Becoming Lin

by Tricia Dower

  44

  The wind whistles under the front door. The fire snaps and spits, struggling to warm the room. “We’re losing more heat than we’re gaining,” she says. He leaves, comes back with a blanket and cocoons her in it. They’ve gotten into the habit of sitting by the fire on Friday nights and revisiting the week after tucking Tavis in. He tells her what happened at church. She shares any cute or troubling things Tavis has said and done. Surprising how much she counts on it. They’ve shoved the coffee table aside this bitter Friday, drawn the couch nearer the fire and huddled closer together than usual. When she asks, “What do you think God looks like?” he’s still shaking his head over her account of Tavis declaring her “poopie head” a few days ago.

  “He asked you that?”

  “No, I’m asking you. If you had to draw a picture of God, what would you draw?”

  “Oh.” He puts on a studious face, stretches his long legs toward the hearth. She smiles at his feet in the yellow, black and blue argyle slipper sox Tavis picked out for him for Christmas, smiles at the thought they’re warming the misshapen pinky toes she’s always found endearing. “A blinding white light, maybe,” he says. “Like the sun shining in all its brilliance, per Revelations.”

  “Forget what the Bible says. I want to know what you see when you think of God.”

  “Hmm, right now?” He closes his eyes, takes a moment. “The Northern lights. Intense. Shimmering. Purple, green, red, yellow.”

  “Are they male or female?”

  He laughs and opens his eyes, turns his head towards her. “Neither.”

  She meets his gaze. “Why do you say Our Father, then, when you pray? Why not Oh, Northern Lights?”

  His smile disappears. “That’s how Jesus taught us to pray. Is this some feminist thing?”

  “It’s a truth thing. When I was a kid, nobody told me to picture a white light. They showed me illustrations of an old man with a long white beard, sandals and a flowing gown.”

  “Ah, yes, Daniel’s vision, clothes white as snow, hair like pure wool.” He’s preaching to her now, sparking her impatience. “We talk to children in terms they can understand. God’s role as a loving father, for example, guiding and protecting his children.”

  “Yeah, and set them up to be crushed when he doesn’t protect those children.”

  He touches her shoulder. “Is that what you are, Lin? Crushed?”

  “What I am is angry at myself for ever believing in a Santa-like god who hands out rewards if you do what he says and punishment if you don’t.”

  He dons his ministerial face. “You seem to be wrestling with this. Why is that?”

  “I’m finally giving myself time to think about it. For years I’ve wondered why God saved me from Eldon Jukes and not the other girl. What if God is a blinding white light, a powerful force that simply sets our lives in motion but intends no purpose for us, good or bad?”

  He frowns. “That’s too cold and impersonal for me.”

  “Maybe the truth is cold and impersonal.”

  He rests his head against the back of the couch and looks up at fire shadows strafing the ceiling. “Have you ever seen the Northern Lights?”

  “Only in a magazine. You?”

  “The winter I turned ten. Dad and I went ice fishing on Lake Superior, not far from the Canadian border. On a moonless night, out of absolute blackness, the lights appeared with an audible shush.” He speaks as though transported, his voice slow and distant. “Words from the Christmas story leaped into my head. Heavenly host. Then God entered me in a flood of warmth. I felt His energy run straight through me. He was breathing with my lungs, filling my mind.” He turns to her with watery eyes. “He’s not some impersonal force that simply set my life in motion, Lin. He carries me. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

  The Bible again. “So who are you, then? Some Jesus clone?”

  He winces. “I prefer disciple. Why the edge in your voice? Why these questions now?”

  Her heart pounds at what she’s about to say. “I made a New Year’s resolution to ask you about your faith. You’d assume I’d know after seven years but I don’t, except in the shallowest way. If I come back I need to know who I’m coming back to.”

  He takes a sharp breath, stands and looks toward the windows for a moment as if held by a thought, places another log on the fire and sits on the raised hearth, facing her. “I’ve never intentionally hidden myself from you, as I sense you have from me. Have you too been lonely in our marriage?”

