by Amy Thielen
Aaron built a fire in the woodstove in the center of the house and dropped a pile of snowy logs at my feet, on which I propped my boots to let them melt off. Outside, the sun was dropping. He lit an oil lamp, tinting everything orange. I shivered, not with cold but with the engrossing weirdness of the place. If I hadn’t known him and his family all my life I’d have thought I’d just entered a madman’s lair.
I looked up. The flat ceiling, fourteen feet up, was covered with overlapping pieces of rusty sheet metal (“the backside of old trailer house siding,” he said). The blotches of maroon, orange, black, and pink swirled into a surreal pattern like the one that forms on the back of your eyelids when you squint in the dark. The house was sided with rough board-and-batten, but the interior was made of shiny logs, which he explained were the extra slabs that he’d taken home from the mill, stripped of excess bark with an axe, varnished thickly, and nailed onto the walls to create a faux-log-cabin effect. Though he’d fully intended to put down a wood floor over the wide plank subfloor, he fell in love with the dirty patina the floor had taken on during the time he’d been working on it with his muddy work boots, and instead decided just to preserve its finish with four layers of heavy varnish. In the flickering firelight from the oil lamp, the dark pine boards shone like lacquered dry coffee in a forgotten cup.
Nearly every inch of space on the walls was filled with stuff: paintings, photos, iron tools, lake buoys, record covers, deer hides. Crude handmade wooden weapons hung ominously amid the sculptures and paintings. The tables held a granny’s menagerie of tchotchkes—trinkets, figurines, little glass boxes with taconite pellets, quirky old coasters, brooches, geodes, music boxes with yellowed gloves draped over them—a nice collection of everything you might have felt like buying in an antiques store but put back at the last minute. Each treasured knickknack held its own orderly slot. Everything wore a lacy shawl of dust.
The nearest electricity box was more than three miles away. He poured me a glass of water from the jug he’d brought in and explained that there was no running water, either, because the pump he’d attempted to pound in the kitchen had come up dry. And no phone. He laid the eggs and the bacon, the loaf of bread and the coffee on the kitchen butcher block. We were marooned, with just these resources. And yet it was the coziest place I’d ever been, like the fantasy house that children dream about as they sit in their forts, wishing them to come to life. Most adults forget about those places as they grow older, but not him.
We slept there that night, crawling the ladder to the loft bedroom. I pulled out the lace-up petticoat top I’d bought in a vintage store, which suddenly felt a little too historically accurate. My fantasy is out of the bag now, I thought, as I fastened the long line of pearly buttons and crawled into bed. Aaron piled the heavy quilts on high. When we turned off the oil lamp for the night the mice began to play a game of pinball in the rafters, and immediately Aaron corrected his mistake.
“I always play night music to drown out the mice,” he said as he went downstairs to put a Fritz Kreisler violin tape into the boom box. The high notes of the violin kicked in, swirling into the dark like a voice. We lay there, taking turns rolling over toward the window to look out at the soft drifts of moonlit snow.
Aaron said, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been afraid of the dark. I used to think it was a monster”—he held his arms up—“chasing me.”
“You’re not afraid now, are you?” I asked, a little scared myself.
“I’m starting to get over it,” he said. “It’s better with someone else out here.”
The next day when we were ready to go, we let the fire die down, shut the door, turned the latch, and hung the open padlock on it. As we walked back to the road in yesterday’s trampled footprints, I turned around. The loft window formed one eye and the window in the door another, making a crooked, lovable face. It was hard to believe we were going to leave the house out there all alone. It was already a character.
And although Aaron hates it when I say this—because it’s so sugary—when I looked back at the house, I thought its board-and-batten siding made it look just like the one on Little House on the Prairie, ladder to the sleeping loft and all.
—
A few months later, the long, record-breaking cold winter of 1997 came to a close. To celebrate the temperature’s rise to zero, we drove around with the car windows down. The sun was shining, and in an instant we were old-timers, happy, and constantly together.
I was graduating that spring but hadn’t yet formulated a plan. Many of my friends were moving to New York, and others were headed on to more school. I figured I’d work a year in Minneapolis, then probably go to grad school myself to become a professor. The English department felt more like home to me than any other place. I knew Aaron intended to keep making art and that he’d want to move back into his empty house in the woods that summer, but he was keeping his specific plans for the future close to his chest.
