Though my mother wanted our support, logistically she needed it, confined as she was then to her bed at the Lutheran Home. Ma met with each of us (my brother, Pete, her sister, Suze, and Wolski) separately, in an apparent divide-and-conquer strategy. Though, in the end, she may not have needed to be so cautious. We were, every one of us, easier to convince than she expected.
My mother’s right eye nailed me against the wall of her room. Her left eye was still and murky. She waited to hear my objections. It was telling that I couldn’t think of many.
“He is going to be expensive,” I offered.
“So bury me in a cardboard box if you have to.”
“Ma,” I protested. “Please.”
“I’m serious. You know I don’t care what kind of damn container I’m in, but I want her next to me.”
“There are other options,” I said. “Still.” Though I knew this wasn’t true and so did she. We’d known this for twenty years now. I pressed my back into a bookshelf full of framed photos of her children, her grandchildren, her sister, my father in his navy uniform. One of the pictures, of Dee in middle school, toppled off the shelf. The rubber bands in Dee’s braces were magenta. I scrambled to set it right but couldn’t and ended up clutching the photo awkwardly. My sister’s twelve-year-old face shone up at me.
“Don’t give me that crap,” she said. “Not from you.” My mother tried a shake of her head. She looked like a doll being tossed by a toddler.
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“This is my last chance. I can tell, Pegasus,” she whispered to me (using Dee’s nickname for me was purposeful), and then she repeated, “This might be our last chance. I want her next to me and your father when I’m buried. I will not leave Dee’s plot empty. I won’t do it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. We’d buried my father in Forest Home Cemetery after his heart attack. My mother had purchased a plot for herself then too, and after Dee had been missing for twenty years, she’d purchased a third plot for her youngest daughter with the hope that one day we might find her body and finally have a proper funeral for her.
She clutched frantically at the air with her right hand like she wanted me to go close to her, but a bout of nausea rose in my throat. I stayed where I was, so she clutched her own dead shoulder instead, crossing her right hand diagonally over her chest. Her left hand lay like a dismembered limb by her side. Outside the room there was another Lutheran Home resident yelling, You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me. I felt a little dizzy from the heat of the room, the smell of reheated food, the overlapping white noise of the residents’ TVs on all at once.
“You owe me this,” Ma whispered. The nausea continued to bubble. It had moved into the soft palate of my mouth, which now watered. Suddenly, my mother began laughing. It was unlike the laughs Dee and I had shared with her as children, though. There was something dull and metallic about it: a knife in need of honing. She clutched her dead shoulder and laughed and laughed. The doctors had said this was something that could happen too. It was called emotional lability: It caused her to mix up her emotional reactions, to express them without provocation, to be confused. I had the awkward instinct to laugh with her, but when I looked into her eyes, I saw a deep well of fear and confusion. I just reached for her right, feeling hand. Her whole body went limp.
“Watch that video,” she said. “Just watch it.”
“Okay, Mama,” I whispered back. “Okay, okay.”
She laughed at me.
Across the street from the nursing home, my aunt Suze was sitting on the curb, smoking a cigarette and rebraiding her long gray hair. She had just gotten off work—her cheeks were flushed, there was a sweaty dew on her brow, and she was wearing dirty sneakers crusted with diner-floor filth. As I’d gotten older, I’d become more impressed by my aunt’s ability to waitress well into her sixties. Though of course she’d never looked at it like that: It’s got nothing to do with ability, Margaret, she’d scolded me once, it’s about need. Though she’d tried on a few different jobs over the years—a couple stints as a receptionist in various offices, some telemarketing gigs, even sales—she always seemed to go back to waitressing. She was an incurable extrovert, she was hugely anticipatory of her customers’ needs, and she was most content when she was in motion. So she was very good at what she did. Still, I knew the lifestyle wore her mind and her body down, though she wouldn’t admit it to us.
