OUR LADY OF SORROWS

A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of y ,, the requirements for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing

by

Teo Carla Spengler

San Francisco, California

May 2017 Copyright by Teo Carla Spengler 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Our Lady of Sorrows by Teo Carla Spengler, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Art in Creative Writing at San Francisco

State University.

Michelle Carter, Professor OUR LADY OF SORROWS

Teo Carla Spengler San Francisco, California 2017

This is a collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces and poetry.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

____ Chair, Thesis Committee Date 1

^Something I Want to Document

Fact: I hike the contraband trails above Sare at dawn. I am alone. Mine are the only boots on the packed soil, in the beech forest, on the limestone rise. Still, what once was never disappears without a trace. The mountain mist holds the warm, heavy scent of the wild boar that retreated deeper into the Pyrenees last night to outdistance the hunters. And my ears imagine the swift, light footfalls of the Basques escaping from Franco’s Spain under cover of darkness, thieves in the night stealing back their own lives. Then something small and round glints on the footpath in the first rays of the sun: a leaden ball. As I bend to retrieve it, the musket booms of Napoleon’s soldiers echo back from the cliffs of

LaRhune.

Fact: I did not know my mother when she was young, when she lay in the lawn chair in the black and white photo, smiling, one arm extended toward her sister. Yet I imagine her happier before she became Mrs. L.C. Spengler, before Alaska’s wind-chill penetrated her body, before the minus 70 degree temperatures froze her heart, before my father. Not happy but happier, hope still alive that, just ahead, over the rise, something wonderful waited. In San Francisco, years later, I open my palms to a psychic to find evidence of what I already know and will never know: “she was never happy, your mother, but she was happier earlier than later.” 2

Fact: it makes a certain sense to stay in bed all day every day in Delta Junction Alaska, a living tomb of a town in a violated state.

Fact: An aunt I never knew write this to my mother when I was 6 years old: “I am sorry about the slap you received at the hands of Ziggy, but it was the only way to deal with a hysteric woman. Why are you so shocked that Mom doesn’t remember you? I told you she did not know our faces. That is why you came to Perth Amboy, to talk about what was to be done. But you made your own plans at the White Court Motel. You took Mom to the airport without even letting us say goodbye. On your own head be it and the heads of your children.”

Fact: I have a sister. We played together on the linoleum floor of my family’s trailer parked on a section of cleared homestead land in the vast, unforgiving wilderness of central Alaska. We started school the same year and road the school bus home in the dark arctic afternoons to try to clean the house so perfectly that my mother would get out of bed.Like all miracles, infrequent and long-awaited. I love my sister and still dream of her.

I have not seen her for 20 years. 3

Fact: My mother had a sister. Children of poor Polish immigrants, they grew up bull ed and ashamed in New Jersey and left as young women in search of new identities. My mother flew north to Alaska, her sister joined the WACS. Both of them Americanized their names and married men they were afraid of who drank too much and went by their husbands’ names the rest of their lives. I never heard my mother speak Polish willingly; only on her infrequent visits to her mother’s house in New Jersey, and when gramma developed dementia and came to live with us. My father was not pleased and the arrangement did not last long. On April Fool’s Day in the beginning of a cruel spring, my grandmother packed her bags and walked out into heavy snowfall, heading to Poland. Or so they said. When the men came on horseback and with dogs to search for my grandmother, one of the horses bit my finger as I fed it a sugar cube. They never found a trace of my grandmother or her suitcase. I have seen her in my dreams lying dead in my father’s toolbox behind the garage.

My mother, my beloved mother, my mother never recovered from whatever happened that day. I never recovered either. Decades and oceans away from my childhood, living in southern France, I still dream of my mother, sitting on a chair turning her face away as I, on my knees at her feet, beg her to love me. 4

*Delta Junction

The town of Delta Junction, Alaska, unrolls along both sides of the Alcan

Highway for a few miles, the clump of commerce downtown, the one motel, then the structures dwindle, disappear, yielding the roadside to dwarf forests that run all the way to Canada, thousands of acres of spruces stunted by the solid permafrost just beneath the soil surface, by the vicious winds of winter, by the temperatures so low the very memory of them cracks under pressure like brittle sheets of ice.

The Tanana River serves as the northern boundary of the town, a mighty river choked off every autumn by the gods of weather, ice some 43 feet thick stifling the river’s roll and tumble, a gag held on so long you’d think the Tanana would turn blue and suffocate. Men take this as a kind of victory, and place a tripod on the ice surface and a tripline to a time-clock on the shore, and offer money to he whose guess comes closest as to when the river will break its bonds. The eerie, echoing crack something between the extended scream of a woman and the boom of gunshot.

The western boundary of the town is the old, deep scar of the Delta River bottoms, the two-mile-wide ditch where the little whip of river thrashed and struggled so in its placement that it scraped away the topsoil of the land surrounding it, leaving only gravel studded with beached, bleached logs. Wolves cross the frozen ice in winter and hunt around the edges of the town, hunt and are hunted for the per-pelt bounty. In 5

summer run-off, the Delta swells its banks and feeds the Tanana, running almost parallel to the jagged, white peaks of the Alaska Range.

Delta is the official end of the Alaska-Canada Highway. It is the end of the line, and most of the 1,000 people living here in their trailers with wanagons or pre-fabricated homes or log cabins are refugees, one night’s run ahead of the demons behind; the prejudice or bad marriages or pending criminal charges. Even the long arm of the law gets frostbite here, and some wanted men lived in town for years, playing pool at the

Buffalo Lodge, drinking at the Evergreen, openly, without fear or shame.

While I lived there, the town had seventeen bars, one grocery store, three churches, one gas station and the school. The town’s grim face bears witness to the magnitude of the prejudice my mother faced in New Jersey; that Delta seemed a welcome escape is powerful evidence of the monster she was escaping. She never spoke of it to my sister and me, nor to my father who embraced her tales of a middle-class childhood for the stature and respectability it gave him. It was this lie that in time poisoned her relationship with her sister, but I get ahead of myself.

For now, I simply place my mother in Delta Junction in front of the little wooden structure topped by a cross that was the local Catholic Church. I see her standing there, arms hanging lifelessly from sloped shoulders, head tilted to one side, eyes dark and squinting, lips pursed in a tight line. She was excommunicated of course by marrying my divorced father, and she could not take communion or any of the sacraments, but no 6

matter. It is here that I see her, my mother, waiting without hope for something that never came, in the shadow of the church’s wooden sign: Our Lady of Sorrows. The Burden of

Proof 7

*Our Lady of Sorrows

My mom thought she would be a writer. And she wrote well. But she never wrote a single story as far as I knew, only lists of things she would write about, on titles of stories to come. I wasn’t bom yet when she wrote the lists. I came upon them after she died.

My sister changed my mom’s will the day before she died, so I inherited nothing to speak of from the house, only my personal things from my bedroom. I grabbed a few things on the way out though, a box from the storage shed containing old letters, notebooks too, plus a beaded belt my aunt gave my mom when they were young. She never wore it in my memory, but I had a photo of it from some Christmas before I was bom, under the Christmas tree. My sister was there too, only months old. I took the box without thinking through the reasons, but over time I came to understand. I wanted tc know why, why it all happened like it did. And what had happened too. All of it. I wanted to understand it all truly. All I knew at that time were the stories.

Because my mother was a writer. Don’t forget, don’t ever forget. She never wrote a story on paper, but she created an entire world full of imaginary characters and scenarios. She built a past from her imagination and told it orally, like Homer: the great history of our lives, the Spengler story. Like the Greeks, my sister and I believed it, we believed it all. 8

Only when I got older did I wonder, first about the stories that occurred during my lifetime, the spin, yes, but the facts too, like what about her staying in bed for weeks on end, what about the silent treatment? They never made it into any of the stories.

For years, all my doubts were flattened by the weight of Mom’s words, all questions smoothed out like white caps drawn to the great shore. But my own memories remained there, somewhere below the surface of my consciousness, and surfaced as the tides of her life waned and the seas receded, leaving crags that did not fit at all into the landscapes of her tales. Like if wolves ate my grandmother, what happened to her suitcase? Jarring facts and internal inconsistencies so bold I don’t know how I had missed them for all those years. Then, in time, the stories were contradicted by other sources - neighbors, Dad’s kids from his first marriage, Mom’s sister.

Cracks in the cliff that ultimately fell in great chunks just like the cliff beside the

Old Rich down to the Delta River flats. Eroding over time, thinning the road and narrowing the distance between our house and the drop to the river year by year, ineluctably.

But for a long time, we believed. We believed she was a great mother, the greatest. That she and Dad were deeply in love and happy. That we were the luckiest kids alive. Maybe it wasn’t believing so much as that fiction technique John Gardner discusses in his books, the willing suspension of disbelief. Gardner would have been proud of my 9

mom. We were proud of her. We loved her unequivocally, Larri, Tim and I, and did our part to service and maintain the stories she began.

After she died, I stuffed my clothes and the stolen box of evidence into the small back seat of my Karman Ghia and took it away. It represented a whole new world to me, but it wasn’t to be explored yet. First, I had to survive her death and her new will, and come to terms with my own life. I survived by marrying a man I did not love, drinking a lot on a two-month honeymoon to Hong Kong, then divorcing him and heading to Ei rope with a man I loved who could not be there for me. He left first, but I came back eventually and then the diversions were done. I fell apart, chunk by chunk of my eroded cliff collapsing. I fell into pieces that smashed into dust at my feet.

Convinced I was dying, I headed from one doctor to another, describing symptoms like my tongue looking strange, my arms getting pins and needles, losing feeling in my toes. One day I couldn’t insert a tampon and called 911 in tears saying that my vagina had closed up completely.

My decade of therapy began and guilt weighted down my life. I was betraying my mother, my family. I hid from everyone, refused phone calls, sure that somehow my sister, the better daughter, would prevent my descent into the craters of my past.

I began in time to sift through the letters in the evidence box I had stolen from my mother’s house. Letters first, letters from Dad to Mom, from my aunt, from Dad to us.

And the notebooks. It was the notebooks that made me understand that when she left 10

New Jersey as a young woman all alone on a Greyhound bus, she intended to travel to

Alaska and write stories about it. On one page she sketched out little anecdotes to help her remember, but I could not follow much without the details. The earliest notebook dated back to her first year in Alaska, the dog sled team that attacked her, the “mad money” jar she kept on her desk when she was secretary in the Plumber’s Union Hall.

Then Dad, and finally Delta Junction. And the list, the list of titles.

The list started with “Silent Tears.” It ended with “Our Lady of Sorrows.” 11

* Looking Out

Long before Larri and I were bom, my dad built a look-out point right on the edge of the river cliff. It was just across the Old Rich from our front yard. At that time, they lived in a small trailer. Dad didn’t build the house until much later.

But they had a look-out point. Dad ran a little chain-link fence along the cliff edge. Old photos show maybe four feet of land beyond the fence before the plunge down to the river bottom. He installed a round wooden table with a burled log segment for the base and two large wooden chairs that he painted forest green. They were for the grown­ ups.

Larri and I liked to imagine our mom, pretty and young, wearing a long dress and drinking a cocktail with our dad out there. But we never saw the two of them having drinks there. Still, my dad didn’t like us to sit in the grown-up chairs and we never did unless he was gone to work at one of the Nike sites. He’d fly out and come back a month or two later, so it was safe then. Mom didn’t care. She said the cliff was strong and solid and would be there forever.

From the look-out point you could see the entire river valley, the rocks and sand of the bottoms, weather-worn logs left on the river banks after the runoff, white and shiny like bits of a dinosaur skeleton blown to pieces by the winter winds. Far across, the fringe 12

of the dark green forest formed a thick line against the sharp, snow-covered peaks of the

Alaska Range, all angles like a white saw blade against the luminous sky.

Mom set us up tea parties out there when dad was gone. It was one of her few

areas of rebellion. She would bring little metal wine glasses on a small tray and apple juice or Kool-Aid and fig newton cookies. It was her position that the cliff was strong and

would support us, just like a mother’s love. She reminded us not to get too close to the

edge though.

“We won’t,” my sister would reply.

“The cliff is strong,” my mom would repeat, “but you don’t want to tumble off the

edge.”

“We won’t,” Larri said. As the older daughter, she was always the spokesperson

for us.

“I know you won’t,” Mom would say. “My good girls. I just don’t want you to get

hurt.”

“We won’t,” Larri promised solemnly, “we won’t get hurt.”

And we never did fall off that cliff edge, but other risks and dangers came over

the years there, and we tumbled off the edge of them, all three of us, and shattered into

pieces like Humpty Dumpty, and all the king’s men arrived late and didn’t try very hard. 13

* Family Slides

What would I remember without all those family slides, like the one with two

little girls in matching pink bathing suits, and then Mom with white teeth and red lips

lifting up a coconut with a straw in it; and all those beach shots with blue, blue ocear and

us kids with tanned skin and people passing by and smiling, and no snow, no snow at all?

We spent three weeks in Florida that one year and left, never to return, but the way it built

up in family lore you’d think the golden light of southern sun poured over half our

childhood or more, and mom wore summer dresses with full skirts every day of our

young lives and combed her hair smooth, and pinned orange lilies behind our ears.

And those home movies that Dad took, those dolphins leaping in unison in an

azure pool as a pretty lady cracks a whip and waves; and my sister wearing an inflatable

inner tube with a lion head on the front as she tiptoes carefully into calm waters, looking

back toward the camera to make sure she’s doing it right; then Mom strolling beneath

palm trees with me on one side, my sister on the other, small as dolls beside her, all three

with matching sundresses. And last, there’s the lady who gives us something, maybe

candy, and my sister thanking her.

Yes, in our minds we’d smiled and swam our way through childhood years, the

decade plus two between my birth and dad’s death, and the days of our lives smelled like

coconut lotion, and soft breezes wafted back our hair, and dad was never, never there, never a player in our little lives, always behind the camera. 14

Of course choice moments in Alaska are fossilized in slides as well. Here’s a shot of my dad’s Rambler pulling a line of kids on sleds behind it over the snow pack of the

Old Rich, and all you see is scarves and snow boots and parkas. It is my sister’s birthday party, but she slips off her sled and the next sled with me on it runs over her hand and she cries and I am scolded, at least I think all that happened, but it isn’t evidenced in this family history.

Each slide looked like a tiny window with wide white frames, and dad arranged them upright in boxes just the right size. He did it meticulously, each slide numbered so that the sequence of a day would not be forgotten, each reel of film stored in the flat cardboard box it came in, marked in ink with a list of all the scenes inside. Every we< ;k in our small trailer - then, later, the cabin my dad built, and even later the house in

California my mom moved us to when he died - the family would sit on kitchen chairs arranged as if in a movie theater and eat popcorn and watch the family slides and movies projected onto a clean white sheet hung on an open wall. Sometimes we’d watch for an hour, sometimes for three or four, my mom and sister crying because those blessed days of childhood were gone and would never return.

