by Amy Thielen
Somehow I knew there had to be more. I went to the town library, where I checked out novels by Erica Jong and other feminists from the 1980s, whose fierce energy I liked, though I didn’t understand yet what they were fighting.
I checked out Gone with the Wind and read it in a single sixteen-hour jag, turning pages steadily throughout the day, then the night, then the cool hours of the dawn. I fell asleep around 7 o’clock in the morning, missing The Price Is Right at 10:30, my main reason for waking up before noon that summer, and then slept for fourteen hours straight. I called my friend Chelsey to brag about my binge. As we talked I weighed myself in the bathroom, reporting that I had lost two pounds in two days. We were just beginning to weigh ourselves. Books were good for everything.
Like we did, Chelsey and her family moved to their lake cabin on nearby Big Sand for the summer, and our buddy Sarah (Aaron’s sister) lived year-round on Fish Hook. Together with our friend Cara, who grew up on a Christmas tree farm east of town, we cycled among cabins, taking turns lying on air mattresses in different lakes. As we floated in mine, our feet brushing the soft tops of the weeds, Chelsey and I reminisced about summers past when we would pack up picnic lunches and take them into the Norway pine plantation. Wearing canteens on our hips, we’d walk until we found the perfect portal in which to enter the fairy-tale forest, the entrance that took us from the bright sunshine into deep faux-night. The Norways had been planted in tight, unnaturally even rows, and their high canopy blocked out the daylight. They had friendly, long needles, much softer than the mean quills of the spruce. After we found the patch of forest bottom we were looking for—so perfectly carpeted with fallen needles that it looked like clean barn bedding—we’d unfurl our cheese sandwiches and black plums wrapped in paper towels. The single butterscotch crispie bar we’d brought to split crumbled a bit under the weight of its thick chocolate-bark top as we passed it back and forth, bite for bite.
We talked about going on a picnic in the plantation again, but we never did. I remember realizing that my powers of pretend were fading. We were gearing up for our junior year in high school and would have to bring real details and real experiences to the fight. Otherworldly was momentarily out.
—
Built in the 1940s, and bought by my mom and dad in the 1980s, the cabin was resolutely my mom’s place. No matter that the relationship between her and my dad had been crumbling all winter at the house in town, at the cabin she spun for us the myth of the perfect family. There we lived out an idyll: days on the boat, nights by the fire, sunsets and dinner bells ringing from the trees, and pink flamingos. Lots of pink flamingos. Flamingo toothbrush holders, clocks, letter openers. She stuck an entire flock of them in the yard, as if declaring it the entrance to Margaritaville. Out on Long Lake, Mom’s fantasies were central.
The centerpiece inside our cabin was a fieldstone fireplace with a rangy deer head above it. Out back sat a dusty screened-in fish-cleaning house in which my cousins and I gutted and filleted and flicked fish eyeballs at one another from our fish-scaling forks. On the lake side, mature white pines pocked the gentle slope down to the water, where an old-fashioned boathouse with an attached deck loomed out over the shore. From that deck, my brothers and cousins and I fished for suckers in the spring, our hooks baited with chunks of fatty leftover steak. If it was dark and still enough, if the air wasn’t raking the water, we could see the blimplike suckers clearly in the shallows, swift black demons swooping in for the meat.
In the early years, Mom left the cabin untouched, and she and her sisters and mother spent many a weekend there installed around the kitchen table, drinking gin and tonics and playing cards. As if to enforce the casual vibe of the lake, the women all put their pajamas on right after dinner—groaning as they shucked off their clothes that they just couldn’t wait to get out of their bras. (Their equivalent of letting down their hair.) The men must have been around, but I just don’t remember them.
Like all prerenovated cabins, the grubby original turned out to be more fun than the redone. Small and dark and postered with relics from someone else’s dreams, old cabins come equipped with a freeing fortlike glee. Without the cultural tradition of these shacks, the upper-Midwestern character would be wildly different. It’s all the thrill of camping, but with ice cubes.