Then one day, as I was sitting on my bed reading The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein—a famously unreadable book, but one that effectively drills the dream of the pioneers into your head over the course of two thousand pages of repetitive nonsense—and Aaron was sitting in the wooden chair next to me, embroidering a tiny baby-quilt art piece with the logo for the fictional Two Inlets Knife and Gun Club, his absurdist ode to the rack-and-gun culture of our home, I started to cry, my tears projectile.
Aaron kneeled by my side, imploring me to tell him what was wrong. What was it that he had done?
“Nuh-thing!” I wailed. I didn’t know. Or I couldn’t say. I couldn’t see. I finally coughed it out, the words that hadn’t yet gone through the pipes of my brain but had been keeping me from breathing deeply.
“I wanna go up there!”
“You want to go up where?”
“I wanna move up to the house with you!”
“My house? In Two Inlets?” He was honestly shocked.
“Yes!” I shouted, wiping my face. I glared at him through puffy eyes. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
“I—I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d want to live up there.”
He looked at me, slumped on the bed, fully depleted and about as unvarnished as I’d ever been with him or anyone else. “All the guys up there told me that I’d never get a woman to live at my place,” he joked.
“Some guy says women can’t live in the woods and you believe them?”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t think it was really your thing. Honestly, I thought I’d have to build a rambler at the front of the road to get you to move there with me. The road is so long and terrible.”
“It’s terrible,” I agreed. “But I don’t care. I want to go up there.”
“You really want to live up there, sweetie?”
“Yes,” I exhaled. “I do.”
For some reason, going back felt like the very definition of moving forward.
I had said it: I wanted to go home. It was hard for me to admit, but moving away from my hometown two years short of my high school graduation had somehow messed with the flow of my natural exodus. The city, where I’d found the culture, the books, and the people I’d been looking for, wasn’t enough. I didn’t even like that damned town, and never thought I’d want to go back and live in it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d left something behind there that I needed to retrieve. Aaron, a post-high-school flight risk like myself, felt a similarly inexplicable urge to go back to the town to which he’d never expected to return. He didn’t put a name to it, and neither did I, but I could feel the energy of what pulled him.
Somehow in fusing our two minus-forces we had made a strong magnetic positive. The charge between the poles of our two homes—rural and urban—remained strong and tight with tension, setting our insane future migratory life together in motion.
11
ARE WE GOING TO BAKE THIS BREAD IN MY LIFETIME?
That spring, after we decided to move in together, I took Aaron to Pierz, my parents
’ hometown, to meet Grandma Dion.
Addie Dion, my mom’s mom, lived in a green rambler the color of lime Jell-O on a side street a block off Pierz’s Main Street. For years her sprawling backyard was taken up with an equally large garden, whose far edge reached the backside of Thielen Meats, the meat market and smokehouse owned by generations of Thielens on my paternal side. (As it often goes for two fated families in small towns, the path between doors was beaten well before the formal link took place.)
Like many a Midwestern house, Addie’s had a formal front entrance decorated with Catholic statuaries that no one ever used; the tiny side entrance into the kitchen received the heavy traffic. You walked in and pried off your boots in a precipitous two-foot-square foyer, walked up two steps into the bright yellow glow of the kitchen, right into the kitchen table wedged into an alcove. The move that felt most natural was to sit down, which most people did. I cannot recall that table without people stuffed around its perimeter, all talking, eating, and drinking in a liberated fashion, and its top was never bare.
Every opportunity to turn a plain day into a more delicious one was taken; my grandma took levity where she could get it. Losing her husband to leukemia left her with three daughters under the age of four, very little cash to sustain them, and no choice but to run an incredibly tight household ship. In a house where the loss of the father whispered in the corners, the food at the center of the table set everything right with the world. Her cooking was thrifty but extravagantly rich, heavy with meaning and flavor.