But at night when I can’t sleep, it’s not Florida that returns to me, but the dark swath of winter in Delta Junction after nature pulled down the blinds in September, leaving us in bleak twilight until April wound its way to May. My mind can’t conjure up the smell of the tropical magnolia pinned in my hair, but instead gives me the acrid odor 15

of Jim Beam on dad’s breath late at night when he comes into my room, the ghost that looks out of mom’s eyes when she takes those valium, the thin wolf howls from far away grieving the long, deadly night of winter.

Sometimes my mind makes a running start for that summer all too early when mom went back to New Jersey to see to Gramma, and how we little girls stayed home to help Daddy DD and his friends dig the basement for the cabin, and all the evil in that dark hole, twenty miles from the nearest neighbor, so far, my dad liked to say, that nobody would hear you scream. I pick up speed as I approach the memory, feeling a< ,ain the tight grip of those big calloused hands around my small wrists, the dank smell of excavated dirt like in a grave that chokes me, but then I hit a solid wall and bounce back one more time, bruised and bloody. It is only then Florida appears before me, palm fronds rubbing against each other in the warm breeze.

I look at the timeline I have made of my childhood, from my birth through my dad’s death, linked catastrophes lining the path I traveled, like the crucified rebels lining the road from Capua to Rome after the suppression of the revolt of Spartacus. And I wonder if memories of those times lurk just behind the bright magic of the slides and movies, memories I can access if I only find the right spell to release them.

Somewhere in here must be an image of mom getting off the small plane with

Gramma, her fearful glance at dad’s grim face, and the fire that spat from Gramma’s eyes when she tasted the jalapeno pepper dad gave to her. And men on horseback with hounds 16

searching the backwoods for Gramma when she disappeared. My own unforgiving face

watching him collapse, a few years later, watching him grab at his chest then curl

backward in a sort of summersault, to lie still and heavy as a felled oak.

When Mom died, my sister inherited the family slides and movies, as well as

everything else. By that time I have come to think of the slides as dangerous,

hallucinogenic drugs that confuse the truth, rather than valid pieces of my past, but my

sister never sees things that way. She splices all the home movies together and transfers

them to a DVD, then sends a copy as a gift. When I stick it in the computer, I find she’s

added a theme song that plays throughout - “Never Neverland.”

I watch the DVD all the way through with the sound turned off. I do it in a cafe, just for safety, but I really don’t have to worry. It’s like the tooth fairy - once you know,

you know, and a thousand tooth fairy stories cannot make you believe again.

I watch it all, the dolphins leaping and the lady waving and my sister venturing

timidly into the Gulf waters. I see my mom looking pretty, and banana trees, and even an

old man with a monkey. It wraps up as always with a strange lady waiting to be thanked.

In this scene, my sister and I wear little red skirts with rose appliques, and white tops

with Peter Pan collars. My mom looms above us, hair smoothed back and smiling

graciously and the lady to be thanked is also tall, and both ladies turn toward us, two

small girls with braids. My sister says thank you ma’am, making a little bow, for

whatever it is she’s received, but I, at three, cross my arms tightly, press my lips together, and shake my head. It ends with my mom drawing back her hand, but the slap itself lost somewhere on the editing floor. 18

*A Person

I remember her best up in an aspen tree, the leaves trembling but her hands steady, the knife sharp and meticulous as she carves her initials into the bark. The fact that they are carved there is all that keeps her alive. She checks it every day, hoisting herself up to the lowest branch, hand over hand she rises, to run one thin fingertip over them. It’s gone now, that tree. Just gone, no good-bye note, but she never left one either the day the family took off for the lower-48, just waved to the aspen from the rear window of the Rambler, but she was crying. They say aspens are not long-lived trees, but it shocked me that it was gone, twenty years later, the entire Old Rich eroded away, a bite taken out of the cliff by the giant in charge of such things. But I went down to the river bed, down the old Devil’s Slide my sister and I used to use for a fast, bumpy ride, and found it there, part of a pile of slide debris. I found it, and traced again with the tip of one finger those three letters, trying to remember what it felt like to be young and always afraid. 19

* Devil's Slide

My father’s house was set back from the Old Richardson Highway, usually called the Old Rich, a narrow gravel lane. It had been the read Richardson - one of two major roads in Alaska - for decades, but over time the Delta River came too close. The river itself was only slightly wider than the Old Rich, although it swelled to twice that size during spring runoff. But the river bottoms were a mile or so across, a wide, treeless expanse of rock and sand and logs carried downstream and beached along the way, gleaming white like dinosaur bones. The river had eaten away the land for untold years so that, while I lived there, in my father’s house, the entire bottoms were 20 or 30 feet lower than the Old Rich.

Larri and I played in the river bottoms in summers. Before we were bom, my dad build a look-out point on the cliff edge beside the road, with a table and a couple woe den

Adirondack-style chairs, and a set of stairs winding down the cliff with a thick wire beside them to hold onto. But the wire and steps eroded by the time we were old enough to play on our own. We built a rough path down that we called Devil’s Slide not far from the remnants of the stairs.

We built forts of the washed up logs and watched the swallows turn in the wide blue summer skies. They were cliff swallows, and dug holes into the cliff to use as nests.

The cliff wall was dotted with these holes as far as we could see in both directions from 20

Devil’s Slide. I liked to watch the swallows circling, great cloud of light, white birds in a harsh land. They must have headed south before winter broke us all.

Over time, the river, the shattering winds of winter and the swallow’s efforts eroded the cliff face, and great chunks of cliff fell. While I lived on the Old Rich, only residential traffic was allowed, and the swallow’s nesting holes pushed closer and closer to our playground swings and the house itself.

I lived out my childhood years on this eroding ground. The process of erosion and crumble was too slow for us to recognize as a living phenomenon. Like so many risks and losses, it passed unacknowledged. And why not? It was better not to feel the fear of perforated ground, it was better not to look the danger in the face. So I watched the swallows circling instead, as the river wore away familiar ground of a childhood leaving only dust and rock piles at the base of the cliff until the river returned to wash it all away, farther downstream. 21

*Seeds #1

Mom drove us around Delta and, at first, we were filled with hope. The prizes looked so cool. I wanted a stuffed elephant with pink ears. Larri wanted a calculator.

“If each of us sells 100 packs of seeds per day for five days, or 50 packs of seeds per day for 10 days...” I say to Larri.

“Or 100 packs a week for five weeks,” Mom says crisply as she pulls up in front of the Vermullion house at the top end of the Old Rich.

Larri and I are eager. We both hop out and hurry to the door with our seed selections. Larri was older so she was to speak first the first house, then I would speak first the second and so on.

The two Vermullion kids are in school with us, Barbara in third grade and Gary in first or second grade. We know the parents a little from school events but they are younger than my parents and have never come over to the house. Larri knocks.

The door opens and there is Mrs. Vermullion, a pretty lady, younger than Mom but pudgy, with a little-girl pouty face. Today her face is red and puffy. She looks like she has been crying, with lines running down her face. Her clothes look rumpled as if she’d slept in them, loose clothes concealing a chubby body. She sees us there, turns as if to flee, then turns back to us, using her hands to straighten her blouse and brush out the wrinkles. I stare at her nose. I think it is bleeding. 22

“Hi Mrs. Vermullion,” Larri begins her rehearsed speech. She is concentrating so

hard on remembering it that she doesn’t seem to notice the blood dripping down Mrs.

Vermullion’s face, even when she wipes it and it smears.

“We are selling seeds in order to raise money for the Brownie Scouts.” Larri

wrinkled her forehead, concentrating on saying the right words in the right order. I witch

Mrs. Vermullion’s lower lip swelling and getting darker.

“For every packet of seeds you buy,” Larri’s words march on, following each

other like little soldiers. “For every packet you buy, our Brownie troupe gets 10 cents.

The money will be used to pay for our projects in the community.”

I cannot take my eyes off Mrs. Vermullion’s face. She raises one pudgy hand to

touch her swelling lip, then, catching my eye, jerks it back down. Her eyes move behind

us to take in Mom in the Rambler in front of the house, the exhaust forming clouds in the

icy air.

“In the interest of honesty,” Larri goes on, then she pauses. She always forgets

this part. I nudge her and make a small, circling gesture with my fingers to get her to

move along.

From behind Mrs. Vermullion, the noise of breaking glass. Larri doesn’t react, as if nothing is happening.

“In the interest of honesty,” she tries again but again gets stuck. 23

I leap in. “So if you want some seeds, they are 25 cents a pack.”

We have lost Mrs. Vermillion’s attention. She turns when she hears the glass breaking, looking over her shoulder, breathing fast. Suddenly a man appears behind her.

It’s her husband, Garrett Vermullion. He is right behind her and claps a hand on her shoulder. Mrs. Vermullion winces.

“Close the god damned door,” he says in a low voice. Then he sees us and adds,

“You trying to heat the entire state?”

“These girls are selling seeds,” she says, stuttering. “Brownie scouts.”

He reaches out and closes the door, leaving us standing alone on the doorstep The snow falls steadily and gently around us. I see the spots appear on Larri’s parka, each one like a little star. They say every snowflake is different. I try to think about the snowflakes.

Larri looks at me.

“Do you think she’s coming back?” she asks in a whisper.

I nod. I am sure Mrs. Vermullion is coming back. We wait there on the steps. A thin moon appears but is quickly crowded out by clouds.

“Did I do okay?” Larri asks me. I squeeze her arm and leave my hand there.

From inside the house comes noises like someone pounding in nails. We wait there. Finally the door opens a crack. It is Barbara, the daughter. She thrusts a dollar bill at Larri. 24

“For the Brownies,” she whispers. Then the door closes.

Larri looks down at the dollar. She shrugs, then places two packages of nasturtium seeds and two packages of radish seeds on the doorstep in a little pile. We trudge back to the car.

“How did it go?” Mom asks, looking up from her Lady’s Home Journal and putting the car in gear. It is so warm and safe inside the car.

“Fine,” Larri says. “Just fine.” 25

* Late-Night Love

Late at night she wakes us up and makes us toast with sugar, cutting it carefully into diagonal quarters. Our fingers, greasy with the melting butter, lift the triangles to our mouths. She has stayed in bed all week long, forever and ever it seems to us. Our eyes watch her face, looking for a sign that we have been forgiven for all we might not have done, all we could have done better. She smiles slightly, tightly, her eyes distant and appraising as a cat’s. We wash our hands and go back to bed.

An hour later, her shrill voice summons us out into the living room where we line up against the wall like soldiers, a platoon of two short figures in flannel nightgowns. She barks an order for us to get our sewing boxes. We scuttle back into our room, each pulling a box from opposite sides of the closet, carrying it out. Eyes meet eyes: how might we have failed her this time?

We sit close beside each other on the couch, not daring to meet her gaze, the boxes heavy on our knees. They are made of dark cane, lined with tufted red velvet, with lids that open on hinges. The inside of the lids have little compartments for scissors, stitch rippers and pinking shears.

We sit and wait for the direct order. Time smothers us, a huge cat sitting on our chests. Outside the double-paned window, icicles hang like daggers against the dark 26

drape of the silence. It could be midnight or noon. Winter’s long night has closed the eyes of the world.

She’s looking at me, I feel it. My sister’s leg edges away from me, almost imperceptibly. My box is heavy on my knees as if it were a small coffin. I look up and see her eyes. I wish I could die.

“Open,” she says.

I undo the clasp of my box. I hear the creak of the lid of my sister’s box and, in one quick, desperate motion, open my own. I see the crimson velvet of the lining. I see the scissors and the pinking shears. I see little hands and feet, faces, costumes. The b >x is filled with dolls, a dozen of more plastic dolls dressed in costumes from different countries. I sit there staring at it, unable to take a breath. I hear my sister crying and then my own sobs.

My mother stands up suddenly, straight and very tall.

“We’re crying from joy, mommy,” my sister gasps. “We’re crying from joy.” 27

*MommyMeMe

When I think of my mom, she is always standing in front of Our Lady of Sorrows

church, a small, square white building with a cross on top set beside Buffalo Lodge and

across the Old Rich from Jack’s Chevron Station. She wears a woolen Pendleton skirt

and jacket, square and boxy in a dark-purple herringbone pattern. She has a look 1 know

well on her face, a mouth pressed firmly together and turned up slightly at both ends, but

not a real smile. She directs her eyes slightly to one side and far away. What is she seeing

there? A vision of what she had hoped for in life. Disappointment hangs from her like

widow’s weeds.

My mom, I call her now. She started as Mommy MeMe, and that lasted longer

than you might think, years longer than Daddy DeeDee, into our school years. In time it

was shortened to Mommy, then, as we grew older and bolder, to Mom. I think of her as

Mom now. My own daughter, herself older and bolder, refers to me as Teo to her friends

because, she says, I wasn’t much of a mother. I don’t argue. Everybody gets to put ti ie

puzzle together themselves.

I never called my mom by her first name, not to her nor to anyone else. She hated her first name. It was Sophie - ironically, this year’s most popular name for girls. She hated it and abandoned it and her last name to the extent possible when she married.

Mrs. L.C. Spengler she called herself to such an extent that I still run into people who think her surname was Elsie. 28

So there she is in my mind’s eye, standing regally like the Leo she was, letting someone - was it me, with my little Brownie camera? - take her photo but keeping her royal distance at the same time. Nobody did that better than Mom. Was it before or after the valium? Before or after Gramma got killed or else permanently misplaced? The miscarriage? The estrangement from her family? The breast cancer? Before, I think. But before or after, she carried all of those sorrows already in her disappointed eyes, and they entered Our Lady of Sorrows with her.

My mom took us to church every Sunday, even in winter when temperatures dipped to -60 degrees below zero. Larri and I wore little lace circles on our heads - those were the days women had to cover their heads in church and all the church ladies wore some kind of hat. She sent us to first communion classes given by Father Joe and learned the stock responses of the age: who made you? God made me, etc. And in time we w ;re gifted matching white rosaries and rosary bags and proudly marched down the aisle for the first time. Larri got in trouble for chewing up the host, but I did it right, earning

Mom’s disapproval for again besting my sister.

Mom didn’t go to communion and, Mom being Mom, we didn’t dare ask why.

Later we learned that Dad had been married before so both of them were excommunicated. I stopped investing in religion at that point, my boundless loyalty to my mom outweighing all other attachments in my life. Yet I associate her still with Our Lady 29

of Sorrows church, its six cement stairs leading to the door, narrow steeple, the dark, windowless room lit only by flickering candles and filled with guilt for eternity. 30

* Eternity

I sing loud and fast, so as not to give her a chance, but she lays in wait for me— my sister is like that—and gets ready to break in on the “love.” There’s nothing I can do about it.

“It’s only right,” I sing, “to think about the girl you love...”

“Love, love me do,” Larri bursts in, her round nose a little redder than usual, aer face bright with the thrill of the game. She dibsed the cliff side of the back seat of the

Rambler so I’m stuck with the drop-off side. We both hate the drop-off side and I almost got in the passenger seat beside my mom, but then we couldn’t play the Singing Game, and it’s almost three hours to Fairbanks, and, anyway, even when I’m not looking at the drop-off, it’s there on my mind, the sharp, steep, endless fall to the frozen Tanana River.

