by Tricia Dower
So she listens as Mother relates how Grandpa met Grandma at a church social where he bid on and won her pure whipped cream pie. That he was stern and expected his kids to turn over any money they earned if they lived at home. That little Betty, who liked make-believe and yes, she’ll admit it, showing off, performed in plays her father never bothered to see.
“You get those gray-green eyes from your great-grandmother. She was clever, carding the wool off sheep to make thread and knitting the thread into lovely bedspreads.” She reaches over and gently raps Lin’s knee. “Here’s something I bet you don’t know. Your great-grandfather was an orphan, bound out to a farmer at seven until he was sixteen. A servant! After that he was a bounty soldier in the Civil War. He received seven hundred and eighty dollars for volunteering to substitute for a man who’d been drafted. How ’bout that?”
Lin lifts her eyebrows in amazement. “So the rich could buy their way out.”
“Yep.” Mother stands and stretches, looks around. “We didn’t have your trees but this place reminds me of home, the nearest neighbor so far away. The winters were heavy and quiet and some summer nights you could hear a distant storm. The stars were just as easy to see there as they are here.” She laughs. “I don’t suppose they know they’re not twinkling over Kansas tonight.” She points out a harp, an eagle, a swan, a teapot and a scorpion close to the horizon. Lin has never been able to spot any shape other than the dippers and Orion’s Belt. Staring up at the stars against the inky sky, she feels barely attached to the earth.
“It wasn’t lonely on the farm,” Mother says. “The hands were there every day except Sunday. Flora, Ivy and I helped Mom feed them at midday at that huge pine table our dad made. We set out heavy platters of fried chicken and biscuits, bowls of mashed potatoes and string beans, Mom’s thick, white gravy.” She gives Lin a rueful smile. “Good for you going back to college. I’ve got nothing to show for all the meals I’ve cooked.”
The day she leaves, the wind returns. It flutters high in the trees and sends the leaf shadows dancing on the bedroom ceiling. Tavis’s eyes turn green.
58
Fri, Aug 24/73
I saw a different me today. A hero, not a victim. Ha! There should’ve been background music.
At noon, Lin heads out on foot from the boxy green bungalow that hasn’t been her home since she married Ron. She rounds one corner, then another. She’s not in a hurry. It’s her thirtieth birthday. Aunt Libby has taken Tavis to a petting zoo because Lin asked for time alone to wander and reflect on leaving her twenties behind. Not a lie. Not the whole truth either. She passes the narrow road leading to Crazy Haggerty’s old house. Crosses the highway and gives her old elementary school a flippant salute. Just before the train station, she turns right again. By one-thirty, she’s outside Bing’s Pharmacy where Miranda Haggerty is pharmacist now. She pretends to study a window display of sunscreen and mosquito repellent until the only customer, a young woman with a toddler on her hip, leaves.
The cold as she enters shocks her. Bing’s wasn’t always air-conditioned. The floors are still wooden, the antiseptic smell pervasive. She heads for the back, smiles to see the bin of horehound candies still there, a small metal trowel for scooping them into little white bags. Daddy was hooked on them when she was a kid, scolded her when she snickered at the name. She stands at the counter and coughs softly. Miranda comes from behind a partition in her white pharmacy jacket, the fine lines on her face and around her mouth the only surprise. Her hair is still the rusty red of dried blood and falls to her shoulders in soft waves as it did thirteen years ago. She scans Lin’s face with the same green eyes, speaks with the same lilt as she says, “Good day.”
Lin smiles and says, “It’s been a long time. I’m Linda, Lin now, Betty Wise’s daughter.”
Miranda looks puzzled. “Oh aye? She didn’t say you’d be visiting.”
“I suppose it’s been a while since you saw her.”
“I see her every week, has she sent you for something?”
That old jealousy flares up. Lin considers saying, Yes, she sent me about her hemorrhoids, what do you suggest? But what would that accomplish? “No, she doesn’t know I’m here. I came with the hope you could help me understand what’s wrong with her.”
