by Jess Lourey
Instead, I tiptoed back down the hall and tried the door handle to Ted’s outdoor garden space. I had seen his patio area from mine and knew that it was directly in front of his apartment’s skylights, a feature my apartment didn’t share. His patio door was locked. I considered breaking it down, or just knocking on Ted’s front door, but both ideas lacked the stealth I was after. I was feeling crazy, but not crazy enough not to know it.
I thumbed through my keys and found the tiny one that unlocked my patio door. I hadn’t been out there since I had cleaned my herb and tomato pots in October. The area was small, maybe ten feet by five, and it was covered with brittle March snow accented by a chute of gutter ice. There was also a rusty ladder leading to the roof. Before the quiet part of my brain could organize its arguments, I climbed up the ladder, hauled myself onto the roof, and crawled over to Ted’s side of the building.
The March wind hit me like needles up this high, but the rush I always got from acting instead of waiting kept me moving forward. When I was by Ted’s skylights, I army-crawled over and peered down. Staring back at me was my second penis of the day, and here it wasn’t even noon. Brad was tied up to Ted’s loft, about four feet from my face, and if his eyes hadn’t been closed in ecstasy, he would have seen me staring down at him.
Ted’s niece, whose name I was really going to have to find out, was swaying toward him like a naked snake charmer, only she was on her knees because there wasn’t enough headroom in the loft to stand. When she got to him, she put her mouth near the top of his penis, and from my angle, I swear it looked like she was blowing and tickling him at the same time. For an absurd moment, I wondered if she was one of those poor women who had taken the term “blowjob” too literally, but then I realized what she was doing. She was playing Brad’s flute, accompanied by the nice Portuguese musicians I had bought for his listening pleasure. I had seen enough.
I crawled carefully back down the ladder, the March wind no match for the fumes coming from my head. I considered storming into the apartment and demanding an explanation, but Brad wasn’t clever enough to juggle shame and an erection at the same time. Besides, I hated confrontations. The shitter was I had been thinking of breaking up with him, and now he would get the last word. Or the last note, in this case.
No, clearly there was only one way this could end well for me. I let myself out the back door, removed the nuts holding the front tire onto Brad’s bike, and went for a walk. When I returned home that night, having decided nothing except that my life sucked and today would forever be known as Cocks ’n’ Roach Day, I was grateful to get a call from my good friend Sunshine Waters. Sunny and I had met when my college roommate freshman year, Cecilia, took me to her hometown of Battle Lake, Minnesota, over Christmas break. Battle Lake was a town of 798 people three hours west of the Twin Cities and two hours north of Paynesville. Sunny had stayed around there after high school because she had emotional ties. Her parents had died when she was young, and the land she’d inherited from them provided her comfort. It was 103 acres of rolling hills, hardwoods, and lakeshore with a doublewide trailer—gray with maroon trim—in the center and various outbuildings sprinkled around it. That’s where I had first met Sunny, at a Christmas party at her place, and we had hit it off instantly. Sunny was smart, funny, and not afraid of chocolate.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Mira! It’s me. Sunny. What’s up? You sound funny. You OK?”
I wiped my eyes. “Sure, if you consider losing your job, getting flashed by an out-of-work guitarist with a penis like a microwaved legume, and finding your boyfriend cheating on you OK.”
“You caught Brad cheating on you, huh?”
“Yeah. The good part is he doesn’t know I know, so I technically get to break up with him.”
“He was a weasel anyhow.”
“I know.”
“Hmm. You want to hear my good news?”
“Will it make me feel like even more of a loser?”
“Probably.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’m in love. You remember Rodney Johnson?”
I riffled through the list of Battle Lake names I knew from visiting Sunny so often, and I finally pulled up a picture of a short, dark-haired guy who was always smiling. “The guy who took a girl to her prom when he was thirty-one?”
“That was a few years ago. He’s changed. He’s a real sweetheart.”
I sighed and switched the phone from my right to my left ear. Sunny picked up boyfriends like old ladies picked up cats. “Well, good. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”
“I am happy. Gotta favor to ask, too.”