The Richardson is no wider than our driveway, twisting around tight curves cut into the cliff, no fencing or anything, and even though mom is puttering along like she always does when she’s driving, I can smell her fear, a kind of cold, metallic smell like after dad welds pipes together in the basement in winter.

I watch the cliff wall trudge along out Larri’s window, the sharp edges of cut rock patched with frozen snow, and concentrate on the words she’s singing: “You know I love you, I’ll always be true, so pleeeeeease...” 31

I am all ready with “Please, lock me away,” but I don’t say it; it evaporates from my mind in a poof. I feel the shift, just like you feel a shift from second gear into third, as

Mom’s energy crystalizes into something hard and cold as an icicle. My eyes shoot to the rear view mirror, but I’m too short and all I see is the top of her forehead.

Larri goes on triumphantly with the song, but her voice and chubby body cloud and fade. The sound of the snow tires on the hard-pack of the Richardson changes slightly, the steady crunch turns to a kind of whine like a dog crying far, far away. The cliffs on Larri’s side of the car pick up their pace, hurrying back toward Delta Junction at top speed, a blur now, the color of the river in spring, muddy with runoff.

I lean up forward toward the front seat. Snowflakes rush at the windshield like galaxies. I see Mom’s hand clamped onto the steering wheel. She jerks the wheel to ihe right and the car turns but the back tires skid a little as we round the curve so fast. Larri stops singing and in the quiet space I hear Mom’s breath, in and out, fast like she’s running.

“Mom?” Larri says.

“It’s okay girls,” Mom says in a thin, high voice. The words come out really fast.

Then, “Isn’t this fun girls?” The car fills with that metallic smell and I see she is leaning forward herself now, hugging the steering wheel. Again she forces it toward the cliff ind the Rambler slips around another curve. I hear her foot smack into the floorboard of the car over and over. 32

Larri’s eyes take up her entire face now and I think she is going to cry. My own eyes sting with tears too, but I know that crying never helps anything - Mom tells me that often - crying never helps. I bite the inside of my cheek, and feel the first tear hot on my face, then Larri reaches over and takes my hand. Her chubby hand is warm and she holds mine, tight and reassuring, squeezing it every now and then, and I look at her plain face and her pink, cat-eye glasses and to me she looks a little like Jesus in the picture in our room with his dark hair down to his shoulders and that calm look on his face, and I remember that she is older than me, a whole year older, and that we are sisters, and that means something, and that nothing can change that ever, not the snow or the cold or oven the drop-off to the Tanana. The thought wraps around me like a soft blanket and I think of

Carolyn Lanier from our class who was riding a scooter last summer and tried to do a U- tum but got hit by a car and died, and how she used to write “Carolyn is a Christian” on the blackboard and how she didn’t have a sister, but how I do, and Larri is here, and the car skids again, then straightens out, but it seems far, far away as a dog crying and I close my eyes and feel eternity spreading from my sister’s palm into mine. 33

*The Teaching Machine

You never knew when you went to bed. There were no particular warning signs.

The first you hear of it is at 5 o’clock in the morning when you hear loud voices in

Spanish. “Traiga la pelota Tosca.” Rosita and Panchito are back.

Sometimes your eyes meet your sister’s across the double bed. Sometimes you just leap to your feet and speed into the living room. You are irrevocably awake, wide awake, the fear of God running like adrenalin through your veins.

She is in the kitchen. You see her through the pass-through between kitchen and dining room, just her m idriff- enough to see that she is stiff and straight. You take in every element of the environment, the rush of wind in the stunted spruce trees in front of the house, the tap of snow against the big window. You smell an overpowering meaty odor. You say “Good morning Mommy.” You get no response.

You sit next to your sister at the dining room table repeating the Spanish phrases after the phonograph voices. “Me llamo Rosita. Este es mi hermano Panchito.” You keep your voice cheerful. Your sister’s voice is cheerful too. You venture a glance through the pass-through. From your seated position, you see her face, stem and unsmiling.

You repeat the phrases with energy, although there is nothing novel or interesting about them. You’ve heard them before. You plow along like you might walk down a road you’d walked a hundred times. True, you haven’t heard them for a month. But that time, 34

it had gone on for weeks, morning and evening day after day. “Este es me perro. Ella se llama Tosca. Traiga la pelota Tosca.”

The cuckoo pops out of the cuckoo clock once at 5:30 a.m., releasing us from the company of Rosita and Panchito. She comes in and you watch her remove the needle and turn off the stereo. She says nothing, humming under her breath. You sit down at the piano, move fingers across the keys. Fur Elise, a dozen times. Your sister pulls out the

Teaching Machine and leans her bespeckled head over it as if she were trying to read ancient hieroglyphs. The next time the bird pops out, it cuckoos six times. You switch places with your sister.

She sets the table around you and the Teaching Machine, forks, knives, salt, pepper. This is not the cold cereal we’ve eaten every morning for the past 30 days.

Breakfast comes through the pass-through: Two plates. Each has two sunny-side up eggs cowering in the comer while center stage is something that looks like an old piece of leather: a beef liver steak, she always calls it, dipped in wheat germ and fried in butter.

The smell occupies the room with its alien presence and you have tears in your eyes even before you manage to saw off the first bite.

In time she releases us to dress like astronauts and board the waiting school bus.

She stands by the double-paned window watching without waving, as we struggle up the driveway to the Old Rich. She looks neither happy nor sad, on guard, as if she thinks we 35

might make a false step along the way, rip off scarves and suck in the frozen air, or n ake a true break for freedom, leaping over the cliff to the river bottoms and away. 36

*Diggory

If she’d been given a better role, would it all have been different? Something other than Diggory, the old servant man blowing his nose, and her nose already a problem, a cherry nose, our dad’s nose, always a little red like the acne on her shiny forehead? Maybe if I hadn’t been given the lead, the lady who stoops to conquer, with a bottle-green skirt that swept the floor, my hair in one, long silken curl down the ruffles of my blouse? If I hadn’t exited stage left that Saturday when we played to a full house or as full a house as was possible in the make-shift stage in the high school gym, to find

Diggory sobbing into her handkerchief? If I’d stopped then, walked off the set and gone with her into the Magic Wood behind our homestead where we used to play fairy princesses in early winter, the limbs of the stunted spruce glittering with light snow; if I’d run with her, hand in hand, out of the school and away, would it all have unrolled differently, the long ribbon of years?

If Mom hadn’t said I stole all the luck from her that time about the puppies, our little curly heads bent over the shipping crate that had come all the way from a puppy farm in Kansas, holding our breaths as if the world was about to begin. Inside, two cold, black noses; two pairs of wondering eyes looking up guiltily, soft wiggly bodies of plush.

She’d wanted the boy, like in that Prince Tom book we got through Weekly Readers, a golden boy cocker puppy, and I was to have the little golden girl, “Lucky” I’d already named her, but they’d sent us one mutant pup, something white with shorter ears, cuddled 37

in the crate beside the tiny, golden one. “Please God, let it be the girl,” my mother whispered as she lifted it out by the scruff of the white neck. But there it was, the boy.

My sister cried and I cried too, touching Lucky just once, gently, lifting her li tie golden body into my arms for a quick hug, a forever goodbye, and then I handed her over.

I kept the white one, although mom wanted to send it back. All that way alone in a dark crate seemed too harsh for a tiny dog to bear, his little heart would break somewhere in the hold of the bush plane between Fairbanks and Seattle, with no love and no hope of love, so tiny that when I kissed his eyes he went right to sleep, but nothing stays that young for long.

One day for no good reason I could see he lunged at me and ripped open my flesh, and there was a second time and a third. I never told, but the last time even my mom, who never noticed anything ever, saw the bloody wound on my face and took him away, leaving me with only the smile of scar on my cheek. They said it would disappear in time but it never went anywhere but down, sinking into the flesh like a schooner with a broken mast melting into the waves, gradually settling on the sea floor to trip you up if you happened to walk there, in the deep, hopeless dark.

But, if we’re talking the whole truth here, that wasn’t all we’d need to change to get back to a cleaner slate. You’d have to talk about my riding bikes no hands and winning at chess and playing varsity basketball and being elected president of the class, and then all the boy, Chris Bliss, who loved to brush my hair, and Robert Glover who 38

gave me his watch, and Chris Nunley with the ring, and Huey, who wrote poems for me or Troxell who invited me to prom. My sister would sit at the kitchen table on Friday nights and listen to request hour, writing down the song titles and who dedicated each to whom in her trademark purple pen, a hopeful glow on her face always, until the last song of the evening came in. If one boy had dedicated one song to her, might it have ended better for us? If someone had asked her to the prom so she didn’t have to bribe Guy

Schmitlein, a nerdy freshman, to be her date? If someone had given her his ring or helped her on with her coat?

Dad died when I was 12, my sister just 13. After that, we’d sometimes watch the home movies he’d taken when we were little, and sometimes when I can’t sleep at night,

I think of the reel-to-reel projector throwing its images onto a white, fold-up screen. I’d like to reel back in my life that way to when my sister and I played with Dad’s chessmen, making them into the Swiss Family Robinsons, the queens and rooks the girls, the knights the boys, or when we had that fort on the generator house roof and found mysterious tree twigs in the shapes of our initials, or when we resolved to live together in a penthouse in

San Francisco when we grew up and never never cut our hair.

But nothing stays that young for long, and life happened around us, or maybe it was just that ugly business about Dad after all, the summer Mom went to New Jersey, that I screamed and she didn’t, that I ran away and she didn’t, that I told and she didn’t and never, never will. The door slammed between us with finality when mom died that 39

April Fool’s Day. I found out she had a new will, written the day before, that cut me out of the meager inheritance, a new will written all in purple ink.

*LCS

My father burned his initials into the front of the gray hard hat some 50 years ago or more, the letters - LCS - drawn carefully, precisely, as if written in pencil and erased again and again until they satisfied him. The hat reminds me of a large turtle: the hard, smooth outside shell a soft, smoke-gray, lipping out at the bottom; the inside a complex structure of strong, crisscrossing straps that form a softer place to put a balding head. The outside’s scarred with scratches and one small dent as if Maxwell brought his silver hammer down on it, but the letters LCS remain unmarred. He took such care with those letters that it feels like a part of him is still there, tracing them, the deadly power of his big hands concentrated on each letter in turn, as if he’s well aware that his grave will have no marker and that these letters are the only legacy he will ever leave. 40

*The Nilssons

The Nilssons are crazy, the whole family. That doesn’t make them stand out i 1 my hometown Delta Junction, but kids can sniff out these things early. In third grade, I refuse to go trick-and-treating at their house. My mom makes me go anyways because Mrs.

Nilsson will be hurt, but I toss out the rice crispy bars she gives me.

The Nilssons live in a sprawling, ramshackle house set in the deep shade of stunted spruce trees off the Tok Highway. It’s next door to Taylor’s Trailer Park where

Ken Taylor chopped down every single tree, so you really notice the pool of darkness lapping around the Nilssons’ place. The shadows remind me of dark floodwaters filled with the bodies of small things that have died. When I mention this, my sister looks £ t me with disgust and my mom calls me Sarah Bernhardt.

We know the Nilssons like we know everybody in the town. The Nilsson children go to school with us and Don Nilsson publishes the weekly newspaper, the Delta

Midnight Sun, and sits on the school board with my dad.

We kids call him Mr. Nilsson. He looks like Mr. Doll out of our book Floating

Island about a family of dolls with china heads that get tossed up on a tropical island. Mr.

Doll’s head gets cracked slightly in the shipwreck but he says it doesn’t bother him. He has a pleasant expression on his painted face, and a small, penciled-in mustache. There is something dapper about him, even in the jungle, and his calm, happy expression never 41

varies even as his children get lost and the doll family cook runs off to live with the monkeys.

But I stay as far away from Mr. Nilsson as I can, and try never to let his shadow cross my path. When I see him, the little hairs raise up on my arms and my face gets hot and I want to go away fast. I ask my sister about it, since she is a year older and infinitely better than me.

“Don’t you think Mr. Nilsson is weird, Larri?” I ask her one day after school. My mom is mad at us for something and has gone to her bedroom, and Larri and I, like little bees, buzz around the house cleaning and vacuuming.

“He’s a grown up,” she said, pushing up her thick glasses. She frowns at something just over my shoulder. She’s probably thinking it is me who did something that made Mom mad and it isn’t fair that she has to clean up too.

“I know but...”

“And he’s daddy’s friend.” Her ten-year-old eyes meet mine sternly. She’s named after our dad and never allows anyone to say anything against him.

“Not really his friend,” I say. “Daddy laughs at him and calls him a slacker.”

“Still,” she says, “he’s a grown-up.”

I can’t get around this fact, so I get back to dusting the living room.

Mrs. Nilsson is clearly a grown-up too so I don’t ask Larri about her. Her name is

Marilyn and she is plump but not jolly. Sad lines run from her nose to the comers of her lips, and some mornings she drives her kids to school without brushing her hair. We see 42

her every Sunday with her kids at Our Lady of Sorrows church. They always troop in late, and everyone looks up, and Father Joe stops the sermon until they file into place, filling up an entire aisle. Mr. Nilsson never comes with them. Larri says he may be a

Mason like dad.

There are eight Nilsson kids, some a lot older than my sister and me, some younger. The oldest is Kathy. One day she gets married. My mom takes us to church. We hear the organ play “Here comes the bride” as Kathy floats down the aisle like a pearly cloud on Mr. Nilsson’s arm. He wears a new suit with a vest and smiles that pleasant smile with the shadow just under it. Mrs. Nilsson, in the same green dress she wears to

PTA meetings, sobs in the front pew as Kathy sweeps out of the church and away, like a white balloon someone accidently releases. We never see her again.

Next oldest to Kathy is Bill, then Margaret, Gary, Mark, Debby, and finally the twins Michael and Roger. Debby is one year ahead of us and Mark two years ahead, he twins three years behind, so we know them all from school.

Bill Nilsson is a grown up, so much older that, when he comes over to see my dad, my sister calls him Mr. Nilsson. I call him Bill because he tells me to and he doesn’t tell Larri to. Every time we see him I am afraid he will tell her to call him Bill too, but he never does.

Bill looks very much like his father, with the dark, wavy hair and the dimple in his chin and the shadow just beneath the smile. But Mr. Nilsson is portly while Bill has 43

the build of a cattle rustler in Rawhide. He’s already out of high school and he owns a pick-up truck and dates Bonnie King, who babysits us sometimes.

Once Bonnie stays over at our house while my parents go to Fairbanks to check in at the union hall and go shopping. It’s a hard, three-hour drive along the Tanana River cliffs, so they won’t be back ‘til late. Bonnie lets us listen to the request hour the military radio station runs every Friday evening then tries to get us to bed. Larri says “Yes

Ma’am” and brushes her teeth and gets in her nightgown. I brush my teeth and get in my nightgown too but I don’t make any promises.

Larri and I climb into the canopy bed in the room we share. I have the left side, nearest the window, she has the side near the closet. Bonnie tucks us in and closes the door, but I say I am afraid of the dark and pretend to cry until she agrees to leave it open a little.

