by Aimee Liu
But the farm was also a part of me, because it was part of my mother. The living room shelves held scrapbooks crammed with everything from Diana’s first baby locks to the powdered remains of her high school corsages. The stairwell was lined with photographs of her skiing and swimming and camping, looking gangly and tan, with curls tighter than mine and the same corkscrew grin as Henry.
In some of those pictures fair-haired men slung their arms possessively around her waist. When I asked about them, she’d say, “Oh, that’s Bill,” or Bob or George or Richard—old beaux, some of whom had begged her to marry them. Now they were real estate agents, doctors, and grain brokers. None had a last name like Chung.
“So why didn’t you marry one of them?” asked Anna. “They look pretty cute to me.”
“But, darling, I knew if I married any of them I’d be stuck here the rest of my life. In the Midwest, anyway.”
“Too boring?”
“Suffocating.”
Just how determined my mother was to escape was revealed in a steamer trunk in the attic containing hundreds of sketches for evening dresses and high-fashion women’s suits. Although I was no great judge of art, I could tell these were serious drawings. The colors stayed inside the lines. The faces looked like movie stars. The detailing was minute. Each sketch was dated and signed in bold script. And some were clipped to carbons of letters addressed to the top couturiers of the day: Cristóbal Balenciaga, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, and Lucien Lelong. “Dear Miss Chanel,” read one:
I am an aspiring young designer who immensely admires your work. The newspapers say that you have retired, but I do not believe it. You are too young and your ideas are too brilliant for you to quit designing. The world of haute couture needs your vision!
Miss Chanel, you are a great artist, and I would be honored to serve as your apprentice. From the attached sketches, you can see how much your designs have influenced my own. If you would give me a chance, I will gladly pay my way to Paris, or wherever you might need me. Please consider me your humble servant. With greatest regard,
Diana Campbell
“How’d she know who to write to?” said Henry, staring at the foreign names.
“She read the fashion pages, dummy,” said Anna. “She saw what she wanted and went after it.”
“Fat lot of good it did her.”
Neither Chanel nor any of the other designers ever answered these letters, and my mother never saw her sketches turned into couturier clothing. The money she’d saved during high school got her as far as Chicago, where she dressed mannequins for Marshall Field until she could afford a one-way ticket on the Twentieth Century to New York. Saks Fifth Avenue hired her to do their windows, which was how she met my father.
Through glass.
“He was the most exotic man I’d ever seen,” she told us. “And he was watching me. I tried to keep on working, but he motioned me outside, and just like that he asked me to a party that night. At the Rainbow Room! Do you have any idea how long I’d dreamed of going to the Rainbow Room? I can tell you, my darlings, that was the most exciting night of my life. I borrowed a green crushed-velvet dress right out of the window and had a girlfriend do up my hair. Joe danced like an angel, and I could tell from the way people treated him, he was really something special. When I found out his photographs were on the cover of Life magazine, I just about died. I thought, I am finally off the farm for good.”
From the vantage point of Wisconsin, I could see my mother the dreamer, the frustrated sophisticate. I understood why at age sixteen she’d left the Midwest for New York. But I was also grateful that she brought her children—if not her husband—home.
I was especially grateful the summer I met Johnny Madison. The summer I was ten.
At the far end of the screened-in porch where we kids always slept sat a wooden Victrola with a crank and needle that resembled an old hearing horn. Every morning, right at dawn, Grampa Henry would crank up that Victrola, set it spinning with songs dating back to the twenties—songs like “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” and “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”
“Rise and shine!” he’d bellow, clattering a wooden spoon against one of Gramma’s tin pans. “Rise and shine, you slugabeds. Mornin’s wastin’.”
The first thing we saw when we opened our eyes was a large, deeply freckled old man dancing about in his undershirt. “Henry!” Gramma Lou would call from the kitchen. “Give the poor children some peace.” But even if that had shut him up, which it never did, the aroma of her cinnamon rolls made it impossible to sleep.
