I order and eat mindlessly, finishing while they are still dividing sandwiches into dainty triangles, still nibbling small forkfuls of cottage cheese. I drink coffee to pass the time, adding more sugar and creamer each time the waitress refills my bottomless cup. I roll the empty sugar packets and the foil-lined creamer packages into tiny tubes, and make stars and hexagons and parallelograms on the tabletop. Infinitely amusing. Only boring people get bored, my mother used to tell me. any other errands for you, Evelyn? I jump, and sit up straight in my chair. Both Steffie and Mother Maurie are staring at me, polite inquiry in their eyes. Sleeping in school again.
I, uh, I want to stop at the music store and look at the tapes. Suddenly it seems like a very juvenile errand. As well to say I was stopping by the candy store, to get red and green suckers and a handful of Double Bubble. I am embarrassed, and they know it.
You and your music! Mother Maurie gives a condescending snort of laughter. All right, but youll have to do it while were in the drugstore picking up Tommys prescription. Did you remember to bring it?
She goes right on talking as I dig through my purse, finally coming up with the small empty pill bottle for Toms allergy medication in my coat pocket. It is sticky, Teddy must have played with it, and I surreptitiously wipe it on my napkin before I hand it over. I try to find the threads of the conversation again, only to realize no one is talking, they are all waiting expectantly.
The men are here, and I dont know how or when theyve arrived. Grandpa Potter, stooped but daunting still, rests his big hands on the edge of our table. His eyes scan the table, feasting on his wife and perfect daughter. He is given to saying things like The Potter men have always been proud to say that their women dressed well, no matter how bad the harvest has been. We take care of our women. His eyes skid over me, roll briefly toward heaven. He is a strange old man, I think, proud of his wifes and daughters gentility and polish, but equally proud of his own rough edges and crude ways. He never minces words, never worries about giving offense. Of all Toms family, Grandpa is the one who never bothers to hide that he does not understand me, does not believe I will ever quite fit. He scares me, and I wish I could hide that from him. Right now, I want to sink under the table to escape that sharp stare. But suddenly Tom pushes into the seat beside me, his thigh warming against mine, and instantly all is well, no price is too great to pay for possessing him. Tall and golden he is, blond hair, brown eyes, big hands, and one big hand surreptitiously strokes my thigh before coming to settle demurely on the tabletop. He smells of Old Spice tinged with diesel oil, the mechanics smell that never quite leaves his skin. The hostess has followed them to the table, and I feel her eyes move from Tom to me and back again. She does not understand it any more than I do, why does this man who looks like a cigarette billboard cowboy, this gorgeous perfect man, sit down beside a woman like me? I move closer to him, and set my hand atop his on the table. The hostess looks away, moves away. I take a breath. I am safe now. My Tom is with me.
My Teddy is with him, clinging to his grandpas hand, his small head looking defenseless, his hair newly shorn and slicked. I dont like it, and for a moment my anger flares, who does that old man think he is, always carrying out his compulsion to keep those boys looking like boys upon my little son? No one asked me if he needed a haircut. I love his dandelion tuft of fine hair, I dont care if it covers the tops of his small pink ears. But Teddy is looking at me, his brown eyes big and round. He has been brave this time, not flinching when the buzzing razor nibbled down the back of his unprotected neck. I smile at him and try to put my approval in it, try not to remember how, when we first arrived in Washington, Grandpa took him to the barber, without my knowledge or consent, and brought him back, red-eyed and disgraced. Mommas little tit cried when the barber tried to shave the back of his neck and over his ears. Well, no grandson of mine is going to run around looking like a goddamned hippie. You wanna be like that, you stay with your mommy, baby boy. Ill tell you, no son of mine ever behaved like that in public! Five years old, and he acts like a goddamned baby.
And I had watched Teddy shrink with each contemptuous statement, and had foolishly made it worse by putting my arm around my little son, hoping to shield him from his grandfathers disgust. And Teddy, my Teddy, had flung my arm aside and pushed me away, run out of the little house and into the fields to cry, newly ashamed of being afraid of something unfamiliar, newly ashamed of letting his mother hold and comfort him. And that wicked old man had glared at me and said, You coddle that boy too much. Gonna ruin him. Time he was with men more often, instead of hanging around your skirts like Mommas little tit.