“I think she’s going to have a boy over,” I whisper to Larri under the covers.

“Maybe Bill Nilsson.”

“No, she won’t,” Larri says, but her eyes light up and we both lie in bed listening with all our bodies. It’s late winter and 50 below zero out there and our nearest neighbors, the Vermullions, live 10 miles away. The silence presses in so hard we forget to breathe.

Then comes a clicking sound. It is Bonnie dialing the telephone, some long clicks, seme short, then a hushed conversation. A little later, the sound of a truck’s motor rakes through the night. The engine cuts and the truck door slams, then there’s the squeak as 44

the back door of our house opens, then another as it closes. Footsteps pass the bedroom.

We lie there listening.

“Come on,” I whisper to Larri after a few minutes.

She huddles under the covers, pulling her lips back and crunching her shoulders up.

“It’s our house,” I remind her. “We have a right to know who’s here.”

We slide softly off the bed and tiptoe to the bedroom door. Larri grabs a pencil and notebook in case we need to communicate with each other. She’s good with things like that. We listen at the door for a few minutes, then we hear voices from the living room. Bonnie’s soft, high laugh ripples through, the smell of cigarettes.

I go down on hands and knees and creep out onto the carpet behind the smaller sofa. Once I get there, I beckon to Larri who follows me. The living room is all shadows, with only a dim lamp in the comer and the flames leaping in the fireplace. My eyes are accustomed to the dark of the bedroom, so I quickly make out two figures on the big sofa.

They are kissing. Bonnie sits on someone’s lap and her hair falls over his face so I C£nnot see who he is.

I turn back to my sister. She is too afraid to peek, so I make kissy lips to let her know. She hands me the paper and pencil and I write “K I S S IN G” in big letters.

Without making a sound, I move my head around the edge of the couch again to look.

Bonnie’s head changes position and I can see. It is Bill Nilsson. My chest hurts, like 45

when all those fireplace logs slid out of the back of dad’s truck and fell on me. I write

“Bill Nilsson” on the paper and hand it to her.

Her eyes widen. She writes “Maybe they are getting married.”

I think for a minute, then write “Let’s sing that wedding song.”

Larri makes that gesture of fear again, pulling back her mouth and raising her

shoulders, but I write “Come on. It’s our house!” I grab her hand and count off one, two,

three on my fingers, then suddenly I stand up, dragging her with me.

“Here, comes, the bride,” I sing loudly and rhythmically. At the first note Bonnie

King leaps up off Bill’s lap, catches her feet on his and falls to her knees on the rug. He

stands up abruptly too, almost tripping over Bonnie on the floor. In the firelight, his face

is sinister, the lower half lit up by the flickering fire, his eyes and forehead in shadow.

“Here, comes, the bride,” I sing at the top of my lungs, and Larri joins in, not

loud, but loud enough that when we run back into our bedroom she is laughing and proud. We hear hurried footsteps then the back screen door smacking shut. When Bonnie

comes into the bedroom, we let her plead for a time but then we decline to keep the matter a secret. Mom’s face turns an angry red and she calls up Mrs. King. That is the end of Bonnie and Bill and the end of Bonnie as a baby sitter. All I have to do to cheer up

Larri for the next six months is to chant “Here comes the bride” under my breath.

I don’t know if my parents talk to Bill about what happened - mom repeats

several times that the girl always sets the pace for these things — but he keeps coming over to see my dad and smoke cigarettes with him in the garage. If I go outside when he’s 46

there, he winks at me, tells me I’m a cutie pie and dares me to do different things, like take a drink of a beer or sit on his lap. I always take a dare.

One day I go outside and find Bill and my dad standing across the Old

Rich at the area Larri and I call the Lookout Point, an outcropping on the edge of

a cliff that falls away to the river bottoms below. The men stand right at the edge

of the cliff, not talking to each other, and their energy hangs stiffly around them

like curtains. I hang back, that heavy male energy choking me. Suddenly Bill says

to me, “Hey cutie. I dare you to jump.”

Nothing feels real, everything seems far away like I am watching it 01

television. I watch my legs starts pumping and take a running leap toward the cliff

but my dad’s big hand lashes out and smacks me to the ground. He doesn’t say a

word. I don’t say anything either, just go for ice to put on my eye.

One day when I am 11 years old Bill drives up in his pickup truck for the

first time in a long time. I go out to tell him my dad is not home. He is standing by

this metal pipe my dad suspended vertically from three pines with chains. The

pipe hangs free between the three tree trunks and you are supposed to hit it with

another piece of metal if you need everyone to come, like for dinner. Mom never

uses it though.

Bill’s standing beside the gong wearing an old cowboy hat that makes it

too dark to see his eyes very well, only the chin with the dimple and the shadows. 47

All the little hairs on my arms stand straight up suddenly and my face flushes. My

hands tremble.

“Dad’s not home,” I say. My voice squeaks a little and my throat hurts.

“Hey cutie,” he says. “I have a special dare for you.”

“What dare?” I say.

“Sniff this rag three times.”

My feet are trying to walk away, but I say, “Like, just sniff it?”

He takes a bottle from the truck, pours something on the rag. “Put this up against your nose and sniff. Really deep. Yeah, like that. Two more times.”

My head swirls away like I’m passing through a galaxy. The next thing I know I am lying on the floor in my dad’s garage. The light is dim and my head is so heavy I can hardly lift it up. I hear someone talking and it is me and I am saying, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” I wake up a second time in my own house and Bill is gone and I can’t remember why I hated him. But now I stay far away from him, just like Mr. Nilsson.

Bill joins the Army and goes off to boot camp that fall. Mr. Nilsson publishes a photo of him in uniform on the front page of the paper, and Mrs.

Nilsson brings over a copy to show mom. When I look at the photo, I think it is

Mr. Nilsson. 48

*The Nilssons II

Margaret Nilsson is the next oldest Nilsson kid and her father’s favorite. She has a beautiful soprano voice and sings in the church choir. She is quite fat even when I first know her and she gets heavier and heavier as time passes. She wears her hair in curls like

Little Lulu and goes to church every day.

On Easter Sunday, mom makes Larri and me go to mass at Our Lady of Sorrows.

She wants us to wear the little white gloves she bought us for communion. Larri wears hers but I say I can’t find mine.

The little church is half full and we wave at friends when mom isn’t looking.

After Father Joe says a prayer or two, Margaret Nilsson goes up onto the pulpit to sing.

Her bright red dress hangs around her body like a tent, and her dark curls bob as she steps up in those high heels.

Larri whispers to me that Margaret looks like a lady pig in her heels, and it’s true.

Her legs are shapely but very plump and the heels raise her on her toes like little hoofs. I start to laugh and cannot stop. I bite the inside of my cheek, and Larri pinches my arm but

I cannot stop and I finally cover my face with a handkerchief and pretend to be sneezing until it passes. Mom scowls over at me. Margaret sings Ave Maria.

We all walk outside after mass, and there is Margaret with Mrs. Nilsson. My mom, still glaring at me, walks over. I hang back a little but get close enough to see 49

Margaret’s face, the sad lines running from her nose to the comers of her mouth.

Suddenly, her face droops in this weird way like it was made of cloth, and her eyes turn up until only the whites are left. Then her mouth opens and she spout out words in gushes, like she was vomiting them up, words I didn’t know, words that made no sense, in a voice that is deep like a man’s.

Mrs. Nilsson raises her hands and shrieks, a long, continuous cry like an ambulance siren. Mom stands there frozen, staring, and Larri grabs her arm. Father Joe rushes over to catch Mrs. Nilsson as she collapses. I see her large purse hit the ground and a small Kleenex pack and a beaded change purse fall out of it.

Father Joe eases her to a sitting position. Then he turns to Margaret who continues to speak this language in someone else’s voice. He’s a small, thin priest but he places his hands on her plump shoulders tightly, as if he was going to lift her into the air.

Mrs. Paton, a teacher at school, runs over toward us. “She’s speaking in tongues,” she cries out and falls to her knees. I see my mom kneeling down too, and my sister and other people too. At that moment, Margaret’s real eyes come back and she opens them very wide and points to a spot just behind me.

“Demon!” she screams. I turn around like a shot but nobody is behind me. Still, she continues screaming, and her voice carries all the way across the field to the Buffalo

Lodge, where men pour out of the bar to see what’s going on. 50

“Out Satan,” Margaret shrieks, still pointing toward me. Then she starts in on a

Latin prayer and repeats it over and over until she collapses beside her mother in the dirt in front of the church.

The entire next week kids at school joke about it, pointing at me and saying “Out demon!” But I remember the way Margaret’s eyes rolled up and the voice, like a man was hiding inside her. Soon after that, Margaret starts seeing demons everywhere, and one day in winter they take her away to a special hospital in Fairbanks. That same year, Debby gets pregnant and changes her name to Skye and runs away. Gary joins the Green Beret and his helicopter goes down and his dad runs a front page story about how him in the

Delta Midnight Sun.

I am in junior high school when my mom gets a phone call from Mrs. Nilsson about Bill. Mom is still weak from cancer surgery, and she stays in her nightgown most of the day and smells like sweat. Nobody comes over for coffee anymore, so it’s exciting when the phone rings, like a fresh breeze blowing through the narrow aisles of our life. I hear the name Bill and move to the dining room table with my school books to hear better.

“Oh Marilyn, I’m so sorry. And poor Bill,” my mom says, pressing a thumbnail between two teeth and staring out the little, double pane window as she speaks. It is

February and the lawn outside is a snowbank. Larri and I don’t have school because we never have school when the temperature drops to 65 degrees below zero. 51

“Of course he didn’t,” my mom says. “Some young girls are like that, they lead men on. It’s always the girl that sets the tone.”

Mom wouldn’t tell us details but at school Michael and Roger Nilsson say that some girl in Texas came on to Bill then claimed he raped her. Mom writes a letter for dad, who is the town mayor, about Bill’s good reputation in the community.

I go out to the lookout point that evening, standing there on crumbling ground, the river bottoms cold and barren some 25 feet below me. The Delta is only a thin whip of a river, but over time it has carved out a wide bed some 2 miles wide. I look across to the dark spruce forest on the other side, backed by the jagged teeth of the Alaska Range. I have lived beside this river, these mountains, all my life, but they seem strange now, alien, as if I am looking at the snowy surface of Pluto. I don’t feel real and nothing feels real. A cold emptiness scours my chest cavity, and my body is separate from me.

“I hate you,” I yell as loud as I can to try to make myself real again, but my voice is tiny, crushed into little pieces by the vast expanse of sky. All I hear clearly is the echo, bounced off the mountains and back to my terrified ears: “you, you, you.” 52

^Whatever Happened to Winnie?

Whatever happened to Winnie? Or Honey for that matter? Starshine or Poohie? I remember each dog distinctly but don’t know when or how they died. Did my mom just hide it from us? She hid her own cancer, so death made her afraid.

Winnie was our very first dog and I was small. I only remember him from photos of a knee-high Larri and even smaller me sitting with Winnie carefully posed on our laps

- Larri’s lap, if truth is essential here and after all it’s supposed to be truth I’m writing about, no? Trolling the waters of my childhood for floating pieces of it left over from the wreck of the freighter.

Winnie was a small, black cocker spaniel, bought perhaps - I’m sure of it—to replace my dad’s dog Blackie, back in Missouri. He wrote to Mom about Blackie when he went back for the stomach ulcer surgery, how he tried to tell him why he wouldn’t be back but Blackie wouldn’t understand and he’d wait and wait but Dad would never come through the door again.

(Did he never, ever return, not once, to see his sons growing up? Never? The younger boy was only four years old when he left, Robert, who never spoke to him again or reconciled when he grew up, who hated him until the day dad died and never came to the funeral. Who can blame him?) 53

Anyway, my mom tried to replace the pieces of his lost life, two girls to replace

the two boys, and Winnie, a black male cocker spaniel, to replace Blackie, the black

spaniel left behind. I don’t remember Dad being very close to Winnie, but I was so young

I don’t really remember that dog or what we did with him or even what became of him.

And it must not have been wildly successful since every other dog we had, from Honey

through Smiden, the last, was golden and female.

Honey we got as a puppy for someone who lived over by the Corrados off the

Richardson Highway in a trailer. She was a strawberry blond color, but not a full cocker.

Her ears stood up straight sometimes and her tail was log. She had two puppies, Poohie

and, I think, Starshine, but it’s also possible that Star was Poohie’s puppy. Star was

stockier than Poohie, with a star on her forehead. Poohie looked like Honey, who must have died at some point but how and when, or did she run away or get lost?

Then came Missie and Dandy, two real, pedigreed cocker spaniels that arrived in a shipping crate from Indiana or Ohio as gifts for us girls. Larri wanted a boy, because of the boy spaniel in the book “Champion Dog Prince Tom”. But the boy turned out to be white and dad said it wasn’t fair how I always stole all the luck from Larri. So she got the girl who was golden (Missy) and the boy who had to be sent back was mine, but he fell asleep when I kissed his eyes and followed me everywhere I went, so I loved the little dog, unwanted through no fault of his own, and named him Dandy. But he was vicious as he grew older and attached me out of the blue, finally biting my cheek and Mom “found a 54

home for him” and he was sent away. I don’t know how that story ended, but I remember crying the day he went away.

He was replaced in California by golden Curdie. Larri found a home for Missy when she went to law school. Tim put down Curdie after Mom died. Before that, Tim got

Smidgen and he kept only her.

Years later, Tim sent me a notice of Smidgen’s death, how she died at home

“surrounded by loved ones. I remember that when Mom died, Tim took Smidgen to the beach and saw a shooting star or so he said, and how she too was reported as dying at home, “surrounded by loved ones” and I was there but didn’t count as a loved one and hadn’t for a long, long time. But whatever happened to Starlight? What happened to

Poohie? To the goddess of lost things

You must be very busy.

I want to know how you organize it all —

The lost hopes, dreams, youth, loves, with the lost socks of every sock-wearing human on the planet.

And all those lost dogs let's start there.

Why not start with the dogs and get them home each to each where they belong? 56

*Dark Side

I always sleep with the window open now because I can. Outside, the moon is full.

Through the veil of fog, it’s more like a smudged fingerprint than a man’s face you could

pick out of a line-up. The back of the moon is forgotten, invisible, forever in darkness.

I was named after my grandmother and maybe that explains everything. She was crazy,

couldn’t remember things, walked into the woods and was eaten by wolves, like a Little

Red Riding Hood story hacked apart and put back together wrong.

I remember the wolves better than grandma. Throughout my childhood, I listened for

their long, one-note song bouncing off the frozen winter sky in a world so cold that every

bright thing is felled and squelched. Flowers, like the bluebells my sister and I called

forget-me-nots, nodding gravely in midsummer but were gone with the first killing frost;

it was too cold for butterflies or frogs or roses, except those with more than five petals.

No majestic trees either, just the stunted spruce, no taller than the length of my father’s

shadow. The warm heart of the world had broken long ago and the ground lay frozen all year just below the surface. Roots could not get a grip and anything that tried to stand tall was mowed down by the brutal winds of winter.

