As was the practice of many food and appliance companies, International Harvester attempted to draw attention to its refrigerators and freezers through the publication of promotional recipe books. Just as General Mills had invented Betty Crocker, International Harvester invented Irma Harding, and put her on the cover of Irma Harding Presents Freezer Fancies. The cover is dominated by her black-and-white portrait. Her head is framed in a nimbus of white. Tucked tastefully to the left of her collar is a miniature copyright sign. Irma Harding is not real. I do not hold this against her. Her initials pretty much confirm what the copyright symbol implies—Irma was conceived in the advertising department and delivered by an artist on deadline. My candle burns undimmed.
Irma’s career was brief. “Millions Will Follow Her Counsel and Leadership…Millions Will Call Her Their Friend…,” read the headline from the October 1948 edition of International Harvester Dealer News, in which Irma debuted, but in 1955, second-guessing their ability to compete in the domestic refrigeration business, company officials sold the division to Whirlpool, and Irma went the way of the horse-drawn reaper. Pickup truck sales held steady through the 1960s, but Ford and General Motors were selling in much greater and ever-increasing numbers. By the 1970s, it wasn’t even close, and in 1975 International stopped making pickup trucks altogether. Tom Brownell and Patrick Ertel, authors of International Truck Color History, attribute the decline of International’s light truck line (the company continued to make large industrial trucks) to ongoing labor conflicts, turf battles between members of management, the predominantly rural location of International dealerships, and—note for future reference—lack of marketing attention toward women. Noticing that women were becoming more involved in vehicle-purchasing decisions, many manufacturers responded with truck ads featuring women at the wheel—driving campers, for instance. If a woman showed up in an International ad, it was usually in the form of an accessory.
I am a sucker for the idea of a time machine, and sometimes I look at my unmoving truck and quite unoriginally wish I could have been the guy to whom the salesman handed the keys in 1951. I’d like to get a look at the country back then, the big changes coming on, but still a lot of dirt roads over which to roll. I imagine myself bumping down a set of sun-dappled washboards, giving the truck its first coat of dust. Maybe I’d be coming home to a wife, and maybe she’d hear me coming and be waiting on the porch in an apron, waving a dish rag, and I would roll in there guilt-free and anticipating beef roast and green beans, having not yet learned I was a chauvinist piggy. Alternatively, my wife may have been planning to gag me with the dish rag, bind me in the apron, and take my spanking-new truck on the lam. In 1951, American women were entering their fourth decade with the vote. They were fresh off the Rosie the Riveter years, when millions of their sisters had shown up for work and proven themselves in scores of traditionally male roles. In 1951, when Earl Silas Tupper became desperate to save his failing plasticware business, he turned not to a man but to a woman: the deliciously named Brownie Wise. The company shortly posted revenues of $25 million, Tupperware entered the national lexicon, and Wise became the first woman ever featured on the cover of BusinessWeek. The 1951 debut of I Love Lucy put Lucille Ball on a trajectory that would culminate in her reign as the first female studio head in Hollywood history. The first Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Correspondence ever given to a woman was awarded in 1951, when journalist Marguerite Higgins was recognized for her Korean War reporting—the implication being that a girl with a pen might aspire to more than taking dictation from a man in a suit.
If you stick with the Year in Review approach, it is easy enough to accumulate anecdotal evidence that the emancipation of women was progressing apace in 1951. Truth was, when the boys came marching home, we repossessed Rosie’s riveter, tossed her a trivet, and did our best to get her back in the kitchen. Irma Harding cut a strong figure—you could easily imagine her clicking briskly down a marble hall to some office somewhere—but she remained the creation of company men, and to gauge their perception of the sexes we need only consider the slogans International Harvester dreamed up to headline the 1951 advertising campaign. Tagline for trucks? “Every model Heavy-Duty Engineered!” Refrigerators? “They’re femineered!”
