Bob’s Side
Earlier in the spring, Bob led a march to protest the military-industrial complex. The march ended with Bob standing on the roof of the Stanford Research Institute. Later that week, the dean of admissions pronounced that no Hagen relative or progeny would ever attend Stanford again. As though it matters what a dean of admissions thinks. Bob knows a revolution is coming. When he gets back to California, he’s going to enlist in the Army and volunteer to be sent to the Vietnam War so he can take the operation down from the inside.
Bob wonders if he should be fishing. It’s bourgeois, or at least the way it’s practiced in this family. On the other hand, he is soothed by the familiar feel of his waders, the pull of the river rushing past.
Hawaii
Spring break of her senior year in high school, Chrissy takes a trip to Hawaii with her parents. Ann and Bob have never gone and they are bitter about her trip, which is satisfying. The Hagens are traveling with the Taylors, including their two boys James and Bill, and the dentist Dr. Kirkshank and his wife. After they spend a few days in Oahu they’re flying to Maui. The first night at the hotel on Waikiki Beach, Chrissy opens her windows to feel the ocean breezes while she sleeps. She’s a bit hot and itchy from the bad sunburn she got that afternoon, but she’s just gotten her braces off and the vacation stretches before her.
The next morning, Chrissy, Bill and James walk down the beach to the Royal Hawaiian, a massive old pink hotel where they’ve heard they can rent surfboards from the concession stand, a little Tiki hut. The guy who runs the place is a real surfer, gorgeously tanned. Chrissy smiles, feeling especially glad the braces are gone.
“You have to bring your board back here or you’ll lose your deposit,” he says.
She carries her board into the crashing waves. It is hard work getting out past the breakers, but Chrissy hasn’t been swimming her whole life for nothing. She watches the locals survey the waves coming in. She’s bodysurfed before, so she knows how it feels when a wave is right, how the power of the water surges the body forward onto shore.
Chrissy squints her eyes as she catches sight of a big wave. She paddles in front of it, feels the wave pick up the surfboard and then she scrambles upright. For a few glorious seconds she stands on her board before she falls back, launching the board away from her. She kicks to the surface, scans the waves for her board and when she spots it, swims for it.
“Look out, look out!” she hears. She turns around and James Taylor’s surfboard whacks her right in the face. She swims in, her head pounding. When she reaches the beach she pauses to examine herself. Her teeth feel wrong and her lip is split from the inside to the outside.
“You’ve gotta bring your own surfboard in!” yells the attendant from the surfboard concession. Chrissy heads back to the hotel, unable to worry about him or the stupid surfboard. She tries to hold her teeth in her mouth but doesn’t wipe away the blood as it gushes out.
Bill follows behind Chrissy. “We shouldn’t say that James was the one who hit you, we’ll say it’s a stranger,” he says. This seems right. This will go better if there’s no one single person to blame, and even though Chrissy is the one injured, she can see that she might be accused of bringing this on herself for being such a risk-taker. Chrissy finds the adults in the hotel restaurant having lunch. The Doctor’s Wife leaps up.
“She got hit by somebody’s surfboard,” Bill Taylor explains.
“Were you knocked unconscious?” the Doctor asks.
Chrissy shakes her head no.
“Let me see your mouth,” Dr. Kirkshank says.
She shakes her head again.
“I can’t do anything unless we can see.”
Chrissy opens. Dr. Kirkshank pushes the loose teeth back into position. She’d like to scream, but his fingers are in the way, and all she can manage is a strangled kind of noise.
“I’ve got to stitch your lip up, but I need to get Novocain first,” the Doctor says.
“Just do it now,” Chrissy says, garbling the words. “It hurts so bad anyway.”
“No, I need Novocain.”
Chrissy holds ice to her lip while he’s gone. It’s a Sunday and it takes two hours for the Doctor to find an open pharmacy. Her sunburn from the day before suddenly becomes worse. She looks like a horrible monster, she can feel it. She won’t be able to meet any boys. She won’t even be able to chew the sweet pineapple she’s been promised.