I remember my grandmother as short and bewildered, smelling like talcum and old wool.

She never spoke. She braided her gray hair and pinned it around her head in a dirty halo.

Her body had lost its sharp outlines and her steps faltered, but her eyes, black like mine, 57

sparked with indignation and rage, shouting the words her muddled brain had forgotten:

you bastard.

She came to us when I was five. Ten months later the wolves got her, so they said, and

that was that. The one daring act in my mother’s life had been to snatch her from the rest

home to bring her north to live at my father’s house against his wishes. Grandma had

tended chickens in New Jersey so we bought some hens and put them in a shed behind

the house with a space heater in winter, though my father said the electricity cost him a

fortune. It fell to me and my sister to go out at night and lift the birds to perches so their

feet wouldn’t freeze to the ground. Some jumped down and froze anyway, the anchored

birds all flapping wings and desperate clucks until my dad brought out his hatchet. We always tried to get there first in the morning. A little warm water poured on their feet would usually free them, just like when you touched your tongue to the frozen jungle- gym at school and had to wait still as a corpse for a teacher to come with water.

We lived so far from town that nights were dark and silent as the inside of the freezer in the garage, a place my sister and I feared above all others. My father trapped wolves for the pelt money, and he stocked the severed heads in the freezer to frighten us when we opened the door. At night I heard wolves howl from across the frozen river, the rising cry piercing the dark like a stiletto blade.

I can’t remember my father’s face when mom stepped off the plane with grandma, although surely I was there. The truth is, I can’t remember much about that time, only the 58

headless chickens twitching on the shed floor, the wolf howls like warning sirens, and my father’s huge hands. I remember too when he gave grandma a hot pepper to eat, her strangled cry, his laughter, my mother’s tears, but mostly grandma’s black eyes cutting out his heart.

I don’t remember grandma packing her battered, blue suitcase the color of forget-me-nots and starting down the Old Rich for New Jersey, nor us clearing snow off the windshield of the Rambler so my mom could go after her ten minutes later. I don’t remember the state trooper coming either, and he was a drinking pal of my father’s, but the police report said that he was there. They searched the area on horseback for three days and never found a trace. Eaten by wolves, they said, most likely wolves.

I didn’t wonder then. Alaska, wolves. It happens. I didn’t wonder then and yet I wonder now. How could she disappear without a trace? The snow was deep, soft in early April.

Couldn’t they follow her slow steps to see where they ended? Couldn’t they see wolf tracks? And what about her suitcase? Did the wolves eat her blue battered suitcase?

Outside my window, now, the full moon slips behind a cloud but the air is mild and fresh.

I close my eyes. I remember how mom got breast cancer the year after grandma died, and how I ran away at 12 with only a backpack and traveled so far it took a year to get my sister’s letter saying that my father died on a hunt across the river. The foghorn from the port becomes the howl of wolves in my sleepy brain, and I dissolve into the sound ar d 59

travel with it like an astronaut to the dark side of the moon, looking for a worn suitca se the color of flowers. 60

*The Burden of Proof

• My sister, 7 years old: “What’s mom mad about? We better vacuum again. Be sure to get under the radiators this time.”

• Mrs. Archie Olmstead, Delta Junction: “You mother was an absolute saint. SI e never said a bad word about anyone in Delta. I never heard her complain.”

• Helene Crizna, age 84: “I was in Zofia’s class in grade school. She never talked or played with the rest of us, as though she was better than us. One day she crawled under the cloak closet and wouldn’t come out or even answer. They had to send for her older sister Irena to get her out.”

• Irene Chace: “I was always called on to deal with your mom’s moods. Always!

Of course I remember when she crawled under that closet. I got called out of an English test and missed the rest of the day because I had to take her home. It wasn’t fair. I had a hard enough time. Weren’t there teachers for that?”

• Mom, 1980: “I always loved reading. When life was difficult, I would jump into a novel and it was like I was gone from earth to somewhere better.”

• Dad, 1980: “Now you girls help your wonderful Mommy MeMe while I’m gone.” 61

• My sister, 8 years old: “She’s got her hair in pin curls. She’s humming. It’s gotta

be the silent treatment. What did we do this time? Let’s bring in wood and clean up tie

kitchen.”

• Irene Chace: “When we were in high school, she would stay in bed instead of

going to school. She just lay in bed all day. She just couldn’t face life.”

• Letter from my dad in Alaska to my mom, visiting in New Jersey, a few months

before their marriage: “Honey, I dont like to hear you say that. You just stop saying that

and git to gittin. Of course you can. Your something special. Fer crying out loud: Don’t

fall into that dark place again when the fella that loves yous far away.”

• My sister, 9 years old: “Mom’s in bed again. We better do stuff. You practice the

piano while I clean out the oven. Then I’ll practice and you fold the wash.”

Mark Nilsson, the grown up son of a Delta Junction neighbor, visiting my mom in

California. “It’s a mess and nobody cleans it. That’s why I picked up the broom and got

like a mountain of dirt in ten minutes. Everything’s a mess. There are three women in the

family; even if you girls are in college, you come home sometime. That table cloth, it’s

stained and dirty, it should be taken off and washed. Everything needs to be washed. The bathroom’s filthy.” 62

Marilyn Nilsson, Mark’s mother: “She didn’t have an easy road to hoe, your

mom. With your dad gone so often and all. Minus 70 degrees is no circus, not even

mentioning the wind chill. Thank god she had you girls.”

• My sister, 10 years old: “We must not have done it well enough.”

• My sister, 11 years old. “It’s the silent treatment again. What did we do?”

My sister, 12 years old: “It’s the silent treatment again. What did you do?”

• Doctor in California: “She was supposed to get check-ups every year after that

mastectomy.”

• Mrs. Archie Olmstead, Delta Junction: “She just went to bed after your dad died.

She loved him that much. Couldn’t go on without him. Lucky she had you girls.”

• Irene Chace: “I found that house for her in Santa Cruz, called her and told her to

come. It’s worth a million now. You think she might have been grateful? Ha!”

• Judy Berman, family friend in California: “She just didn’t want to bother anyone.

She had that cough for six months.”

• Arlene Schaefer, family friend in California: “I told her I was taking her to lunch,

then took her to the cancer doctor instead.”

• Mrs. Archie Olmstead, Delta Junction: “You mother was an absolute saint. She never said a bad word about anyone. I never heard her complain.” 63

• Irene Chace: “I told her to go to the doctor, but she never did anything I told her.

It was like she wasn’t even hearing me.”

• My sister, 20 years old: “While you were spending the night with your boyfriend...”

• My sister, 21 years old: “While you were working your precious job in D.C...”

• Irene Chace: “Of course it was your sister changed Zofia’s will. It was the day before she died, been on morphine for a month. As if she got up out of bed, after all that time, and decided to rewrite her will.”

• My sister, 22 years old: “Better you’re angry with me than Mom.”

• My sister, 22 years old: “I was just trying to help Mom. It was her house, after all.

She got to decide who got it.” 64

*Dust

It is all my mother’s idea to take this trip to New Jersey, although she will deny it

later. My mom and dad fight about the trip. I am doing the dishes in the kitchen. After I

am done, I squat down and listen from behind the counter. Uncle Eddie is taking his wife

and nine kids to the Jersey shore for the summer. Mom wants to go. Dad wants to stay in

Delta Junction.

“My daughters aren’t going to be stuck for another summer in this cow town,” my

mother says, tears and anger playing rough chords in her voice. “I want them to see

where I grew up,” she says. “And New York. They’ve never seen New York.”

“For crying out loud, Sophie,” my dad says. Something makes a bang, like a glass

set down hard on a table. “Get it through your head. They’re only girls. They’re going to

grow up and marry the kid who works at the gas station. What does it matter if they see

New York?”

We pack up the Rambler in June and drive all the way from Delta Junction, down the Alcan, across the top of the country, to Tom’s River, New Jersey in two weeks. I keep a diary on the way down, where we fished along the way and what we ate and all the times my brother got what he wanted by crying. 65

June 3. Camped along the Yukon. Ate cold pop tarts for breakfast. We took

turns reading Winnie the Pooh to Tim because mom had a headache and

dad was angry. Drove 302 miles.

When we pull into Tom’s River, the door swings wide into a different world of

color and sea spray and laughter. The house my uncle has rented is a block from the

ocean and the grown-ups are together all the time. Everything changes. My sister anc11 no

longer babysit Tim; we sleep downstairs with my cousins and we girls spend every day at

the beach. I buy my first bikini, a white one made of fabric that looks like leather, and the

lifeguard at Tom’s River tells me it looks swell. I use my first tampon. My father stays in the backyard at my uncle’s house with a white handkerchief over his bald head to shield it from the sun. My mother looks after my brother as though she were used to it.

That summer is my entire youth, each day a jewel that splits the sun into a hundred thousand points of light. I shop for summer clothes with my cousin Ellen and stop afterwards at the soda shop to drink my first coke. I kiss a boy for the first time and dance the twist at the local teen center. I buy a Swinger with my birthday money and take photos of Ellen buried up to her neck in sand, of the sand castle we built and trimmed with seashells, of my sister trying to do cartwheels in the sand. I catch crab in nets and read horoscopes in Ellen’s teen magazines and listen to the Turtles and the Monkeys and the Beatles on the radio, learning all the lyrics and singing along as if summer were forever. 66

The day we leave New Jersey feels like a death. We girls cry all night long and

Ellen and I cut fingers and make oaths to one another about never forgetting and never

cutting our hair no matter what, even if we are offered the best job in the world if we cut

it we will refuse. We swear we’ll come back when we are grown and rent this same l ouse together.

When my dad brings the Rambler round, about to pull back out onto the freeway of life, my mom climbs into the front seat with my dad for once, just as if she did it every day. In the back seat, while my sister and brother drift off to sleep, I press my lips to my own cool reflection in the car window, a farewell kiss.

By the time we get to Calgary Canada and the unpaved Alcan Highway, my mom is in the back seat again with my brother. I can’t remember when that happens, but it does, just as it always did before, and I am, as my dad says, once again riding shotgun.

Then the tire blows, the Rambler skids, my dad brings it to a stop by the side of the road.

I am sent out into the blowing dust to change it.

I am strong. I have changed a tire before. I try the top nut and put my weight into it, budge it, then twist it until it’s loose. I move the tire iron to the one on the bottom, but it is stuck tight. I try the one on the left, then the one on the right, but I cannot loosen any of them. Dad is angry. He moves out of the car and squats beside the Rambler like an old cowboy, his face leathered, frowning. He makes me stand outside and watch him as if my 67

arms can be shamed into strength. All the days of summer blow from my heart like oak leaves turned yellow and crimson, lifted up and strewn by the winter wind.

My mother sits in the back seat of the Rambler holding the head of my sleeping 4- year old brother. Beside them, my older sister peers through her thick glasses into a paperback edition of Little Women.

Dust covers the edges of the book. The Alcan is not paved in Canada, and everything in the car is already covered with dust. All the way from Calgary the sandwiches my sister and I put together for family lunches collect dust and grit along the lines of mayonnaise like some geologic formation. Dust is spread so thick on the dashboard of the Rambler that, when I trace the letters of my name in it, my mom sees from the back seat and snorts at my self-involvement.

I stand some five feet away from my father as he changes the tire. My eyes track his every muscle movement so minutely that I see the gestures pass through his mind before he acts on them. Inserting the tire iron into the lug nut, bracing himself, yanking one end up and pushing the other down. His big Germanic features are closed like a bank vault, but I know he is angry with me, and not just for being unable to loosen the lug nuts.

As he leans into the tire jack, his muscled forearms almost pop with fury. Suddenly his body tenses inward and his huge, callused hands move up to grab his chest. After a moment, he rolls gently backward into the dust of the Alcan Highway. 68

I think he’s been shot through the heart. I spin around to see who shot him, imagining a rifle and silencer. Nobody’s there, just the long strip of Alcan stretching on and on in the late morning sun. Then I turn back and scan his face for a sign of life. His eyes stare straight up and I see dust settling into their moisture.

When he falls, the tire iron falls from his hands and clinks against the tire rim. My mother does not hear the clink of metal. I see her head and shoulders through the back window of the Rambler. She stares vacantly into space, pressing a thumbnail absently into the space between two bottom teeth.

In time, I look back at my father and the fact that he is dead settles over me like a long, cloak someone wraps around my shoulders. The moment crystalizes into memory even as it happens, suspended there like a forever icicle from the overhanging roof of my life: how he crunched in on himself like a sea anemone when you poke it, then toppled backward to lie still on the dirt. I realize with a kind of thrill that he lies there dead and nobody knows in all the world but me. 69

♦Wolves

From my earliest memories, we lived on the Delta River cliff. The little live wire

of a river had, over millennium, word out a deep, rocky river-bed, sometimes twistin \ it

way over to the side where the Old Richardson paralleled it in front of my father’s house,

other times moving west toward the jagged teeth of the Alaska Range.

The cliff fell away about 20 feet past the Old Rich, dropping straight and strong to the river bottoms. My sister and I played along that cliff, climbing down the set of wooden stairs my dad had built with little landings along the way, until they crumbled over time.

The river gorge extended flat and gravelly for a couple of miles marked by tree trunks and old tires from the run-offs of prior years. In spring the snow in the frozen mountains melted and the little frozen river awoke, swelled and flexed its muscled. In winter it withered into thin bones immobilized by freeze, and Larri and I could hike across in a couple of hours. But wolves roamed the river bottoms too, passing from the forest at the base of Mount Deborah, Mount Hayes and Mount Hess across to our side in search of food. You could hear their cries, wild and thrilling, over the long night of winter. 70

My mom would tell us not to fear, that the cliff wall would protect us. Thinki lg of

the steep cliff, clutching tightly to my bear Hiber with one hand, my sister’s hand with

the other, I would fall asleep.

“But why can’t the wolves climb up the stairs?” I asked Larri one day. “Or

Devil’s Slide?”

“They’ll smell humans,” my sister said. She was a year older and knew a lot.

“Wolves don’t go where humans are.”

But, one day in late spring when the snow had melted at the bottom of Devil’;

Slide, we came across the rusty steel of a trap with a chain attached to a stake and pounded into the ground. Its jaws were open, its teeth pointed like a Jack-o-lantem’s teeth. Larri pulled me back, said to leave it alone.

Larri told my mom about the trap that evening. She was feeling strong I guess, so she brought it up with my dad that evening, pressing her lips together angrily, but he just

laughed and said it was a great spot for it. Wolves, he said, were attracted by the smell of humans. Wouldn’t she rather have a wolf tethered by a metal chain to the ground, unable to run, than on the prowl near the girls’ playground? It would die in a couple of days from lack of food and water.

“But Daddy, the chain is all rusty,” Larri said. “It might be able to break away.” 71

“It still wouldn’t last long pulling a trap behind it,” my dad said. “One way or

another, a wolf in a trap is a dead wolf.”

