Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  This month is just full of firsts. I attend my first PTA meeting, Owen plays with his band in front of a live audience, a man on a motorcycle invites me to a biker bar, and my happy family of four enjoys a breakfast of pancakes and belly bacon. With the exception of that PTA meeting, these new experiences have all turned out surprisingly well.

  This optimistic mind-set is mine when I look in my freezer and see all that meat, tucked safely away in white butcher paper, just waiting to satisfy our winter appetites. Today the temperature did not get above forty degrees, and when I went outside to pick the last of the green beans the heavy air smelled like snow. It’s only October, but the wheel is turning and winter is coming. In years past, I always thought of November through April as ski season, snowman-building season, and holiday-decorating season. This year I’m just trusting it’s not going to be hungry season, and I have our vegetable garden and Rocky to thank for that.

  Belly bacon cooks up like regular bacon, it just has even more fat. But to learn how to prepare the other cuts of pork when the time comes, I turn to a 1950 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, a hand-me-down from my German grandmother, my father’s mother, Florence Link. Grandma Link died a few years ago, several months past her hundredth birthday, but oh, the stories of meat preparation she could tell!

  In her self-reliant heyday, Grandma Link made blood sausage, head cheese, boiled tongue, and pickled pig’s feet as the Depression felled her neighbors and took their farms. Frying up some of our side pork or belly bacon would have been as common to her as flipping a sausage patty is for me.

  I open up her cookbook to the section marked “Meat-Stretchers,” and I believe that this red binder of culinary secrets is a direct line to her frugal kitchen. Just think of all the savory dinners I’ll cook for just pennies a plate!

  An important consideration, because though their father and I have yet to agree on either a custody schedule or whether he will pay any child support, I’m figuring on a best case/worst case scenario: that the boys will spend most of their time with me and that financial support for that will be negligible. I flip through the meat-stretching recipes—Meat Patties with Tomato Sauce, Scotch Scallops, Beef Éclat—when my eyes come to rest on a featured recipe for something called Emergency Steak.

  In order to make this dollar-stretching delicacy, the home cook has only to mix together 1 lb. of ground pork, 1 tsp. minced onion, ½ cup milk, 1 tsp. salt, ¼ tsp. pepper, and 1 cup Wheaties cereal. This meat batter is then placed on a lightly greased pan and, in the big finish, “patted into the shape of a T-bone steak. Strips of carrot may be inserted to resemble the bone. Broil, serve hot … immediately.”

  Emergency Steak is not something you’d want to eat lukewarm, I’d wager.

  The boys and I are not facing this kind of meat emergency—at least not yet, and hopefully not ever. Mr. Wonderful and I have an appointment with the court social worker to discuss how he is going to support the boys. Regardless of what the court decides about that, I am still going to feed my sons well. The carnivores, the omnivores, and the veggie-vore, too. And I refuse to subject a single shaving of our open-pollinated, lovingly grown heirloom Scarlet Nantes carrots to any meat emergency.

  Owen can eat our carrots, and all our other garden veggies, however he wants to, whether raw, cooked, or stir-fried. Luke, Will, and I plan on baked ham, pork chops, and of course, belly bacon.

  · · ·

  “When Mardi sells the house, she’ll be in a much better position. Financially at least.”

  I tuck my wool skirt under my behind with my clammy hand and sit down in the social worker’s office. We are at our Friend of the Court appointment, and it took me forever first to find a skirt and then to iron it and I’m a few minutes late. When I arrive, Mr. Wonderful stops talking and looks at me, his mouth bolted down in disappointment.

  I’ve long been a disappointment to him, I think—too stubborn, too opinionated, too much—and with this revelation I feel something new: sympathy. For what he must be going through, for how much he is probably missing the boys, for his own loneliness. Seeing me like this—scraggly, out of breath, mismatched, and late—can’t be a real picnic for him, either.

  All men surely want a wife they are proud of. He obviously didn’t get one.