Miranda’s soft laugh feels unkind. “There’s naught wrong with her. The world is just terrible toxic to some people.”
Lin crosses her arms. “So exactly how is the world poisoning her?”
Miranda puts her hands in her jacket pockets, leans back against the partition. “Has she not told you then?”
Lin feels like a child in school, trying to guess what answer the teacher wants. “She’s mentioned things over the years: scar tissue, a messed up internal thermostat, nerve damage.”
“Is that not enough for you, then, her word?”
Lin is tempted to walk away.
Just then Miranda straightens up and looks past her. Lin turns. An elderly man has come through the door. Miranda touches Lin’s hand, says, “I’m after getting some lunch once I take care of this gentleman. Care to come with me? We can talk better then.” Her face has taken on a softer expression. The sudden shift surprises Lin but she says, “Yes, I’d like that.” She wanders down the aisles, peering at cold remedies, laxatives, sanitary napkins and bandages until Miranda puts a Back in 30 Minutes sign on the door. She leads Lin through another door beside the pharmacy and up a narrow staircase to her apartment. It isn’t much. Right under the roof and low ceilinged with three small rooms, plain white walls. The air is stuffy and pungent with something spicy-sweet, incense perhaps.
“It’s strange warm today,” Miranda says and opens a kitchen window that overlooks an alley where a policeman was shot dead when Lin was still in grade school. The memory of that and the town’s grief comes hurtling back as though they live in that tiny kitchen. Miranda offers her a tuna fish sandwich but she isn’t hungry. They sit on a scratchy maroon horsehair couch in what Miranda calls the parlor while Miranda eats. There’s little else in the room but the couch and an end table with a lamp. Lin feels a stab of compassion for Miranda. The woman should live on Park Avenue after all she’s gone through. She asks about the framed photo on the end table: a grinning young man with an abnormally small head.
“My lad, my Cian,” Miranda says. “He’s twenty. Naught wrong with him either. He’s in a group home and it suits him.”
“Oh, I’m glad.” The child Lin saw Miranda with so many years ago didn’t look healthy enough to live long. “How often do you see him?”
“Every Saturday. I go to him or he comes to me.” She grins and Lin is shocked to see teeth missing on both sides of her mouth.
She glances at her watch. Thirty minutes will pass quickly. “If nothing’s wrong with my mother,” she says with some urgency, “why is she in pain?”
“We’re all in pain,” Miranda says. “How does yours seep out?”
Lin stiffens. “I haven’t come to talk about me,” she says. “The things you recommend: the hot stones, the warm baths, the teas and purgatives. They make her feel better for a while but they don’t actually cure her.”
Miranda grins again. “To be cured of life,” she says, “aye, that’d be a trick.” She takes the last bite of her sandwich and wipes her mouth with a paper napkin. “Your ma is trying to put down the weight of old suffering and step away from it. Would that mine had done the same. She took her life when I was three and changed mine forever. Sometimes I look for her in Betty Wise, she’s become quite dear to me.”
Lin loses her breath for a moment. All these years, she has resented Miranda for doing what she with her useless psych degree hasn’t been able to: acknowledge her mother’s pain and thereby ease it for a while. She considers Mother’s otherwise friendless life and the miracle of Angel in hers, tells herself to put aside her jealousy and ill will toward Miranda for a moment. She’s thirty years old, for p
ity’s sake. She swallows hard and says, “Thank you for that.”
After leaving the apartment, she pauses on the sidewalk to marshal her thoughts. While she still lived in Stony River she avoided, whenever she could, the radioactive path that led her to Eldon Jukes. Her plan was to tread it deliberately and purposefully today but Miranda’s words play in her head. Should she go straight back to Mother and Daddy’s, step away from her old suffering rather than try to retrace it? So what if a million years ago some crazy guy scared the hell out of her? Rhonda would say he ran out of lines and left the stage with his death. But he hasn’t left her mind and that’s why she’s here.
