by C J Hribal
Evidently not. While we were talking a tall, rail-thin man came over carrying a couple of grocery bags, and Charlie didn’t even sniff his pants. The man wore overalls, and his T-shirt flapped on his thin but muscular arms. There was a silvery wash of stubble on his chin and some longer hairs further down his neck. He was carrying housewarming presents: a bag of apples and a bag of tomatoes. “Them apples is last year’s from the fruit cellar,” said the man, “but the tomatoes are fresh.” He handed a bag to each of our parents. “I’m Alfred Bunkas. I live over there.” He pointed at the original farmhouse, which must have been pretty in its day but had succumbed to an asphalt siding salesman in the late forties or early fifties. It was now a nondescript blue with a pine green trim that did not match. “I seen you already met my mother.”
“We did?”
“Your kids did. Probably scared them.” He turned to us and pointed at his throat. “My mother has a goiter. That’s what you seen on her neck. And her eyes”—he pointed to his own—“them’s cataracts. It makes her eyes look funny, don’t it? All milky? Well, she sees things milky, too. It’s no fun being old when your body’s breaking down on you.” He turned back to our parents. “Not enough iodine in her diet. I told her she could get that and her cataracts taken care of, but she’s stubborn. You know how it is with old ladies.” He turned back to us. “Her name’s Tillie. You can call her Grandma Tillie if you want. She’d like that.” Alfred Bunkas then bent himself double to talk to Wally Jr. and Ike. “She won’t hurt you,” he said. “She’s a nice old lady. She just looks funny.” Wally Jr. and Ike kept their wide eyes on Alfred Bunkas as they slowly backed away and sidled themselves in behind our mother’s legs. Alfred Bunkas laughed. Our parents thanked him for the gifts, which Alfred Bunkas waved off—” ‘tweren’t nuthin’ “—then he shook their hands and loped across the field back to his house.
“What a nice man,” said our father.
“These apples are a little soft,” said our mother, “but it was a nice gesture all the same.”
Said our father, putting his arms around our mother, “I think we’re going to like it here.”
“We’ll see.”
“We shall see what we shall see,” sang our father.
A fine sand blew from the bare gulleys between each furrow. When the breeze picked up, you had to squint to keep from getting a faceful. “Let’s get started,” said our father.
The Mayflower movers had been working the whole time we’d been out exploring. They’d been consulting with our mother, too, about where she wanted things. Now they were almost done. We stayed out of their way as they brought in the big items, which they set against the walls or in open areas between the boxes. We would be days getting everything to rights, but it was July and we had eight weeks before school started to set up house, to learn our way around the place, to make friends and put our farm in order.
The house was hot, and our mother thought we should start by opening the windows. Only we couldn’t. Sand was everywhere. The window tracks were clogged with it. It was like the Dust Bowl, said our mother. “Does this all come from not knowing how to plow right?”
“Contour farming,” said our father. “Crop rotation. I bet they teach that at the high school. The Hoveling kids must have been absent that day.”
Once we got some boxes put away, we could see where the Hoveling kids had probably been instead. They’d gone through the entire house before they left, kicking in doors and ripping out woodwork. Our woodwork. The house had been built without any. Closets were open caves, the windows glassed-in holes, and floors met walls without moldings or toe rounds. Our parents had authorized workmen to measure, cut, and tack up all the trim. We’d stain, varnish, and do the final nailing ourselves. Our first family project. Trusting people, our parents had no idea what sort of people they’d bought their house from. Any trim not already nailed to the wall the Hoveling children—or, could it be, the adults?—had broken over their knees like kindling. The wreckage was total—floor moldings, toe rounds, sliding closet doors, hinged doors, edging—all of it snapped or kicked in. An obscenity in red Crayola suggesting what we could do with ourselves adorned the living room wall next to the fireplace. Our mother had missed it earlier.
