Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  It’s the official appraisal of our farm, and it arrived yesterday afternoon, Christmas Eve. According to the balding appraiser with the snow-ruined wing-tip shoes, our farmhouse, outbuildings, and land are worth $312,800.

  “Mom, is that really what a hobo is?” Luke asks.

  Nope, I think, there’s actually a little more to it than that. Because you can be a mother who lives in a house that’s apparently worth a small fortune, but if you still can’t offer your sons anything better than hot dogs for Christmas dinner, that can qualify you as a kind of hobo, too. Or at least make you feel like one.

  But of course I can’t say this to Luke.

  “Yeah,” I tell him instead. “Pretty much.”

  7

  January 2006

  WOLF MOON

  Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.

  —LORD BYRON

  Two weeks after Christmas, it begins. It’s late on a Monday morning and it starts with an ache buried real deep, somewhere along the axis that runs down my neck and in between my shoulder blades. In hours every muscle in my body feels worked over by the wrong end of a claw hammer. By the time Owen and Luke get home from school, just before four o’clock, I’m upstairs in my bedroom, in bed, fully clothed, shivering and sweating, under a wool comforter. I’ve slept most of the day and I’m still exhausted.

  The mortgage is two months overdue, but work is going to be missed, deadlines are going to be missed, assignments not turned in, invoices not sent.

  “Watch TV,” I mumble to the kids from somewhere deep in my pillow. This command is a bigger clue to them that something is amiss than the sight of me in bed in the middle of the day. They’ve seen me take a late-afternoon nap before, although not too often, but a directive that they turn on the idiot box in the afternoon on a school day? A Monday no less, just a couple of weeks after their holiday break with homework assignments galore? Pure craziness.

  The boys are not allowed to watch television or play video games during the week. When they were babies, they didn’t sit in front of any screens, at all, ever, not a one of them. We owned one television set, but it was stored on the floor in the closet. Reception never has been too good in there, which was exactly the point.

  I wanted my sons to do what I did as a kid—read books, climb trees, build forts, play kick-the-can, and skin their knees sliding into second—not spend their childhoods in front of a screen.

  Our TV was eventually dusted off and brought out into the open for one reason and one reason only: so that I could watch football. (If I’m ever given one of those questionnaires that ask me to reveal something about myself that few people know, I’d put down “rabid Detroit Lions fan.” Someday we will be in the Super Bowl. And win.)

  After football season, the idiot box stayed out of the closet and was eventually hooked up to basic cable. Owen and Luke were in elementary school by then, and Will was in preschool, but the boys were allowed to watch only a limited amount of television (an hour per day), and even then only on the weekends.

  So of course they are stunned when today I’m actually telling them to turn the thing on. Usually when they get home from school I’m prompting them toward, first, a snack, then their homework, then music practice, then their chores, then, if there’s time, going out to play. If it’s bad weather, they can read a book, play a board game, bake with me, or do a craft project.

  In their defense, when I tell them to go watch TV, they do seem a little worried about me; yet they still can’t believe their luck and waste no time thundering down the stairs, running into the family room, and body-slamming each other for the remote. Will won’t be home for another hour, so it’s just the two of them. I don’t actually see any of this activity, I only hear it, because I can’t move from the warm magnet that is my bed.

  So what, I rationalize, as my eyelids begin to latch themselves shut again. So they’ll watch some Dragon Ball Z or Captain Planet for a couple of hours. Just this one time. How bad can that really be? I know they’ve watched these programs at their friends’ houses, and they don’t seem any worse for wear afterward.

  But just as I’m about to fold back into my influenza coma, the sound of deviant stoner cartoon laughter filters upstairs and into my fading consciousness, now located in some distant land between my twin earaches. Through the mung I hear two TV voices chortle and then have an exchange along these lines:

  “Uh, I have an injury. Huh-huh-huh.”

  “You do? Heh-heh.”

  “Yeah, I have this great big crack in my butt. Eh-heh-heh.”

