Carry

by Toni Jensen

  II.

  Before the neighborhood becomes Macalester-Groveland, it is part of the Fort Snelling military reserve. A U.S. Army post built between 1820 and 1825, Fort Snelling comes into existence in part because of the fur trade, because of fear that the British would take over the fur trade in Canada and what would become Minnesota. The site, situated at the confluence of the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers, is considered by some to be the point of origin for the Dakota people.

  A few years before the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, the land that would become the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood is sold to the new City of Saint Paul. It’s sold, of course, despite not ever having been bought, not ever having been rightfully owned.

  The fort itself remains and plays a key and devastating role in the war, including confining Dakota men, women, and children who did not take part in the fighting. According to the Minnesota State Historical Society, “The Dakota non-combatants arrived at Fort Snelling on November 13, 1862, and encamped on the bluff of the Minnesota River about a mile west of the fort.”

  Next, the Dakota were moved by the soldiers to below the fort, to the river bottom. According to the Minnesota State Historical Society, “In December soldiers built a concentration camp, a wooden stockade more than 12 feet high enclosing an area of two or three acres, on the river bottom. More than 1,600 Dakota people were moved inside.”

  Before the neighborhood becomes Fort Snelling, it is the home of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. According to research from the Urban Indian Health Institute, as of 2010, the Twin Cities are home to 30,373 Native people, a good many of them Dakota and Anishinaabe. The place still is Dakota and Anishinaabe land, despite war, despite displacement, despite land theft, despite a concentration camp, despite America.

  III.

  Despite the warning from the sellers, I buy the house and we all move in late that summer. One fall day, I’m talking to the next-door neighbor of the warning. We’re talking over the fence as neighbors sometimes do, or at least as neighbors sometimes do on sitcoms. I have never done this before. The fence is a regular brown wood and yet the whole experience seems surreal, as does much of life in my new upper-middle-class neighborhood.

  “They only want money,” my neighbor says. “They only care about money. I just want to protect my father.”

  My neighbor, Susan Berkovitz, is reporting, not for the first time, how her family’s turned against her. She’s in her fifties, with dyed black hair and dramatic gestures. Her voice goes high and whiny on the last part, and she turns her big, dark eyes to me with a mournful headshake.

  Since we’re not actually in a sitcom, I don’t laugh. She’s clearly performing, anticipating a response.

  “My sister,” she says, “is such a bitch. She really only cares about the money.”

  Susie, as everyone in the neighborhood calls her, lives with her elderly mother and father. In the three months I’ve lived next door, I’ve heard a version of this story from her many times. I almost never see her parents, and the other neighbors tell a different story about Susie, but I’m trying to remain neutral. We live next door. It’s in my best interest to remain neutral, to try to get along.

  It’s a beautiful fall day in Minnesota, a respite between summer humidity and winter’s cascade of snow and cold. I’ve been raking leaves, and Jack and Lucy chase and race each other in the postage stamp of our backyard. They’re far too big for the yard but are using its space well. Susie, the neighbor, coos to them in her odd falsetto. She speaks in this baby-doll sort of voice much of the time, especially to the dogs.

  I’ve been told the following things about Susie: if you or a visitor park a car in front in her parents’ house, she’ll yell or slash the tires or kick them; if she’s angry with you, she’ll fabricate a reason to call the police; if she’s angry with you, she’ll open the gate and let your dogs out. Two neighbors have warned me of this last part after one family’s gate was left wide open, despite how none of the family members were home; their dogs got out and then were hit by a car. It was rumored that Susie had done it, a rumor she didn’t deny.

  I don’t know, of course, how much of this is true or is verifiable. What I know for certain is that we live in a beautiful and stolen neighborhood, which is to say we live in a desirable neighborhood in this, our America. People here walk to parks and restaurants, say hello and know each other’s names and families and pets.

  In the mornings, the men and I go to work. The wives, who all are as educated as I am or more, mainly stay home with the children. The children seem mostly lovely, and the wives seem mostly on the verge of screaming.

  I’m nice to Susie in the same spirit with which I wire shut both the front and back gates nearest her house—precautionary. But it’s more than that. There are things I like about her. She’s nice to the dogs so far and mainly nice about or indifferent to how strange, how anomalous is our household’s makeup.

  Jack, in particular, likes her baby-doll voice, and this afternoon pauses his galumphing to stretch against the fence, and Susie reaches out to scratch the wide space between his ears.

  She seems to be having a good enough day, and by this I mean she’s dressed and put together in a regular way. Her fuchsia lipstick has been drawn in the lines and her shirt is all the way buttoned. Her blackest of black hair is combed down, is not winging out at extreme angles.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “about your sister,” and nod in a way that is meant to approximate the act we call consoling. She pets some more Jack’s soft block head, and he stretches more, toward the top of the fence, to receive her attention.

  “She’s evil,” Susie says. “I don’t know what else to call it.”