Though she was fifteen years younger than Ma, they’d always been close. When Pete, Dee, and I were young, she was like a second, much cooler mama to us. She’d watch us on weekends and sometimes take us camping or to the 7 Mile Fair, a big flea market near Illinois. She used to rubber-band big wads of her cash tips, tuck them into her fanny pack, and then hand the cash out to us at the flea market so we could buy whatever random shit caught our eye. These outings used to infuriate our parents, but she always laughed at the junk we brought home. She never had kids of her own, so she doted on us.
When she saw me, she crossed the street and then wrapped me in a tight hug. I breathed in her smell, which was mostly of the perfume called Red Door.
“How is she?” Suze asked. This was a question we rarely asked of each other anymore because the inanity of it was too overwhelming. Maybe my mother’s deteriorating condition had made it seem more appropriate again.
I shrugged. “She’s . . . animated.” I hoped this would serve as a warning.
“So what did you say?” she asked.
“I said sure. She wouldn’t hear much else.”
Suze hardened her face like she was receiving a bad diagnosis. “I figured.”
I wanted then to warn her about a shift I felt inside me. “Maybe she’s right?” I said. “I don’t know.” I looked past Suze onto the stretch of North Avenue that ran from the swamps in the suburbs all the way downtown where it eventually spilled over the bluffs and into Lake Michigan. “Maybe we have a chance here.” When I looked back at my aunt, she was gazing at me sharply. Though she tried to soften her face, I’d already caught an expression she hadn’t meant for me to see. There is no word for the specific mixture of pity and pain one feels toward a beloved who is sinking.
“Maybe,” she said, but it was obvious she didn’t mean it. She cupped one of my ears and then tugged on the lobe like she used to do when I was a kid.
February 1991
The year Dee went missing, she was a freshman at Mount Mary College, a small all-girls’ liberal arts school run by nuns. She had applied on a whim after receiving a glossy brochure in the mail. Dee was charmed by the quiet, stately campus and the school’s core curriculum, which, she explained one night at dinner, was rooted in humanity’s search for meaning. Pete laughed, teasing Dee that she was sending herself to the nunnery. But when they offered her a partial scholarship and she vowed to pay the rest of her tuition by working part-time at a nearby hair salon, he stopped teasing. Ma enjoyed the idea of Dee studying at an all-girls’ school: She felt Dee had gotten out of control in high school, lamenting her youngest daughter’s love interests, whom Ma described as a slew of degenerates. She thought maybe Dee would be more focused at Mount Mary.
Though I was not under any such illusions, I also supported Dee’s decision, because I had been disappointed in my own school of choice. I was a junior at UWM, on the East Side of Milwaukee, a school that felt large and impersonal, full of brutalist concrete buildings and dimly lit, orange-carpeted libraries. One rampant rumor held that UWM’s libraries were populated by perverts who sat and waited underneath the tables to fondle girls’ feet.
In retrospect, we both ended up at the wrong school. I would have been much better suited to the verdant humanism of Mount Mary, and Dee probably would have enjoyed those aspects of UWM that I abhorred: the larger classes, the boozy house parties, the proximity to Brady Street.
I hadn’t made many friends at UWM in my two years there, in part because I’d taken up a serious relationship when I was still a freshman. Dee was also trying to find her footing
that year. Between work and school, she struggled to find a group of close friends like the one she’d leaned on in high school. So we were close then, maybe closer than we’d been since we were girls, I think because we both felt out of place. She spent a lot of nights at my place in Riverwest, and we often spent weekends together back at home. Maybe this lack of belonging had pushed us back toward each other, even while I could see that the contours of our new adult lives didn’t necessarily have room for the same kind of relationship we’d had as girls.
