Becoming Lin

by Tricia Dower

  Ron points to a cluster of U of M students hoisting Draft Beer signs. Jeff says, “Cool.”

  Grace recalls a Bread Not Guns strike she and Howard got involved in one April day in 1935. “Four years before you were born, Ronnie.”

  Helen says, “But we weren’t even at war then.”

  Grace smiles at her. “We could see it coming. Hitler, Mussolini, Japan invading Manchuria. People like Hemingway were writing about it.”

  Lin tries to picture Grace as a young wife then, one child dead, another soon to follow, a terrible war on the way. How did she have the heart to bear Ron? Thank God she did.

  A voice radiating from a bullhorn interrupts her reverie. It’s from a man on a platform. His amplified speech is unintelligible to Lin but it spurs the crowd to form a column and head down Marquette Avenue. Carl, Helen, The Prairie Fire Six and The Northfield Five follow like livestock. Somebody starts a chant: “What do you want? Bring the troops home! When do you want it? Now!” Lin stutters until she picks up the syncopation of a missing pause before Now. Her hat muffles sounds so well she can’t be sure her voice carries past her own skull. Other voices judder up through the earth into her legs and hips, their words one vast rumble, their bodies a three-block-long spine curving through downtown, owning it. Her toes are numb but her heart warm with self-congratulation: testimony against war is public prayer she’s comfortable with. Police keep a quiet eye on them. A few men in military caps hold up signs reading Better There Than Here but they’re not aggressive. “How peaceful it all is,” she says.

  Carl says, “Ah, yes. The inoffensive geniality of Minnesotans.” Imagine him knowing such words. He no sooner utters them than someone shouts, “Go back to Russia, you fucking Communists.”

  “Must be my outfit,” Lin says. Carl, Helen and Ron laugh but inside she’s shaking. Eldon Jukes called her a “fucking bitch,” the force of his words violating her nearly as much as his body. She imagines him still here in some other dimension she, like a blinkered horse, can’t see, his spectral “Looks like you could use a ride” slicing through the noise of the crowd. Will he never leave her alone? A molasses-like fatigue overtakes her and the rest of the march is a struggle. They end up at a park where a guitar-strumming folksinger gets the crowd laughing. Fern tells Jeff to heed the words of the song.

  Sarge, I’m only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen,

  And I always carry a purse.

  I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my asthma’s getting worse.

  Yes, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, and my poor old invalid aunt.

  Besides, I ain’t no fool, I’m a-goin’ to school,

  And I’m working in a DEEfense plant.

  Jeff says, “I don’t get it.”

  Carl says, “He’s telling you how to beat the draft.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  Fern is silent all the way back to Prairie Fire.

  Lin is tight-lipped too. Annoyed she let Eldon Jukes mar the day.

  At home, the living room furniture huddles together on the braided rug as if terrorized. A note from the Parsonage Committee says this is the new arrangement because the feet are damaging the hardwood. As if the floor hasn’t been scarred for decades.

  “It looks dumb,” she says. “The rug’s too small.”

  “Peter Hemstad’s flowery handwriting,” he says. “His pitiful idea of a warning.”

  “Is he on every committee?”

  “Just about. I should’ve called on him like Mom said. I’ll do that Monday.”

  He appropriates felt from the Crafty Gals box in the church and covers the furniture where it touches the floor, slides a note into the Committee’s mail slot thanking them for the opportunity to devise a solution to a “scratchy” problem.

  The radiators bang out glorious heat.

  15

  She hasn’t seen Mother and Daddy since the wedding. They arrive at the airport dressed for the cold, Her Majesty in a nappy brown and tan coat that looks like a hedgehog pelt, ankle-high brown boots and a brown, bell-shaped felt hat a flapper might have worn. Daddy sports a gray/black serge overcoat and a coonskin cap he got at a costume shop. “He’s such a comedian,” Mother says. Lin sent them photographs but they exclaim as though it’s all a surprise when Ron pulls up at the parsonage. Mother asks if the front door symbolizes the parting of the Red Sea. She’s a comedian too. Daddy inquires about the signs in the garage from last month’s protest. “Did you think that was wise?” he asks when Lin explains.