The next day I told Larri I was going out to swing. But I found a long, stout stick and carried it down Devil’s Slide to the wolf trap. I thrust it into the yawning trap mouth.

At first nothing happened, but I kept putting it in different spots and suddenly, with a clack like a door slamming shut, it closed on the stick, snapping it into two pieces thi.t flew into the air. One hit my leg, leaving a long valley dug into the flesh.

I separated the chain from the stake at a rusted link, then carried the trap out to the river, halfway across the bottoms. It was huge and powerful from the runoff, its song happy and dangerous at the same time. I tossed the trap as far out as it could. I watched carefully until it sank under the muddy water. 72

*Even the Silence

I haven’t been in that house, that room, for 40 years, nor seen in decades an Alaskan winter’s night. But still I remember it as yesterday: rising in the deep of night from the bed I share with my sister and tiptoeing to the window. White blankets all, the ground and trees and the summer chicken coop snow-shrouded and glowing dully in the cold moonlight. Everything white and silent and heavy, even the silence heavy, static, unmoving.

Out of the white, just beside the house, a lynx appears, padding up the pathway on silent paws. It walks slowly, pacing, smooth as a shadow gliding across the snowpack, each rolling step confident, sensual, deadly, king of the winter night. I hold my breath until the tufted ears disappear into the frozen darkness of the forest. 73

*Running Away

Chapter 1

The icy doors of winter slam shut early, and it’s white and lonely outside, so cold it will freeze your lungs if you step outside without a scarf to breathe through. It’s my job to plug in the Rambler at night, every night. It’s my job to bring in logs for the fire.

It’s my job to shovel out the snowbank at the top of the driveway after the snowplow passes.

Chapter 2

My father is big and strong and violent, with hands like hams. He goes to work far away. He flies his Piper Pacer to Fairbanks and then catches a plane to a Nike Site to help the country build defenses against Russia. He comes home for a week after four weeks away. He asks my mother if my sister and I have done our chores. She always says yes.

She is as afraid of him as we are.

Chapter 3

Sometimes he is mean to my mother and we hear her crying in the bedroom. One time, after he leaves for the Nike Site, she tells us we are going to run away from home, 74

the three of us and Poohie the dog. We are happy and excited. We plan the route we will

take down the Alcan through Canada to Seattle. We think about the fresh vegetables we

will eat there, instead of frozen vegetables from the big E&E Meat Truck that delivers our

order every year in August.

Chapter 4

My mother is like a young girl now, singing in the mornings. Over breakfast, we talk about what we will see and do. Over dinner, we look at pictures in books of New

York and California. When will we go? my sister asks. He comes home in two weeks.

Chapter 5

One week later we are ready. We have packed our bags and piled them in the

Rambler. We filled it up with gas at Jack’s Chevron. I got maps of the Alcan from Deihl’s

Shopping Center. My sister cleaned up the house so it would be clean for my father’s return.

Chapter 6 75

The phone rings. It is news that my father’s airplane went down and he is in the hospital in Fairbanks. My mother has us unpack the car and she drives to Fairbanks. He survives and comes home. We never mention our plan to run away again. 76

*Cha Cha

I went to Aptos to ask my aunt questions about my mother. I went reluctantly,

because Aunt Irene was difficult at all times and could be vicious sometimes, and because

she had had a difficult, vicious relationship with my mother. But mom was dead, and I

wanted information, even if I had to sift through the spewed vitriol to get it.

She was really my only source of information about Mom’s childhood as Zifia

Perkowski. Their parents had been poor and Polish and Catholic, and only six of the ?ight

babies had survived. My mom and Irene had escaped the prejudice and poverty by going

as far from their childhood home in New Jersey as they could, as soon as they could. But they dealt with the past very differently, in ways that negated each other, and so had spent their lives in stilted togetherness or not speaking at all.

By this time, all of the six Perkowski siblings are dead, except for Aunt Irene. She

is generous to me probably because she considers it a victory over my mom every time I

visit her house, so I steel myself for certain guilt as I pull into the driveway of her small house with its huge garden and view over miles to the Pacific.

She comes to the door, and as she hugs me, I notice that she looks older, her bowl- cut hair whiter, her thick glasses magnifying her eyes into huge insect eyes. But something about her firm, comfortable body and her features makes me think of my mother and miss her. 77

She bustles around and makes us coffee, and we settle into cushy chairs in front of her roaring fire. She’s made the house into something out of a cottage magazine, with huge windows overlooking a bright flower garden. I think of my mom’s house, the same cottage style but never fixed up. I put down tile and my sister and I painted the walls, but mom never invested in making it lovely, just like she stopped brushing her hair and wore the same sweats, day in, day out, in the years before she died.

“So tell me some stories about my mom, when you were young,” I ask.

Irene purses her lips, making lots of little lines appear. “Oh your mom!” she says, sighing and rolling her eyes. Because of her glasses, it’s hard to watch without laughing, so I look away.

“I mean, like, what did she like to do?” I try. “What did she do for fun?”

“She stayed in bed,” Irene said. “Whenever things were hard - and they usuajly were - she’d go get into bed with a book.” This I rated as true, since Mom herself had told me once that her favorite escape from the cares of the world when she was young was a book.

“And this was most of the time,” Irene went on. “I was older, so that made some difference, but still, it wasn’t right. She never could face the world.” 78

This was a direct contradiction of my mom’s accounts to us of her childhood, but

I had memories of her staying in bed for weeks after dad died. I waited to see if she

would continue.

“It really wasn’t fair to me. I was a couple of years ahead of her at school, and I

always had to take care of her like I was her mother. One day I’m in fourth grade and

she’s in second grade. They come in and pull me out of class because your mom has

climbed under the coat closet and refuses to get out. I go into her classroom and there she

is, squeezed under the coat closet and she refuses to even say why. I get her out and then I

have to take her all the way home, missing my own classes.”

I think about mentioning the letter I found from my dad to my mom before thsy were married. Don’t think that way, Sophie, just don’t. You can get through these problems, and you have to because the world would be just awful without you in it. Don’t even think about it, because there is someone out here who needs you. But I don’t ask about it. I drink my coffee and get a tour of the garden before I leave. 79

*Seeds II

Thelma Musgrove, the name still gives me the shivers. She was our third grade

teacher and she also ran the Laundromat in Delta. But the former role was more

important to us, since we had a washer and dryer in the house.

Mrs. Musgrove’s body didn’t have an ounce of fat on it, like Jack Spratt. It was

tough and sinewy, and she never wore jewelry, not a pin, not a necklace, not a bracelet.

She wore dark-colored pencil skirts that hit some six inches below her knees, with

collared blouses and buttoned up sweaters over the blouses. She looked like a warhorse version of Olive Oil, older, grayer and tougher, tough as nails.

As a teacher, she was strict and mean. We were all afraid of her, all 18 of her

including Tommy Wilson, our class bad boy. The smell of lunch boxes, of white bread

sandwiches, still makes me think of her, that slight nausea, the anxiety, the claustrophobia. Larri and I never got into trouble, perhaps due to the fact that my dad

was the mayor and President of the PTA and Chairman of the School Board - but other

“good kids” did. I remember Evelyn Glover, a studious little girl. She did something that displeased Mrs. Musgrove, who showed up at Evelyn’s house with a belt and got her parents’ permission to whip her.

We knew Mrs. Musgrove and had a certain leverage with her because of Dad. And her husband, Ed, was a Buffalo-Lodge buddy of my dad too and a regular chess partner. 80

One day he disappeared and never returned. But it wasn’t like Gramma. Dad knew where he was, he had gone on a bender and caught a plane and just decided never to return. I guess he was an alcoholic, although in those days we didn’t know the word or that men who drank every night might not have been able to stop, or that there was some association between their violence at home and their drinks at the Buffalo. I had gone with my dad to the Buffalo Lodge a few times to watch his chess games with Ed

Musgrove, but he didn’t seem to me to have more drinks than Dad, who drank every night at home too, and kept a bottle of “Firewater” at the Nike site.

We heard that Ed Musgrove was gone before we left for school that day since someone called and I heard Dad and Mom talking about it, and Larri and I hoped that

Mrs. Musgrove would miss school that week, or at least that day. But no, when we walked into the prefab unit that housed Delta’s third grade class, Mrs. Musgrove was there, stem and tight-lipped as ever. She didn’t seem the slightest bit wounded or upset by her husband’s disappearance. As usual, she made everyone who hadn’t done homework stay in the classroom at lunchtime while the rest of us took our lunch boxes down to the school gym as usual.

Even Larri didn’t feel sorry for Mrs. Musgrove, and we imagined the joyless life her husband must have had with her. It seemed right to us that she lived alone. But not for long. A few weeks later, she adapted two native Alaskan boys - twins - and they came to school with her and also worked every day in her Laundromat. She called them Peter and 81

Ben. I’ve never seen boys with such clean jeans, although they wore the same ones day after day all year long and we saw the fabric at the knees getting thinner and more and more ankle showing as the months passed. Mrs. Musgrove was notoriously tight with money.

Neither Larri nor I were wild about selling seeds to Thelma Musgrove. But Mom took us by Green Acres, the trailer park on the Old Rich across from Musgrove’s, and we waded through deep snow to get to the trailers, and Mrs. Musgrove’s yard was nicely plowed so Mom drove in. The Laundromat was built in front of the Musgrove house, so we walked into it first to see if she was there, but no, just the boys, Peter and Ben, on hands and knees scrubbing the floor. They motioned us around back to the house.

It was Larri’s turn to pitch, so she knocked, then gave her big, phony smile when

Mrs. Musgrove opened the door. She looked smaller outside of school but just as tough and she squinted at us as if she wasn’t sure who we were or whether we were up to no good.

“Hi Mrs. Musgrove,” Larri said, then fell right into the standard paragraph. “We are Brownie Scouts and our troop is selling seeds to raise money for summer camp on

Harding Lake and other community activities. Brownie Scouts are part of the Girl Scout

Organization that encourages girls to get involved in their communities and in nature.” 82

We hardly ever got this far in the spiel, the adult usually stopped us with a

friendly word, so it wasn’t surprising that Larri forgot the next line. I remembered it

before she did and prompted her “It’s only fair...” I whispered.

“It’s only fair...” she began but still couldn’t pull out the line. Mrs. Musgrove was

frowning deeply, two deep parallel lines appearing above her nose, so I jumped in.

“It’s only fair to mention that each Brownie who sells 100 seed packets gets a

prize from the company.”

Now was the time to show the prospective client our merchandise. Larri and 1

each carried a box-top with samples of the different kinds of seeds available, from pansies to cucumbers. And we usually did it inside. That night was very cold but Mrs.

Musgrove just stepped out and closed the door behind her. She seemed impervious to the cold and I’d already learned to block out bodily sensations like cold, but Larri’s hands inside the red mittens trembled. Mrs. Musgrove frowned again but didn’t comment.

She began flipping through the seed packets dismissively. “This will never grow here,” she said, holding up a packet of cantaloupe seeds. “Nor this.” She held up begonias.

This continued for a long time. Larri’s teeth were chattering like mine do when I cry. Finally, Mrs. Musgrove had eliminated all packets but one of pansy seeds from

Larri’s box and one of pansy seeds from my box. 83

“How much?” she asked.

“Twenty-five cents a package,” Larri managed.

Mrs. Musgrove left us out there while she went inside. Larri and I looked at each other, rolling our eyes. Eventually she returned with a change purse.

“Twenty-five cents a packet?” she repeated.

Larri and I nodded together. Mrs. Musgrove handed one pansy seed packet back to Larri. She snapped open the change purse, pulled out a quarter and handed it to me.

“I’m giving it to you because you remembered the words better than your sister,” she said, but I put my hands behind my back and refused to take it. She shrugged, handed it to Larri, then turned and went back into the house.

Larri’s fingers were shaking so much that she dropped the quarter into the snow as we ran for the car. It took us another 10 minutes to find it. 84

^Carrying Charges

She’s gone again and I’m not the only one with questions. Clouds of fog presi

against the bedroom window, not one but a host of ghosts jostling for position to peer into

the room where my aunt died two days ago. I sit on her bed looking through a shoe box

of old photos, more ghosts, family ghosts in forgotten shades of gray.

Here is one of my aunt and my mother as young women, laughing. The sisters recline like movie stars on lawn chairs on a patchy stretch of New Jersey backyard, faces eager, arms bare and hopeful as green shoots in early spring. My aunt leans toward my mom, reaching across the distance between them to touch her shoulder. They are

laughing, both of them, Irena and Zofia Perkowski, laughing.

“Both dead now,” I say to my cousin Ricki who is drinking a breakfast Bloody

Mary.

“Dead,” he agrees, clinking the ice cubes in his glass around and nodding slightly, wisely, like a man of the world. It was touch and go for a while there, ugly at the end, but he has succeeded in inheriting the house, and his relief still hangs thickly on the air like cheap incense. We are selecting photos of his mother to put on the mantle to remember her life, to find, perhaps, something to carry away.

I see Ricki’s hand trembling as he reaches for the next photo, fingers budging against his will after a night of drinking. The photo shows our grandmother on the same 85

scrappy lawn, her six daughters gathered around her like so many cut flowers of varying

heights waiting to be arranged. Her only son is a babe clutched to her breast. The

children’s smiles shimmer like sunbeams on living water. Ricki lists off their names as if

all of them were part of the fabric of his life, and it annoys me. He never knew them very

well at all, nor did I. They all stopped speaking to both his mother and mine so long ago.

Ricki takes a long, last slug of his drink and sets the glass down decisively. “So

what name to put on the grave marker?” he asks me. His eyes glitter from the drink and

the hangover, from the tears and the exhilaration of emancipation at 45 years old, but it is

a serious question. Names are not easy in our family. He goes to refresh his drink before I

can think of an answer.

My aunt was born Irena Sklodowska Perkowski and we called her Cha-Cha, but to everyone other than family, from her second-grade students to the neighbors who

shared her quiet street for over 30 years, she was resolutely Mrs. Fell. About that, and many similarly small matters, she was inflexible.

I was visiting Cha-Cha the day Ricki’s wife Robin, then a 35-year-old accour tant he was dating, stopped by to be presented. She was almost 6 feet tall but fragile and delicate beside Ricki. She told me later that she’d only married him because he was taller than she was, and maybe it was true despite the “ha ha ha” she added to the story, for they made an attractive couple that first’meeting; even Cha-Cha must have thought so. But when Robin extended her hand toward my aunt and said “So happy to meet you, Irena,” 86

Cha-Cha drew herself up in the rocking chair, tilting her head back to inspect the intruder

with cold eyes. The dark tock of the grandfather’s clock sucked the air from the room,

then Cha-Cha spoke slow and distinctly in what my sister and I called her icicle voice: “It

is Mrs. Fell to you.”

I wanted to say something to Robin, but I couldn’t think of anything that mig it

have helped. It was best that she knew what she was getting into before she married him.

Cha-Cha would not be an asset as a mother-in-law. There were too many carrying

charges.