Once he was satisfied that he’d roused everyone in the house, Grampa traded in the spoon for his plastic flyswatter. Thanks to the sheep and the general proximity of nature, the farm always had more than its share of winged invaders. One logical defense would have been to repair the fist-sized holes in the window and door screens, but my grandfather preferred to treat the insects as wild game. He particularly liked to hunt during meals, and breakfast was no exception.
My mother was never a morning person. She liked to lounge, contemplating the day ahead while the first few jolts of caffeine got her engine going. (Her mother’s inability to make a decent cup of coffee, she said, was symptomatic of all that was wrong with the Midwest.) Wrapped in a peach silk bathrobe, her face still glossy with night moisturizers, she came to the dining room to fill her cup, then quickly headed outside to escape her father’s performance.
But the morning after we arrived that summer, Mum had just begun her ritual pour when—thwack!—down came the swatter. Right through the stream of coffee.
“Bull’s-eye!” Henry was Grampa’s scorekeeper. “Number nine.”
The fly that had balanced briefly on the rim of my mother’s cup was now enmeshed in Gramma’s lace tablecloth.
“Yah! Jew-bait!” Grampa shouted. “’At’ll teach him.”
My mother put down the percolator and closed her eyes. I watched her lips move as she counted to ten.
“Anna,” she said when she’d finished, “we’re going into Milwaukee. Be ready in fifteen minutes.”
As soon as they were gone my grandfather started Henry on the driving lessons they’d been plotting since the previous summer.
Gramma Lou put up a token protest, but it was not unusual for a country boy to learn to drive at age twelve, and she had to admit that, even if Henry never drove in the city, it wouldn’t hurt him to know how to handle a gearshift on the farm. She loved her daughter dearly, Gramma said, but she’d never fought her battles for her, and this was no time to start.
Unfortunately she had stronger opinions when it came to my going along. “If you think I’m risking two of my grandchildren with that old coot, you’ve got another think coming.” She handed me a wicker basket and shooed me out toward the mulberry tree to pick enough for a pie.
From the upper branches I watched Grampa’s old blue sedan grinding up the lane through the middle of the farm. They weren’t making much progress, and the dust they were kicking up must have made breathing uncomfortable. But I imagined them together, Grampa probably telling Henry one of his dirty jokes, making him laugh so hard he lost his concentration and ran over a boulder. Then Grampa would curse the day Henry was born, tell him he was worthless as a sheep turd, and jolly the car around the rock until they were on their way again, singing in unison Grampa’s anthem:
Pooh, pooh Harvard
Pooh, pooh Yale
We do our learning through the mail.
We’re no dummies,
We’re no fools,
We go to correspondence school!
“Want company?”
A big boy, almost as big as Henry, was standing directly below me. He had round blue eyes and sun-bleached hair that made his skin look even redder than it really was. When Grampa Henry was a child, he might have looked like this boy.
“I’m Johnny Madison. Came to give your grandma some tomatoes from my ma. She said you might want some help.”
“I guess.”
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He hoisted himself onto the branch below me and picked a handful of berries.
“She didn’t give me anything to put ’em in.”
I moved the basket within his reach.
“That your brother out there?” He nodded toward the ball of dust gathering at the crest of the hill.
“You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Baby-sit me.”
“Baby-sitting’s for girls.”
“Then go someplace else to wait for Henry. I don’t need any help.”
“I’m not waiting for Henry.” He chucked another fistful of mulberries into the basket. “I don’t even like Henry.”
“No? What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothin’. I only met him once or twice. We just never found nothing to talk about.”
My grandfather’s car disappeared into the back forty. Heat waves shimmered like mirages across the space where it had been.
“Well, what do you like to talk about?” I asked.
“Promise you won’t laugh?”
I crossed my heart.