  “We did.” The waver in her voice at even this minor resistance perturbs her. She’s determined to confront him, finally, about what he said to Ron after the wedding.

  Chance presents herself that night as Mother gets ready for bed and Ron zips over to the church to check on the palm branches for tomorrow’s service. Lin and Daddy claim the chairs on either side of the fireplace. Memories from Stony River switch on like a light: Mother forsaking them for the evening, father and daughter decoding their separate days for each other. Tonight they dissect the theatrical interpretation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper they all went to see at a church in an adjacent county. Pipe clenched between his teeth, he says, “What’d you think of them leaving Jesus’ chair empty?”

  Chance plants a different question in her head: Did you tell Ron that Eldon Jukes raped me? Suppose he says he didn’t. She’d be left doubting Ron.

  “Smart move,” she says. “Everybody’d expect too much from the poor guy.”

  “Your Aunt Libby flew to Milan in November and saw the mural. It’s flaking plaster like dandruff.”

  “I didn’t think she was religious.”

  “She isn’t. According to your mother it was some old maids’ tour. She brought us back a napkin holder with the painting on it. The apostles’ eyes move when you jiggle it.”

  Lin laughs. “Now, that I’d like to see.”

  He reaches into his back pocket, pulls out his billfold and extracts a check. “Your mother and I are so proud you went back to school.” He pauses to blow his nose. “We know you’re Ron’s responsibility now but we wanted to help with tuition.”

  The check is for a thousand dollars. She should be embarrassed but she’s getting resigned to living on the generosity of others, not much different than when she lived at home. She claps her hand on her chest and murmurs, “Thank you.” Mother, trailing fumes from a therapeutic bath, sticks her head in to say goodnight and Ron returns.

  Chance skips off to bed.

  Open Door is Palm Sunday joyful the following morning. Lin sits with Mother and Daddy after the choir anthem, a stirring rendition of “The Holy City” that makes her teary. The sanctuary is at capacity thanks in part to Harold Schroeder’s recruits: college men who need evidence of religious devotion to become conscientious objectors after graduation. The Emburys, the Weems and assorted relations are missing, their absence so palpable it takes up space. But Peter Hemstad is here and everybody has a grin ready to pull from their pocket for the pastor’s in-laws or “inners,” despite their feelings about his views on war. Mother and Daddy can’t help but realize what a first-rate decision she made in marrying him. Resplendent in white robes and a purple stole, he delivers a sermon that casts her into the raucous Passover throng in Jerusalem, the dust of the road, the sounding of choirs, lyres and cymbals, the bleating of sacrificial lambs—the burning of myrrh, cinnamon, saffron and frankincense not enough to mask the stench of spilt blood. Then he spoils it by pointing out everyone’s telephone bill has gone up due to an excise tax to pay for the war. What’s that got to do with Easter?

  “It went through on April Fool’s Day,” he says, “but it’s no joke. There is recourse, though.” He gives an imperious wave. “Simply deduct the tax from your bill. The phone company has assured me it won’t cut off your service although they will report it to the IRS. I, for one, am prepared to engage
in a discussion with the fine folks at the IRS about why resistance is moral and best. I will tell them this story, which if it isn’t true should be: Henry David Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax for the Mexican-American war. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him in jail and asked, ‘Henry, what are you doing in there?’ Thoreau replied, ‘Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?’”

  She frowns at Ron. He hasn’t had a single discussion with her about not paying this tax and she’s the one who writes out the checks and mails them.

  Grace skips Tuesday’s prayer breakfast so as not to “steal Betty’s thunder.” But Mother scarcely speaks, much less thunders, until the ride home. Clutching her brown leather pocketbook to her chest so tightly you’d think it holds the Hope Diamond, she says, “That woman whose skirt was too tight, who had us pray for her migraines?”

  “You mean Arleen Sweany, the beekeeper?”

  “I don’t know who I mean. I only want to say Miranda would’ve known she was ailing even without hearing her bellyache.”