In the name of improvement, my mom chucked the dusty deer head, added on a couple of bedrooms, and put down practical gray berber carpeting throughout. She kept the fieldstone fireplace, though, because it was stacked by hand by someone else years ago. On cold evenings, not unheard of even at the height of a Minnesota summer, we made what we called pudgie pies right in the open hearth, layering white bread and ham and cheese into the pie iron, then carefully cracking an egg in the middle before locking the two sides together and holding the iron in the fire to cook it all into a buttery, turtle-shaped pie; it was kind of like a French charlotte with American breakfast filling. For this totally blind cooking process, the pudgie-pie cook had to rely on her instincts. I liked my bread almost burned and my yolk soft, so I bravely held my iron down in the orange-and-silver coals and pulled it out only when tiny droplets of butter and melted-cheese liquid dripped from the iron.
On sweltering nights, which the dramatic northern summer could just as easily produce, we sat in front of the fan with our feet in buckets of cold water and watched movies. My mom made us big bowls of heavily buttered popcorn and then stood in the kitchen frying up half-slices of bacon, which she passed around on paper-towel-lined plates. She bought it from the family meat market in Pierz, never in less than five-pound bundles, and it flowed throughout my childhood like water. “Another pound, kids?” she’d ask, until it was gone. As she fried and flipped, the dog sat at militaristic attention at her feet.
When my dad came home, his face was often shadowy with his work, the numbers, spreadsheets, and complicated personal interactions still churning in his head. His was a difficult job, a shuffling pattern play each month, and we were unreservedly proud of him. Unlike us, he was not “off” for the summer. He changed into his only pair of shorts and tan walking shoes, still wearing black dress socks up to his knees, tilted the fan toward his recliner, and sat down with his paper. Because his mind functioned best with all points firing, he found it relaxing to stretch himself out in his recliner in a numbing blitz of simultaneous media—watching TV, reading the newspaper, and listening to the baseball game on the lo-fi AM radio all at once.
My mom’s opinion of my father was in free-fall that summer, so she asked me to serve him his libations—now ice water instead of his previous Chivas Regal, following the premature heart attack he’d had the previous fall at the young age of forty-one. He was the kind of guy who quit things cold turkey. She peeled and sliced thick wedges of raw kohlrabi and handed me the bowl with a shaker of salt. “Give this to your father.” His predilection for the raw, wet salted chunks was an indicator of his family’s German roots, and the only food craving I remember him having. Once, I caught him munching on a salted wedge of what looked like a potato and asked him, “Why are you eating raw potato?” He replied flatly, as if the answer were obvious: “Because your mother ran out of kohlrabi.” Dad accepted even the shiftiest of substitutions: When a restaurant failed to stock ginger ale, he routinely told the waitress to give him a glass filled one-third with Coke and two-thirds with Seven-Up. It tasted nothing like ginger ale, and when I told him this he said, “At least the color is right.” My taste buds were more demanding, like my mom’s; his were clearly more zen.
At the cabin, as the raucous outside leaked dangerously into his precious interior downtime, my parents’ after-hours fights gathered steam. As the heat wave continued, one day we were surprised, but not really, when he didn’t drive out to the lake after work but instead stayed alone at the house in town. It was quiet, air-chilled to his liking, and the dog, who loved nothing better than to sit on his La-Z-Boy-propped legs, went with him.
In October, we moved back in with Dad at the house in town,
which I hoped would set everything straight. Football had started for the boys and I was in the school play.
My mom and I fell into the habit of sitting up after dinner to snack on her sinful buttered popcorn and page through mail-order catalogs, me drinking water, her drinking red wine. With her own future swirling uncertainly, she took to talking a lot about the family’s past and then vaguely about my future, insisting that I could do anything I wanted to do. The narrative my mom spun for me involved college and then moving away to get some kind of job in the desk-and-cubicle world before eventually settling down with a nice—preferably rich—man and having children. I pictured the first part, living in a city, working in an office, wearing a low-cut pinstriped business suit straight out of the pages of Victoria’s Secret, this catalog being my only window into the cosmopolitan world. I didn’t know what I’d be doing exactly, but I thought it might involve signing contracts and having heated, triumphant meetings.