“Flying… I’ve flown, you know. Nobody believes I have. They say I just imagine things, but honest, sometimes when I’m out in the fields by myself I start taking bigger and bigger steps, going higher and higher between each one till pretty soon I’m flying about ten feet off the ground and staying up there, too.”
“I’ve dreamed I stepped off the top of the Statue of Liberty and flew all the way home.”
Johnny smiled a faraway smile. “That must have been nice.”
“It was only a dream.”
“I did the same thing from the hayloft in your grampa’s barn.”
It was plain I didn’t believe him.
“C’mon. I’ll show you.”
Before I could answer, he scooted down out of the tree and ran off. By the time I reached the barnyard fence he was standing in the opening to the hayloft, fifteen feet above me.
“Don’t!”
“You don’t believe I can! Just watch.”
“No, I believe you, but what if it doesn’t work this one time? Don’t jump, please.”
“I want you to see me do it.” He stretched his arms.
“How about inside? Then if something goes wrong, you’ll land in the hay.”
Johnny rolled his eyes, and I could practically hear him thinking: Women! But he moved away from the ledge.
I did not see Johnny fly that day, but he did swoop and swerve and do loop-de-loops. We both did, for that matter.
The barn was half full of hay, with bales in the back stacked all the way to the ceiling, the rest arranged in steps down to the mounds of loose fodder that turned the floor into one great cushion. You had to be careful to avoid the trap where hay was dropped to the sheep stalls below, but otherwise it was a child’s paradise, complete with floor-to-ceiling rope. When Johnny wasn’t diving free, he was swinging and hollering like Tarzan.
“What religion are you?” he asked when we’d finally exhausted ourselves and lay peeking out through cracks in the siding.
“No religion.”
“What d’you mean? Everybody’s some religion. You’re Catholic or Jewish or Protestant.”
“What’re you?”
“Catholic.”
Through my crack I sighted Mount Assumption, a black finger raised to the sky.
“You go to church up there?” I asked.
“I been.”
“What’s it like?”
“Boy, you really aren’t religious, are you?”
I snapped a piece of straw in two and studied the insides.
“It’s boring,” he said. “The priest chants all this stuff in Latin, and when you can understand what he’s saying, it’s usually what’s going to happen after you kick.”
“Kick what?”
“Kick the bucket.”
“What?”
“Die, stupid!”
“Oh.” I must have looked a little hurt, because Johnny apologized for calling me stupid.
“What does happen?” I asked.
“You go to heaven if you’re good, and hell if you’re not.”
I could tell from his voice that he had nearly called me stupid again but checked himself.
“Know what I think?” I asked.
“What?”
“I think the whole world is really just a speck on the floor of a giant’s throne room, and after we die we’re born into that giant’s kingdom, and in the next life after that we break through to the next giant’s palace.”
“I think you’re a nut.” But he was smiling.
I don’t know why I told Johnny that. If I’d told it to Henry, he would have said something like “You have the brain of a cockroach.” If I’d told Anna, she would have said I was spending too much time around Grampa. I’d never even consider telling one of the grown-ups.
But Johnny, after some thought, replied, “One day I’m going to have a plane all my own. If I fly high enough, maybe I’ll meet that giant of yours.”
Johnny had ten brothers and sisters. His father was a hog farmer with a fifth-grade education, his mother a harried but gentle woman who encouraged her children to dream. Johnny had never been out of Wisconsin. But he was sure he would spend his life flying.
It was the only way, he said, that you could catch a glimpse of heaven without dying.
“How cute, little Maibee’s got herself a boyfriend!”
“Ask me, the kid’s a demento. I mean, Jesus, he’s practically my age. What’s he want with a squirt like her? If he was baby-sitting, sure, but I don’t think Gramma was paying him.”
“Leave it alone!” Gramma Lou said, coming out on the porch to say good night. “Johnny’s a fine boy. If you don’t like him, Henry, that’s all right, but Maibelle can choose her own friends.”