  But Mr. Wonderful keeps right on talking as if I weren’t even in the room. It takes me a minute to adjust, but then I understand that, incredibly, he’s talking about selling our farmhouse. He’s laying out his opinion to the social worker on what he thinks is a reasonable fate for our sons, a reasonable fate for our money, and, in a move I didn’t anticipate, a reasonable fate for our farmhouse, too. It makes the most sense to cut his losses, he says, and just sell the place off.

  I stare at him openly, but I’m too shocked to say anything. This is the first I’ve heard a word about selling the Big Valley. That would be impossible. Where would the boys and I go?

  The four of us leaving our garden and our zucchini patch and Major’s memory and our farmhouse is unthinkable, and I feel my brain start to boil. I pay the bills, I feed the dogs, I water the garden, I clean his leftover junk out of the garage, and I climb down into the well pit with a flashlight to jiggle the pump wire when it shorts out. I make sure our boys still have one stable thing in their life: their house.

  But half the Big Valley still belongs to him. He’s not going to relinquish that half to me just because the boys and I have been caring for it by ourselves for a few months. This is what penetrates my naive Rebecca of Sunnybrook brain stem as I turn to face the bearded social worker.

  “But we have an agreement,” I say, concentrating hard on keeping my wrath at bay. From my wealth of past experience in conflicts with the opposite sex, I do know that irate women fare poorly in arguments with logical-sounding men.

  “Let’s take a look at it,” the social worker says, his beard bobbing up and down when he speaks, “and we’ll just see if it meets the standard guidelines.”

  Regardless of the agreement that their father and I have worked out, the default arrangement for two working parents who divorce is still for their children to spend one week with one parent, and the next week with the other parent. This arrangement is called “week on, week off.” I have overheard mothers at the boys’ schools use this term, and it sounded like “weak on, weak off.” And I know that I cannot, will not, be weak.

  Without my sons I won’t even need the farmhouse, because I will die. I will die if I have to be without them for a week, and then another week, and then another. No blood, no guts, and no mess, I will simply sit down again in my flowered chair and cease. Although the mission of the Friend of the Court is to protect children, I look around this social worker’s claustrophobic office and know that I am here for one single, selfish reason: to save my own life.

  The Friend of the Court encourages divorcing parents to work out a custody arrangement themselves, and though Mr. Wonderful wanted week on, week off and I wanted him to volunteer for the first manned space mission to Mars, we have managed to compromise. He will have regular “parenting time,” but the boys will live mostly with me. This is our agreement, but the social worker still has to put his okay on the schedule.

  I unfold the paper and hand it over. The social worker, the Beard, smooths out the creases, reads through it quickly, and then turns to his computer. Typing away, he tells us that we are only one of his nearly six hundred cases and that if all goes well today, we will never meet with him again. That is his goal.

  And this is the first thing he’s said yet today that I understand. Because I don’t belong here, in these clothes, in this room, or with these men. I belong back on the Big Valley, waiting for my kids to come home from school. I belong in the garden, or in the kitchen, opening a package of our own ham, thawing sweet corn, and cooking them a good dinner.

  Mr. Wonderful is leaning in his chair, tipping it back, and his arms are crossed behind his head, making his sweatshirt ride up. His pale belly reveals too much and I have
to look away, but not before I feel real regret for our sons. What noble boys they are, in spite of their parents’ bickering. I wish I were bold enough to kneel down on the floor in my skirt and grab the chair legs and yank his world right out from underneath him.

  Is this what a “good mother” thinks about? Probably not. I look over at my husband. He looks calm. Rational. And not at all like he is plotting any such thing against me.

  The social worker’s computer is loaded with a software program called Prognosticator 19.0, and all he has to do is key in the variables—number and ages of the minor children, income and monthly expenses of the mother, income and monthly expenses of the father, custody schedule—and his computer does the figuring. There is actually an algorithm for lives like ours. Who gets whom, and what, and where, is calculated not by this man’s supposed savvy about parent-child relationships, or by the reason for our divorce in the first place, but rather by a mathematical formula.