Under threat of a compulsory bikini wax from Germaine Greer and the editors of Bitch magazine, let me state for the record that the term femineered! is a real time-warping mind-bender. The sexism is one thing, the blitheness quite another. Cheery condescension meets leering futurism. I understand now why my favorite nursing professor went all Valkyrie on me when I referred to my lab partner as a girl in 1987. I always thought the sisterhood of second-wave feminists who ran the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire School of Nursing were a tad uptight, but femineered! goes a long way toward explaining their frame of mind.
If I had a bra, I’d burn it.
My truck is an ugly truck. I picked it up in college, bought it for 150 bucks from a guy named Ron. Ron used the truck to haul firewood—it wasn’t even licensed for the road. The truck body was originally a hearty red, but at some point Ron swabbed it with a coat of pink primer. He used a six-inch-wide paintbrush. There were a lot of drips and runs. In other spots the primer is spread so thin that the bristle pattern is highlighted in hairline streaks of surface rust. When he finished, Ron signed and dated his work, daubing a knockoff Playboy bunny beneath the spare-tire bracket.
The front end of the truck is blasted with rust. The grille has deteriorated to the point that the headlights wobble in their sockets. You can stick three fingers through the gaps in both front fenders. The bumper is bent. Before I parked it the last time, the radiator was blowing green mist. The front windshield is cracked in the vertical, and rain leaks around the weather stripping and streaks the dash. There is a boil the size of a grapefruit on the left front tire. The speedometer never has worked, and the deck of the bed is so riddled with holes that you could load half a yard of gravel and over just three miles of bumpy road, sift the sand from the stones. To a large extent, the truck is, as they say, shot.
On the other hand, I’ve never done a thing to that old six-cylinder engine beyond changing the oil, and yet it has always spun smooth as an antique safe dial. The cab doors close with a seamless click, just like they must have done when the last line worker tested them fifty-some years ago. The lugs on the back tires are fat and nasty, no wear at all. The wiper blades run off the vacuum system, so they bog some when you punch the accelerator, but then you back out of it and they whip-whip-whip as if they’re making up for lost time. You could pop corn on the in-cab heater. And after six years at a dead stall in my driveway, all four tires are still holding air.
I bought the truck when I was in my final year of nursing school. For the next three years it was my sole means of transportation. I drove it to school, I drove it to work, and I drove it up north to visit my folks or go deer hunting. There were problems. The truck tended to lock up and refuse to crank when the engine was hot. If I switched it off, I’d have to wait an hour before it would start again. It was a little light in the rear end, and didn’t handle so well in the ice and snow. Sometimes the headlights blinked on and off. And I used to run out of gas a lot. The gas tank was huge, but the gauge never worked. I stashed a curved stick behind the seat and took readings with that. I’d thread it down the angled gullet of the fill pipe, then draw it out and estimate my range of travel based on how much of the stick was wet. The calculations were inexact: If you were the guy who jumped out of his car in 1989 to push me through the stoplights at the intersection of Clairemont and Fairfax, thank you. Ditto the Samaritans of Hastings Way and Eddy Lane. And here’s to the boys at Silver Star Ambulance Service: When I misread the stick and stalled at the troublesome convergence of Birch Street and Hastings Way, they spotted me and sent a uniformed EMT dashing through traffic to rescue me with a can of lawn mower gas.
As ugly as the truck was the day I bought it from Ron, it has only gotten worse with the years. More rust. B
igger holes. A couple more dents. One windshield wiper is missing. I was driving on the freeway in a blizzard and the blade was icing up, so I rolled down the window, reached around, and, timing the wiper—an old Wisconsin wintertime motoring trick—grabbed and snapped it every time it came past. The idea is to knock the ice loose. On the third try, I mistimed the grab and the wiper came off in my hand. I drove the rest of the way with my head out the window, squinting against the snow and dipping my head back in the cab at regular intervals to shake the ice-cream headache. The other wiper is still intact, but held in place with athletic tape.
