Liz throws her boyfriend's sweater at him. "Put it on. C'mon. Go," she says, and pushes him toward the window. "Hurry up, it's freezing," she says. She strips her bed, fast, because she's running late for waitressing at the supper club. She's tired of stripping it every other day, but her boyfriend keeps coming over every other day, and she can't have her mom or her sister wandering into her room, twirling her hair, and noticing the sheets. She bundles them into a ball. Her boyfriend scans the area below the window before he climbs out and onto the step ladder. "See ya tomorrow, babe," he says, and leans in to Liz, giving her cheek a little lick goodbye. He begins climbing down. Liz wipes her face. She pulls down the window, pulls up her black "good-tip" skirt. She grabs the ball of sheets. Outside her room, she shoves the ball into the laundry chute, and hears it whoosh down, already good as clean.
The laundry chute is jammed. Liz shoved her bedsheets down there, and now they're stuck somewhere in between the basement and the upstairs. This is the third time this month. Ginny is aware that the whole house regards the chute as if it is some sort of transformer: goes in dirty, pops out clean and folded on the bottom, without Ginny lifting a finger. Now, she will have to get the hoe from the shed to grab the bundle down from the basement opening. Then, she'll have to pick the wood splinters from the chute out of the fabric. Patience. Give me patience with that girl, she asks. The hall light catches the last fringe of a perm as she looks up, through the ceiling. Exhausted, she calls out to Hazel; Ginny knows she's somewhere in this house, "Hazel! Grab the rest of the laundry! Please!"
Hazel sighs and pulls her hair into a ponytail. She leaves her homework spread out on her bed. Then she collects the bath towels from the bathroom with a laundry basket, and scours the bedroom floors, looking for dirty underwear and socks. Liz's bedroom smells different lately, thick. Hazel knows this is because her boyfriend sneaks over without anybody knowing, and knows not to say anything about this.
It's November. The basement is musty from the wood they just stacked along the north wall that's still too wet for the furnace. A box elder crawls out of the pile, and nears the bottom of the stairs. Hazel crunches it under her house shoe. Around the corner, her mother is standing over the dryer, picking at the outside ball of Liz's sheets with a tweezers. She pauses every so often to look up at the wall. Duct-taped to the ceramic brick are cut-outs of healthy, smiling women in Lycra from Prevention magazine. This is what, her mother says, she used to look like, before she had Hazel. She just didn't bounce back this time, but she will, she says, she will. Hazel scoots around her mother, and empties the laundry into the washer, pours in a capful detergent and a little bleach. The egress windows have fall leaves plastered to them from the wind and rain, that's why her mother squints to see the splinters, holds the fabric to the light bulb that hangs overhead. A trail of rainwater runs along the crack in the concrete wall opposite them, where the caulk that held the window in place broke away. Hazel throws a dirty towel on the small puddle, and watches as the draft blowing the rain in plays with the spider webs along the rafters. She runs her hands over her hair-pricked arms, and pulls the sleeves of her thermal T-shirt down. The furnace is across the basement, partially hidden by hangers of her father's chore clothes-muddy overalls and undershirts, the hangers topped with caps, aligned vertically with duct-taped, four-buckle boots. They look so complete, like bundled mannequins, she sometimes has to look hard to be sure her father isn't standing there instead, in his old Marine posture. "When are we starting the furnace?" Hazel asks her mother. She misses the sudden burst of heat from just standing near it, the nearness of the blaze when she lifts the door lever with an oven mitt to add more blocks of wood. She can feel this November settling damp in her bones.
"Not until your father says it's time," Ginny answers, leaning both hands on the dryer. "Now run upstairs. Do your algebra."
Hazel considers asking her mother if she needs any help, but knows she doesn't want any; she picks the laundry basket up and runs upstairs. She takes the steps two at a time, when she can stretch her legs that far. At the landing, she shuts the basement door loudly, just loud enough for her to feel the impact jar her elbow, lets the laundry basket fall and rattle across the kitchen linoleum, and hits the light switch. Then she pauses, opens the basement door quietly, and tiptoes down half the stairs, until she can see her mother again, still leaning on the dryer. She waits for her mother to speak.
Ginny finishes pulling splinters from the sheets. There are obvious things she chooses to ignore, but never splinters. They can tear a sheet apart. She closes her eyes, just to give them a rest. It's getting too dark down here, she thinks, and cold. She knows Frank should have started the furnace already, it's just that he's got so much going on up in his head, troubling his heart. She shivers, and throws the sheets in with the rest of the wash. The machine rumbles. Water cascades onto the towels; the motor revs to turn the blades. She runs her tongue over her chapped lips. Please guide him, please guide him, because I can't, she prays. I can't even look at this burden, cannot fathom this decision, can't even think about it. Give him Your eyes, your wisdom, she whispers, the soft words lost in the sound of the falling water. Give him Your eyes give him Your eyes Your eyes.