During her second semester at Mount Mary, she began seeing a man whose identity, to this day, remains opaque to me. It’s frightening now to consider how little I knew about this person. These are some of the facts I thought I knew: His name was Frank. He was thirty-five, he was recently divorced, and he was training to become a firefighter. He said he had worked most of his life for his parents, who owned a small cemetery in Menomonee Falls. He seemed to have a lot of money, or enough money to splurge on gifts for Dee, but he didn’t seem upper class. I thought that he was crude and that he was a bigot.
Was that all? Why didn’t I know more? What did I think then? Probably that I had time to get to know him. Probably that eventually I would understand what she liked about him. (It turned out that I had no time at all, and that fact still haunts me.) Or maybe I didn’t get to know Frank because, off the bat, I hadn’t liked him, and so I guessed he was a fad, another phase Dee would leave behind when she felt she’d gotten what she needed. She could be ruthlessly utilitarian.
The way Dee always told it was that she had met Frank at a bar at the beginning of her spring semester. She had liked his confidence but also his composure. She said most men in the bars had a desperate, hungry air about them, like they’d steal you away if they thought they could. She said Frank was different. They’d gone on a few dates: coffee, then a Bucks game and a late dinner at his buddy’s Italian restaurant, where they got the whole candlelit dining room to themselves. Dee felt the whole thing was very adult; she liked that.
When she first told me about him that spring, I said I was happy for her and that I was excited to meet him. She said we’d definitely hang out together, but then she always seemed to find an excuse to put it off. This stung. And honestly, it got to the point where I wondered if she was making him up, and I said so once, while we were out to breakfast together.
“He’s an adult, Pegasus,” she said smartly. I rolled my eyes at her. She was a college freshman—she barely knew what that entailed. “He doesn’t have time to barhop like you and Leif.” This was a deliberate slight against my then-boyfriend, Leif, who admittedly did enjoy barhopping.
“So? Leif’s an adult too,” I told her. Leif was twenty-eight and gainfully employed at Ambrosia, a local chocolate factory. We’d recently moved in together: We paid our rent on time. What could be more adult than that? “He seems to make time for me. And for you.”
She shrugged because she knew I was right. Leif often cooked simple dinners for me and Dee. He’d been to Sunday dinner at Ma’s, where we’d watch the Packers game together. Sometimes Leif even watched long, boring Brewers games with Pete while they both crushed cans of Schlitz. “Yeah,” Dee said. She studied her eggs. “I’ll ask.”
I didn’t know at the time if he was refusing to meet me, or if she was reluctant to introduce us for some reason, but either way, something felt off. I tried to explain this to her, but she got defensive. “I said I’ll ask, dammit.”
When I did finally meet him, I could see why Dee might have wanted to keep us apart. He proposed we meet for custard, which I thought was kind of creepy, because it seemed like the type of outing an uncle or a brother would suggest. But I loved custard, and I loved Dee, and so I tried to push the thought away. But then he chose some Podunk custard stand in West Allis that I’d never heard of, which also annoyed me because everyone knows Kopp’s is the best.
Frank hugged me when we met. I didn’t like the feeling of his body against mine. I kept my arms awkwardly by my sides. When he pulled away, I felt like he was looking through my clothes. Some men seem to be able to do that—to make you feel totally naked. How did he make Dee feel?
“Finally!” he said. He clapped me on the back and grinned. He had dark, wavy hair that stayed glued in place even when he moved, on account of copious product. He smelled like cedar chips. He wore a gold chain that seemed too tight for his neck and a large gaudy graduation ring. He made a big show of paying for our custards, which came out to a whopping eight dollars. He seemed able to keep a part of his body touching Dee’s at all times. He didn’t look like her boyfriend, he looked like her boss. I made a note to tell her that later. We sat outside on the damp cement benches, even though it was chilly, and ate our custard in relative silence. I shivered and tried to hide it.
“Dee tells me you’re a writer,” Frank said. I nodded. “Have you published anything?” I shook my head. I tried to eat my custard faster, but my head ached already with cold. My mind was numb. I wished I were drinking. I knew he was trying. I locked eyes with Dee, and I could tell she was begging me to try too. Plus, while I’d heckled her for weeks about meeting him, I couldn’t think of a word to say to the guy. I knew I’d hear about that later.