  Lin silently groans. Has she mentioned Miranda to keep the assault alive in Lin’s mind or is she attempting a covert approach into a discussion of her own ailments? Lin has avoided asking about them as she refrains from reacting to the Bertle sisters’ flatulence at Crafty Gals. “How would she have done that?”

  “Just by looking at her. She says the light around sick people is gray or brown. Healthy folks have a pinkish glow. She has a gift, that girl does, like Edgar Cayce.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Was. He’s been dead twenty years. He could tune in to a patient’s mind and body like it was a radio and tell what was wrong.”

  “He was a doctor?”

  “Nope. Didn’t get past seventh grade. But he’d go into a trance and see the problem.”

  “You don’t believe in that stuff, do you?”

  “It’s not stuff.” She turns her head quickly, taps on her window. “Hold your hat, what are those?” Silvery clouds of birds with black-tipped wings and raucous cries rain down on a marshy patch not far from the turnoff to the church.

  Lin feels like slapping the steering wheel. Ron accuses her of being evasive at times. If so, she’s learned from a master. “Snow geese. They stop here on their way to the Arctic to nest.”

  “They sure do make a racket.”

  “Back to Miranda,” Lin says. “What color does she see around you?”

  “Kraft caramel.”

  Lin squints but sees only sunlight touching the edge of Mother’s hat. “And what’s she say is the reason?”

  “My thermostat’s out of whack. It can’t keep my insides the correct temperature.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’m either too hot or too cold. Most days it’s like I have a fever. Everything hurts.”

  “Sure it’s not the Change?”

  “I was far too young for that when the pains started.”

  They’re on the gravel road now, muted by snow that refuses to melt. “Yeah, but you had a hysterectomy when I was a kid.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Miranda says the busted thermostat gums up the contact between my nerves and my brain so the only message is Ow!”

  Lin clenches her jaw. How old is this woman? She acts as though her body is a complete mystery to her. “Is that the reason for the stones?” She was deliberately silent when Mother used the oven yesterday to heat smooth flat stones she brought from New Jersey.

  “Uh huh, I lay them where Miranda says I have energy points.”

  Lin wonders which disorder in her psych text fits Mother: avoidant, histrionic, neurotic, hypochondriac, psychosomatic? Could arrested development play a part, too? “What’s Doc Pierce say about Miranda’s advice?”

  “I stopped seeing him a year ago, I thought you knew that. He spoke a bunch of hoo-ha, wrote me off as a lunatic, made me feel there was nothing to wake up for anymore. Miranda takes much better care of me. She has her pharmacy license you know.”

  “That means she can dispense drugs, Mom, not prescribe them. You need a doctor for that. If you don’t have confidence in Pierce, find somebody else.”

  “She doesn’t prescribe drugs for me.”

  “What does she do then? Go into a trance? Cast a spell?” Lin has seen her only twice, first, at age eleven, when two policemen escorted a teenaged Miranda and a child with a freakishly small head out of Crazy Haggerty’s house. Kids called him that because he’d weave down the street in red shoes and a sequined suit, chase people from his porch with a shotgun. Until he died, nobody knew he’d hidden a daughter in his house or that she’d borne him a child. Lin obsessed over that girl for months, stopped sitting on Daddy’s knee, afraid what had happened to Miranda could happen to her.

  “I’d tell you,” Mother says, “but you don’t sound open to it. You sound a little mocking.”

  “It’s just that I’m worried about you.”

  “That so? Or are you trying to show how superior you are?”

  The rest of the ride passes in white-lipped silence, Lin thinking about the only other time she saw Miranda, five years after the first, when detectives brought them together. Miranda identified the knife Eldon Jukes likely pulled on Lin as one stolen from her house when it was vacant. The assumption was Jukes took it but the police couldn’t say for sure, having found it only after he used it to kill himself. Miranda shrieked when she picked it up as though someone had run her through with a bayonet. Lin thought she was nuts and why wouldn’t she be, stuck inside a house with a crazy old coot until she was fifteen. Mother said she was only psychic. An understanding had passed between her and Miranda that Mother took as validation of her suffering. Lin is jealous of that, she realizes with a jolt, jealous Miranda knows a different Betty Wise than she does.

