by Donnna Salli
What I wanted was to read.
With seven readers in the house, I had no trouble finding a teacher whenever I wanted. I started kindergarten reading like a second grader. My teacher, Miss DuBois, didn’t even try to hide her delight. She’d let me read the books for story hour.
“Antonia will read to us now,” she said one day. It was just before Thanksgiving. The classroom walls were lined with strutting brown-paper turkeys with tail feathers in primary colors. I tucked my feet beneath me to rise from my rug but froze when a complaint clobbered me from behind.
“She read to us yesterday.” It was Johnny J., my kindergarten nemesis, not to be confused with Johnny B., a boy who never caused me any grief. Johnny J. had risen from his rug, unbidden. His flaxen hair was standing straight up, weaving in a river of static.
“Didn’t you like the book Antonia read, Johnny?” Miss DuBois said.
“Yeah. But I want to read today.”
“You’re not quite ready.”
“I am, I can read,” chirped Natalie Bean. Her hand shot up, waving. “Cat. C-A-T. Dog. D-O . . . uh . . .”
“G. Very good, Natalie. When you’ve learned more words, it’ll be your turn. Antonia, come.” Miss DuBois motioned me forward. “You may choose a book.”
“Again?” came from Johnny. He gave a loud groan of sorrow and pain.
“Johnny,” Miss DuBois warned. Johnny J. had jumped to his feet and was en route to the bookcase. “Back to your rug, please. John Jessup—your rug.”
“Ohhh,” Johnny expelled through set teeth. He flopped his butt down hard onto his green rug and speared me with a scowl.
Not quite a year later—fat jack-o’-lanterns were dancing across the classroom walls—the principal summoned my parents to a conference. At its conclusion, I’d been advanced a grade starting in January. I’m not sorry to report, when Master Johnny J. heard about it, he all but writhed on the floor.
As I contemplated starting college, I wanted the hell out of Dodge. I come from a comma of a town near Minot and Grand Forks—that would be North Dakota—and I was ready for Exclamation Point. I chose Wisconsin, at Madison. I have family not far from there, my father having grown up in Door County. The UW offered everything I could want—distance, drama, and weekends with my grandparents.
I’ve spent life pretty much inept around men. It started early, by not starting. I was fifteen before I had my first visit from my friend, what girls back then used to call their periods. I’d been watching, wishing for that first one, but when it arrived, I was at a loss. It came on so commonly, so coarsely. I had longed so, but the sensation I felt as I crossed over was that of falling out of a swing. My body was barely changed outwardly, its inner workings hidden. As the fact of the red smear in the crotch of my panties made its way to my brain, I felt, surprisingly, grief. Something wondrous had come, but I recognized instantly and with regret that something wondrous had gone.
I didn’t know what to do. So I got rid of the evidence. My mother has this unfailing radar. Within hours she had found the stain in the tangle of the hamper and come to me, panties in hand. She’d been out painting windows and was wearing one of my father’s work shirts. She looked beautiful. The shirt was untucked, her hair up in a kerchief. One strawberry strand had come loose and had paint on it. She’d apparently brushed it back with her hand.
“Toni,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You need to rinse these in cold water or the stain sets.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it and looked away. My chest was swelling with some kind of emotion, and tears were gathering.
Mom circled her arms around me. “You’re okay, sweetie. It takes getting used to, I know. But it’s just part of growing up.” Of course, she’s never been one to let pass a chance to tease. She said, “If you kiss a boy now, you’ll have a baby.”
I was mortified, thrilled.
That evening over pot roast and glazed carrot spears, she announced meaningfully to my father, “Our little girl has become a woman.” I don’t know who was more red-faced. Him, or me.
By my freshman year in college, men were completely mysterious to me. I’ve always been excitable, and I didn’t know which would be worse—approaching a guy or being approached. Either way, I knew I’d squirm and expire on the spot. But I was on a mission to find my soul mate, and I brushed my hair a hundred strokes each night and doused myself each morning with baby powder perfume. Sort of a pre-embalming ritual.