In 1989, I took off for Europe and left the truck behind my grandpa’s barn. It must have weathered the dry docking fairly well, because I remember driving it to work in the early 1990s, but sometime around 1992 it developed that radiator leak and I parked it again. In 1995, I moved north to New Auburn and had to have the truck hauled up on a flatbed. A local mechanic got it to run one more time, but the radiator still leaked, and then the gas tank rusted through, and that was that.
I am homing in on forty years old. Another twenty years and I’m looking at sixty, and these days, twenty years seems like next Tuesday. I feel young but pressed for time. I am beginning to get a sense of all I will leave undone in this life. It makes my breath go a little short. I’m not desperate, just hungry to fill the time I am allowed. To cover new ground. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m having the vaunted midlife crisis. I’m not trying to reclaim my youth or recapture the past. I just want to get that truck running. The past belongs where it is, as it is: an essential, fault-riven foundation for the present. I don’t expect that truck to take me anywhere but down the road. I don’t plan to, as my cousin used to say, cruise chicks. Although I’d be a stone-cold liar if I said I didn’t think sometimes of blowing down some back road with a woman over there on the right-hand side, her eyes turned toward the fields passing by, a hint of upturn at the corner of her mouth.
This is not going to be a restoration project. I don’t want to rehab this truck only to spend my weekends with a chamois and a bottle of polish. I don’t want to circle the fenders nervously, checking for dings like some pastry chef searching for hair in the cupcakes. I just want to patch a few holes and punch out a few dents. Scrub the rust down and lay on some paint. I want to get this truck running so I can, as the boys in high school used to say, go “bombin’ around.” Ramble off to my brother’s farm and return with a load of barnyard dirt for my backyard garden. Drive up Old Highway 53 to the IGA to buy potatoes and bacon. Hammer down the swamp road in the moonlight. I want to bump down a logging trail in November and back the truck up to the gutted body of a whitetail, the cooling meat destined to feed me in the year to come.
I’ll have to get with it, because I tend to sit on stuff long past the hatch-by date. Which in most cases is fine. There is enough ill-considered hastiness in the world. Trouble is, at some point you keel over and croak. The man with differently sized eyes standing in my yard asking to buy the truck—he wasn’t the first. It happens two or three times a year, someone knocks on the door and wonders if the thing is for sale. They all get the same answer: no. I want to fix it up. The squint-eyed man looked at me like he didn’t believe it would ever happen. He squinched that bad eye down extra tight, spit again, and then he got in his own truck and headed back home to Chippewa Falls, where for all I know there is an International refrigerator in every home and the streets are paved with gold.
On behalf of the brand, I apologize for the whole femineering thing. It’s like the big farm kid trying to fashion a homemade valentine from a beer carton using a pair of tin snips. International was never about the ineffable essence. “For many,” reads the copy on the back of International Truck Color History, “International Harvester means handsome, sturdy, no-nonsense trucks.”
Handsome. Sturdy. No-nonsense.
Irma.
Back to the Color History: “…International trucks have an earthy, wholesome quality that makes them attractive.”
Earthy. Wholesome. I pull out my copy of Freezer Fancies. Irma’s eyebrows are trim but not overplucked. Her hair is pulled back and gathered, but not so tight as to eliminate the waves. A ruler-straight part runs the center of her scalp, suggesting that Irma values tidiness and discipline, but the loose curls bobbing above the nape of her neck imply that fun will be allowed. The gathered hair is too informally hung to be termed a bun. You see a little fluff and dangle. Something to shake loose. The carefully combed part speaks of a tight ship, a neat sock drawer and folded underwear, but the curls are there to be let down when the work is done. I am also thrilled with the wash of gray above her left brow. It courses backward in easy waves, and it speaks to me of experience. Whither your sulking supermodels in the face of this bright, strong, touch-of-gray woman! She holds her head erect on a graceful neck, she is wearing nicely turned button earrings, and she has a dimple just below one strong cheekbone.