  All the times she wanted to phone Artie. All the times she did because she felt Ron wouldn’t understand her. “Lonely is as good a word as any.”

  He sits beside her again, rests a hand on her blanketed knee. “Ask me anything. I want you to know me. I’ve always wanted that. And I want to know you: what you do every day, the people you’re meeting, the books you’re reading, the conversations you’re having without me. Not knowing is such an ache, Lin, such an ache.”

  “Whatever I say would be incomplete. You might form the wrong impression.”

  “Then help me form the true one. Not having you here every day makes me imagine all sorts of horrors. It’s fine for you to be on your own but Tavis is still my responsibility.” He stands and grabs the poker, fiddles with a log, his back to her. “Just so you know, I asked Lenny to stop by every so often to see if you need anything. I probably should have told you sooner.”

  She flops back against the couch. “He phones you to report on me?”

  He turns. “No. I stop in and see him after I drop Tavis off.”

  “Does he go into my apartment when I’m gone?”

  “Not that I know of.” He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t meet her eyes.

  A chilling thought settles on her. “Does he let you in?”

  He shakes his head so slowly she wonders if he’s grappling with the truth.

  She opens and closes her fists under the blanket. “You have a key, don’t you?”

  He shrugs. “My name is on the lease.”

  She pictures him skulking around as the FBI would, poking into her garbage, rummaging through drawers and closets. She hugs herself to stop a shiver. “What do you do in there?”

  He sighs heavily as though glad to rid his lungs of air. “Sometimes I just breathe you in.”

  Last week. The towels in the linen closet not quite right. “You’ve been reading my journal, haven’t you?” Her idea of him as pure slides away like snow from a roof.

  “Yes.” At least his face has the decency to flush.

  “How much have you read?”

  “Everything, I think.” He gives her a sad smile. “How ambitious you were for us at first.”

  She goes cold with mortification at what he must’ve read. Then hot with anger. Why should she be ashamed of her private thoughts? They’re all she truly owns. She throws off the blanket, moves to an armchair. “If you’ve read it all, you know how scared I was. You let me imagine someone was stalking me. I trusted you.”

  He rises from the couch and stands over her. “You want to talk about trust? To me it means having no secrets. And the two shall be one flesh. Remember that from our wedding?”

  “That’s about sex.” Something they haven’t had for three months, which is fine with her.

  He swallows hard and blinks. He’s always said relations and she’s followed his lead out of respect for his sensibilities. But nobody under eighty says relations.

  “It’s about intimacy,” he says, “an idea that seems foreign to you. Your own journal convicts you. In it you admit you’re aloof and keep yourself from me.”

  How dare he blame her for his invasion of her privacy? She’d flee if it weren’t cold and dark outside. She glares up at him. “I can’t talk about this anymore. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  He lifts his hands in resignation. “
Suit yourself.”

  He goes upstairs, brings down a pillow and another blanket, sets the key to her apartment on the coffee table and says goodnight, his voice terrible in its tenderness.

  She listens to him climb the stairs, tiptoes into Tavis’s room and snugs the Snoopy quilt around his shoulders against the enemy Red Baron cold. Moonlight off the snow outside his window casts a shadow on his face and the deep silence of his sleep.

  She lies awake for hours, unexpectedly deflated the FBI wasn’t in her apartment after all, almost as deflated as when the Minutemen letters turned out to be false. Sleep takes her, eventually, and lures her into invisible houses in the woods behind the parsonage, each house behind another like train cars. She floats through them until she reaches a ranch where people on bulls seem to be expecting her. “You’ve entered a world beyond myth, beyond time,” they say, the meaning of their words eluding her. They invite her to ride a bull but she’s afraid. She runs back through the train of houses to the parsonage.

  Sat, Jan 27/73

  They signed the peace treaty! Ended the draft! It would be wonderful to call R to celebrate but he ruined that last night. Are you reading this, you bastard? You want my true feelings? Here’s one: I hate you. Satisfied?