The first week of October, I packed my books and headed for Helen White Library. It was Saturday, the day a glory. Sunshine was gilding the campus, leaves blowing on the trees. I walked through a breeze that smelled of late grasses and flowers. It was tempting, from my study carrel next to a window on an upper floor, to go out into the world below, but I stayed where I was, scratching through draft four of a descriptive essay. A trip to Helen White wasn’t only about studying. I was trawling for studious men, and at the next carrel sat a modern Adonis.
I wore glasses then and had taken and slipped them into my backpack, but I still managed to slide into the carrel gracefully. The point is, the old eyeballs weren’t seeing much. But the heart was. Adonis had olive skin and hair curled black over his collar, and his eyes—no lie—they smoldered.
I needed to get noticed.
I leaned back in my chair, staring into the void above my prose like a classic film legend. I twirled and untwirled my hair. Suddenly the divider between the carrels melted away, and I leaned toward my object. He turned, surprised. My hair was long, and it fell forward of my shoulders, spilled spellbindingly red onto his arm. It bewitched him. His arm lifted—slow, inevitable—and wound its way into my tresses. His eyes bored into mine, as with a slow, tingling, rapturous pull, he moved my lips toward his. My heart went berserk.
My real heart.
In real life. The rest I’d imagined.
A vein started to thrum in my temple. Thrum, thrum. Thrum, thrum. I was having trouble breathing. I knew if I stayed, I might flop like a rag doll to the desktop. I foresaw a crowd gathering, scrutinizing me like a species of insect, and I slammed my glasses onto my face and crammed my essay into my pack. Adonis looked up, finally—looked away—checked his watch. I got up and bolted. The speed of my exit made the bag checker at the door finger through my pack with extra care.
Call me the Queen of Irony.
On Halloween morning, I ended up at health services. Antonia Sprague, whose virgin lips had never been touched, who’d gotten no closer to a guy than a carrel away, had mononucleosis. Spit-swapper’s disease. I was struck by the injustice of it—to suffer the humiliation of implied sin, without having bathed in the pleasure.
That was the end of my first freshman year. My parents jumped into the pickup and came to collect me. When I’d recovered, I ferried plates at the local truck stop. The regulars called me Stretch. “Whoa, didn’t see you there, Stretch. Told you about that standing sideways. Say, Stretch. How about another cup of joe?” That job was the best thing that could have happened to me. I realized not everything worth something is in books. But books come close. By August, I had mastered the contact lens and was flush with cash. As I hung up my apron to go back to Madison, I knew I’d go to school forever, to sling ideas instead of hash.
I was also already thinking the whole fifties, sixties mom thing wasn’t for me—and when I met Sam, he felt the same way. About fatherhood, I mean. Deciding not to have kids has been interesting. An acquaintance at church took my hand one morning, gave me a grandmotherly smile, and pressed a slip of paper into my palm. On it was written, in a careful but unsteady hand, MARK LOFTUS, MD, followed by a downstate phone number. Mark Loftus is a local boy who made good. He’s also a fertility specialist.
I’m amazed that I fit in at church. My colleagues—a few, I mean—think me intellectually deficient for being there. There’s a pelican on the roof, for God’s sake. Well, yes—that pelican gives me hope. It’s outside the box. I don’t know that God e
xists, and I’ll say so. Half the people in the pews would say the same if you put the screws to them. I can’t look to the Bible, chapter and verse. I was maybe ten when I stopped reading it literally. There’s a legend around the church that one of the pelicans that inspired its founding is still out there. People see it, here and there. It’s a mysterious and lovely idea. Aside from what the pelican might mean—because, who knows—do we say it’s there because it is, and we know it intuitively? Or is it there because we say it is—we create the reality? Either way works for me. It’s the questions that matter, not answers. To stop wrestling with questions is a kind of death. There’s something in me beyond reason, though—something like whatever brings the monarch back to its wintering grounds, to the very trees its great-great-greats left at the start of the migration.