My sister and I escaped the Mrs. Fell treatment because my aunt had loved my

mother and bestowed on us at birth the right to call her Cha-Cha, a mangled,

Americanized version of the Polish word for aunt. It was a gift with strings attached, like

everything she gave, but it marked us as family. Robin became her daughter-in-law and

lived with Ricki in the downstairs apartment, but she was never granted family status and

she was “Felled” through the day my aunt died.

I follow Ricki into the kitchen and make myself coffee and toast while he stirs up another Bloody Mary with a little less tomato juice. Ten in the morning is early for him to be moving around, but he sits at the kitchen table with me, sipping his drink. He has

loved his mother and hated her, and hated me when I hated her. But today we are uneasy allies. 87

“I’m so glad you’re here, Cuz,” he says. “You were always her favorite niece.” He

wipes tears from his eyes with a Kleenex, then blows his prominent nose, daubs his

mustache. Ricki’s not a bad looking guy when he’s not hung-over. He carries little fat for

such a big man, so he looks in better shape than he actually is. His graying hair is cut

well, as if he were a lawyer or a businessman, but in his sweats and t-shirt he looks more

like an attractive, aging fisherman with squinty, vulnerable eyes that fill with tears more

often than one might expect. Ricki’s not a fisherman or anything else, really; he hasn’t

held a steady job since the Alaska pipeline fiasco years ago, other than helping his mom

out in her garden. He and I were close when we were small but as I went through college

and law school and out into the work world, our connection grew fainter.

Out the window the fog lifts its skirts, exposing the dazzling frills of Cha-Cha’s

garden below: the exuberant roses, the bursting hydrangea, the hundred creamy bells of

the angel trumpet shrub that shades the bird feeder, where blue jays flash in and away like

shooting stars. I wonder if Ricki will have Robin feed the birds now that Cha-Cha’s gone.

“You talk to Robin this morning?” he asks me.

“You think I get up at 6 a.m.?” I say, avoiding the direct lie. Robin made coffee at

5:30 as usual and let out the two hefty golden labs, Butterball and Daisy. I sat with hrr awhile before she left for work. She was hopeful of beginning anew now that Cha-Cha was gone; I was less optimistic.

“She shaped him for 45 years,” I reminded her. “That won’t go away.” 88

“But it might fade over time. There’s a chance.” She glanced at the framed photo

of my aunt on the table: the tight-lipped smile, the eyes dead as last night’s fire. “Adios,

Mrs. Fell,” she said jauntily, her own eyes flashing with a spark I had not seen in years.

Then she said “Ha ha ha” and left for work. I do not mention any of this to Ricki. He

doesn’t like her to talk to me when he’s not there.

“Robin thinks I should use ‘Mrs. Fell’ on the grave,” Ricki says. “But she always

hated Mom.”

“You know how Cha Cha treated her,” I say. He straightens up stiff and sudden

like a marionette jerked into action, so I move on quickly. “And a good argument can be

made for using Mrs. Fell. Nobody called her Irena since my mom died. She lived her life

as Mrs. Fell.”

“I guess you’re right,” he says. “Funny, isn’t it? Mrs. Fell. Pretty funny, after

everything that happened.” He snorts a laugh, as if he has never thought of this irony

before, then stretches out his lanky, six and a half foot frame, and heads down to the hot

tub to smoke a joint and pull himself together. I see him duck his head slightly to get through the doorway to the stairs. *Momentary Landscape

A felled, stripped pine trunk stuck upright in the frozen earth as if it grew

and was flayed just there, in front of my father’s house, its three burls

budding like undeveloped arms, topped by a moose skull, antlers attached,

eye cavities staring hopelessly out at the Old Rich Highway after the plow

passes, snow layers packed tight like bandages, and across to the frozen

gravel of the wide river bottoms, to the savage teeth of the Alaska Range

on the very very edge of the world. Gone now, gone. 90

*Seeds 111

Tracy Taylor was a Brownie too, so Mom bought four packages of seeds from her

and we sold her mom six packages - three each girl. Her mom, Dory, wanted to buy four

packages each but Mr. Taylor, Tracy’s dad, argued against it. He was like that.

Ken Taylor managed Taylor’s Trailer Park up the Alcan from downtown Delta.

Lots of kids lived up that way - the Nilssons, the Brandts and the Fetts with their eggs

and their pigs for sale, fat-fannied Fetts Larri and I called them. In truth they all had very

plumb bottoms, from diminutive Mrs. Fett through the older kids, down to Dale Fett a

year or two ahead of us in school who was the first boy who ever liked me and gave ne a

peanut when I was in third grade as a sign of his affection. They were Catholics and

came to Our Lady of Sorrows every Sunday, usually sitting in front of us, so we saw the

line of bottoms weeks after week.

Anyway, Tracy Taylor lived in the heart of her dad’s Trailer Park and in her dad’s heart as well. It seemed to us that he tolerated his other kids, Alan and Teresa, almost as if they were step kids, but Tracy he adored. He carried a picture of her, not his wife, in his wallet.

Dad always scorned Ken, called him an amateur at everything, and maybe he was.

He certainly had lots more opinions that he expounded on than he had work. Once Dad 91

hired him to help change the lid on our septic tank with his tractor and he dropped the

heavy steel piece on Dad’s foot.

We sometimes liked Tracy and sometimes hated her. She was competitive like her

dad, and also, like him, was loud and stubborn with her opinions and never seemed to be

able to concentrate on the task at hand. She had pretty, honey-colored hair to her

shoulders and cat-eye glasses. She hiked her skirts way up for school, but I could hardly

hate her for that.

Tracy’s opinions were the main reason we hated her I think. She knew for a fact

that cats were better than dogs, and she had three cats. Larri and I both developed

allergies to cats that protected us from having to do overnights at her trailer.

The Taylors lived in a trailer that looked like a house. It was a “prefab” house,

like the Bishop’s, that arrived up the Alcan in two sections that were then connected.

Each was pulled buy a huge truck and one slid off the road on the way up so they had to

wait another three months for a replacement. My Dad said that was Ken’s typical lucic.

Tracy had the biggest bedroom in their trailer. The day we went to sell seeds to the Taylors, Mom actually came in and had coffee with Mrs. Taylor and Larri and I piled with Tracy into her room Tracy’s little sister Teresa tried to come in too but Tracy closed and locked the door. 92

Tracy had talked for months about the scooter se was getting as soon as the snow

cleared that spring, meaning late April or May at the earliest. It was now March and the

bragging got louder every day. She kept a large photo above her bed of the scooter her

dad was buying her—but there were different items scotch taped to it this visit. I savr a

lipstick tube and some eye shadow stuff.

“What’s all that makeup doing on your scooter picture?” Larri asked.

Tracy frowned. “My stupid dad,” she said, then pulled out a fuzzy, pale blue

sweater her mom had bought her in Fairbanks. She passed it around for our admiration. It

was soft as fur.

Teresa and Alan tried again to get in and Tracy stormed off to tell her mom. I

leaped up to read the sign on the scooter. It said:

“Because Tracy disobeyed her dad, she will have to wait for her scooter:

• lipstick, one month,

• mascara: one month,

• eyeshadow: one month,

• foundation: one month.”

Tracy burst in while I was reading it. She saw me up there. “My dad searched my book bag,” she said. “But he won’t stick to it. You’ll see. I’ll get my scooter this summer.” 93

Mrs. Taylor bought vegetable seed packs from me and flower seeds from Larri.

She chuckled about the idea of selling seeds in Delta Junction. “I’ve never been able to

grow so much as a potato,” she said, “let along gladiolas and eggplant.”

After that, Larri, Tracy and I walked around the trailer park trying to sell seeds but nobody bought any. Butch Brandt kept us talking a long time though. He was already in high school. Tracy had a crush on him and kept trying to say shocking things, but Butch kept looking at me and, before we left, gave me a bracelet he’d found that looked like it was made of gold. I wasn’t invited back to Tracy’s for a long time. 94

*ln the Deep of Night

I rise in the deep of night from the bed I share with my older sister and tiptoe to the double-paned window. White blankets all, the ground and trees and the

summer chicken coop—all snow-shrouded and glowing dully in the cold moonlight. So far from town, my father likes to say, nobody would hear you if you screamed. Everything white and silent and heavy, static, unmoving.

My older sister Larri’s not in bed. Looking out the window, I stop my own breath to listen for her breathing, the wheezing, the occasional snores a heavy 9-year-old might make. Nothing. She’s gone again. One more time.

I think of my mom, visiting her mom, somewhere in the lower 48 in a place called New

Jersey. Her mom needed her. She had to go. One day she’ll be back, with presents tucked into her bag she said. In time for Christmas, she said. It’s November now. Time’s heavy, slow and still as winter.

Icicles line the window like magic daggers of different sizes lit up by the moonlight, sparking rainbow colors. Everything beyond is white. Out of the white, just beside the house, a low shape appears, a lynx, padding up the pathway on silent paws. It walks slowly, pacing, smooth as a shadow gliding across the snowpack, each rolling step confident, sensual, deadly, the king of the winter night. I hold my breath until the tufted ears disappear into the frozen darkness of the forest. 95

I hear the door creak behind me and spin around. Nobody is there, just an open bedroom door in the winter in the house of death. I start to cry, silently. I sit on the floor and cry without making any noise. 96

*The Long Drop

The utility poles behind the house were taller and more important than the

short, scrubby spruce trees, stunted and dwarfed by permafrost. The poles

marched in from the Richardson Highway, up the swath of land the tractors

had cleared to bring us electricity and telephone service.

On one pole, my dad set up a lamp—really just a light bulb with a kind of

metal roof above it—to bridge the gap between the lamp on the mudroom

door and the light installed above the moose horns on the garage door. This

pole light was some 20 feet up, high it seemed to me but I was smaller then,

and one moonless night I watched snowflakes drifting through its beams as

they took the long drop from cloud to earth. The memory has returned to

me a thousand times since, how they turned as they fell, like ballet dancers

in slow motion, soft but certain, in a slow, silent, solemn pirouette down

through the long beam of white light to the ground. 97

*My Father's House

How could it have been different, pressed on all sides by the long, cold night

of the Alaskan winter, rough icicle teeth shining from the eves, dim window

eyes made even dimmer by the storm windows slapped on top to keep out

the coldest cold?

How could it have been anything but what it was: stuffy, stifling, a living

grave, especially the basement, unfinished, without windows, filled with the

ghosts of dark and terrifying things that happened there. Our room, the one

I shared with my sister Larri, was dressed up with a frilly canopy bed, a

little make-up table with a mirror in cream and gold and two girly jewelry

boxes, but it never really fooled anyone except my sister. She’s still stuck

there, trapped in the dream of a fairy tale childhood. ^Something Happened on that Spot

He comes out the front door carrying a shotgun, some guy I don’t know,

one more redneck in a state of rednecks. I stand on the road beside the rental car

looking over to where my tree used to stand, a tree I climbed a thousand times, my name dug deep into its bark, my tears falling on its branches, gone now, tree and name and tears. I don’t cry any more. Behind the spot where the tree isn’t, the play yard crumbles. The tire from the tire swing lies on the ground, still attached to its chain like a dog that had been leashed there some fine afternoon, years ago, and forgotten.

“Get off my land,” he says.

“Public road,” I say. I point to a spot about 20 feet away. “Property line marker is there,” I tell him. I know it by heart, this land. Something happened here.

He frowns, spits tobacco on the dirty snowpack. Behind him, the house looks small, afraid, beaten. The porch roof collapsed and pieces litter the front yard, shiny metal squares like dull mirrors reflecting only the sky. My father’s garage, behind the house, casts a dark shadow.

She lay there, dressed in her good blue coat, her hat with a veil unside- down on top of a snow shovel. It was a dream, only a dream, a recurring dream. “I’ll give you fifty bucks if I can walk around the yard for ten minutes,” I

say.

“Fuck off,” he says. “Nobody goes on my land.”

I get back into the rental car and drive up the Old Rich that isn’t the Old

Rich any more. They named it after my father when he died. I know its dips and

rises, and over there where the dark forest crowds the road and my sister and I

shivered when we had to bike past it even in summer. My grandmother tottered up this road one snowy April, thirty years ago, carrying a blue suitcase. Something happened here.

All those wrinkles, the small straight mouth, eyes closed but not peaceful.

She lies asunder on a bed of tools, one shoe missing.

I return after midnight, park up by Sipes homestead and walk in, the stars brilliant knifepoints in the black sky. I know it by heart, this land. Wolf howls lace the night fro across the wide river bed, proclaiming their innocence. I pass behind the play yard, up the power-line cut that runs in from the Alcan, hover beside the huge gas tank lifted off the ground on metal legs. It’s big and rusty now like the pick-up truck near the house, plugged into the electrical current. 100

The house is dark, but I know he is there, on guard, watching for me. I

stare at the front window - my Mom called it the picture window - until I glimpse

his face, peering out. Then I circle around back.

The chicken shed behind the house is closed with a padlock but the warm,

heavy olor returns to me from the past, the squawking, the tiny feathers flying

everywhere. In one statement, they said my grandmother had arisen early to feed

the chickens and disappeared.

She lay there in her good wool coat among the dirty tools. My child’s arms

trembled with the weight o f the lid and I couldn ’t see where the red was coming from. Never, in my dream, have I been able to see.

I walk softly to the far side of the garage, but the snow must have thawed

and refrozen because it cracks beneath my feet. I flip on my flashlight for an

instant to pick a path. I know the dark. I was raised in this dark. I know this land

by heart. I pass beside the lean-to where we kept the sleds. To the right, the ramp

my father used to work on the Rambler’s engine. Behind the garage, I see that it is

still there standing solid like a giant building block. I hear the slight scrape of the screen door of the house opening then closing. Above the frozen river, the northern lights play across the night sky, neon-green lines and swirls like an invisible child’s finger painting passing on a certain message, although beyond my current comprehension. 101

The top of the tool bow is level with my chest and covered by a hard layer of snow. I check the hinges; they are rusty and could squeak. But something happened here, on this ground. I ease it open, the long, low creak eerie in the deep darkness of the night. Something seems to rush out, blowing back my hair. Quick

I shine my flashlight in. No tools, nothing. Whatever was here has been cleaned out and gone, leaving only faint traces of red in the wood at the bottom of the box.

I walk back around the side of the garage, numb. He is there, up near the road. I see his silhouette against the green glow of the sky. He holds his pistol as the sky-writing alters and amends itself, frantically, a crucial message. Then I see it too. Standing there holding the gun, that man could be my father. * His Excellency

Did my mom hate the Donahues because Irene was my best friend, or did

she object to my friendship with Irene because she hated the Donohues? Either

was possible. Not having a best friend outside the family was an unwritten,

unspoken Spengler rule, someone other than each other that Larri or I might

confide in, learn different values from, and, especially in my case, hang out with

on the long bus ride to school or during recess, to the exclusion of my sister. To the extent I was able, I did all these things with Irene.