The Garden
The summer after her freshman year at Whitman College, Chrissy becomes Petrea. The Doctor’s Wife understands why she’d want to make the change. Petrea is her given name. It sounds more grown-up.
Also that summer, what was once the swamp across the road becomes the garden. The Doctor’s Wife and her husband turn the lot over with pitchforks until their hands blister. They add fertilizer, install a spigot for water. Cottonwood trees at the back of the property shield the garden from the view and sound of the Vernon Road. They raise peas, beets, onions, potatoes. Green beans and cucumbers are eaten fresh or put up in a spicy brine. They grow tomatoes, corn. The corn you can eat right from the stalk, raw in the garden.
Pronouncement
“I will too marry a black man if I want to!” Petrea yells at the conclusion of a debate with her father, loud enough for everyone else in the Golden Temple Chinese Restaurant to hear. The Doctor’s Wife and her husband have always tried to encourage civic engagement and interest in the political questions of the day, so in one way you could say they are to blame.
In Law
“Are you a Marxist or a Maoist?” is the very first thing Bob says to Ann’s fiancé, Carlos. It’s 1972 and all the younger men wear mustaches. Bob’s is blond and Carlos’s mustache is black. Carlos is from El Paso, Texas. One side of his family is from Mexico and the other has been in New Mexico for four hundred years. This is what Ann told the Doctor’s Wife when the Doctor’s Wife asked where he came from.
The Doctor’s Wife rolls out pie dough. It is a simple recipe, shortening, flour, ice water, salt, which produces a flaky crust. The filling today is wild blackberries picked from the mountains, from secret logged off spots that foragers don’t share with each other. The Doctor’s Wife has picked her own plenty of times, but for today’s pies she ordered a gallon of berries from a friend. The berries are tartly intense and they take a lot of sugar to make the filling taste right.
“My dad and I used to eat tamales from the can,” she hears Ann tell Carlos, as though explaining why this was always meant to be.
Isn’t That Right?
“I’ve planed the bottom, but it’s still jamming,” the Doctor says as he opens and closes the front door, demonstrating where it sticks.
“It’s so wet here in Washington. It must expand because of the moisture and then it sticks,” Carlos says. He wants to impress his future father-in-law.
“So what do we do?”
“We take the door down and adjust the hinges. It’s more work, but that’s the only long-term solution.”
“Come look at this,” the Doctor says.
Carlos follows the Doctor into the kitchen. The Doctor opens and closes the spice cabinet.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor’s Wife asks.
“We probably ought to work on these hinges too, isn’t that right, Carlos?”
“Yes.”
“Probably that’s what’s the matter with the upstairs shower door. Isn’t that right, Carlos?”
“Are you going to finish the front door first?” the Doctor’s Wife asks.
Carlos and the Doctor take the door off the hinges, walking it down the stairs, around to the big basement door. Gretel follows the two inside the basement, parking herself next to the table saw.
“Oil-based paint is a whole lot messier and a pain to deal with, but water-based paint doesn’t stick to wood,” says the Doctor. “Isn’t that right, Carlos?”
“Yes.”
“I recently repainted the south side of the house with anti-spider formula. Red
uced the number of spiders by a lot. I don’t know of any formula for spiders that I can put into water-based paint. For my money, I feel more comfortable with the oil-based.”
Carlos gets ready to answer in the affirmative.
“Isn’t that right, Gretel?” the Doctor asks.
Gretel examines her undercarriage.
Ann
The Doctor is on the phone. It’s 1974 and Ann is pregnant.
“You need to go get tested, you and Carlos.”
“For what?”
“To make sure your baby doesn’t have what John had.”
What John had? All Ann can remember is that John had bright eyes, was smart, smart, and then he didn’t let go of the coffee table when he was supposed to. She remembers he was healthy and then he was dying. She doesn’t remember the in-between.