“Yeah?” I was at the window, and I made a fist, pressing the side of my hand into the frost edging the glass and then dotting five little toes over the top of it. A baby snow-foot.
“I’m moving to Alaska for a few months. I decided. It’s for sure. Rodney has a job lined up on a fishing boat, and we can make a thousand dollars a week.”
“When?” As far as I knew, she knew no one in Alaska and hadn’t lived anywhere but Battle Lake her whole twenty-eight years. She must really like this one.
“The first week of April. Here’s the favor. I need someone to house-sit when I leave.”
She paused, and I didn’t fill the empty air. Lord help me, if I had known what I was in store for, I would have screamed “No!” with my last breath.
“You can garden, you can hike, you can do all that stuff you used to like to do. C’mon, Mira. If it doesn’t work out, you can always leave. You’ve got nothing to lose.” Her voice was rushed but cocky. “You got to get back to the dirt, Mira.”
“I don’t know. Battle Lake is so small. What would I do there?”
“The library is hiring, and you can always waitress.” Sunny’s voice changed to a more serious tone. “I need you, Mira. I can’t bring Luna with, and nobody else will watch her.” Luna was the goofy-smart mixed breed Sunny had found at the side of the road a few years ago. “And I need someone to make sure the pipes don’t freeze. I think Rodney is the one, Mira. I don’t want to blow it.”
Sunny always thought whichever guy she was with was the one, but she very rarely asked for help. I looked around. Ricki Lake was making over spandex-clad large chicks on my TV, my stove was hissing out dry heat in my kitchen, I no longer had a job or a boyfriend, and I was sitting in my all-purpose room waiting for my life to start. Still, I hesitated. What sort of person just gets up and moves, and
to Battle Lake of all places? I cradled the phone in the crook of my shoulder and put my hand to the graffittied window just as a pigeon crashed into it. I jumped back. The bird fluttered to the roof across the street, dazed and confused.
I sighed. “If you need me, Sunny, I’ll be there.”
It only took a couple weeks to sever, or at least put on hold, my Minneapolis ties. Alison, Shannon, and Maruta from Perfume River had a going-away party for me, and I left with an armload of cockroach memorabilia and even a pair of penis earrings. There were a couple women in my grad classes who made me laugh, and I left messages on their answering machines saying I was withdrawing this semester. I did the same with Professor Bundy, the journalism teacher whose class I was haphazardly attending. He told me I had a real talent for writing and should be sure to come back. I considered calling the financial aid office at the U, but they were pathologically unhelpful, and I would have to repay my loan whether or not I was in class. I had a month-to-month lease that I ended with a phone call.
My books and my clothes I tossed into tall kitchen garbage bags with yellow cinch ties at the top and stuffed in my brown two-door 1985 Toyota Corolla’s trunk. I put the same type of bags, only more gently, around my plants to protect them from the cold and transported them to the back seat and floor. My cat, Tiger Pop, named after my second-favorite candy and his mottled, white-splashed fur, was brought down last and unwillingly. I set his litter box and water dish on the floor of the passenger seat, knowing full well he would be attached to my should
er and howling the whole two-and-a-half-hour trip.
I looked around my first apartment for the last time. The living room that was also my dining room and bedroom looked beige and lonely. Even the blue, green, and yellow watercolor willow trees I had painted my first summer in the apartment didn’t add life. I realized they would be painted over within the month. My secondhand orange-flowered couch and mismatched chairs would be brought to the dump, my three pots, five bowls, and twelve plastic cups would be recycled or trashed, and all traces of my existence would vanish. Ten years in Minneapolis, and I had nothing but an English degree and a budding drinking problem to show for it. Now I knew how people ended up in small towns. Battle Lake, here I come.
Sunny’s doublewide was small, a cozy nine hundred square feet. The front space was a permanently wallpapered living room with woodsy furniture, and behind it was the kitchen, with a white and brown speckled vinyl floor, particleboard cupboards, and green-topped counters. To the left was the master bedroom, with its own bath, and to the right was a spare bedroom, an office, and another bathroom. By the time I arrived, Sunny had moved all her personal stuff into the office, and she was waiting outside with Rodney, both of them playing with her beloved dog, Luna. After a too-quick exchange of information and hugs, they were out and I was in.