Our mother put her hand over her mouth. She stood like they do in those pictures of people suffering in Asia or Africa, or standing over the ruins of some Mississippi Gulf town devastated by a hurricane. “I have to get some water,” she said, but she didn’t move. Then Charlie, who had nosed his way inside, came up the steps from the landing, put his snout between his paws, and promptly threw up at our mother’s feet. Something was alive in the vomit—a mass of tiny white worms, blind and wriggling. Our mother cupped her hand in front of her mouth, but her vomit soon joined Charlie’s.
Our father had our mother sit on a Mayflower box while he got her some water. “Jesus H. Christ,” we heard him shout from the kitchen. There was a tremendous rattling and kathunking of pipes and metal. Now what? We ran to see. Our father was holding a glass of tap water up to the light. But it was no use; you couldn’t see through it. The pipes were rattling and bonking, and orangey-brown water was shuddering out. Then the tap closed up completely. Our father unscrewed the faucet cap, and a burst of sand and water and rust cascaded into the sink. The particulate in the glass he’d set on the countertop was settling now. What we were getting from the tap appeared to be a forty-to-sixty ratio of sand and grit to well water. Our father handed this glass to Cinderella with the instructions “Give this to your mother.”
The next day we would find out that the well pipes had caved in and that we’d need to dig a new well. A week after that the septic system would back up and we would have to hire the Hoveling cousins to locate our septic tank and dig that up. At the first good rain we would discover that the flashing around the chimney leaked, and that sand was not the only thing the basement windows could not keep out. Water filtered in between the storm and the interior windows, filling the space and turning the downstairs windows into filled-but-vacant aquariums like you might find in a seafood restaurant down on its luck. Water continued to pour in after that and belled out the pink bathroom wallboard like the tummy of a pregnant cheerleader.
Given the horrors to come, our mother’s reaction—crying over a glass of tap water—was not unreasonable, particularly if she was prescient, which from time to time she claimed to be. She was no Jeane Dixon, mind you, but at various times she’d get a presentiment and tell our father, “I feel good about this,” or “I have a very bad feeling about this.” When pressed, she never elaborated, but we were given to understand that something mystical had happened inside our mother, that she simply knew something was going to happen before it did. If she’d had any such feelings about our move, she’d not voiced them to us. What she might have said to our father, of course, is another story. But we thought it telling that he could not face her with a glass of tap water just after she had vomited on her own shoes.
Reluctantly, we filed into the living room, where her crying escalated from muffled sobs to outright keening. The albino sea snakes were still wriggling in the vomit at her feet, and our mother was screaming, “I can’t take this, Wally, I can’t take this, I can’t, I can’t, I simply can’t take this,” just prior to running into their bedroom, where she threw herself on the naked box spring and cried for hours.
“Let’s clean this up,” said our father. He supervised for a little while, then he went back to our mother. The door closed and there was screaming from our mother, things we couldn’t make out, and then our father reappeared, a look of anger and purpose on his face. He didn’t say anything, but when he left we had a pretty good idea where he was going. We knew he wouldn’t be back for hours, and we hoped to be in bed by the time he was.
12. This Will Reflect on Your Merit Review
Was it really like this, our mother crying all the time? Pandemonium and sorrow, shrieking and recriminations, slammed doors, loud silences, our lives constant
ly in the balance? No. Our mother was a trouper. But when you are a child, it is not the moments of motherly strength you recall much, for they are expected. What you remember are the lapses, the moments when things break down—when she breaks down—and the world as you know it grinds to a halt. Your mother, crying her eyes out.
Oh, she cried for joy, too, plenty of times. When we sold the old house, when our father got a larger-than-expected sale just before Christmas, when we gave her handmade Mother’s Day cards, when Nomi announced she was again coming to live with us. But it is when she is sobbing, keening, and then afterward, when she is wrung out like the proverbial dishrag, her emotional insides displayed like a skinned rabbit—that’s the image engraved in our eyes. Our mother clutching her stomach, bent over, trying to keep her grief inside and failing, and Ernie or Peg Leg Meg saying, Momma, no cry, Momma, no cry.
Tugs at your heart, doesn’t it? Pitiful, a mother so bereft she breaks down in front of her kids, has no one else with whom she can find solace—an audience of two- and four- and six- and eight-year-olds.