She turns and heads for the rec center where it started fifteen years ago when friends dropped her off after a day down the shore. It takes her a half-hour to get there. Hollow-eyed teens litter the sidewalk today, longhaired girls in hip-hugger pants, halter-tops and platform shoes, bearded boys in army surplus, more dark skins than she recalls. Whatever they’re smoking smells sweet and evil, like rancid honey. They stare at her and smirk. How unhip she must look in clean white sneakers, crisply pressed black and white checked slacks, a blouse the yellow of a school bus. The neighborhood was never great shakes, is even more ramshackle now. Downtown continues to shed stores. People continue to lose jobs. Bartz Chemicals, the major employer and where Daddy is an accountant, has been shifting manufacturing to other states for years.
She passes slowly through the back alleys of time, taking it all in. She was panicky then, needing to be home before anyone discovered she was gone. The years have morphed family homes into repair shops and drycleaners, corner stores into bars with loud music spilling from open doors, their insides dark as night. A soda fountain looks familiar and First Presbyterian is still there. The QuickChek is new. There are more cars now. They had shorter front ends then, longer fins in the back. She passes the grand old lodge with its bronzed elk on a parched lawn and the skeleton of a hotel that fire has eaten alive.
How close she is to him here. She hardly slept last night anticipating today, remembering the weight of her arm against the door with no handle. She inhales deeply to foil the soft flutter of panic beneath her chest. Just over the hump-backed bridge the pale green convertible approached with its terrible purpose. The sidewalk simmered under her thin-soled sandals that day and the top of her head felt soft from the heat. She’d been down the shore and gotten the backs of her knees burned. Today a more merciful sun slides in and out of the clouds.
She turns down her street like he did, but this time she’s on foot, not in his predatory car. When Ron brought up the assault during counseling she realized if she wasn’t to forever stand in the shadow a stranger had cast on her life, she had to give that day a better ending, break the spell. After he said, “Beg for your life” and she spit on him, breaking whatever black spell he was under, he drove her back and let her out across from Tony’s Garage, a block from her house. She’s there now, staring at the Esso pumps that used to be Texaco’s. She hears Rhonda say, “The secret word is resistance” and sends up a silent cheer for her brave younger self.
All she has to do is cross the highway calmly, not stagger like she did fifteen years ago, her breath coming fast, the ground beneath her feet heaving, every cell begging God not to punish her further. Mother and Daddy had gone to Boston for three days so Mother could have medical tests. She’d bullied them into letting her stay home alone then abused their trust by going down the shore, removing herself from divine or any other protection.
She’s breathing easier now, negotiating the slate sidewalk in front of the tidy yards of three brick houses, new since she left Stony River. She sidesteps Mother’s potted geraniums on the front stoop, shivers with pleasure at the aroma of garlic and tomatoes greeting her on the screened-in porch and beckoning her through the living room, past the ski-legged cherrywood table decked out for her birthday dinner with the good china, not the chipped second-best, and into the tea-kettle-wallpapered kitchen where Mother in her faded Now You’re Cooking With Gas apron spoons sauce onto fat lasagna noodles. A fan swishes hot air around the room. Mother is flushed, fifty-three, and glowing from health you’d suppose if you didn’t know better.
“Oh, good, you’re back,” she says. “Did you run into your father?”
“Should I have?”
“He headed out in the car with Libby and Tavis to look for you. Not sure which way. He thought your feet might be complaining. You’ve been gone for hours.” Lin pictures Daddy in his stodgy white Dodge sedan, driving slowly as if leading a parade, squinting into the sun, Aunt Libby and Tavis hanging out the windows ready to shout, There she is. She smiles at the wonder of it. She’s not Linda Marie Wise anymore, won’t be alone tonight as she was fifteen years ago, screaming until her voice disappeared.
“I love you, Mom,” she says and tears up, embarrassed at such undisguised emotion.
“I know,” Mother says. “Grab an apron. We’re making Baked Alaska for dessert.”