The first order of business was finding a job, and I took Sunny up on her suggestion to try the library. It was rare for a town this size to have its own stationary book collection, but a wealthy benefactor had provided the money to get it running, and city funds kept it going.
I slipped into an assistant librarian position pretty easily after I lied about my knowledge of the Dewey decimal system. I was working on my master’s in English, sort of, so they didn’t ask many questions. At just over minimum wage, they were happy to have a warm body. They probably wouldn’t have been so quick to hire me if they had known about the murder following just one step behind me, ready to pounce once everyone settled in.
I learned my job and settled into the town—hooked up with my one local friend, Gina, filled the fridge with fresh foods from Larry’s, and read a lot of books I’d been meaning to get to. Meanwhile, the snow melted, the gray receded, the air started to smell fresh like cucumbers, and the buds on the trees and seeds in the dirt trembled and hummed until they exploded in splashes of color so bright green they were almost yellow. Spring in Minnesota happens scary fast. When Sunny called to check up on Luna and me, I told her confidently that things were going to happen for me in Battle Lake. I could feel the buzz in the air like the hum of bees.
Once the head librarian, Lartel McManus, saw I had a knack for the library job, he flew to Mexico on a three-week vacation he said he had planned for months. Friday, May 1, was to be my first official day alone at the Battle Lake Public Library. May Day had always been one of my favorite holidays. When I was ten, my dad sneaked into my room and left a foam cup decorated with pastel ribbons and filled with waxy Tootsie Rolls and cherry-flavored Dubble Bubble gum. I pretended I was asleep until I heard his footsteps on the creaky stairs. The note read “Happy May Day! You know I love you.”
I wondered about the power of small gestures as I woke up without an alarm clock on May Day, and I actually whistled as I slipped out of bed. The night before, I had ceremoniously dumped out all the bottles of liquor in Sunny’s house, and I arose reborn. I decided to go to town early to open a savings account with my sixty dollars cash. Call me an optimist. The seven-minute ride to town was beautiful, with young morning fog webbing the low spots by the sloughs. The air had that waiting-for-the-school-bus smell, and through some cosmic wrinkle, I could actually tune in the good radio station out of Fargo. Sheryl Crow commiserated melodically with me as I pulled toward town.
There were short stretches of road where I couldn’t see any houses, just oak and sumac pressing against the air. It brought to mind the research I had just finished for the second part-time job I had landed as an on-call reporter for the Battle Lake Recall, the local newspaper. The library job alone didn’t pay enough to cover my student loan payments and buy gas and groceries, and besides, I needed to keep my English muscle in shape for when I went back to grad school.
For my first article, I wrote a retrospective piece for the Battle Lake Lady of the Lakes celebration, the first festival of the year. It marked the end of winter and the beginning of the farming season and involved an all-town garage sale, a parade, and a dance at Stub’s. The celebration wasn’t until Memorial Day, but the chamber of commerce wanted to get the word out so they could sign up people for the parade. On the surface, Battle Lake was your average Minnesota town with a population under a thousand—most of the residents were farmers or blue-collar workers, most radios were tuned to the country music station, everybody ate their lunch at the Turtle Stew Café, and the whole area bloated with tourists in search of the perfect fish every summer. My piece delved below the surface, however. It was a full-page article, complete with photos, on the official founding of Battle Lake on Halloween Eve 1881.
As I drove into town, I cracked my window and sucked in some fresh air, thinking how similar it may have smelled a hundred years ago. I stopped near the curb in front of First National Bank, which was tucked on a corner of Main Street. The Battle Lake Public Library, Lakes Area Dental, and a temporarily abandoned building that used to be Kathy’s Klassy Klothes occupied the other three corners. Laid out alongside each of these cornerstones were little knickknack and antique stores, a bakery, a couple hardware stores, a drugstore,
a post office, a church, and various service offices—chiropractor, accountant, Realtor. Standard small-town fare. I saw that the bank was still closed, so I pulled into the library parking lot.