But what of those moments of strength, the default mode of our mother’s existence? She had us all week, twenty-four hours a day in the summer, seven of us, rambunctious and high-strung, hellions each to each. All of us pulling for our moment of attention, all of us screeching out our hurts, our needs, our laments, the injustices done us by our brothers and sisters, our denials about the injustices and hurts and lambastings we visited upon them. Our mother acting as referee until she got tired of it and screamed, “Enough! Settle it yourselves. I don’t care who did what to who. Whoever tattles is getting the same spanking as he who hits. And he who hits is getting spanked twice—once by me and once when your father gets home.”
When our father gets home—the great empty threat in our household. At one time—when our father came home at night—it might have carried some weight. But now, when our father was gone all week? When he called from Ishpeming or Thief River Falls or Duluth-Superior? Fat chance. By the time he came home on Friday, he’d already visited Banana’s Never Inn in Holton or the Dog Out on Highway 45 and JJ—his new Offices—and he was in no mood to settle petty disputes that had been accruing since Monday. What did he care that Robert Aaron used Ike’s plastic tank as a target for his pellet gun? Or that Wally Jr. crayoned inside my Silver Surfer comic books? And what of my own malfeasance, squashing Wally Jr.’s Play-Doh elephant to a squishy turd under the heel of my foot?
“You’re driving me to drink!” our father yelled, hands up in the air.
“No, Wally, you already drove yourself to a drink. Then you came home.” Which as likely as not sent our father out again, “just so I can hear myself think, goddammit!”
So how about our mother’s default mode? How about the time she drove into Augsbury on a tractor to get a prescription filled because there was no car and she couldn’t drive one anyway? Or all the times she dealt with our mashed or sliced fingers, broken arms, cracked skulls, poked eyes, or sprained or broken ankles all by herself because our father was in Ypsilanti, Michigan, or Cloquet, Minnesota? Or what about the time the sheep or the cows got loose, or the chickens all took sick at once and died? Or what about our school plays and music lessons and concerts, our ball games and parent-teacher conferences—nothing our father could ever make it home for? Or what about all the illnesses, the measles and chicken pox and flu and mumps, the strep throats, the asthma attacks, the pneumonia, the fevers, the diarrhea and the vomiting, sometimes both ends at once, sometimes three or four children at once, one child puking into a stewpan while diarrhea drips down his bum and another child is crying piteously for saltines and flat 7UP and another announces, “Mommy, I don’t feel so good,” just before vomiting all over his pajamas, sheets, and teddy bear, while another is fouling the sheets because the pent-up gas he thought was a fart was really the same lower intestinal bug his brother had? Oh, and did we mention our mother didn’t have any friends, not being able to drive into town or a neighboring farm to meet them, not to mention not having time for friends anyway seeing as how she had to keep the house running in our father’s absence? You think that didn’t take balls?
So she allowed herself her periodic cry to console herself, and we, blind and selfish and desperate to keep ourselves at the center of her universe, tried to understand.
What has been harder to understand is Dorie’s yes-I’m-here-no-I’m-not disappearing act. She’s been almost defiant about it. The clincher was this evening during dinner, before she asked me to take a walk with her down the field. We’ve got paper plates balanced on our laps and she tells me, “You know, hon, I’m going to be traveling a lot for this city council thing. It’s supposed to just be our district, but the way it works these days is you’ve got to have a larger presence for effective fund-raising. I’m going to be all over. Which is why this trip out East is important. I need to get away before I throw myself into all that. And,” she adds, almost as an aside, “I think we need to think about how we’re going to pay for all this.” I can feel it coming, the linkage between my books and her council, but I ask anyway. “Pay for all what?” “Oh, you know,” she says, “doing a little belt tightening, rethinking what we like but can live without, showing some—what do the Republicans say?—fiscal responsibility.” “Are we talking about my bookstores here?” She pats my knee. “We can talk about this another time. I just wanted to put it on your radar.” I suggest that her two trips this summer—the lap around Lake Michigan and her solo trip out East, consuming six weeks between them, might fall into that category of “things we like but can live without,” but she just laughs. “Ace,” she says, “be serious.”