But above all, I am taken by those eyes. Irma Harding is my Mona Lisa. You will hear Mona Lisa described as enigmatic. Irma looks more energetic than enigmatic. I look at Mona Lisa and I think, there’s a girl who would run up your credit card and pout. I look at Irma, and I think, there’s a woman who keeps her checkbook balanced. I think, there’s a woman who would be pleased to ride in a truck. Shoot, she could drive the truck, and I bet she can double-clutch like a full-on gear jammer. You look at Irma’s eyes and you think, there’s a woman who wouldn’t mind a little wind in her hair, a little muss. I imagine Irma riding beside me in the truck, I’d look over there and that part would be holding but those curls would be blown, and she’d be grinning. If those boys at International had kept Irma on board to sell trucks instead of refrigerators, they’d still be in the thick of things. Frankly, I’m not sure she would have put up with their guff. I look at the picture again, reconsider the lines of her jaw and the steadiness of that gaze, and I get the feeling that if a guy messed around with Irma, he’d wind up doing long stretches listening to Otis Redding albums in the dark.
Back in the real world, I am long past conjuring a woman who would even have me, never mind suit me. I simply have no idea who she might be. I went on my first date at sixteen. Lisa Kettering. I kissed her in the moonlight shadow of a pine tree, and she cut me loose inside of two weeks. Now, at thirty-eight, I have a relationship track record that can be summarized in a single overwhelming understatement: the art of going steady eludes me. And after two decades of having the mirror to myself, I have cultivated an accumulation of tics and idiosyncracies bound to unhinge the most long-suffering angel. Lately I’ve been in monk mode. No dates for nearly a year. When I met my last girlfriend, I fell headlong. Without sense or reservation. She drove a beautifully beat-up blue pickup, rolled her own cigarettes, and painted her motorcycle John Deere green. You should have seen her in a pair of work boots, backhanding the sweat from her brow. I goobered along behind her like a ridiculous balding teenager. But then came an all-too-familiar time when our conversations went dead between the lines and I got the old gut-sink. For a while I lived in hope—an eggshell kind of hope—and then one day I heard a country music song with a first line that went, “I won’t make you tell me / what I’ve come to understand…” and I just thought, a-yep.
We plunge into love with a naïveté that ignores all prior humiliations. Thank goodness, I guess. Because we never learn, we reach for love again and again.
CHAPTER 2
JANUARY
THE YEAR BEGINS barren and brown. There should be snow, but the land lies stripped in subzero wind. Among the remains of last year’s garden the tan stalk of a dead tomato plant ticks against the spare wooden frame that propped it through the fat green days of summer. The stalk wavers along a brief arc, dipping herky-jerky like the wand of a failing metronome. The plant yielded some good tomatoes. I roasted them in a deep pan with salt, olive oil, cloves of unshucked garlic, and sprigs of thyme. You ladle off the juice every twenty minutes or so and freeze it for a sweet, delicat
e stock best consumed during snowstorms. The residual pulp gathers body from the garlic and spirit from the thyme. The spent garlic, when squeezed warmly from its husk directly upon your tongue, will slacken your face and make you shimmy.
The stock and the pulp are in my little chest freezer now, down in the basement where the fuel oil furnace has been firing all day. I can hear the blower kick in, a muffled rumble followed shortly by a huff of warm air through the grate. I am on the second floor at the head of the stairs, standing at a window overlooking the garden, which is comprised mostly of raised beds—loaves of soil contained by rectangular frames constructed from two-by-twelve planks in the manner of a sandbox. The tomatoes that hung from that plant were pale yellow and big as a baby’s head. I grew them from a seed harvested from a plant sown by my sister-in-law. She planted her garden in spring and didn’t live to see fall, killed in a car wreck in her seventh week as my brother’s wife. The tomatoes are called Amish Yellows. We write “Sarah’s Tomatoes” on the little plastic flags.
The windows in this old house are loose. The wind sets them to rattling. Looking down, I have my face close to the pane, so close I raise a little fog and smell that cold window glass smell, the scent of ice and dust. The wind rises and seeps past the sill. I imagine this outside air purling and tumbling through the warm inside air the way water curls through whiskey. My nose is cold at the window. The earth is frozen dirt. I think of the grave.
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