She tucked me in and patted my hair. I pretended to be asleep.
“But I just don’t get it,” said Henry.
“And that’s just my point,” said my grandmother. “You don’t need to.”
Say what they would, Johnny Madison was a good friend. That summer and the next, while Henry learned to drive and my mother and Anna went off touring antique stores or into the city, Johnny showed me the sights of the country—the spring that gushed icy water deep in my grandparents’ woods, the swimming holes and hidden nests you couldn’t find by road.
Johnny knew the land’s magic. He made soap by rubbing flowers between his palms. He pulled Indian arrowheads out of tree stumps and lured spiders from cyclone webs. He guided me into thickets where we feasted on wild raspberries and smeared our faces red. Although my mother had warned me never, ever to eat a wild mushroom, I believed that Johnny could tell the poisonous from the safe ones and, sure enough, I survived when he dared me into eating one of his “champonions"—though it tasted like dirty socks smell.
“You have to know these things if your plane crashes somewhere far away from towns or people,” he said. “Trouble is, I feel like I know everything there is to know around here. It’s getting too easy.”
But there were a few mysteries Johnny hadn’t quite mastered. Over my grandparents’ back hill lay a secret hollow cut through by a creek where he claimed fairies hid their treasure. Three little bald-headed men they were, dressed in robes made of cast-off snake skins. Johnny had fallen asleep beside that creek late one afternoon and woke at midnight to see the men turning the stones to make the water run true. When they finished, they joined hands and jumped together into the deepest pool. Johnny searched for the men by moonlight, and when the sun came up, he dove to the bottom of the pool. All he found was a kingfisher’s feather, bright blue-green and perfectly clean, floating on the water.
“And,” he said in a hush-hush voice, “it has real gold in it.”
I refused to believe this story unless he produced the feather, so one day as we spread our toes in the creek’s muddy bottom he pulled it from his back pocket. And it was, as he’d said, truly b
eautiful, with silken colors and a shaft as hard as ivory. I couldn’t tell if the dazzle of gold laced across the tip was real metal, but when I tapped it on a rock, it certainly sounded like it.
“You painted it on,” I decided. But it didn’t feel like paint. There was no seam and the gold wouldn’t peel off.
“Jeweler in Milwaukee said he’d give me a hundred bucks for it.”
“No. Why didn’t you take it, then?”
“Hundred bucks won’t buy a plane. Besides, if the fairies come back, I might be able to trade this for somethin’ else.”
“What something?”
He licked a finger and held it up to test the wind. “Something no money I know of can buy.”
He looked at me hard. Serious. “Wings.”
The one place Johnny refused to go was Glabber’s woods. Just north of my grandparents’ farm, this stretch of giant elms and beeches contained nothing more sinister than a few Swiss Jerseys and some scattered bee boxes. No one ever saw Mr. Glabber himself, except when he visited his hives, and then he was all suited up like an astronaut. But that was just it, said Johnny.
“Inside that hood of his, he’s all deformed. Warts, scars. Hands are like meat hooks.”
We were sitting on the old stone wall that snaked along the ridge overlooking the woods. No Trespassing signs marked every third tree. Johnny said, “My dad told me if old Glabber sees you on his land he’ll shoot to kill.”
“If he’s as ugly as you say, maybe he’s just afraid people will make fun of him.”
“Dad says he was a pilot. Flew bombing missions over Japan. His plane got hit and caught fire. He parachuted out, but his whole body got burnt. That’s why he looks so disgusting. Dad says when Glabber saw himself in the mirror he went nuts. Started screaming for his plane, and said he was going to get the bastards that did it to him. After they let him out of the hospital, he did go back up, but instead of going after the Japs, he started firing at the other American planes, and then he crashed. Dad says he was trying to kill himself, but they got him out of the wreck okay. Had to spend years in a insane asylum, and they never let him go up again. I bet that made him even crazier.”