Whenever I arrived, Addie sent me to the cellarlike basement cold storage room for provisions. I pulled a jar of fermented pickles from the shelf, its zinc lid frosted with salt. My reach was short inside the ten-foot-long chest freezer, so I heaved my belly onto its edge to retrieve the frozen sugar cookies and foil-wrapped chunks of poppy-seed coffee cake—a little lost balance and I would have been interred in a giant coffin. She laid out these items with dishes of sliced ham, salami, herring, crackers, and cheese. And always in the middle of the snack chaos sat a fat square of butter from the Little Rock Creamery a few miles down the road. Waxy and dense and pale, it was “very lightly salted,” she liked to point out. It tasted just like the famous butter of Brittany.
Some nights she made beef soup with shaggy clumps of tender meat and tiny curled fists of tan natural wild rice, its broth as clear and brown as weak coffee. Or slabs of coppery-pink Thielen Meats ring bologna cut into pointed rounds and fried until the edges crisped sharply like a new penny. This peppery bologna wasn’t bouncy, wasn’t made from suspicious meat scraps like the stuff sold under the same name everywhere else. In fact, Uncle Keith insisted that it contained “nothing I wouldn’t eat,” and he’s a rib-eye-eating sort of butcher. It melted in our mouths.
When we had eaten all of it, she ran the heels of her homemade white potato bread through the oily pan juices. “Try this,” she ordered. “It’s what we girls on the farm used to call dip dee.” The bread, slubbed with ropy sausage juices, was transcendent. It was best followed up with a cleansing forkful of her paper-thin-cucumber salad, properly bludgeoned with freshly cracked black pepper and shivery with vinegar.
She delighted in all seasonal delicacies. When spring’s little silver fish ran in the freshwater streams out of Lake Superior, she was promptly in attendance at the smelt feed at Flicker’s Bar, the same bar in which she’d worked as a cocktail waitress as a young widow. The bar owners brought in the tiny fish by the pickup load and then had a party to get them ready: while drinking beer, the bar crew gutted thousands of fish and cut off their heads by the half dozen with an office paper cutter. Line ’em up and whish! Headless fish ready for their batter. It was exactly the kind of food theater that Addie loved.
—
Addie came from a time when cleaning and cooking were indivisible, and her housekeeping bordered on an overabundance of caution. If there was a bunch of pens in a drawer she would gather them together tightly with a rubber band, putting the kibosh on their potentially uproarious scattering. She repainted the walls in the house every year, just to “freshen them up.” In her garage, a tennis ball hung from a long string attached to a wooden rafter over a rectangular carpet sample, perfectly positioned so that when she inched her car into the garage she stopped when the tennis ball was hanging directly over the center of her car hood, at which point her gas tank would be directly above the carpet rectangle. Untold cement stains were prevented this way. Her rags—her rags—were bleached until the chemicals ate holes in the fabric.
It was the same story in the kitchen. She and my mom spoke reverently of the women who kept their houses so clean that “you could eat an egg cooked on their floors” and less so of others who were such pigs that anything they cooked “couldn’t be sanitary.” (“Soap is free,” Addie liked to add, a holdover from her farm upbringing.) It’s no wonder that the best bakery in the area was called the Sanitary Bakery. To me, the name brought to mind maxi pads rather than great doughnuts, but I got the point: Cleanliness was good. Sanitation was the goal. Add bleach and you had the triune god.
Beneath the veneer of her cleaning, Grandma Dion’s hospitality was a lot like my mom’s—aggressive, good-natured, and generous—but possibly a little more insistent. She was a bit of a food pusher, Grandma.
“Want some sauerkraut hotdish?” she’d ask, pointing to a layered casserole of noodles, ground beef, sauerkraut, and cheese. If you declined, she snorted with genuine shock. Despite the name, it was quite good. The rusty browned shoulders of ground beef bobbed in the sauce, and the lingering tartness of the kraut made the pads at your jaw shudder and tingle. Digging up a deep forkful made a rich sticky sound, as if the hotdish were taking a deep breath, and that sound was a comfort in itself. No one with any sliver of hunger inside them would rightly turn down her sauerkraut hotdish, which she often served to us kids to-go: in Dixie paper cups impaled with plastic forks. This she considered a snack, and we were strongly urged to take it.