  We talk some more about her cousin, who is trying to help, Susie reports, “but I can’t be sure,” she says, “I can’t be sure.”

  She repeats this several times, which is my cue to end the conversation gently, to feign an inside duty, to shut the door behind me.

  During the next year, this cousin, Shelley Joseph-Kordell, will work with Susie’s other family members to remove Susie from her childhood home and then to help her parents relocate to a nursing home in California near where the sister lives. Susie will sneak back home several times during the year; she will be especially distraught over being unable to see her father.

  Soon after, in the summer of 2003, Susie will go to a gun show, will buy a hundred-year-old .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Later, she will tell the police that after the purchase she repeatedly takes the revolver to the target range and practices.

  That fall day, though, a year or so before, I have no way of knowing she’s bought a gun. I have no way of knowing I live next door to someone who’s going to become a murderer.

  IV.

  Before moving to the neighborhood, in Arizona and on the reservation back in South Dakota, I taught English and public speaking classes. I loved the work in both places, the students, my colleagues, the vastness of landscape and sky.

  I especially loved the southern South Dakota landscape, the place in the center where it borders Nebraska. The whole area is beautiful, is surrounded by nature preserves and open land. In March each year, about a half a million sandhill cranes migrate through the region, stopping over at the ponds and small lakes of the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge.

  I taught four classes each semester while I lived there, yet did not earn a salary above the poverty line. It’s what the university had to offer, and I have no complaint with anyone there, only with the overarching system that makes it so. Almost everyone there lived at or below the poverty line; most lived far below it.

  Because I was poor, I worked a second job doing public relations of a sort for a nursing home in nearby Valentine, Nebraska, the mostly white town where I lived. It was an easy commute in good weather, the half hour or so north or south on Highway 83, but it was less easy
sometimes in the winter. I would rather have lived on the reservation, but there was a housing shortage, a housing crisis. One thing the myth of the vanishing Indian continues to get wrong is that we’re disappearing.

  All the white people I knew, including members of my family, assumed I left this job because living there was hard in the unquantifiable ways many white people assume it’s hard to live and work among people who aren’t white. It wasn’t.

  My motives for leaving were simple—I wanted to hustle less, to work less. I was tired.

  This is in the early 2000s, and it amuses me, nearly twenty years later, when people write about the new gig economy, the new second job, the new hustle. There’s nothing new, of course, about any of it. What’s new is how members of the upper middle class now are part of this experience. Once it’s theirs, it’s a subject to be studied and written about endlessly. It’s a situation, an epidemic, an important cultural shift.

  Before this struggle became reality for young people from the upper middle class, back when working two and three and four part-time jobs was the norm only for those from poverty and the lower middle class, in that time I’ll call since always, no one noticed. No one studied it because there was no “it” to study. Whether a circumstance is acknowledged openly or formally or whether it’s denied, how a situation becomes one worthy of study, is mainly in how it does or does not intersect with or affect the lives of the wealthy. Because it’s a commonly held American belief that those from poverty or any version of its neighborhood deserve to suffer, to overwork, to burn out their minds and health and good hearts early. It’s a shrug-and-move-on situation if it’s a situation at all. It’s a Wednesday. It’s as regular as bright leaves falling off trees in the fall.

  Part of how and why I come to feel sorry for Susie, then, or at least to feel a sort of kinship with her, is through her being poor, being displaced. Even though I learn she’s sued almost every member of her family, some multiple times, even though she rants and raves and seemingly has no other work than to make trouble, I feel for how in her middle age, she’s both poor and exiled.

  V.

  That first year in the house next door to Susie’s is a back-and-forth year. After we have the fine conversation on the fine fall day, a week or so later, Susie is having a much less good day. She’s angry, out in front of our houses, on the road verge, telling one of the boys’ friends to move his car.

  “Now,” she yells. “Right now.” She waves her arms around, sticking a finger in his face, even though he’s a giant, standing in the middle distance between six and seven feet tall. My brother first attends this college on a baseball scholarship, and many of the other boys and their friends also are athletes.

  There are days I want to yell at them, too—not for parking on a public street, but for leaving beer cans everywhere, for leaning back too far in my dining room chairs and reducing them to kindling. So I stand in the front porch, at the window screen, waiting and deciding.

  Susie is wearing a soft pink sweater so tight it seems impossible it went over her head. When she turns, I see it rides up a little at the midsection and that her lipstick line today extends upward, close to her nose, and also halfway down her chin. She’s wearing one bright red, pointed ballet flat and one that’s black and rounded.

  I leave the porch and tell the giant boy to move his car, please, and the look I give him is clear. He moves away from and around Susie like she might combust, like she might set all of us on fire.

  It takes a minute either for her to recognize me or to acknowledge me, so like the boy who now is moving his car, I keep a distance. After a full minute, she seems to know who I am.

  “Oh,” she says, “is he at your house?”

  I nod.

  That’s all she says before turning away, before we each go back to our respective houses.