Lin laughs in delight. “You remembered.”
Mother sets her spoon down, holds out her arms. “Absotutely.”
59
Tues, Sept 4/73
T started kindergarten today. Thought my heart would break w/a sad kind of happiness. He looked proud in his new black watch plaid shirt & little khaki pants. Determined, too, like he was off to his 1st job, which I suppose he was. Hope the other kids aren’t mean to him & his teacher is kind & generous. Grace wanted to come see him off but I said no. Not to get back at her. I just don’t trust myself to see her yet.
R moves into a 2-bedroom in another bldg on Friday. T will stay w/him one wk, me the next. Mother said what if he asks to stay w/R all the time? I said I guess I’ll have to die then. She said she won’t let me & I wondered how the fissure between us stayed open for so long, thought of Daddy siding w/me against her when I was younger, turning our frustration w/her silences into little jokes, leading me to think he wanted to be w/me more than he did her, making her into a rival.
T said it’s good to take turns, Mommy. He’ll go to church w/R on Sundays. I agreed to that in the contract we drew up. I might go w/them once in a while, don’t have to believe what R does to share in his joy. Besides, I miss the hymns. St. Augustine wrote it’s a sin to find singing itself in church more moving than the truth it conveys but I don’t believe in sin anymore. I asked R to let me know if he’s going to be late to daycare any afternoon when it’s his week so I can be there. T panics if you don’t pick him up by the time Electric Company is on, starts imagining he’s been orphaned. Most of the kids are gone by then. I’m hovering, I know, aware of the irony.
Ginger’s in love again. Or lust. A guy who lives here, a widower w/2 kids. She met him at the pool while I was in Stony River. He admired her black bikini. I said if he lives here he can’t be made of money & she said she doesn’t care about that anymore.
I still love R in some cosmic way. Feel bound to him by our hopes for Tavis & the beautiful future we might inhabit some day. I just haven’t become enough of myself for that yet. Have to be my own fairy godmother, my own prince charming first. Angel said I looked like a scared rabbit the day we met. I’ll bet.
A year ago I pictured myself as a tiny embryo taking shape within some enormous womb. Barely alive. Defenseless. I’m way overdue for delivery. Ready to burst into the light with long, flowing hair, painted nails, a layer of pulchritudinous fat and tap shoes on my feet.
Ready to dance. Ready to star. Unafraid.
Heartfelt thanks to
…John Pearce, Vici Johnstone, Andrea Routley and Jane Silcott, my exceptional editorial partner, for shepherding my manuscript into the wonder of this book,
…Leanne Baugh, Patti-Anne Kay, Kathryn Lemmon, Angela McIntyre, Marybeth Nelson, Elizah Rosewylder and Richard Wagamese for reading whole or partial drafts along the way, and Diana Jones for persevering through the entire manuscript three times,
…Jeff M. Sauve, Associate College Archivist at St. Olaf College, for helping me imagine what Lin Brunson might have experienced as a St. Olaf student way back when and for granting me generous access to archived copies of the college’s newspaper, yearbooks and other historical records,
…Kathy Spence Johnson, MLIS, Archivist for the Minnesota Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, for answering dozens of questions patiently and thoroughly,
…the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota,
…Mike Wolfgang, for guiding me around “Prairie Fire” and sharing the piece of his heart he left in Northfield,
…Katie Wolfgang and Lillian Dobbs for unflagging cheerleading,
…Colin Dower for everything else, impossible to quantify, especially the love.
My Reading List
A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf, Oxford University Press, 1998
Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Hawthorn Books, 1968
Freedom Riders; 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Raymond Arsenault, Oxford University Press, 2006
Games People Play by Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964
Hopkins Minnesota Through the Years, The Hopkins Historical Society, 2002
I’m OK—You’re OK by Thomas A. Harris, M.D., Harper & Row, 1967
Seth Speaks; The Eternal Validity of the Soul by Jane Roberts, Prentice-Hall, 1972
The Burglary; The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by Betty Medsger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014