“It’s a genetic disease. There’s a test now.”
Ann and Luis drive up to the Stanford Medical Center where they have plugs of skin taken out of their arms, the fleshy part at the back of the bicep. The plug has a depth of four millimeters to get down to the subcutaneous fat so that the doctor can look for unmylenated nerve fibers and to check for the production of Asulfaditide (A). Both parents have to be carriers. If both parents are carriers, their offspring have a one-in-four chance of getting the disease.
Variety Show
The handle of the badminton racquet is my microphone. I’ve arranged everyone in the living room after dinner. The curtains are open to the lake. My mom holds my little brother, a baby, on the low couch on one side of the bone table. Petrea and her new husband, who happens to be Jewish and from Los Angeles, sit on the other. The Doctor sits in his moss green Danish recliner. My dad and grandmother lean forward as I give the order to the Doctor to dance around the room like an Indian. The Doctor has a tremor and even I know his health isn’t good, but that will not excuse him from his act. He dances in a two-step shuffle, circling the room as he whoops with his palm in front of his mouth.
Everybody else nearly dies laughing, but I don’t appreciate the hilarity. The Indian Dance is supposed to be solemn.
Toys
I’m four, my brother is two and our parents have gone away to Europe for six weeks. For the first three we stay in Lake Stevens. On the wall of the upstairs hallway, my grandmother hangs up a large world map. We jab pushpins in where our parents are expected to be, and then connect the pins with pieces of colored string. They are now supposedly taking an overnight train from Rome to Paris.
“They sleep on the train?” I ask.
“Oh yes, I’ve slept on lots of trains in my life,” our grandmother says.
Then we climb in the car and drive to Frontier Village to pick out presents for the day. We stop by Taylor’s Pharmacy then pass through to the B&M via the automatic glass door—this is a necessary and interesting part of the trip—and then we make our way to the toy aisle. I choose a sleeve of colored markers. My brother points at a bag of plastic dinosaurs. I have a vague, unexplored feeling of being spoiled.
They’ve Gone Shopping
I sit with my grandfather, dad, and brother in the metal boat, fishing for perch on the lake. Perch are usually far below my grandfather’s standards, but he’s grown worse. The clouds hang low, spitting rain. My grandfather and dad cast into the lake. My brother and I don’t have fishing poles, so we sit in our raincoats, sharing the same little bench. We’re too young to know what we’re feeling is boredom. And then my grandfather catches a mallard duck. She flaps her wings, quacking very loudly.
I know the ducks from feeding them pieces of stale bread and, during one exciting week, the Donut-O’s that my brother and I begged for and then refused to eat. It’s exciting to have the duck bite us with the sharp little ridges of her bill.
My grandfather reels the duck in, wrestles her aboard and performs surgery. Once free of the hook, the duck ruffles her feathers and then flies away, low over the water, one webbed foot dragging. She settles back down in the lake, far away from us.
We are cold and damp when we get back to the house. My dad draws a hot bath for my brother and me while my grandfather builds a fire. It feels strange for the menfolk to be the only ones attending to our needs.
New Start
They had plans to buy an apartment in Seattle so that they don’t have to drive home after the symphony, or Seattle Arts and Lectures, but the Doctor’s Parkinson’s grows worse. He also has cancer, a list of other bad things. He’s not even that old. He’s barely sixty.
The dining room is turned into a sick room to save the trip upstairs. The Doctor’s Wife nurses him.
Old Age
Gretel lived to be twenty-four. She was never a bright dog. When I was very little she’d come close to me and then topple over, taking me down with her.
The Dusslers
I wave my hand in front of my brother’s facemask and we dive down, reaching for the golf ball at the same time. We swim up, throwing the ball into the floor of the raft, where it joins the others we’ve already collected.