In my mom’s programming of me to become the independent woman she herself wanted to be, her strategy was repetition. She told me the family stories, of strong women and stubborn men, over and over—with much variation in the details, revising them nightly as she saw fit. I was insatiable for the stories. And weirdly, I forgot all of them in between the tellings—like, total amnesia—which dovetailed nicely with her desire to repeat them. She sewed lead weights into the hem of every telling, giving each one the gravitas of new truth, and I believed the latest version as much as I believed in fiction—which is to say, completely.
She squirted herself a glass of wine from the box of Merlot sitting in the pantry and began talking. Her first story often recalled her dad, who had died of cancer when she was just three years old, and her most vivid memory of him, when he’d propped her up on the ledge of the kitchen sink and showed her the stars and told her he’d always love her. She told me about his mom, her beloved grandma Bertha Dion, a short, stout French-Canadian woman who could cook an enormous feast seemingly without effort. “She’d just be tinkering softly around the kitchen and then, suddenly Bam! Dinner for eight would be on the table.” All of Great-grandma’s gravies were elegant and thin, never thick and cloudy. She never turned the flame so high that fire shot up the sides of the pot, she never fried anything so hard that it spit grease (as her own mother did). “Everything was cooked on low heat.” When she made chicken fricassee, the whole mushrooms shrunk to tiny slick knobs and the slow heat nagged at the joints of her meat until it just “shrugged off the bone.” She was kind and soft and gracious, my great-grandmother, just like her food.
In contrast, my mom’s mother’s side—German-Bohemian farmers and dramatic, high-volume storytellers—seared their meat until it browned, and correspondingly, had tougher skins. “They’re funny—you know that,” my mom said, “but horsey.”
“Grandma told me the last time I was there,” I added. “ ‘Be fun, be lively! The last thing you want to be is a dud. Those people are THE WORST.’ ”
Addie Dion knew just when to throw a joke to take the edge off; her hard life had gifted her with perfect comic pitch. The eldest of seven girls, she quit high school to help her mom cook and raise her sisters, and was a widow with three young girls by the age of thirty. She was immensely capable and didn’t have time to waste on delicacy. While she could take notice of the sweetness in a shy person, over time she grew intolerant of introverts, of those who had to be drawn out slowly and coaxed to say what they wanted or needed. Unlike the Scandinavian reticence that made up the stereotypical Minnesota character, she was direct, often to fearless, comic effect. Like a good, fatty piece of bacon is said to have a streak of lean, my grandma had a bawdy streak of lewd, in that old-time way. Take, for instance, her greatest gag, the “Drinking Nuns.” A dozen found photographs reveal the premise: Mother Superior and her three daughters “Sister Joan, Sister Karen, and Sister Renee” in four perfectly rendered nun habits Addie had sewn, parked at a blackjack table in Vegas, heartily enjoying their first-ever brandy Manhattans. It was a serial bit, and they were loyal to their parts: just a few innocent nuns from Minnesota out on a ripper, “lifting a few.” Nothing was safe from her teasing, not even the almighty Catholic Church.
Sensitivity was not her strongest suit, however, and my mom, with her big expressive eyes, was easily the most sensitive of the bunch.
“What she means by that is ‘Have a good bar personality,’ ” my mom said, rolling her eyes. “Like she does.”
“Sometimes, even her food was coarse,” my mom said, “like those hard knoedel she always made.” Just like her personality, Addie Hesch Dion’s cooking was generous and full-throated—and sometimes even catch-in-the-throat.