You have to understand that my Mom made the decision for me in many ways. I was 13 months younger than Larri, so, by rights, should have been in a lower class with my own school friends. Mom kept us both home until second grade, then enrolled us in the same grade. And up ‘til then, and for years after, she bought us identical clothing. Hardly any childhood slides - and there are hundreds - show us wearing clothing that is in any way personalized: we had the little red Heidi tops, the same yellow dress coats, the same clunky shoes, identical velvet parkas followed by matching rabbit skin parkas, hand-knitted pale green sweater-coats with angora dog pulling dogsleds across the back, the same white wool outfits I hated beyond words — boxy tops and squared off skirts, trimmed in blue — the same paisley shirts trimmed with pompoms. The need to individualize burned in me and picking Irene as a best friend was definitely an act of rebellion. 103

The Donohues also lived on the Old Rich but on the north end, up by the

gravel pits, almost at the end where it connected back into the new, paved

Richardson Highway at Probert’s Store. Lots of kids lived down that way, Vivian

Bass, Donna Olsen, John Duncan, Anita Probert. Donna was blond, the class

sexpot een in 4th grade, and, even then, Irene’s rival for the affections of Tommy

Wilson, the class bad boy. Anita was the one the kids picked on, tall and gangly

with bad acne early in life. Irene was cute, with jet black hair and tight, pale-blue jeans that I adored and sometimes borrowed and wore for the day at school.

I don’t know what Irene’s dad did for a living, but he was young and

handsome and his wife Blanche voluptuous and a loud mouth. I am not sure

which quality bothered my mother most. The kids were many and scattered. The

oldest girl had married an older, wealthy Delta widower, then run off with his son.

There was an older brother too, then another daughter who married Mr. Stacenko, our favorite English teacher, then came Joan, a year ahead of us and a good

basketball player, then Irene, then the little brother.

Blanche Donohue was not loved by the “respectable” wives in town. Her clothes were too tight, her language too crude, her kids too knowledgeable. My mom went to PTA meetings in her Pendleton wools suits that eliminated any curves she might have had and made her torso look like a thick log, equidistant 104

from shoulders to knees. Blanche Donohue wore blouses unbuttoned enough that

you could catch a glimpse of lacy, racy bras, clingy skirts and high heels.

In her own way she was a rebel. When the Cardinal of the Catholic dioses

came to visit Our Lady of Sorrows, the priest instructed the ladies in appropriate

greetings. He was to be called “Your Excellency” and each lady was to curtsy

then bend over reverently and kiss his sacred ring. Blanch flatly refused. She said

she had no intention whatsoever of kissing some ring. At home Mom raged

against this insubordination.

“Either she’s a Catholic and follows the rules or else she should leave,”

she repeated to us.

Father Joe tried to reason with Blanch but she flouted him. The ladies tried to move the meeting, intending not to inform her, but it wasn’t possible. His

Excellency was to celebrate mass with Father Joe, then the meeting with the

ladies auxiliary was to happen afterward. It could not be hidden or moved.

At last the day came. Larri and I dressed in our Sunday best outfits (the

dreaded white wool suits with blue trim.) Mom had speculated about what

Blanche would wear but she appeared in a decorous below-the-knee dress with a

boat-neck top and low heels, Irene and Joan in tow. I whispered to Larri that Mom and the other ladies looked disappointed,

but she frowned at me for this heresy and moved closer to Mom in the pew. Irene

and I started passing notes to each other until my Mom noticed and withered me

with a glance.

After Mass, the ladies of the auxiliary trooped up to the front to greed the

Cardinal. I moved quickly over to sit by Irene, feeling my mother’s displeasure

radiating from the front of the church back to me in waves. At the same time as

she presented the other ladies with the smiling face of the Mayor’s wife.

The Cardinal stood calmly in his tall red hat, looking very much like a bishop from dad’s chess set. He blessed the group, then he moved from woman to woman, shaking hands. Irene and I exchanged glances at this change of plan.

When he came to Blanche, she was pale and stood stiffly. He smiled and nodded to her, reaching out to shake her hand. She bobbed down into a curtsey, grabbed his hand and, flipping it, pressed her lips to the ring.

You might think this softened my mom’s attitude toward Blanche

Donohue, but that is only because you did not know my mom. I was not ordered not to be best friends with Irene, but it was hard to enforce as I quickly determined, impossible to establish that I was violating this order. I always loved

Irene and, as I grew older, snuck out to visit her and lied to my mom more than once to spend time with her. 106

*Seeds III!

“I’m not going in,” Larri says, glancing across at Mom from the front seat of the Rambler. Even from my position in the back seat, I saw that Mom’s lips tighten in a pleased expression at this.

“I don’t think we should even stop,” she continues. “Mrs. Donohue is just so weird.”

“You’re just saying that because Mom says it,” I say. “Mrs. Donohue’s always been nice to you.”

Neither Larri nor Mom responds to this.

“Well, I want to stop,” I say.

“That’s just because Irene is your best friend,” Larri says. She wrinkled her cherry nose and shoved up her glasses.

“So what?” I say. “It’s not against the law to have a best friend.” I know perfect well that this is not true, I am not allowed to have a best friend other than

Larri, whose first allegiance was always to Mom. Larri’s supposed to be all the friends I need, four against the world and all that.

“And they are the only people we know who actually grow a garden,” I say. 107

Mom slows the Rambler and turned on her blinker, although in the

twilight of an Alaskan afternoon, it is easy enough to see that there were no

headlights on the Old Rich stretching out flat and frozen behind and before us.

The car turns right into the beginning of the long, narrow side road that is actually the Donohue’s driveway. I see the lights of the house on the hill above. Nobody

else lives on this stretch of road. It is the only light visible in any direction.

Behind us are the frozen gravel pits we swim in summers, then the Delta River bottoms.

The hill is steep but the Rambler makes it up, slowly, and I see Mom’s face, stiff and set in the lights from the Donohue’s porch, as we approach the house.

“Whoever’s going in, go ahead,” she says.

Larri stares straight ahead and adrenalin cascades down from my brain through my body like a shower. I push open the back door, grab my carton of seeds and push out, slamming the car door so hard that the snow layer balanced on the top of the car slides down to the windshield.

I walk up the stairs, Donohue’s house is built on three levels. The ground floor isn’t finished yet but will be the kids’ area when it’s done. Irene had explained it all to me, the huge game room, then four bedrooms, one at each comer, connecting to it. The family lives on the second floor right now and the 108

parents’ bedroom and bath takes up the entire top floor. Irene says that the bed up there is round and that one wall is all mirrors.

The door opens before I knock on it. It’s Joan, Irene’s older sister. Her hair

is short and blond and tousled.

“Hey,” she says. “We saw your lights coming up the hill. Your car sure goes slow.”

“My mom drives slow,” I say rebelliously. Then I add for some reason,

“She wants us to be safe.”

This floor is mostly one big room serving as living room, kitchen dining room and bedroom for the kids. Each of the kids got a closet for their things and a couch to sleep on. I see Irene lying on an old brown couch that has a blanket over the back. She looks small, and her new bangs make her look very young, but she is in the fourth grade like me. She smiles and waves me over. I point to my dirty boots and say I am just there selling seeds and can’t stay, Joan goes upstairs to get their mom. I watch her scamper up the wooden stairs. There are no bannisters or even bars.

Mrs. Donohue appears in a deep pink night dress the color of a flamingo.

Her skin is darker than the kids’ skin and her eyes and hair jet black. She’s pretty, 109

her face like Irene’s but fleshy, with a wide, smiling mouth and arching eyebrows.

She carries two wine glasses. They are empty.

She sets them on a table near the door and comes over toward me. She

looks like a movie star to me, with the hot pink silky gown and her long hair.

“Hello Mrs. Donohue,” I begin.

“Blanche, honey,” she says in a deep, throaty voice. “Just call me

Blanche.”

I smile and say Blanche, feeling as if I’ll have to go to confession this

week for breaking this Spengler law about grown-ups. “I’m selling seeds with the

Brownie scouts,” I say. “I know you have a garden. Irene told me all about it. I thought you might like to buy some.”

Mrs. Donohue glanced out the window. “Is that Sophie in the car? Tell her to come on in,” she says. She takes matters into her ow hands, opens the door and

gestures dramatically. I don’t say anything but feel my face flush. Mom doesn’t come in.

“Oh well,” Mrs. Donohue says. “Irene, get your girlfriend some juice.

Unless you’d rather have a tiny sip of wine?” Her eyes are mischievous, like a little girl’s eyes. A thrill passes down my spine but I shake my head, murmuring thanks. Irene gets me a glass of juice and Mrs. Donohue leads me in and has me 110

take off my coat and spread out the various seed packages on the table. Irene sits

next to me while her mom looks at the seed packages, lots of fruits and vegetables

and flowers that are unlikely to grow in Alaska. I blush again, but Mrs. Donohue

doesn’t say anything negative. She starts making a pile of seed packages.

“They’re 25 cents each,” I say, just so she’ll know. She nods, smiling at

me. I see her legs through the nightdress. They don’t have any hair on them at all.

Mrs. Donohue’s pile grows as the minutes tick by. Finally she finishes and

has Irene count out the packages. She had chosen 27 of them!

“I think this will do for a start,” she says. “But I want you to come back

and spend a weekend with us one of these days.”

“I’d like to,” I say, my voice cracking a little. “More than anything.” At

that moment in time, I want that more than anything on earth.

But I climb back into my dirty boots by the door and zip up my parka. I

am hoping Mrs. Donohue won’t ask if she can pay later - she has more than $5.00

of seeds, since 25 packages were $5.00.

But no, she sends Irene to get her purse, a large cobalt blue one, and draws out her wallet. “Here you go honey,” she says. “And you come back one day, you’re always welcome here.” I ll

I smile and nod and feel tears prick my eyes as I walk out into the cold.

It’s darker now, actually night. I don’t look at the bill until the door closes behind

me. I figure it’s a five dollar bill, but I can just say she got 20 packages. But no, it’

a ten dollar bill.

Mom and Larri say nothing when I climb into the car. Mom drives down

the hill a lot faster than she drove up. I hate her. It courses through me. I hate

Larri too.

“Look,” I say to Larri, holding up the $10.

“Wow!” she says. “Wow!”

I see Mom’s eyes in the rear view mirror. “You’ll give half of that to your

sister,” she says.

I watch the warm lights of the Donohue’s grow smaller and smaller in the

distance. At the Old Rich, Mom turns right. We have a few miles of nothing

before we get to the next house. I feel hot inside, waves of heat as if volcanos are

exploding under my skin. My hands tremble.

I move my right hand very slowly to the door and find, in the dark, the handle that opens the window. I turned it just a little until a half inch of space appears at the top. I slip the ten dollar bill out, holding onto the tip, then close the window back up so that it blows there, suspended, blowing in the wind, a flag, a

little banner or rebellion.

I feel Mom’s eyes on me from the rear view mirror. I meet them, hold them, then I crank the window open a half inch. The snow swirls behind us in the bitter cold of the Alaskan night. 113

*Cancer

Her eyes are blue, the color of cold steel, not a trace of green in them, or yellow

or any warm color. But a certain fogginess softens them, if softens is the right word

which it’s not. They appear slightly out of focus like someone who has watched and

waited too long until their eyes grow dim. Still those eyes accuse.

She never speaks the “c” word. The first time, she tells us that mommy and daddy

are to go away for a week or two and Cha-Cha is coming and we are to have fun with her.

We nod and smile and panic, since she never left us not once after that time she went to

get Gramma and look how badly that ended up, and daddy hates Cha-Cha, so why would they invite her, and kids always know anyway, you never fool them, not about Santa

Claus, not about who loves who, not about Daddy’s drinking. So they go away, her blue eyes smiling and dripping, her thin hand waving and wavering, and the weeks pass and more weeks, and months pass and we think she must be dead then she returns and my dad too and my dad sends Cha-Cha packing. Mom’s bedroom door is always locked when

she changes clothes now but once I see her in the bathroom mirror, chest concave and blackened as if a bomb exploded just nearest to her heart.

Time passes all the other years mom’s miscarriage dad’s death the move to

California to a house near Cha-Cha who never forgives anybody anything and college then more college and more and one day it is done and we are grown and blow away, dandelion puffs in the wind. 114

In all that sweep of time from when I was 10 through college she never really

talks to me about anything, never mentions sex or even says the word breast. She never

talks about my dad and what he did and what he didn’t do and whether she might have

done something to protect me. She never works things out with Cha-Cha or figures out

why I want to kill myself or even talks about it.

She never talks to anyone about anything, and goes to mass and never mentions

that she is excommunicated because she married a divorced man or that I don’t go to

church anymore. The New York clothes from when she was what Cha-Cha called a

“clothes-horse” and lived in New Jersey are gone, the boxy Pendleton suits from when

my dad was the mayor of our small town and she a mayor’s wife are gone. Day in and

day out, she wears stretchy sweat pants and tops that are not washed often enough, and

the smell of old, cold sweat is about her but she doesn’t let us bring in someone to clean

from time to time, to run a wash, to sweep a floor where the dust forms silky dunes in the

comers, and daring young spiders swing the flying trapeze across the top of empty

cupboards.

She summons me from Lugano Switzerland, my sister from Alaska. She doesn’t

use the c-word this time either, only says she has a recurrence but the tears flow to the sea

and we hear time ticking behind us somewhere, foot on the accelerator, and her arms are thin as a skeleton and her high cheekbones could be used for mountaineering holds. 115

It’s come for her but she holds it off awhile. Her stomach fills up with fluid as if

she were pregnant yet she never mentions it or says the name of her disease. She gets it

pumped every second Thursday, a big needle shot through the skin and flesh to drain it

out, and once I am there and drive her in. There’s been an emergency and they cannot

pump her and she is so happy like a young girl given a doll, like a child that sees her

mother once again after thinking she is dead.

I walk with her on the beach, it can’t hurt to walk slowly in the cool sunlight, and

all the things I want to say remain stuffed inside of me as she speaks of the weather and

the latest twist in General Hospital subplot. We pass someone she knows and with him is

a girl about my age, old enough to know better, who pokes mom’s stomach with one

finger and says “what you got in here Sophie?” and I slap her so hard my fingers appear

on her cheek and when we drive away it is me that is crying.

She only shows up in my dreams now, sitting regally on a chair, head turned away

from me, and I, at her feet, beg her to say she loves me but she never does. So when I

wake up in pain my face wet with tears, my pillow wet too, I grab her head from the dream and say right into her face only inches away “Cancer, cancer cancer, it was cancer you had, Mom, cancer that got you.” As if somehow one enunciated word could remake my entire life. 116

*The Escape

It’s the jump I remember, not the why or how; the jump, the magic of it, running, legs pumping, the leap, then one instant looking down the sharp cliff to the river bank below—the tops of trees, the mile-wide stretch of rock and sand with the little live-wire of the Delta River in the midst of it, then dark forest, backed by the savage teeth of the

Alaska Range against the huge blue sky.

I remember how my body caught and rose on the air, floating there like a dus speck, a piece of paper wafted on the wind, a bird, a runaway kite—I was suspended there between the Old Rich and the river bottom long enough to see the sun glinting on the little, newly thawed river. It comes back to me every month or so, the floating. There is no beginning or end to the memory, only the lightness and power of the escape.