We’re getting ready to dive back down again when the Dussler boys drive their big yellow ski boat very close to us. The raft bobs up and down violently. Pat Dussler’s electric bullhorn squawks on.
“You nearly killed those two little boys!” she yells, the bullhorn carrying her voice from her front deck out across the lake.
My brother and I find the Dusslers endlessly captivating. For one thing, if it wasn’t for them, there wouldn’t be any golf balls to collect—the Dusslers knock golf balls off their lawn into the lake. Collecting the golf balls doesn’t seem to interest them, so we do it, though we don’t return them, we keep them in a big bucket in the canning room. The golf balls are the least of what is interesting about them.
The Dusslers are beefy, athletic boys who aren’t physically afraid, even when they should be. They sometimes ride a seat-less BMX bike off the roof of the boathouse, flying into the water. Once, they drove a borrowed ski boat over a big rock and tore out the engine. Another time, while trimming a new plank on the dock, Fred Jr. and Jimmy Joe stood in the water while operating an electric saw.
Pat Dussler uses the electronic bullhorn so she can be as loud as her husband and sons. She used to work at the meat counter of the B&M before she met Fred Senior. Fred and his brother own a small local burger chain. One year they began to build what they said were stables right next to our garden. After the concrete foundation was poured, an ugly building of buff colored steel rose quickly. Once completed, there were no horses to be seen. At five in the morning, metal doors banged open, starting a day full of the noises of a truck garage. My grandmother and grandfather filed a lawsuit. The land around the lake was zoned for agricultural use, so it wasn’t a clear-cut case, but the suit prevailed and the garage was torn down. Now there’s a frostiness between the two families. This frostiness does not diminish our fascination—actually the opposite.
Once their ski boat is tied up, the Dussler boys stand giggling at the end of the dock.
“Hey mom,” Freddie yells. My brother and I poke our heads above water and watch.
Pat is on the front porch watering her pansies.
“Hey mom,” Freddie says again.
We tread water. What are they going to do?
“Hey mom,” Jimmy Joe says.
She turns around. “What?” she asks into her bullhorn. The two big boys pull down their trunks and moon her, their laughs booming across the lake.
The Basement
I’m downstairs with my brother in the basement, waiting for the rain to stop so that we can swim. We’ve found a rattrap. I pull the crossbar back, straining against the heavy-duty spring. My brother puts a pencil on the base of the trap and then I let loose the bar. The pencil snaps in two, sending shards flying. We immediately start to look for other things we can break.
“What are you doing down there?” our grandmother calls.
“Nothing,” we shout up.
Where can we find more pencils? I look around
the basement. The canning room was meant for Mason jars, but is now mostly filled with toys for the beach, inner tubes, skis, buckets and shovels. On a cross beam near the door to the outside are two outboard motors, a battered army-green 10 horsepower, the other a 25 horsepower in a cream and mustard colored plastic case. Behind these are a series of cabinets crammed with other stuff—an extra badminton net, the badminton racquets, the birdies, mismatched croquet balls, a sail wrapped around itself. None of these things will fit in the trap. How badly would it hurt if we put a finger in the trap?
“Boys! Come upstairs for lunch!” we are called.
Barrow, Alaska
Bob is on a mail plane landing at the Barrow Airport. Barrow is the northernmost city on the continent, 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It’s February and the temperature hovers around negative twenty degrees. Bob lives in Fairbanks, but even there it is so cold in the winter that Bob’s German Shorthair Jed has burned his whiskers off by huddling too close to the wood burning stove.
Bob has come to Barrow to sell insurance—life, property-home, car, boat, snowmobile—because Barrow is the closest town to Prudhoe Bay, the base for the oilfields of the North Slope. Despite all the oil money around, the Barrow Airport is a simple affair, one runway, a single low building. Bob takes a taxi to the hotel, in sight of the Chukchi Sea. The houses stand on stilts and are made of unpainted plywood. Whale bones share yards with broken down cars, new snowmobiles.
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