She loses control of what's she's saying, as if her tongue is now someone else's.
Hazel crouches on the stairs, and tries, again, to understand her mother's prayers.
In the living room, there is a loveseat where Ginny studies the Bible each morning under lamplight. The pages are marked and annotated with the fine pencil she rests on the belly lump that will not go away. Beside this loveseat is the recliner where their father reads the paper every night and sips his whiskey. Frank is a man of habit. The cushions are flattened, retaining the imprint of his body, and the upholstery is worn clean where his loafers rub. Some nights he falls asleep in the chair with the newspaper spread out over him like a blanket, and a flushed face. When he wakes, he rubs his eyes, and says, "No wonder the bums use these," and begins lifting the papers from him. He winks at Hazel. "Great insulation."
Hazel is eleven, almost twelve, this coming December. She sits in the loveseat while her mother washes the dishes. A crime show is on the TV, muted. The dishes clank softly in the soapy water, the rinse nozzle hisses. Her father shuffles newspaper pages to the left of her. Lamplight floods over her shoulder, and heat from the floor register rises and ruffles the gold-edged pages of the Bible in her lap. Her father has finally started running the furnace. She bends her head over her mother's Bible, and prays for the Rapture. Hazel still feels innocent enough to be Raptured, but only if it happens now, or five minutes from now, but an hour or a week might be too long. Liz is only a few years older than her, and Hazel can tell from the sounds that come out of her sister's room that Liz can't still be innocent. And if He doesn't come quick, that'll be Hazel. If Hazel could only understand her mother's prayers, her method, figure out the details of faith, she might have a chance, even if the Rapture doesn't happen before she commits a biggie.
Her father taught her that unless an action is executed with precision, everything will collapse around her. Think of everything as if it is a building, and you are laying the cornerstone. This is why she skipped ahead three years in math: precision. He has repeated this most days of her life, while stacking hay bales and shooting free throws. He says that if you screw up in the Marines-bam-you die, and it's not pretty. She knows by the way he says this, that it is not just talk.
But the news, now, that's all just talk. Frank sips his whiskey, and looks over the paper at his daughter. He wonders what she's praying about, if she'll take his wife's fervor too far and end up being one of those touched people with a religious tic-a constant crossing of various vital organs without provocation. More than likely, it is a phase, like ventriloquism was a year before-throwing her voice to make the coffee pot talk, saying, "I wish I were a real dummy and not just a coffee pot. Hint-hint, Dad." But you can't encourage these phases too much. He didn't get the dummy, and it passed. He finishes his drink, and exaggerates a yawn, pushing his arms through the air. He covers his face and chest with the newspaper spread.
But now he's just hiding.
If his brothers call, Ginny can tell them that he's sleeping. He can't come to the phone.
The situation is this: Frank's mother, for three years now, is sick, is in a coma. As the tubes drip liquid food and hundred-dollar meds into her, the hospital drains money out of them. This woman who fed them her own milk, they can no longer afford to feed. There is no Medicare, no insurance, no inheritance, no money in anyone's pockets, in anyone's assets, and, as Frank's brothers point out, no hope. His brothers said it would be arranged like this: They would each write a "Yes" to More of the Same or a "No" to Life on a slip of paper, and fold it to the size of a fruit pit and cast it. They would not discuss the answers beforehand; they would not talk about their individual answers at all afterwards. Someone else would open the slips of paper. There are three brothers. Something would be decided.
"This is stupid. Stupid," Frank had said when his brothers introduced the plan to him. "Can't we just sit down and talk it out? Don't we owe her that much?" He shoved the butts of his hands into his eyes.
"We've been doing that for over a year now, Frank," they'd said. "We just need to do it, need to do something."
All he has to do is say the word, and it will happen. Whisper it to a piece of paper, and throw it to the dogs.
"Hazel, honey?" Franks says from underneath the paper. "Can you run and get me a refill?" His arm holds the empty glass out to his daughter. Enable a potential sin in her father and risk committing one herself, or disobey her father? These are the tricky ones. Hazel is almost twelve, and she does not know how to be precise with God.
"Yeah, Dad," Hazel says, getting up. "On the rocks?"
