know,” I said, watching the road roll out its rug of slush in front of us. It’s gotten warmer: the usual big January thaw making its annual two-day appearance, duping us into thinking winter’s nearly over when, really, it’s just begun. “But she deserves to be treated with respect, Phil. She can’t help it that she’s blind.”
He glances at me, and the car veers a little closer to the curb. His face is scrunched up, eyes narrowed. I look away, back at the curb, which is painted yellow. A warning.
When I look back, he’s glaring at me. He says, “Do you think I don’t know that?”
Something flutters under my arm then. As if I’ve got a little mouse hidden under it. An artery, pumping. I realize I’m scared. “Forget it,” I whisper into the windshield. “I’m sorry I said anything.”
“Do you think I don’t fucking know that it’s not her fault she’s blind?”
I shake my head. “Of course not,” I say. “I just felt bad for her today.”
“Well.” Phil looks back at the road now, slowing, turning, seeming satisfied. “Well, a person could spend his whole life wandering around looking for things my mother thinks she hears and smells all over the goddamn house. Ten times a day she’s asking me, ‘Do you smell something moldy? Phil, go look in the attic, I think I hear a bat.’” He imitates his mother’s voice—whiny, childlike, but hard-edged, a cross between Betty Boop and my own mother, whose voice, I realize, I’ve nearly forgotten until now, hearing a bit of it in Phil’s impression.
I shrug. “It didn’t hurt me any just to check around the house. I don’t see what difference it makes to you. She was right last night, wasn’t she? About the plumbing?”
“So what?” Phil stops the car in the Rite Aid parking lot, squeezing between two fat mini vans. “So fucking what?” he asks again, slamming the car door, hurrying toward the store.
I unbuckle my seat belt, open the car door, and step into the parking lot, which is glazed with ice that’s been thawing and freezing and thawing now for two months, and I try to hurry after him, but, under me, the parking lot is slick, shifting in panes of gray beneath my boots, and I start to skid. Slipping, I see the fogginess of that slush rush at me, as if I’ve stepped into the path of a nebulous mirror. “Phil,” I call out, and for an instant I glimpse my own surprised face in that mirror as I fall among the swirling clouds and slop—
In that reflection, I’m wearing a veil of slop. The pavement underneath it stings the heel of my hands, and the hot pain brings tears to my eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asks, turning around, finding me behind him on my hands and knees, looking up, seeming to cry. He comes over but doesn’t reach down to touch me, just hovers, casting a wan shadow. I sit, now, resigned, and the slop starts to seep up through my jeans. I feel it spread through my panties, onto my bare skin, and the tears feel hot, the way it feels to pee after swimming in ice-cold water, the way freezing begins as cold and ends as burning.
“HOW ARE THINGS WITH PHIL?” Dr. PHALER ASKS TEN minutes before my hour’s up. By now, we have entirely dispensed with the pretense of psychoanalysis, the pretense that there is something scientific or medical about these hours we spend together. We no longer sift through the details of my childhood and dreams for trouble. That laborious process bore no fruit—just some dull nuggets, like unsalted cashews: a string of images that were not symbols, memories of childhood birthday parties at which no fun was had, insults endured in elementary school rest rooms. Even the subject of my mother has been for the most part exhausted, except on special occasions, like her birthday or my parents’ anniversary. Instead, we spend my sessions mulling over the trivia of the present, its minor annoyances and daily travails.