And I, too cold with anger to speak, had stared him down, driven him from the little house with my frozen green eyes.
But that was in another time and another place, and I cannot afford to think about it now. Instead, I make my mouth smile, and reach past Tom to hold out a hand to my Teddy. But my little son only smiles, a smile that is at once secretive and begging. He slides into the other end of the circular booth, forcing everyone to scoot over and sending Steffie up against me on the other side. Grandpa has missed none of this. Hes Grandpas big boy today, Mommy. Hes gonna sit over here with me.
Grandpas eyes are black, like little bits of anthracite coal set into his pale, soggy face. He was a big man once, had stood tall and had tanned, weathered skin. Maybe then the lines around his eyes had been laugh lines. Now he looks bleached, like something found under a pile of old trash, a soup label with the colors gone all wrong, the green beans turned blue, a farmer turned entrepreneur, a corned and blistered foot crammed into a pointed Florsheim shoe. I could have pitied him if he hadnt been so hateful. Our eyes dont meet, I dont let him have the victory. I squeeze Toms hand and look into his eyes instead.
Did you find the part? Mother Maurie demands.
Tom nods. Junkyard had it. He turns to me. You eat already?
Yeah, but if you
How much was it? Mother Maurie cuts in irritably. This is business, and Tom has no sense, mixing it up with a conversation with his little wife. Mother Maurie has shifted gears, is no longer the chic shopper but is now the shrewd businesswoman, versed in every facet of the familys farm equipment dealership.
Seventeen-fifty. New one is twenty-two, but if old man Cooper wants his tractor back in the fields by Tuesday, hes gonna have to be happy with secondhand parts. Tom goes back to scanning the menu hungrily, fielding Mother Mauries agitated questions easily.
She is upset with the parts supplier and doesnt care who knows it. Wants everyone to know it, as a matter of fact. If they think they can get away with treating Potters Equipment this way, they are in for a surprise, shell go right to the factory for parts after this, just cut them out entirely, and let them eat that. Why, she must order two or three thousand dollars worth of parts a year from them, and for them to let us down like this just isnt good business, as theyll soon find out. Her own ruthlessness is giving her great satisfaction. She speaks clearly and almost loudly, so that other people at other tables hear and know just how hard-nosed a little businesswoman she is. She is proud of her savvy, and so is Grandpa Potter, for he nods sagely as she carries on.
Toms fingers close over mine and hold me fast. The others at the table are talking, and he is replying to them, but his fingers against mine are a different conversation, and a different man is speaking to me from the one who they know. I listen to him alone, letting the other voices fade into a background hum like summer bees. I know I do not belong in their world. What matters to me is that somehow, Toms world and mine have intersected, and that in that brief crossing, we can be together.
FOUR
Fairbanks
Winter 1963
My family is a family of poachers. Very few people know this outside of the immediate family, and almost no one else would believe you if you told them, for we seem very ordinary people. My mother works making floral arrangements in a flower shop. It is a part-time job, and she is always home before we are. She believes children need a mother to come home to. My father works for Golden Valley Electric Association. He works in the coal-fed GVEA generator building that is right across the playground from my school. Sometimes, when I miss the bus, I walk across the street and sit amid the darkness and noise of the big generators until he is ready to take me home. I think of the electrical power plant as a great cave full of large machinery exuding a constant deafening level of sound. There are ladders, and gauges to check, and it is always warm there, in contrast to the immense cold outside.
People call my father the plant engineer. I find this tremendously confusing. For one thing, my mother works with plants, not my father. For another, although there is a train that goes right past the back of the GVEA plant and leaves mountains of coal there like gigantic mounds of droppings, to my knowledge my father never runs the train engine. But this is not the sort of thing I am adept at explaining to adults, so when they say he is the plant engineer, it is easier to let them persist in their ignorance.
The GVEA building is grey with black windows and tall black smokestacks that speckle the snow outside our school with black soot almost as soon as it falls. The snow outside the school never tastes good, and I never eat it, no matter how thirsty I get.
The name of my school is Immaculate Conception School, and I go there with my two younger brothers and my little sister. My two older sisters go to Monroe High School, which is joined to ICS by a lobby, like Siamese twins joined at the hip. Both schools feature Jesuit priests in black cassocks with the unnerving habit of sometimes turning up in plaid flannel shirts and black pants, looking almost like anybody else. There are also nuns in white wimples and long, whispering black skirts interrupted only by the chattering of the rosary beads that hang at their hips like holy six-guns. The nuns are more honest, and never dress as anything other than nuns.