  My two older sons are fifteen and thirteen now. And their virgin ears have just been breached by MTV’s couch-sitting anti-heroes, Beavis and Butt-head. Or, if you prefer, “Ass-munch” and “Bung-hole.” Help me, Jesus.

  I don’t have the energy to halt this or even comment on it, and after I register what they’re watching, I fall back asleep. Was this objectionable program still on the TV when Will, who turned nine right after Christmas, came home an hour later? Who knows.

  Did I fix them any dinner? Probably not, and the next several days pass with me in feverish suspension, not awake but not asleep, either. What do they eat? How do they get ready for school? Who helps them with their homework? I don’t know.

  I have one memory of standing at the front window in sweatpants, watching Will stand at the bus stop, in the dark, in a snowstorm, alone. I see the bus slow to a stop, the light go on inside the bus as the hinged door opens, I see Will’s backlit form walking up the steps out of the swirling snow and into safety, and then I collapse on the couch for the rest of that day and maybe for the next one, too.

  I know Will doesn’t miss a single hour of school the whole ten days I am sick, because he receives an award for being one of only two kids in his entire elementary school of more than three hundred students with perfect attendance. How did he manage this? How did his brothers? I don’t know.

  By luck, the flu strikes when their father and I have switched weekends, and so the boys are here with me for two weeks straight. They bring glasses of water and juice upstairs and stand watch while I drink them. Owen makes me a cheese sandwich, which I can’t even think of eating, and Will brings me a sweaty handful of Fritos. He knows they are my favorite. In another life I could eat half a bag. I eat two, maybe three chips.

  CNN must be on, because I hear recurring headlines that nauseate me further: if we are headed for a recession, Michigan will feel it earlier, deeper, and longer than the rest of the country; Ford is closing fourteen auto plants and cutting a quarter of its Michigan workforce; and mad cow disease is spreading through Canada, perhaps heading our way.

  Is there such a thing as mad pig disease? I consider the last shankburger from Rocky that I ate—was it too rare?—before I fall asleep again.

  The flu bug keeps right on biting me through the weekend, unabated. I am too sick to even wonder what I’ve been infected with after that contaminated-meat headline fades. Later I will learn that I don’t have food poisoning, I have a virus. And I will eventually understand that virus’s probable ancestry when its spread becomes the medical story of the moment.

  In September a teenage boy butchered pigs at a slaughterhouse in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, some ninety miles southwest and across Lake Michigan from my sweaty bedroom. I can see a bay of this very body of water out the window from the sickbed I’ve taken to. The Wisconsin pig slaughterer is stricken with a bad flu virus, later found to be unlike any ever before encountered by medical science—a mutation of the swine flu—and I’m pretty sure this microscopic freeloader migrated—yes, maybe even flew—its evil piggy self across the water and into what feels like every single one of my cells.

  How is it that a bout with the flu can take me down so completely?

  I can do pain. I’m actually the stuff of extended family legend where pain tolerance is concerned. After Will was born via emergency C-section, a nurse on duty in the maternity ward overlooked that teensy-weensy detail called an IV
drip. For the first eight hours after surgery, my nervous system was flying commando. No fluids, no anti-inflammatories, no pain meds at all, not even a baby aspirin. It wasn’t until the nurse on duty the day after my surgery noticed that I didn’t have an IV and opened a drawer in the cabinet next to my bed and found my unused bag of new-mommy drugs inside that I knew something was amiss.

  I just had my core sliced open from hip to hip, pain was to be expected, right? I just ground my teeth and bore it. I didn’t complain, I kept my dobbers up. But this flu is even worse than that and it is taking me down.

  The boys keep me in fluids and Tylenol, bless their beating hearts, and somehow keep themselves fed, dressed, and in school. One night Will comes upstairs and reads me a chapter of the book I was reading to him before I got sick. The lost china rabbit is now in the care of a girl with a mean father and a bad cough.