Last summer, I was driving back from a trip to my brother’s. I was in a long line of cars moving through a construction zone. The car ahead of me veered to the right, and I saw why. A kitten had been hit—it lay to the left of the lane. As I passed, it raised its head—just its head—and its mouth opened. A last, imploring O. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t help. For the next hour I wept and drove and railed at God. I believe, without doubt, that the kitten and I are part of a whole. As long as some church somewhere believes in it, serves it, and allows someone like me, I’ll be there.
When I think of God, or whatever name you know God by, I have to go to metaphor. If there’s a divine being, it’s out there, yes, watching over, but for me it’s more like that wolf on a dark, snowy hillside you’ll see in prints in antique shops. My Grandpa Sprague had the wolf print on the wall of his library. I used to sit and stare into its blue-green world for hours. There was something distant and comforting about it. I was drawn by the cold slope of the hill, the wolf’s steaming breath, so real I could hear it. I was mesmerized by its one visible eye shining over the shadowy cabins below. The wolf loved them. It loved the snow-covered roofs, the light yellow and warm in the windows. They belonged to him.
That’s God to me. If there is a God.
I met Sam at a political rally my last year of grad school. He’s just shy of five-foot-ten—I quietly gave up heels when we met— and has California-surfer hair, slightly thinning on top, hazel eyes, and a smile so charming it’ll defrost a Deepfreeze at a thousand paces. I gave up cigarettes because of that smile—well, that, and his being an unrelenting nudge—though it took a few years. I started smoking in graduate school, more for the buzz than the image, though the image did confer its own buzz. The cigs had this implacable power. All I had to do was see some femme fatale or studly sweet cheeks light up in a movie, and I’d feel, like a sweat, nicotine hitting the blood. I never smoked in the house, once Sam and I moved in together. I stood outside in blizzards, pouring rain, heat warnings—I haunted the garage at thirty-below, sucking in one more drag. But Sam has powers, too. The smokes didn’t stand a chance.
At the time we met, I’d had very few . . . well, I can’t even call them relationships. Sam is four years older. Those few years made him not intimidated by my mind, the way guys my own age had often been. I don’t say this out of conceit. Whether you’ve got looks or brains or charm, you generally figure it out and use it. I do what I can, fashion-wise, but I’m no model. There are no cheekbones to die for here. I realized, early on, I wasn’t cut out physically or mentally for gliding around with a book on my head.
My family has always been proud of me, in that conflicted way families have. As a kid, I could get straight A’s, yet be confounded by the simplest mechanical task. I lost an hour once, trying to change the thread on a bobbin. My mother grew up in a community where sewing in women was second nature. She’d misplaced the manual to her sewing machine, or thrown it away. She didn’t need it. I was a different case—without directions, I was flummoxed. Mom finally changed the thread for me.
I probably seemed a little strange. I’d read anything, anywhere—bulletin boards, circulars in the mail, traffic signs, the backs of cans. I’d read standing, squatting, in odd sprawled postures across my bed at two in the morning, slumped in the big armchair with my feet on the wall above my head. I’d read in the tub, crowded on the bus, packed into the car, walking down the sidewalk, even washing dishes with a book propped open behind the sink. When it got too loud in the house, I’d go to the garage and hide in the passenger side foot well of the car.
Mom would find me there. “Toni, what are you doing here again? Go outside—get some sun.”
“I’m reading.”
“I see that. But you’ve got an odd smell, and you’re shedding spores. I just vacuumed this car.”
“All right.” I’d exhale, dramatically, to emphasize how inconvenienced I was, get my sunglasses and a hat, and plant myself beneath a tree, where I’d read some more.
Sam’s a reader, too. But he limits himself to sci-fi and factual stuff. He’s a logical, grounded, male-brained person. He’s a lot like my father, who’s a school psychologist. I’m a sucker for the type—I also have a slant toward things logical. But I’ve got a definitely female way of communicating. I occasionally just need someone to listen. I need to rant and cry and blow off steam. But Sam can’t stop himself from offering some sort of solution. It annoys the piss out of me. Through our entire separation, he’s never given up suggesting answers to my problems. Even about the men I’ve been seeing. You’d think he’d know better.