The moral here was that the Germans, you see, were hard and coarse, just like their dumplings. The French, my mom’s father’s people, with whom she had a special kinship, were soft and benign, just like their sauces. My mom’s cooking, although heavily influenced by her mother’s German roots, also bore some resemblance to the little French-Canadian lady’s: her gravies were strong but pourable and shimmered faintly with a surface glitter of fat; her potato soup was not like the local version—thick as sandcrete—but instead more bisquelike, each floating potato distinct. When my mom ordered a creamy soup at the local diner, she also ordered a glass of milk to stir into the soup by the spoonful until it was thinned to her liking. When she moved in the kitchen, she slid as smoothly as Grandma Bertha, like a slow pinball.
“I always wanted to be a chef, you know,” she said.
“You did?” I was surprised. “Why didn’t you?”
“My mom said it would be too hard, that I wouldn’t be able to handle it,” she said quietly, sipping her wine. “But there was this program that sent you all the way to France! I brought the pamphlet home and my mom said, ‘Oh! You’d be way too scared to go to Europe.’ And so I didn’t go.”
It didn’t sound right to me. Even though I was as loyal to my mom as a serf, it was hard to imagine my adult self so blindly heeding her advice.
“So I became a teacher,” she said with a sigh, heaving over the lump of practicality. “And then a few years later I had you!” she finished brightly. “I couldn’t wait to quit my job and stay home and cook a big dinner every night.” I knew she was speaking the truth.
As the level in her glass dipped, the dumplings became harder, the sauces thinner, the men increasingly egregious, and the women saintlier.
—
One night my mom poured two glasses of wine: one for her and one for me. I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. It was unspoken: Once my mother started talking, we were French, like her father, and the French drink wine, apparently even the fifteen-year-old daughters. As we sat there eating popcorn, my mom flicking through her bowl in search of slightly burned old maids only partly exploded, me looking for the big, yellow-sopped buttery ones, we paged through catalogs. Then she said, “We should go to the mall in Fargo soon and stock up on any clothes you think you might need because I don’t know how much money we’ll have after this.” She was so flippant about it, so self-assured, that it couldn’t possibly be real. My mom was leaving my dad. I gathered up the clues in her tales of women wronged, her growing inventory of my father’s failings, and stored the bud of their impending divorce in its green, tough, unflowered state, hedonistically allowing myself to ignore it in order to grab on to what seemed essential at the time, the words mall and money. I was a teenager, my desperation for new jeans that tragic.
I remember the resulting trip to West Acres Mall feeling buoyant because we bought freely, but also heavier. Our usual order at the Country Kitchen—cups of thirteen-bean soup and a bran muffin, split—tasted denser, lined with doom.
One night soon after, my mom made boiled pork and sauerkraut for dinner, an assemblage that really deserved a better name. Even though she talked the talk about French food, her best dishes pulled from her mother’s German side. Scented with garlic, thyme, bay, and allspice, her pork roast—a muscular picnic cut—
simmered in tangy sauerkraut juices for four to five hours until it was as tender as tuna. It had the power to stir you deep down, in the way that only long-cooked pork can. I halved the baseball-size potato dumpling that had been poached in the pork broth, smeared butter on its firm ragged interior, and nibbled on the fluffy cloud edges. It was my favorite meal. I had three helpings.
My brothers and I did the dishes as always, and then our parents called a family meeting.
Matter-of-factly, my mom told us that she and our dad were separating. Dad was moving to the lake cabin, we were going to stay at the house in town—“for now,” she said ominously—and their divorce was likely. Large tears rolled out of my brother Bob’s round brown eyes. My youngest brother Marc’s face, a transparent superconductor of his every passing thought, projected shock and confusion. My dad didn’t look up. I was grateful that he didn’t make eye contact because I knew that my eyes would reveal that I already knew.
Suddenly the phone rang in my room, my own private line. I was a teenager—it rang all the time. In a move that I have regretted ever since, I walked away from the table and down the hall to answer it.
Even worse, I still went to play rehearsal that night. During the break, Cara asked me if I wanted to split a package of Gardetto’s pretzel mix from the vending machine, as was our nightly habit. I held my taut belly and told her I’d had three helpings at dinner that night and was way too full.
She said, “Again? Why’d you eat too much for dinner again?”