  Another night Luke stands at the foot of my bed and models the costume he made for history day at school. He is going as Albert Einstein, of course. He uses a fuzzy gray hat of mine for the hair and is wearing a white button-down shirt and the black dress pants he grew out of last year that I was saving to hand down to Will. I point at his naked ankles sticking out of his leather dress shoes. Apparently, even in January, one does not need socks to understand the structure of the universe. Einstein didn’t believe in time and it looks like he didn’t believe in socks, either.

  “That’s why I chose him,” Luke says. “I don’t have any clean ones.”

  I still have plenty of the laundry detergent from the box of domestic supplies my mother gave me for Christmas. Just no strength to do any laundry.

  The boys ask no one for help. The Link motto of accountability, of dobbers up, head down, soldier on, has obviously been passed down to them. By late Monday, a full week into my flu, the three of them can’t keep us going alone any longer, and Owen wakes me up in the middle of the night.

  “Mom,” he says, pressing his hand on my arm. I feel his presence, but am slow on the uptake. “Mom!” he says again, shaking me now.

  I wake up thinking, Is something on fire? Did the horses get out? Burglar?

  These are just sleep-drugged worries that have no truck with reality. There is no fire; there are no horses, not anymore; and burglar—are you kidding me? What do we have to steal? Not a darn thing. Rifling through these thoughts, I finally make sleepy eye contact with my oldest.

  “We’re out of food,” he says.

  I can’t figure out why Owen wants to eat in the middle of the night. I look at the clock. It’s not the middle of the night after all, it’s only 8:30 in the evening. It just feels like the middle of the night because it’s dark outside and I’ve lost all sense of time. My arms and legs feel like lake-sunk trees, my head a stuffy, waterlogged bowling ball sunk in sheets awash in my own chilly sweat.

  At least the fever broke. The smell makes me think that maybe I can do laundry, after all.

  “We’re out of milk, we don’t have any cereal or cheese or apples or anything,” he tells me.

  “Nothing?” I mumble through chapped lips.

  He shakes his head.

  “When did you guys eat?”

  “At school, and then when we got home we had macaroni and cheese. I microwaved it.”

  “Hungry?” I ask. He nods.

  Owen sits down on the edge of the bed and waits while I gather my resolve, which takes a long time considering there’s not too much of it to round up.

  “I can drive if you guys can shop,” I tell him.

  Help, I think. I need some help.

  But I make it to the driver’s seat of our van with my winter coat and boots slipped on over my sour-smelling pajamas. The fever is definitely gone, so are the earaches and the sore throat, I’m just weak. In my coat pocket is our last sixty-five dollars. I won’t get paid for another ten days and not at all if I don’t start churning out some work. That sixty-five dollars has to last us until then.

  I don’t want to waste any energy making a list, so on the drive to the grocery store I tell my sons what to buy and Owen writes it down.

  A gallon of 2 percent milk.

  Two boxes of cereal, their choice.

  Fruit, yogurt, juice.

  A can of lentil soup, I think I could eat that.

  Peanut butter, cheese, eggs, tortillas, hummus.

  Maybe some more Fritos, if there’s enough money.

  Owen is sitting in the passenger seat, and I put the money in his hand. “Don’t go over, because this is all we’ve got,” I tell him weakly. He nods.

  He can’t come back to the van to get more money, because we don’t have any more. I can’t just write a check if he goes over, because it will bounce. I can’t transfer money from savings to checking, because there is no savings.

  I park right in front of the store, driving over the words “No Parking—Fire Lane,” and turn off the ignition to save gas. Just driving here has exhausted me, and I hope I’ll have enough energy to get us home. Owen doesn’t have his license yet and isn’t supposed to drive with just his temporary permit after dark.

  “I’ll be right here,” I say to Owen, then turn to Luke and Will in the backseat. “Boys, listen to your brother. He’s in charge. No arguing in the store, no goofing around. Say thank you to the cashier. Don’t forget.”

  “It’ll be good, Mom,” Owen reassures me as they all three solemnly exit the van. “It’ll be fine.”

  The grocery store has large glass windows all along the front, and I watch as Owen gets a shopping cart and his brothers take their posts, one at each of his shoulders.