There is a history here. A bit of overheard conversation, Dorie to a friend on the phone: “You may as well do as you like. The consequences are going to come later whether you want them to or not, so you may as well at least have fun in the meantime.”
“Who was that?” I wonder, hoping she was just offering advice to one of her recently divorced friends, not making a statement of personal philosophy.
She gets this look on her face. “You know what the bad thing about marriage is, Em? Being married to just one person.”
Don’t go there, I tell myself. Don’t say a word. But I can’t stop myself. “What’s that supposed to mean?” and she says, “Don’t you think it’d be great if there were time bubbles?” “Time bubbles?” I say. “Like one of those Mylar balloons,” she says, “or one massive soap bubble, nicely appointed,” and she goes off on this whole riff about how with time bubbles you could go away with someone you were attracted to and romp to your heart’s content, and meanwhile, outside the bubble, time would have stopped, and you’d return to your life with no time off the clock. With no time missing, no gaps in your life with your spouse, you could feel perfectly safe doing something for yourself without hurting anyone else. “Time bubbles,” I say.
“Oh, come on. Tell me you haven’t thought of it.” We’ve been putting away groceries, the phone rang, and the next thing I know we’re talking about time bubbles and Dorie’s saying, “I don’t think there’s any difference between wanting to fuck somebody and fucking them. If you’re married and you want to sleep with somebody else, you may as well sleep with them.”
The logic here astounds me. “You really don’t think there’s any difference between the thought and the act? Isn’t that what got Jimmy Carter ridiculed?”
“He thought it was a sin, didn’t he?”
“But don’t you get any credit for wanting to do something and choosing not to?”
“Why should you?”
About a year and a half later—right before this past Christmas—she tells me, “Remember that argument we had about the difference between wanting to fuck someone and doing so? I think you’re right. Wanting to do something and actually doing it are two different things.”
Which begged the question “What made you change your mind?”
“Nothing. I just thought about it some more and decid
ed there really is a difference.”
I wanted to believe nothing had happened, that our life together might have lost its magic but we could find it again, simply from the will of wanting it to return to us. I did not want to imagine or believe—but I was tormented by the thought—that my wife was finding that magic somewhere else. With someone else. That was the mystery of our life together—that Dorie had turned elsewhere for magic in her life, but she had chosen to remain with me, and so she lived a double life, and I did, too: the life of a man who acts as though nothing is wrong in his marriage, and the one of a man who believes—knows—otherwise.
Not long after that Dorie announced that she was going to visit her friend Mia in Darien, Connecticut, this coming summer and that she was going to get there by bike. Dorie and Mia go way back, to when Dorie had first left Augsbury when she was seventeen and had recently been impregnated by one of her dirtbag boyfriends. Mia was her confidante and partner in crime for a good half dozen years. Probably was also, for a brief while way back when, her lover. Mia is married now, the mother of two, and having an affair with her supervisor at her brokerage house. Dorie tells me this, and immediately I know it was to Mia that Dorie was speaking when she offered up her advice/philosophy about the limitations of marriage. “So, what, you’re going out there to compare notes? Want to see what the difference is between the wanting and the doing?”
Again with the look on her face—exasperation, impatience, maybe even loathing. “It’s a two-way street, Ace,” Dorie says. “People in affairs don’t get there by accident. Whoever they’re married to is at least partly responsible for the affair having happened.”
Then comes the clincher, the thing meant to undo me, which it does. Something so dripping with scorn and condescension that when she says it I flinch. “What, Ace, is this going to ‘reflect on my merit review’? If I had an affair would that reflect on my merit review?” Our father’s phrase. But coming out of Dorie’s mouth it is meant as a reproach against the long-suffering of my mother and the antics of my father. It is a reproach against the kind of marriage our parents had, against me, against, even, the kind of marriage I thought we had. And we are a long way from the kind of marriage my parents had. Or maybe we’re not, it’s just that the roles are reversed, and I am only beginning to understand just how hard everything was for our mother, living with a man who was so frequently elsewhere, so completely caught up in his own desires.