“How is firefighting school?” I said. I didn’t know what it was called, but once I’d said that, I felt it was wrong. My cheeks went hot even though my brain still felt cold and slow. I pictured the vast glaciers that once crawled over North America. I felt much younger than I had in a long time.
He laughed. “It’s hard, honey,” he said. “It’s really hard.”
I refused to say anything after that. I threw the rest of my custard away too.
Damn, did I hear it after. Dee said I’d been rude, which stung, because it wasn’t true, and also because he was the one who’d been rude. She said I’d acted like a half-wit, which also stung, and made me self-conscious. I told her I didn’t like him, and she said I didn’t even try to get to know him. I wanted to tell her the things I had intuited about him, but I was scared she would stop talking to me. I was scared she would hate me. I thought she’d figure it all out soon enough. It was obvious to me that he wasn’t the right person for her, but if she wanted to enjoy the gifts he bought her and the adult trappings of their fling a little longer, maybe that was fine. That was my position on him at the time. But things only got worse from there, and I felt less and less certain that keeping my mouth shut was the right thing to do. And now I can’t believe I ever felt that way.
Leif and I met at a house party my sophomore year of college. He was a real wallflower type at big parties—nursing room-temperature beers or a finger of whiskey near the turntable, or spending long minutes examining the bookcases and leafing through chapbooks. But in smaller groups, or one-on-one, he was charming, boisterous, quick to joke. Later, this made me suspicious that the wallflower behavior was an act meant to cultivate a sense of mystery, but at the time it impressed me—I’d never seen someone so content to be alone at a party. Wasn’t mingling the whole point? Plus, we shared a sense of humor, which was rare in my world. I’d never met anyone except my sister who laughed at the same things I did.
I could tell Leif had been eyeing me from the moment I got there, but he waited until much later in the night to approach me. “You look like a poet,” he said to me. He offered his hand. “Leif.”
I took his hand and rubbed my thumb up and down the thick ligaments attaching his wrist to his fingers. His hands were cool and in need of lotion. I imagined myself rubbing cold cream into his skin. He smelled oddly of cocoa and Lysol. My mouth went a little dry. “Peg,” I said. “Why do you say that?”
“The way you’re noticing everything.”
“Why are you noticing what I’m noticing?” I asked. He had a messy mat of auburn hair that I wanted to put my fingers in, and his eyes reminded me of a set of green marbles spilled across a wood floor. They stayed moving.
He shrugged. “It’s the most interesting thing happening at this party.�
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“Who’s your favorite poet?” I asked him.
He raised his eyebrows. “Bob Dylan,” he said. I laughed because I thought it was a joke. Leif frowned.
“So you mean Rimbaud?” I asked.
“I believe the term is intertexuality.” He made air quotes around the word.
“I think actually it’s just plagiarism.” I made air quotes back at him.
He laughed. “What about you, then?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Kurt Cobain?” We both laughed.
“No, really,” he said. “Come on.”
“Lorine Niedecker,” I said without hesitation because it was the first name that popped into my head and because I’d read these lines about her earlier in the day: Niedecker lived in southern Wisconsin for the rest of her life. She scrubbed hospital floors, read proof for a local magazine, and worked other menial jobs to support herself and her writing. She endured near-poverty . . .
“Grandfather / advised me: / learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery,” Leif recited. Very quickly I learned this about Leif: Lines of poetry stuck to his brain the way gum, once hardened, will stick to the underside of chairs. I tried not to look impressed. He knew.
Thirty minutes after we’d met, he tried to kiss me on the mouth, and I backed myself against the wall.
“Too soon?” His eyes were dopey with beer.
“Much,” I said.
The Comfort of Monsters Page 2