Six inches has fallen by noon, and the weathermen are threatening a foot and a half. Liz and Hazel are out in their rubber boots and work jeans, shoveling the sidewalk that stretches from their back porch out to the barn, where their father is lugging four five-gallon buckets of grain, two in each hand. Liz is angry at the snow. The roads are so bad she can't drive into town to the mall, where she gets her nails done by an Asian man every two weeks. He smoothes cocoa butter into her palms and massages away the shoveling and the waitressing and the boyfriend; then he files them down and paints them cherry red for seven dollars. She tells people this is why she makes the big tips at the supper club. But today she will have to do without: her chipped nails are covered with orange-fade crocheted mittens, and her shiny black hair is tucked under a frizzed stocking cap with a pom-pom.
Oh well, at least no one who matters can see her like this.
So Liz half mumbles, half groans the melody of "White Christmas" as she shovels the snow fast and gracefully, in big, upward swoops. The wind blows half of it back, covering the sidewalk in drifts and dust. "Hazel, watch this," she says, and shovels a scoopful high in the air, then opens her mouth in the wind to catch a mouthful of the powder.
"How's it taste?" Hazel asks. "We're using the barn shovels."
Liz spits on the sidewalk. "Like cow shit." She wipes her mouth with the crackly sleeve of her winter coat, leaving a raw red streak across her face, more red than when Hazel knocks on Liz's door, and her head pops out, and motions to her boyfriend, and she says, "Can't you see I'm busy in here?" Hazel watches the spittle turn white with frost. She's following Liz, cutting into the fresh drifts her sister makes along the edges of the cement. The yard is crisp with snow; it breaks like a wafer when Hazel walks in with her boots. The fresh shovelfuls she throws spread across it and disappear like white fireworks. The tree branches hang low with snow weight, poised to dump their baggage as soon as the girls shovel past.
The wind blows the smoke from their chimney straight across the sky, makes it look like the house is a train, traveling fast across the landscape. The kitchen windows face the sidewalk, and are steamed from the warm inside, the soaking lunch dishes. A cardinal struts along the window's brick ledge and pecks at the corners, looking for seeds jammed in the cracks, and then takes flight. Hazel sees her mother moving behind the foggy glass, and waves to her. Liz packs a heavy snowball, and it hits Hazel right in the back of the knee. Hazel collapses into the snow pile with a grunt, another crumpled snow angel in the making.
Ginny scrubs a cereal bowl and watches her girls rolling around like kittens in the snow. She's glad they don't know that anything is troubling their father, glad they are so unburdened and innocent. She remembers being not much older than Liz, and having Liz growing inside her, not anything larger than a fruit pit. She remembers being wracked with guilt for wanting to cast her out, and be done with her. But things worked out in the way that things will work out. She will just keep her eyes gazing upward and her thoughts moving forward. And now she prays for her girls, that they might not face a decision like Frank's. If we have to go, Lord, let us go fast. She rinses the bowl.
Liz bends over in the snow to break a short twig off a fallen branch. "Hazel," she says. "Watch this." She leans back into the wind, and puffs her chest out under her thick coat. She holds the twig snippet to her mouth, sucks on it, and blows her hot breath into the frozen air. The steam hangs on to the air for only a moment before the wind whisks it away, leaving Liz with lips hollowed into a pucker.
"Lizzie Ann, what's that you're doing up there?" their dad hollers from the end of the sidewalk. His leather-gloved hand is wrapped around his herding cane, and he points the curved hook at them with the length of his arm. "You stop that right now, Lizzie."
"It's just a twig, Dad," Hazel says, while Liz laughs into her mittens. Hazel drops her shovel and takes the twig from her sister's bunched hands. She stubs it out into her wrist in a wide gesture. "It's not a real anything. We're not doing anything." She throws the twig over her shoulder and picks up her shovel again. They're not doing anything wrong. They're kids playing in the snow, his kids. Frank should at least know they'd be smart enough not to smoke right in front of him. He walks out to the pasture to call the calves in to eat. He pulls up his coat collar, and ducks his chin down into it. He still has two weeks to decide anything, the Sunday before Christmas he will drive into town, with his answer folded, heavy, in his pocket. He runs his tongue along his chapped lips. "Here, calves, here, calves," he calls out, and begins dumping buckets of grain into the long troughs. The snow will blanket the feed before the calves find it.
The tree is huge this year-a fragrant, sappy pine from the front forty. Its branches cover part of the TV in some way wherever they put it in the living room. "I say we cut the branches out around the screen or set it up by the stairwell," Liz says.