  Ginger drops by excited, hopeful. She’s gotten eleven responses to her Lonely Hearts ad, isn’t interested in talking about the peace treaty.

  Jolie comes, too, with tired circles under her eyes. It’s after nine. She’s been at The Flaming Bohemian during dinner shift as she is every night except Sundays and Mondays when Ginger is off. Uncle Fran feeds them and keeps Jolie in coloring books and paper dolls. The customers get a kick out of seeing a kid there. It’s her first time in Lin’s apartment and she scans it with astonished eyes. “No TV?” Lin sets her up on the couch with three books. She’s keen on Katy and the Big Snow until she discovers Katy’s a tractor, not a girl.

  The eleven men have sent photos. Ginger lays them out on the card table and reads their letters out loud. One writes he prefers blue-eyed blondes but raven-haired has him intrigued. “Any guy who prefers whatever I’m not is out,” Ginger says. Also out is the one who’s interested in hearing from her if she isn’t fat. “I’ll send him a photo so he knows what he’s missing.” One guy says she’s “a bitch” for requesting somebody “established.” He’s out. So is a guy in a shiny suit. “I don’t come from money,” she says, “but I know cheap when I see it.” Lin wouldn’t have predicted the ruthless edge to her voice. Tall guys are first on Ginger’s list because she heard they get bigger salaries. She nixes a guy with a plump cat face and a muscular one who looks too much like her firefighter ex, Sonny.

  Lin says, “I thought you didn’t care what a man looked like if he had money.”

  “I changed my mind.” She decides to write back to an accountant as bald as a chihuahua, the very tall manager of a factory that makes the World’s Finest Tractors, a silver-haired lawyer, a skinny guy who owns a house painting business and a dark, hairy photographer who enclosed a long narrow business card bearing the single name Barzetti and the image of a plane taking off. In his letter he says he shot the photo while lying on his back on a runway. He also says God whispered her name in his ear. Ginger thinks he may be The One.

  Lin says, “You’ll tell them about Jolie now, right?”

  “Not yet.” She has a camera with her. “I need a picture that makes me look marriageable. Take it for me?” She’s come dressed in a floor-length black skirt slit up her leg and a white blouse with a frilly neck plunging to the waist. Lin gets several shots of her standing against the mustard drapes, one hand on her hip, the other resting on her cheek in a come-hither way. Jolie is conked out on the couch, her little chapped mouth wide open. Ginger carries her out around ten.

  If Lin still prayed, she’d pray for Ginger, Jolie and her own little bruised family.

  45

  She covers the distance from Hennepin Avenue in record time, slip-sliding on frost, trying to outrun the cold that stabs her legs and face. It’s a zillion below with the wind chill. For all she knows the cloudless sky is blue ice. She keeps her mouth shut lest her teeth freeze, half-expects Lutheran Protection’s glass building to have shattered.

  In the lobby, she picks up the February edition of the employee monthly. Plastered on the front are the homely mugs of the three regional sales managers, including the one who wears plaid suits and says, “Hey gorgeous, going down with me?” whenever Lin’s unlucky enough to share the elevator with him. The three graying stooges are newly appointed assistant vice presidents, officers of the company.

  At morning coffee break, she asks if LP has any women officers, hears only the click of Lois’s knitting needles in response. Karin stirs her coffee half a dozen times before saying, “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Arlyss bites into an apple so noisily it could be a rock. She chews for a bit, swallows and says, “I suppose no women are qualified.”

  “Why not?”

  Wendy snorts. “Why don’t you ask the VP of Personnel?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Jacob Gunderson.”

  She considers Wendy’s challenge on the way to Prairie Fire nine hours later. She hasn’t been there for the past two weekends and it’s an insane idea tonight given the temperature. But earlier in the week, Irene informed her Tavis had punched other children without provocation. Lin asked him why and, face tight as a bud, he said, “Because I wanted to.” Irene inquired if anything had changed at home, any reason Tavis might be feeling powerless. Lin phoned Ron and they concluded the only change was her refusal to visit after she learned he’d entered her apartment and read her journal. He’s picked Tavis up the last two Fridays. She’s agreed to resume her visits for a while to see if it makes a difference in Tavis’s behavior. The viciousness has gone out of her anger. Maybe somewhere deep inside she wanted Ron to find her journal and discover the person he claims she hides. Or show her how self-important she was to suspect the FBI still cared enough about her to slither into her apartment.