  The printer prints and the social worker hands us copies of paperwork that we are expected to read, agree to, and sign, right here, right now. And I try to read through it, but the text blurs and all I see is: “This case has been calculated with the mother as head of household and having primary physical custody.”

  No weak on, weak off, not for my sons. They may be spending time at two houses now, but when they say “home,” they’ll mean the same place they’ve always called home. They’ll mean my house. And just as quickly as they appeared, all thoughts of chair tipping evaporate.

  Mr. Wonderful is looking at the paper and frowning so hard his eyebrows almost meet up with his bunched-up lips. He leans forward and the front chair legs bump back onto the carpet. Leveled, he flips the paper over, then flips it back again. I look at the paper again too and see the amount of child support he is supposed to pay. It is a lot.

  Then the Beard pulls open his desk drawer, reaches inside, grabs two ink pens, and slides them across his desk in a V toward us.

  “This is too much,” I say, ignoring the pen assigned to me.

  “What?” asks the Beard.

  “This is too much money.”

  The Beard looks at Mr. Wonderful and Mr. Wonderful looks at me.

  “She’s right,” Mr. Wonderful says, nodding. “She doesn’t need all this. I’m telling you, all she’s gotta do is sell the house and everything will be fine.”

  “This is, ah, highly unusual,” the Beard says, after a pause. “We don’t recommend deviating from the formula.”

  Deviating from the formula, I almost shout, has become our modus operandi. Our habit, our practice, our way, practically our religion. But I stay silent on this and instead, say I’ll take less. A lot less. A decision that will echo over the cold wood floors, and bounce around our empty refrigerator, and infect my credit rating in the months to come, but one I make in all earnestness now.

  I want my husband to be able to recover from this. Emotionally, but financially, too. And what the Prognosticator is suggesting is a fortune by my standards. By Mr. Wonderful’s, too. There’s no way he can afford to pay me that much, pay his rent on the house across the street, and pay his other bills. I’m the one who wanted the divorce, and so I can’t ask him to pay me that much money every month. If I did, he’d go broke for sure.

  Plus, I know that if he has to pay me that much money every month, he’ll ask for more time with our boys. I do want them to have a relationship with their father. I just don’t want to give up even one more minute with them than is absolutely necessary for that to happen.

  And maybe this is all my fault. Maybe without me around, he would be able to move on, be happy, perk up. Maybe it’s me that’s been bringing him down and not those dipping serotonin levels.

  “I’m good with that,” Mr. Wonderful says, grabbing the pen.

  The fate of the farm will depend on what we can work out with our lawyers. The property and the farmhouse will have to be appraised. If they’re sold, we’ll split the proceeds that remain after the mortgage is paid off. If I keep them, I’ll have to refinance and get a mortgage in my name only.

  “We know a good realtor,” Mr. Wonderful says, putting down the pen, slapping his thighs with both hands, then standing up and shaking the social worker’s hand. He is still convinced that I’m going to sell the farm. He’s wrong.

  I stand up, smooth my skirt, and smile at both of these men. I have my boys. My boys. I have to grit my teeth just to keep from yelling it out loud.

  5

  November 2005

  FROST MOON

  May we all be fortunate enough to have a path shown us by the universe, and may we all have the courage to follow it. Enlightenment need not arrive all at once straddling a bolt of lightning … It might come in small packages as moonlight reflected in the frost of a cold November morning.

  —DANNY SWICEGOOD, How We Are Called

  The boys eat cereal for breakfast at the kitchen counter on a chilly Saturday morning, wearing their winter coats over their pajamas. I can see my breath inside our house, and the gas bill reads, “Past Due Amount: $279.00.”

  I’ve been so focused on feeding us over the winter that I haven’t given enough thought to how we’re going to stay warm. We have a perfectly good furnace; I thought we’d just use that—until I saw what heat costs. I should have listened to the Prognosticator.