  They’ve shopped with me many times before, all three of them, and I’ve sent the two older boys into the corner store together to pick up one or two items while I wait in the minivan, but I’ve never asked them to do this. I’ve never asked them to shop like adults—to go through the whole store with a cart and a set amount of money and select several days’ worth of groceries all alone, and then to pay for them and carry them out of the store and load them in the van by themselves.

  I know that my SMILE handbook lists the top five ways that parents can help their children adjust to divorce, because I’ve practically memorized them by now. This is number one: “A parent should not depend on their children for emotional support. Children need to be children.”

  I so want to be that mother, the one SMILE holds out as the ideal. Yet often, like now, I find myself doing the exact opposite of her, and I know it.

  Over the next half hour the car grows cold and I ache and shiver as I catch glimpses of my trio inside the store, making their way from aisle to aisle. Children may need to be children, but in these brief sightings, they don’t look like children to me anymore, they look like small, skinny adults. Something in the way they hold themselves. The way they walk straight ahead, no wiggling, no wasted motion.

  I’ve been sick for eight days, and at some point during each one of those I asked for help, but I’ve asked for it mostly silently, so no one can hear me. Twice, though, I’ve asked for it out loud.

  I called a friend and told her I was sick and probably dehydrated and she drove over and left a two-liter of 7Up on my front porch but didn’t come inside—she has small children of her own, one just two years old, and didn’t want them to get sick, too.

  I called a doctor, but it was on the weekend, he was an on-call physician and not my regular doctor, and he chastised me a good one for waiting too long to ask for help. He was sure I had a new and particularly severe strain of flu, but it was too late for him to do anything for me. If I’d called sooner, then maybe he could have helped. “Now,” he tells me, in a sovereign tone, “you’re just going to have to suffer through.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, Ass-munch.

  There is no one else. My friend Beverly is gone on a mission trip to Africa, so I can’t call her to come help us. Another friend, Linda, is working 24/7, plus she doesn’t drive in the winter anymore, after a harrowing near miss with a snowplow. My paren
ts live 150 miles away. My brother and his new girlfriend are who knows where, doing who knows what. I don’t have many neighbors, and the few I do have I either don’t know or don’t like.

  And then, this final realization hits me hard: for all my spiritual searching over the past several months through a mysterious Eastern religion, looking for some fuzzy thing I’ve been thinking of as my divine nature, we don’t even have a regular old midwestern Protestant church with a real building and real people to go to and ask for real help.

  It occurs to me too, watching my boys push the half-full shopping cart up to the cashier’s lane and load each item onto the conveyor belt, that they’re not much for asking for help, either. Not a one of them. This, I know from my own stubborn self, will yield both rewards and consequences in their grown-up lives. And there’s probably nothing I can do to spare them the latter. No one could have spared me.

  The grocery store’s automatic air lock door swooshes open, I turn the minivan’s engine back on, and out come my sons, my heroes, small, medium, and large, loaded down with bags of provisions. In an evenly spaced line all three totter under their burdens single-file, past the front of the minivan, jogging through my headlight beams.

  I have this piece of a memory then. Once a long time ago, before kids, before a husband, I drove into the parking lot of an apartment complex at night, my headlights sweeping over parked cars, snowed-over front steps, and lighted windows with the drapes closed. I don’t even remember where it was or why I was there. Out from between two of the buildings came three adolescent raccoons tiptoeing through the night, treats in their humanoid front paws no doubt pilfered from a nearby Dumpster. Snowdrifts shone, tiny stars lit the night, and the very air glittered in the cold. For a few quiet minutes no one but those raccoons and I were in the world.

  I put the car in park and watched as the young furry bandits walked a few steps past my headlights single-file, little bodies up on their hind legs, black hands clutching the food to their chests. From around the corner of the building came the mother raccoon, sniffing the air and greeting each cub nose-to-nose. The four of them ate together right there in the cold starlight, then she took her place at the front of the line and led her brood off into some scraggly nearby woods and they disappeared from my sight.