"We aren't celebrating Christmas in the stairwell," Ginny says. She's arranging the sheep of the Nativity scene on top of the TV box, beside the bunny ears. "And we never watch this thing anyway." She motions to the TV with the remote, and all four of them pause to hear the nightly news about the gas station murder and the weather-three inches by sunrise-then she switches it off. "See?"
When Ginny leaves to take sugar cookies out of the oven, she tunes the kitchen radio to the Christmas station and the house fills with static-laced Doris Day and Dean Martin. That's the stuff, she thinks, slipping her hand into an oven mitt. The phone rings. It's one of Frank's brothers. She covers the mouthpiece with a mitt. "Frank?" she says, calling her husband out of the living room. She gives him a look. He takes the phone into another room. The radio announcer has a short list of schools canceled in the morning; the girls' school isn't one of them. Liz decides the tree is as vertical as it will ever be, and falls into a dramatic heap on the couch. Frank comes out of the room, and hangs up the phone. He tousles Liz's hair like she's a 5-year-old boy or a mutt. Both the girls give him strange looks. He says, "I'm not so sure about that, Lizzie-girl." He slips into his loafers. "Don't worry, everyone. I'll go ahead and get the level." He ducks downstairs.
Hazel shoos Liz up, back to the tree, then she climbs over the furniture so she can stand directly across from the tree. She aligns her right forearm with her nose and extends it, bisecting the tree in her sight from top to bottom. "A little more to the right. Just bend it a little. Yeah, like that." Heat blasts her legs from the open heat register.
"Your nose is just crooked. The tree looks fine," Liz says, and walks away, letting the tree spring back to where it just was. "But, hey. You know who thinks your crooked nose is cute?" Liz picks up a glass bulb, and hooks a wire into the top. "The busboy at the club was talking about you when you came in with Mom and Dad last week."
"Who?" Hazel asks. Inside, she feels a clock start to tick away the minutes, days, months, and, hopefully, years she has left of childhood. Her face flushes red, and she steps out from between the furniture, into the cooler air, where she fans her face and shakes the static from her oversized gym shorts. Looking down, she notices the delicate lines of muscle running along her calves. Liz stands on tiptoe to reach high on the tree, and the same long lines of muscle work, and that, Hazel knows, and not her red fingernails, is why Liz makes the big tips at the supper club. No wonder Liz calls it her good-tip skirt.
"The guy-he's a freshman. Said he liked your titties. A real classy dude." Liz laughs and hangs the bulb on the tree. The tree seems to sag with its weight.
Hazel can feel drops of sweat trail from under her arms, and down her sides. She crosses her arms over her chest, rubbing her Christmas sweater into her armpits to stop them from sweating.
"Hey, hand me the garland while you're over there. Let's wrap this baby up." Liz holds her hand out to Hazel, and snaps her fingers.
"No, I'm done."
"Come on. Let's do this."
"I'm done." Hazel walks out to the warm and sweet-smelling kitchen, and stands as her mother moves sugar cookies from the baking sheet to the cooling rack. Ginny turns to look at Hazel over her shoulder and asks, "What's wrong, dear?"
Liz follows behind Hazel and slaps her against the shoulder. "Why are you so snippy lately?"
"I'm going to go help Dad find the level," Hazel tells her mother, and takes off down the stairs.
"Liz, be nice to your sister."
"I am." Liz grabs a sugar cookie and bites into it. She chews and gives her mother the look. She tries to be patient, but why is everyone so snippy lately? She wanders upstairs, to her room, and leaves the tree crooked and the ornaments unpacked all over the living room. Maybe in twenty minutes everyone will cool off, and they can get on with it already. Hazel must be hitting puberty, that magical time in every girl's life. Liz will have to teach her about tampons and then just stay out of her way for a few years-at least. Hazel should know by now that it's always nice to hear a compliment, even if it is from a sleazeball. Liz clearly hasn't sistered Hazel properly. Has she really failed to mention the exchange of values? You fork your values over, you get what you want. This item will cost you your dignity. This one?-just a little hope. If you feel like a clock is ticking, like you're waiting for something, stop waiting; if you wait, whatever you want will be off the shelf. There will be no gifts, no understanding, no transcendence, no clean slates, and certainly no rescuing, even if a certain young man does climb up to your room on your long lovely hair or a stepladder, and says that there is. Dad's off his rocker, and Mom. Mom's Mom-oblivious, the same as always, blind and chipper, and that's sure not helping anything. A handful of rocks patter against Liz's bedroom window, followed by an icy pine-cone, and she switches her light off. Enough. She's done enough tonight. Liz wonders if she's the only thinking person in this house.