  Ron greets them as though they’ve come through the freezing gates of Hell. He tarps the car against the frost and hustles them into the house. He’s painfully polite at first and she doesn’t volunteer much. They spend the evening in Tavis’s room, the warmest in the house. Tavis enslaves them, bringing them book after book to read to him. After he’s asleep, they migrate to the kitchen and sit opposite each other, gripping mugs of tea, the table hard and cold beneath their elbows. Ron opens the oven door for heat. They exchange observations of Tavis, agree he seemed insecure tonight. “I’ve had two weeks to meditate on what I did,” Ron says, his throat sounding dry. “My only excuse is that love clouded my judgment. Can you forgive me?”

  Not used to someone else needing forgiveness, she smiles weakly. “I read you should try to see your thoughts and feelings as a landscape you’re painting and replace any images you don’t like.”

  “And?”

  “So I’m trying to paint over an angry forest fire. Is that forgiveness? I don’t know.”

  He sits back and grins. “Maybe it is.” He reaches across the table and takes her hand. “Any faith questions for me tonight?”

  She considers asking what he believes he’s free to do if God is the one breathing him but she can’t come up with a way to say it that won’t sound hostile. She tells him about the elevation of the three stooges that’s on her mind and the possibility she might ask the VP of Personnel why there aren’t any women officers.

  Chin in hands, his eyes on hers, he listens as intently as he did in their early months together. “Do you want to be an officer?”

  “No, but if I did I wouldn’t want to hear I can’t because I’m a woman.”

  He nods. “A reasonable sentiment in this day and age.”

  She smiles at this day and age. How old-fashioned he is, not the rebel she thought when first in thra
ll of him, not the swashbuckler his snazzy car implied. “It’s simply not fair,” she says.

  “I’ve always admired your sense of fairness. Why shouldn’t you speak with the VP?”

  “He could be offended and tell me to leave the company.”

  “For asking a question? I doubt it. And what if he does? You’ll find something else.”

  She expels a relieved breath. He didn’t say: If he does, you’ll just come home.

  Mon, Feb 12/73

  R called tonite from his church office so Grace wouldn’t hear. He asked if I was over his transgression enough to discuss something he’d read in my journal. Oh here it comes, I thought, the 3rd-degree about Artie. I was sure it wasn’t about what I’d written lately because he can’t have found my new hiding place. Turns out he wanted to know if Seth is somebody I work with. (He didn’t say boo about Rhonda & neither did I.) I laughed inside at the thought of him jealous of some ancient guy who speaks thru a woman in a trance. I said no, he’s a character in a book. About Adam & Eve’s son Seth? I said no, about the nature of reality. A Gnostic book? Jeez he was persistent. I said I’ll tell you what it’s about if you listen w/out judging me for reading it. He went quiet & I pictured him pinching his nose like he does when he’s deliberating. After a bit he said ok. I slid down to the carpet & sat w/my back against the wall, told him about All That Is, said I’d like to believe in it if I had scientific proof. He said you don’t have to choose between science & God or All That Is, if you will. Science can’t prove everything. Some truths are tested through revelation. I said I don’t know if the scraps of belief I hang onto like orphaned socks are true. Don’t have a Northern Lights story to help me decide. I didn’t mention that Twilight Zone moment when Tavis was born because I hadn’t sensed any God-like presence & he’d wonder why I hadn’t told him sooner. He said can’t you live w/some uncertainty, some mystery? I said I’ve been living w/that for ages. He said be patient. Your heart will know the truth when it’s time. And Lin? You didn’t kill your brother. I should’ve said that sooner. Please lay that burden down.