  A month or so later, winter having settled all the way in, I’m getting ready for work one morning when a loud knock sounds at the front door. I’m buttoning my shirt, heading down the stairs from my bedroom. It’s just before nine A.M., and I need to leave for work.

  Two plainclothes policemen stand at the front door, their own dress shirts fully buttoned and pressed. A neighbor, they say, has made a complaint, has said a dog named Jack has been jumping out the window, into the side yard near her property, barking and snarling at her. She’s afraid, she says. She’s afraid for her life.

  “Susie,” I say and sigh.

  There is frost on the grass in the patches not yet covered with snow. There is frost on the outside of all the windows.

  I show them the windows, the dog. He is not always a good dog—he absolutely is capable of snarling and jumping—but only at men. He likes Susie. He has not magically jumped out a closed-tight, frost-covered window.

  The older officer nods and smiles when my main rebuttal is “It’s winter. Who leaves the windows open?”

  He admits there’s an ever-growing file at work with my neighbor’s name on it. The younger one frowns. He seems more inclined to want to discuss the possibility of the dog jumping out the window.

  “Feel free,” I say, “to open any of these windows.”

  And when he tries, of course, he discovers they’re mostly frozen shut. The officers stay only a few awkward minutes more.

  “Maybe keep your distance,” the older one says quietly on the way out, and I nod and hurry off to work, now late.

  I’m not fuming or even disgruntled, really, only irritated. I’ve been prepared by many, of course, for this very visit, for this kind of behavior from Susie. Mainly, though, it’s difficult to take such a visit too seriously when the other prior visit from law enforcement had been such a serious one.

  A few months earlier, back in the warmer weather, when the police arrive at the front door, it’s the middle of the night. I’m upstairs in my bed, asleep, and awake to banging and yelling from below, to shouts of “Get down, hands on your head, don’t move, don’t you move.”

  That night I stumble down the stairs as fast as I can without falling. I hear one of the boys’ voices saying okay, okay—I hear the tremble in it. When I try to pull open the front door, one of the policemen yells at me, calls me ma’am, and tells me to stay inside.

  “They live here,” I manage to say through the closed door. “We all live here.”

  One of the boys does live in the house and the other is familiar to me, is a friend of theirs who spends a lot of time at our house.

  Eventually, I hear the police get the boys facedown on the ground in the cramped, enclosed porch. This is no small feat since the friend is an athlete, is well over six feet tall. They have not yet opened the door. They seem to be worried for my safety.

  I assure them through the closed door that I know these two—that one of them lives in my house.

  When the door opens and the lights come on, the younger officer does not appear to be much older than these boys, is maybe twenty-three or twenty-four years old. He’s blond and on the shorter side. He’s having trouble holstering his weapon because both his hands are shaking.

  “I almost shot you,” he says repeatedly to Alex, the one who lives at my house. “Do you understand? I almost shot you.”

  I don’t remember well the second officer, only that he’s a little older and is calmer. I watch the younger officer’s anguish, how his fear begins to register in the boys’ faces.

  Alex, who a moment before had been facedown on the cold porch floor, is trying not to cry, is shaking now as well.

  I say I know both of them. I say Alex lives here. The officers tell me there have been reports of break-ins in the neighborhood tonight and that when they shined their lights into the front porch, both boys ducked down. The officers thought they were intruders.

  The boys clearly are drunk, had been returning home from the bar. One of them says he dropped h
is keys. The other says he was trying to help him find the keys, there on the porch in the dark.

  One of them is carrying a butter knife. There is no good explanation for why. They’re drunk and not particularly coherent.

  Because he has ID and I can vouch for him, Alex is allowed to stay home, and the other boy without proper ID or anything verifying his address is taken downtown in the police car. He’s larger, and I imagine they think he’s the bigger threat.

  Both boys are white. The one they take downtown has a lawyer for a father, and we call him, and the boy is released soon after, and there is no further trouble for either of them.

  They have good friends who’ve had trouble with the police—other scholarship students, athletes who are not white, who haven’t given the police any more probable cause than these boys have, probably less.

  We know, all of us, this moment to be a grace note, a rare scare, a good end. The next day, there are two Adirondack chairs in the backyard, alongside a child’s Big Wheel and assorted gardening tools.

  “You were stealing things,” I say to them, so angry now I can barely pull my tone together. “You were the goddamn intruders.”

  They swear to me they did not break into anyone’s home, but, yes, drunk, stumbling home, they zigzagged through yards and took things left out in the open.

  “It’s going back,” I say. “All of it.”

  They wait till close to dark to return the Big Wheel and the garden tools, but they don’t ever remember where the Adirondack chairs come from.

  I tell them they should walk around more. I tell them they should try. In the weeks that follow, they still don’t remember. So they sand and peel off most of the chairs’ paint and leave them in my backyard, I suppose thinking this destruction will make the chairs less recognizable should I ever have over for a drink or a barbecue the unknown owners.