She had a word for people who turned down food just because they weren’t particularly hungry, who denied themselves the pleasure of eating in the interest of keeping themselves fashionably bony: gemikli. It sounds like its definition. “You know, not thriving,” she’d say with a scornful smirk, “undernourished.” The implication was that people, especially women, who kept themselves thin didn’t know how to feed themselves, had no appetite for life, and, worse yet, were vain. The subtext here is that when you really know how to cook and to feed yourself, food is not your enemy.
Her behavioral code was forged during a time when “getting your fill” was an art, not a caution. This included drinking, too. Uptight she was not. If anything, she pretended to drink more than she actually did, just to foster a spirit of generosity and goodwill. Like a speck of dirt in her house, all excesses around her table were swiftly swept away. Temporary muck, nothing to worry about if you could function in the morning.
And that’s exactly what she was doing the morning after I brought Aaron to meet her: flipping strips of bacon stacked three deep in a cast-iron pan, calmly making breakfast like we hadn’t all been hanging out around her table until three in the morning. She was clanging things around to make noise, to let some of us know that she was already up and working. The sound of her whacking her spatula against the pan’s edge, along with the familiar scent of that bacon’s sharp smokiness, dragged me from sleep.
So did her voice. “Aaaay-meee…Are we going to make this bread in my lifetime?”
She was in her late seventies, so I got her point. I clomped down from the bed and stumbled across the hall to find Aaron. He was sleeping in what was known as “the green room,” for it was unspoken that we shouldn’t sleep together as we had for the previous year out of respect for the Catholic church I so rarely attended. I looked into his eyes. His face, against the backdrop of the foliage-printed drapery, was tinted limey. “Your skin looks green,” I said, my speech slow. “But maybe it’s just this room.”
“I don�
�t know, but you don’t look so good, either.”
“Holy shit, I have to go make bread now. I don’t think I can do it.” I fell backward next to him on the bed.
“Kidlets!” Addie barked sharply from the kitchen. “It is time to rise and meet the day! We have got to get this show on the road.”
“How can she be up? What time is it?” Aaron asked. We had been up half the night drinking with Addie and her boyfriend, Izzy. Tall and lean like Aaron, with a vintage-looking ivory forelock, Izzy was a retired salesman who had a stockpile of personalized freebies at the ready: pens, money clips, pads of paper. His positive energy was best described as rollicking, a whitecapped wave that spilled over to consume my grandma’s occasional dourness. Izzy’s high cheeks shone pinker every time he said, “Well, that is just wonderful!,” which was often.
At twenty-one, I had never been more in love with Addie and her larger-than-life outline, or with her ebullient Izzy, or with my own boyfriend, who had been willing to accompany me for what would be the final episode of my informal cooking training. Addie called these sessions “workshops” and in my early teens I had come to her house to learn how to make pie, and fermented pickles, and poppy-seed coffee cake—the most renowned things in her repertoire. Now I was here to make her white bread, for which she was not too shy to say that she’d earned the grand champion ribbon at the Minnesota State Fair when she was just a teenager, triumphantly beating out a bunch of outraged middle-aged women. I can’t say I wasn’t afraid of screwing up the bread. I knew that she wouldn’t let me off easy. Of her six grandchildren, she often reminded me, I was the only girl of the bunch.
At one point the night before, I had gotten up to change the record in her enormous turntable console. The last thing I remember clearly was cranking on the turntable’s arm to start the second side of Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits and feeling pretty sure that I had broken her record player. Then, somewhere in between the beers we’d cracked at happy hour and the brandy Manhattan nightcaps we’d sipped at the kitchen table, we had driven to the bar—which now, the next morning, I was starting to isolate as the moment we got into real trouble. After dinner, as my grandma and I did the dishes—she carefully washing, me drying every crevice in each crusty glass with a flour-sack towel that was simultaneously stiff, bleached with holes, and overly fabric-softened—Aaron, the human jukebox, played his guitar. He pulled out the old country hits he knew she and Izzy would like, his clear tenor bouncing around the linoleum kitchen and surrounding us until we felt like we were back in a rural dance hall in 1952. One of his own songs really fired Addie up. “I love the Ponsford life—I heard Marie—she was hollerin’ loud, she was just calling her dog’s name out—dumb dog got sprayed on the porch once again, when will that dog learn the skunk won’t give in.”