That is me, out on the playground, and I am easy to spot because I wear a battered play parka of lined corduroy, and my legs are bare. It is twenty below zero, but it is still required that we spend the morning recess outside. Little girls are likewise required to wear dresses or skirts to school. No one but me seems to find a contradiction there. We are supposed to play games, I suppose, frolicking about in fifty-two degrees of freezing while remaining girlishly modest. The boys play games, running and falling on the snow, tackling one another, yelling with smoking breaths. I stand and watch them, unable to comprehend their pointless energy. The other girls stand in clusters and talk. Most of them wear nylon ski jackets in bright blues and reds, and their waterbird legs are encased in bright tights that match their pleated skirts. I hate tights. They are always puddling down into little circles of fabric around my ankles, and then I have to pull them up by grabbing the waistband through my dress and trying to heave them up. It is impossible to do this in a ladylike manner. It is easier to go bare-legged and endure the cold than to endure the superior looks of little girls whose tights never puddle around their ankles, the shocked scowls of the playground nun as I try to wrestle my tights back up into place. Id rather have chilblains and frostbite.
Making me go to school in winter is one of the cruder things my parents do to me. Although all my brothers and sisters attend school also, I always take it as a personal torment my parents insist on inflicting on me. I do not complain much about it. I am even good at school, very good, if academics are what you consider important. I am academically vindictive, ruining class curves with my hundred per cents, doing fifteen book reports instead of the required five, but it is never enough to counteract tights that go with your dress and match the ribbons in your hair. Vaguely I know that I do not know how to compete. I always put my energies into the wrong arenas.
But it is more than that. School is not my turf. I resent wasting the brief daylight of the winter days trapped in a classroom instead of running through the white and silver of a Fairbanks winter landscape. Yet even that isnt it. I believe there is something unnatural about school, something damaging. To take a young creature and force it into an enclosed space with thirty others like it, all of the same age would you do this to a puppy or a young chimp? You know what happens when you do it with chickens or rats. The same thing happens when you do it with children, only the damage is less visible. If I were a chick, pecked until my entrails hung from my rectum, someone would have taken pity on me. But I am a child and children are expected to endure the tortures of the damned stoically. I believe, perhaps self-pityingly, that it is worse for me than it is for other children. The ones who play in playgrounds, who visit one anothers houses, collect toys, and have sleep-over parties, never perceive how peculiar an institution school is. But I am a healthy young animal, taken from my hunting, from my running and growing, and thrust into an exhibit more inhumane than any concrete-and-steel zoo pen. From the moment I step onto the bus every morning, all power deserts me, and I am less than ordinary. I am prey, and I know it. Within the walls of the school, I know that fauns are Fantastic Animals, imaginary creatures those benighted and bedamned Romans and Greeks believed in, and that good little girls put their faith in Jesus Christ alone. Playing with a faun is probably a mortal sin, like calumny and detraction, niggardliness and sloth. I think I am going to hell. I think there is nothing I can do about it, anyway.
But release me from the bus in the evening, and the world is mine. The misery of the classroom seems an imaginary fairy-tale dungeon, nothing worth telling my parents about. The bus drops us by our orange mailbox on Davis Road. My brothers and sisters start the walk down the lane, but I stand on the road, waiting until the bus breaks down into orange and red taillights and then disappears altogether. My siblings hurry through the dark, eager to be out of the cold. I stand, clutching my book bag, waiting. Around me is the silver darkness of an Alaskan midwinter afternoon. The stars are out, and the Big Dipper swings low. Silver birch and cottonwood line the lane to our house. Our house is the only house on the lane, and not even its lights can be seen from the road. I do not know why we call our driveway the lane. We just do. It is only one car wide, and in winter it divides itself into two tire tracks with a hump of brushed snow down the middle. My siblings are far down the lane now. I walk alone between trees that lean in over me with their burdens of snow like ermine capes upon their bare arms. It is night, and yet it is easy to see. The snow is white on the ground and on the branches, the trees are ghostly grey, and in between there is darkness. The dry snow of the lane crunches and squeaks under my boots.