  Daddy accompanies Lin to choir rehearsal in the church hall on Wednesday. In the breezeway, he pauses to sing, oh so predictably, “I see the moon, the moon sees me.” A bone-colored moon peers through a dark curtain of pines. Lin considers asking in an abstract, theoretical way how he defines rape then thinks better of it. Such a rough word from her mouth would shock him. He’d want to know why she inquired, the result the same as if she asked what he told Ron.

  He says, “Are you happy, kiddo?”

  “Absotutley,” she says as she did as a child.

  Chance blows her a kiss.

  She and Ron fast until dinner on Good Friday, giving Mother and Daddy free rein over the fridge and pantry for breakfast and lunch. Lin sits in the cool and silent church sanctuary from nine until three, the hours it supposedly took Christ to die on the cross, and ponders why she doesn’t love Jesus the way Ron seems to, like a servant or a star-struck fan. She’s more apologetic, appalled by what they did to Him, still not clear exactly who “they” were. Later, Mother asks, “What were you doing in there all that time?” She has seated herself in the breakfast nook to peel potatoes while Lin browns a chuck roast and slices onions.

  “Reflecting on how little I’ve suffered,” Lin says, weeping onion tears. “I’ve never had a crown of thorns shoved onto my head or my hands and feet nailed to a cross, never been left to die a slow, merciless death.”

  “It took you six hours to come to that conclusion?”

  Lin doesn’t say it aloud but she also prayed to be the kind of daughter a mother wants to confide in. “Do you sense a loss of purpose now that I’ve moved away, Mom?” The Minister’s Wife as a Counselor suggests a woman’s basis for feeling important changes when her nest is empty.

  Mother looks up from her peeling. “Why are you so interested in me all of a sudden?”

  “It’s not all of a sudden.”

  “You’ve never believed I’m sick, have you? You think I’m faking it.” She scooches over and out of the breakfast nook, carries the potatoes to the sink.

  “No, I don’t.” Lin might be forcing the o
utrage in her voice but she’s not lying. Mother winces from pain even when she doesn’t know anyone’s watching and naps every chance she gets. That can’t be normal at forty-six. “I want you to get well, to be happy.”

  Mother’s eyes mist. “If we don’t get that pot roast in the oven it’ll be midnight before we eat. Your father’ll be the unhappy one then.” Her nostrils flare with suppressed emotion, giving her a porcine look, making her almost ugly.

  Easter Sunday/66

  We trooped over to Grace’s after church, Mother & I in our vain Easter hats, Daddy & R joking about getting only new shoelaces. I wore my Going Away outfit again, trying to amortize the cost over multiple wears. G’s house was rich w/smells that made me nostalgic for a childhood I’m not sure I had. She had put on the Ritz. White linen, crystal goblets, china you can see your hand thru. Daddy was pleased she asked him to carve the lamb.

  They go home tomorrow, thank heavens. Don’t think I could take their judgments one more day. Daddy says I don’t cut vegetables small enough. You should be able to eat salad w/only a fork. Mother says my not dressing up for dinner every nite shows a lack of respect for my husband. We race each other to the percolator every morning. The coffee she makes is so strong I nearly faint when it hits my stomach.

  I held my breath when she asked about the photos on the mantel of R’s sisters, one dead of polio at 5, the other of scarlet fever at 18 months. Waited for her to say I’d ruined her chance for a son, to lay bare the disgrace of having only me to account for her life, she from a farm family of 8 kids. She said only I’m sorry for your loss. Didn’t say boo at dinner.

  I didn’t say much either, to be honest, lost in thought about how much inside me stays secret. I doubt I can change, don’t know if I want to. I’ve never told R about my role in Mother’s miscarriage when I was 3, that she’d taken me into bed w/her after I had a nightmare. Too ashamed I guess. I didn’t mean to kick her. But intention doesn’t change results. I also reflected on why Daddy didn’t tell me he thought I was raped, pondered what I’ve learned about genes & nurture in school. It’s distressingly obvious: I’m as closed up as Mother & as spineless as Daddy. Desperate as I am to know what he told R, I’m congenitally unable to ask.