The yellow brick structure was a relatively new addition to the town, built twenty years ago, when William T. Everts had bequeathed his entire estate to create it. The library’s inside smelled like slick magazine paper and recycled air, as it had every morning since I had started working there over a month ago. I walked past the rack of new arrivals, sniffing at Deer Hunter’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, and Bow and Arrow World. The irony, I thought, of magazines created for hunters. It was like having a stadium for agoraphobics.
I peeled off my favorite suede jacket on my way to the library’s front desk, the spring air of lilacs and green melting away from me. After a little fumbling in all of my pockets, I found a damp piece of cinnamon gum, hidden under a glow-in-the-dark fish from a twenty-five-cent machine, a crushed Jägermeister cap, and a tattered fortune cookie strip that said, “You enjoy the fun” above my guaranteed winning lottery numbers. I draped my coat on the back of the swivel chair behind the desk and chewed tentatively on the gravelly Trident.
I flicked my dark, disheveled hair over my shoulder, settled in the captain’s chair, and clicked on the front desk computer. I was now the mistress of this domain. I considered creating a new printing sign. The “NO COLOR PRINTING!!!!! BLACK AND WHITE 10¢ A PAGE!!!!” had way too many exclamation marks and seemed rude with all the caps. I made a mental note to get to that later. Pushing back from the desk with a little whirring sound that propelled me the fifteen feet to the front entrance, I flipped the sign to Open, unlocked the single glass door with my keys-on-a-spiral unit, grabbed the four books resting askew in the overnight dropoff bin and the newspapers off the ground, and scooted back.
For a small-town library, it was pretty well stocked. The new fiction section was kitty-corner from the front desk, next to the newspaper and magazine racks. On the other side of the reading carrels were the metal turning displays stuffed with paperback romance and mystery books, so popular with the tourists and the elderly. Twelve tall wooden bookshelves were filled with the more scholarly works: the Dickens, the Hemingway, the I’m Not Crazy, I’m Angry: How to Cope with a Bad Temper.
The reference section was tucked into a dark spot near the storage room. The children’s area, with its Lilliputian blue and yellow chairs, ratty stuffed animals, and big-lettered books, was parked
in a cozy corner under the windows. This was my favorite spot, because of the sunlight and because the kids always got so excited about the books. It was comforting in my current situation—single, barely employed, and mildly superior with no one to appreciate it. You see, I now considered myself a cosmopolitan gal. It was easier to pretend that I was biding my time and finding my wings in a small town rather than to face that I had failed in the big city.
I finished the setup routine as Lartel had taught me—put away the books, make sure sufficient pencils are lined up on the counter, dust the tables—and then settled in behind the counter. The cheery chime of the door opening revved my heart up a little, I’m ashamed to say. Here I was, a city girl excited about dealing solo with my first library patron. I turned to see who the eager reader was but also reached for a magazine so we could both pretend I wasn’t snooping. The library can be like a doctor’s office. Patrons reveal deeply personal information about themselves by what they choose to read, and discretion is a must, especially in a small Minnesota town. The married mother of four who checks out The Joy of Sex paces nervously, paging through the new fiction section until the gas station owner has left, himself shoving Prozac Nation between a book on fly-fishing lures and Chilton’s latest. I loved looking inside people’s windows, so to speak.
And speaking of love, it just so happened I was wondering if I was going to get any in this town I was tied to, at least for the summer. My only hope was the massive tourist population bringing in some dark-haired male who knew that the word “seen” couldn’t be used without a helping verb, as in “I seen the biggest buck in the woods today!” Maybe I was shooting too high.
I studied today’s first solo library patron out of the corner of my eye and corrected myself. Here was a stranger with brown hair that curled around his ears, late thirties, and I swear his green eyes reflected intelligence. I crossed my legs to keep a whistle from escaping between my thighs. If practice makes perfect, I’m pretty good at judging people, and I judged him to be worth further examination. Of course, desperation does lend a certain graciousness to my opinion.