So often when I need to talk, I wish my family were closer. Geographically, I mean. News from home comes mostly by phone. Dad’s on the telephone a lot at work and is no fan of it at home, so I talk mostly with Mom. Our conversations are so leveling, so interesting. “Guess what?” she said one day. It was spring—Sam and I were still back East. “Your father and I have decided to get some ducks.” They’d ordered four ducklings from the feed store and were building a shelter by the pond.
“The pond?” I said. The whole thing seemed questionable to me. Winter is diabolical in the Dakotas—even the fish head indoors. “What about next winter?”
Without the slightest hitch in her voice, Mom said, “I’m clearing a spot in the freezer.” As if she and Dad regularly beheaded the brood around their table.
“Mom,” I said. I’d helped my grandmother slaughter enough chickens to be thinking this wasn’t a good thing. “Who’s going to put them there?”
“We will. We think raising them will be fun, a return to our childhoods. You’d think you were talking to city folks, or something.”
Some weeks later, Mom reported the ducklings had arrived—two females, two males. They lived at first in a box in the house. Our next conversation was dominated on Mom’s side by hilarity and disgust. She described the birds’ voiding into their own water and food, the way they then ate and drank with relish.
For some reason I’ve never understood, considering the ducks’ future, Mom announced they had named them. When the weather warmed, it wasn’t the ducks that went out. It was Patience and Temperance and Courage and Fortitude who moved into the little house by the pond, where—according to Mom—they carried on happily.
By July, Mom was reporting weird things about Temperance. She’d swim the circumference of the pond and go into a spin. Her head would pull back and to the right, as if she were in a vise. Her body would convulse, her path would devolve into smaller and smaller circles until during one episode she went under, her legs sticking up, beating the air. The other ducks sent up a call of distress and swam in a tight little pack. Hearing and seeing it all from the window, Dad did a record sprint and pulled Temperance back.
The only birds I was seeing were pigeons. Sam and I were living in an apartment in an eight-unit building that had once been a house. In its glory days, it had been the family home of some wealthy, unnamed urbanite. It had a wide central staircase that at some point had been walled down the middle by an enterprising landlord. The nearby river, crapped up and smelly despite a reclamation project, wound dutifully through what had once been the elegant part of town.
We didn’t have a yard. Out back was a parking lot with a large tree paved into the middle of it. Out front were two bushes, each entertainingly surrounded by a white picket fence. A mere three steps would put someone who was leaving out into the street.
The next time Mom called, they’d lost Temperance. The duck had another spell, and no one was at hand. By the time Dad heard the other ducks wailing and beat it up from the barn, it was too late. There was no reviving her.
The loss, for me, was a distant one, but it hit me. To make it worse, I went out to the parking lot the next day and found a pigeon huddled in the corner where the concrete step joined the house wall. It was lame in one leg and missing feathers. From the look of things, the other birds had turned on it and pecked bleeding ulcers into its skin.
We didn’t socialize with our neighbors. There was an unspoken agreement everyone should keep to themselves. But there was this woman, June—I’d guess in her sixties—from apartment one, who was as drawn to the pigeon as I was. I knew from her mailbox her last name was Mancini. I’d observed, in long bouts of loitering at the window, that she and her husband lived with a woman about their age who seemed somehow disabled. I’d watched them help her into and out of their car.
“A shame,” June said. We were fretting over the pigeon, and June straightened up and wiped her hands on her dress. She’d been trying, without luck, to get the bird to eat something. “I hate when a living thing ends up like this.”
“My parents have ducks,” I said. “One just drowned. A fit of epilepsy or something.”
“A duck? Drowned? Don’t that beat all. This fellow’s not looking too good, either. It bothers me to think of him huddled here all night. He’s cat food in the making. Can’t take him in, though—not a wild bird. He could spread some kind of disease. With Iris, I can’t take a chance.”
“Iris?”
“My sister. She’s been with us since Ma died. It’s going on five years. Ma said her labor with Iris was hard, and very long. Iris . . . well, she’s walked a different road. Nowadays that doesn’t happen so much. You want kids?” she said.