  When I was my sons’ ages, heat was never a problem. I remember being so warm as a girl. As if there were a tiny furnace inside of me, generating just the right amount of heat in my body regardless of what the elements were doing outside of it.

  There I am, decades ago in my burnt-orange bathing suit, diving off the end of my grandparents’ dock, over and over again.

  The sun is starting to go down and all the other kids are on shore shivering. My brother and my cousins are trembling inside their beach towels, but mine sits folded on the dock and I don’t even feel the cold. The lake is mine.

  I put my palms together, point them toward the dark and unknowable center of the earth, and dive. My arms are pale, freckled, stick-thin. But underwater, they are ablaze.

  “C’mon, Mard, right now. It’s time to go up. It’s getting dark.”

  My mother is only momentarily exasperated. She’s proud of me, I know, because she was a girl raised among boys too, once. She knows the singular joy of outlasting them. Of outswimming them, of outrunning them, of outthrowing them, and of hitting a baseball so hard they can’t catch it.

  I pull myself onto the dock, stand up dripping, and my mother leads us on our walk up the steep hill to our grandparents’ house. I’m right behind her, pine needles sticking to the undersides of my bare feet. “Warm as bathwater,” I say over my shoulder to the shivering boys, my towel draped over my arm.

  Soon enough the image is gone and I’m right back to our gas bill. “To Avoid Shutoff Send Payment Immediately.” And then the company tagline at the bottom of the bill: “Comfort and Efficiency for $3 a Day!” Only a couple of bucks for heat. That seems completely doable. And yet I have fallen behind even on this.

  Our clothes dryer, our hot-water heater, and our ancient furnace all run on natural gas. I’ve set the furnace at fifty-five degrees; just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. We can hang clothes out on the line even in winter and they will eventually dry. I’ve encouraged the boys to take showers at school after gym class whenever they can. If we need hot water for other things, we can boil it on the electric stove, but we are going to need an alternate source for heat.

  Please God, help me think of something.

  This should not be an insurmountable problem. Humans have been figuring out ways to keep themselves warm for thousands of years. I am an educated adult woman in possession of a perfectly good journalism degree, and I should be able to figure it out, too.

  The three boys put their cereal bowls in the sink, put on their winter gloves, and head for the TV in the family room and Saturday-morning cartoons.

  I burn the heat bill in the fireplace and watch the e
xclamation point turn to ash. Alternatives. I need alternatives and I need them now. The tiny furnace inside of me isn’t enough today, and even though my sons don’t complain, I know they are cold.

  The worst part? It’s only the middle of November. Winter hasn’t even started yet.

  By afternoon the sun is out and the temperature climbs to almost sixty degrees. If you don’t like Michigan’s weather, the saying goes, just wait a minute. And if I don’t like whatever problem is confronting me, I can just wait a minute for that to change, too. A new one is bound to be along shortly.

  This is an unusually warm day for this late in the season, but not unheard of, and so I know it’s not an answer to my prayer, it’s just a temporary reprieve. Still, I might as well take advantage.

  I open up all of the windows in the house, because it is actually warmer outside than it is inside. The boys must be getting used to me doing things that go against convention, because while they watch me, and Will even runs to help, they don’t bother to comment.

  I hear Will’s feet pound up the stairs and then the sound of the ancient double-hung windows creaking open in the upstairs bedrooms.

  “Mom! There’s a butterfly stuck in here!” he yells from his room.

  “Open the screen and let it out,” I answer back, without even thinking.

  I have this sudden image then of my youngest son tumbling out of his second-story bedroom window and falling to the ground while an oblivious yellow butterfly pulses upward, and I’m taking the stairs two at a time. I arrive in Will’s room just in time to see a dusty brown moth, the kind that eats sweaters, escape out of the corner of the window where he’s loosened the screen just an inch.

  “I saved it,” he says, smiling.

  Another catastrophe averted.