In the basement, Frank hefts a couple of logs from the pile and reloads the furnace. He pulls an aluminum folding chair out and sits and warms himself by the fire. His chore clothes hang next to him, tower over him like he's in the Marines again. He knows Hazel is scared sometimes to come down here because the basement is dark and these clothes look like a man, standing, staring at you. Sometimes Frank, too, catches himself feeling watched while he's down here. But it is just another trick the dark plays on your head.
"Dad?" Hazel calls from the staircase. "Dad, did you find the level yet?"
Frank knows he should keep quiet. She won't come any further down the stairs, unless she hears his voice. His face is wet. But she knows he's down here. He said he'd be down here. He wipes his face and nose. "Here. I'm here," he says. Hazel creeps around the corner. "Dad, you okay?" He nods. When he sits in this chair, his daughter is taller than him. She looks around. She knows she can't look directly at him, because he's crying, and daughters can't see things like that. She says, "You should really put more lights in down here. It's creepy." Frank wipes his face and nods again. "You know Mom likes to be by herself here, too. She prays down here, you know that?"
"Mmhmm."
"Do you always know what she's saying when she's praying?"
Frank shakes his head.
"Me either. She speaks in tongues, I think. I have to sneak down the stairs to hear any of it, and then I still don't understand it, and that bothers me. She knows something huge, and I can't understand any piece of it."
The Sunday before Christmas, the tree twinkles and white light flashes in patterns across the table while Hazel stamps Christmas cards. Liz is upstairs, quiet, with her boyfriend. Ginny is in the kitchen, elbow-deep in suds, humming along to the radio, "Oh Holy Night."
Frank walks into kitchen. He's having trouble zipping his coat. He's leaving to visit his brothers tonight. He says, "Ginny, can you step in here a minute? I need to talk to you." She wipes her hands on her apron, and follows her husband into the study. He closes the door behind them.
All he has to do is say the word, and it will happen.
"You write it down. You write it down. I can't," he says. He reaches for his wife's hand and places the pen and the slip of paper in her palm.
"Honey, are you sure you can do this?"
"I have to. Please, just write it down." His hand shakes as he moves his wife's hair. He whispers the word into her ear. She gives him a look, making sure. He nods and turns away. Ginny leans over the desk, and writes the opposite. She then folds the paper, and folds the paper, until it is the shape of a pencil's eraser. She puts this in her husband's pocket, and turns him around. "C'mere," she says, and wipes his face with her apron. Frank leaves.
In the kitchen, Ginny takes off her apron and hands it to Hazel. "You think you'd mind getting the laundry gathered?" Hazel nods, and stamps three more cards. She takes the apron, and runs upstairs, two stairs at a time. She grabs the laundry basket of damp towels from the bathroom, and throws the apron in. The basket is only half full, so she walks through the bedrooms and gathers the dirty underwear and T-shirts that have been thrown on the floor. She saves Liz's room for last. The lights are on in Liz's room, and she can hear voices and laughter behind the music. She knocks softly, and no one answers. She knocks again, and says, "I need to get your laundry. Mom's doing a load." Liz's boyfriend answers the door. He doesn't have a shirt on. "Give me a minute," he says. When he returns, he throws a handful of Liz's panties and his boxers into the laundry basket. "Oh, and this too." He bends down and grabs a bottle of their father's whiskey, mostly empty. He puts it in the basket. "Merry Christmas, kid." Liz comes to the door wearing his t-shirt. Her face is red around her mouth. She says, "Don't say anything, Hazel, please." He leans over and twists his tongue into Liz's ear, bites into the lobe, and pushes the door shut.
Hazel throws the panties and boxers down the laundry chute, hoping they will disappear somewhere in between the upstairs and the basement. She walks downstairs and drops the laundry basket by the basement door. She listens for the sloshing of dishwater, then bends over and takes the bottle of whiskey. Hazel tucks it into her sweater, and walks across the kitchen, past her mother, who doesn't look up. She leaves the house gently, through the kitchen door without a coat on.
"Here I am," she whispers, as if she's meeting someone. The wind cuts across the yard in frozen sheets and the branches of the trees rattle against each other and Hazel's body trembles. She unscrews the cap off the whiskey, and drinks until her mouth is full. Her tongue works up against it. She spits it out, into the snow, and it burns through. Warm drops run down her throat, and she walks out, down the sidewalk. She throws the bottle out into the yard for them to find in the spring. The dim light from the basement shines through the frosty window. The washer door opens, and then there is the rushing of water. Frank drives into town. He carries his answer, no bigger than a fruit pit, down in his belly. Another is in his coat pocket. All he has to do is whisper the word and things will work out the way they will work out.