A Fireproof Home for the Bride

by Amy Scheibe

  “Yes, Mrs. Hagen,” she said.

  “Would you care to tell the class the difference between Swiss and Salisbury steaks?” The older woman balled her plump hands into fists and propped them on a tightly girdled roll of doughy midsection.

  Emmy took a deep breath and tried to ignore the girls giggling behind her, or the sharp turn of Bev’s head as she glared at them.

  “Salisbury steaks aren’t actually steak, but cheaper cuts ground up and filled with pork or bread to resemble a steak,” Emmy said. She heard a girl in the back whisper, “She should know,” but ignored the insult. No matter how much the home economics class taught them budgets and sewing, Emmy already knew her skirt was cut from noticeably coarser fabric. She pressed on. “Swiss style is made from the lesser cuts as well, but pounded and scored and then braised with peppers and onions until tender.”

  Mrs. Hagen nodded approval without lowering her nose, and Emmy stopped listening to the lecture. Though they had been living in town for a few months, they were still scraping aspects of their pastoral life off their boots, and it didn’t surprise Emmy that Mrs. Hagen would single her out as an expert in the area of cheap steaks.

  Emmy glanced at Bev, who mouthed the word witch while raising one eyebrow in a delicate arc. After graduation Bev was going to summer in New York with some distant cousins and then fly on to Paris, to live with an uncle for a year and study at a college called the Sorbonne. Bev was the first person Emmy had met who actually had dreams and the means to make them come true already purchased in the shape of a one-way ticket tucked away in her father’s desk. Cooking lessons were simply Bev’s way of marking time until the final day of high school.

  Bev pretended to take a note, then scooted her tablet across the table for Emmy to read.

  Come out with me tonite.

  It’s Monday. Emmy scribbled back. What’s to do?

  Be young, have fun.

  Can’t.

  Bring Birdie, your mom won’t mind.

  She will mind. Emmy wrote, longing to say yes. Though she wasn’t fond of her mother’s severe daily schedule, she didn’t have the nerve to challenge it.

  Movie Saturday?

  Maybe. This she thought she could attempt. Maybe there was a way for her to escape the Saturday evening routine of listening to the radio after a long day of cleaning and mending, baking the bread for the coming week. She could always back out if she failed to convince her parents.

  Pick you up at 5:30.

  Okay.

  Okay?

  Let’s hope.

  * * *

  “Dad,” Emmy said the second her father walked through the door. It was Friday night, his most exhausted moment, but also the time at which he was the most agreeable. “I made Swiss steak for dinner. It’s still hot.” Christian Nelson gave his daughter a weak but warm smile. She’d raced home after school and pounded the scant pieces of round she could find into four small slabs of meat. The recipe called for green peppers, but onions and canned tomatoes were all Emmy had—that and the never-ending bounty of potatoes. The steaks had simmered for a full three hours and now were as tender as veal. She and Birdie had eaten egg-salad sandwiches, saving the meat for their father.

  “I’ve had a long day,” he said, and went to the kitchen sink to wash his grime-weathered hands. His sloped posture indicated that she wouldn’t have to prattle about her school or his work. Not that they had lengthy conversations on a typical day, even when it was just the two of them. Emmy had set the small kitchen table with a pretty cloth and had buttered the last of the week’s bread for her father to sop up the gravy. Karin wouldn’t be home from prayer circle for another hour, and Birdie was listening to Gunsmoke on the radio in the other room. This was Emmy’s moment. As her head began to buzz, she sat down across from her father and noted how small his blue eyes were set above his graying stubble. He was getting old, she couldn’t deny it—at least forty, probably older. The girls’ birthdays were marked without fanfare, and Emmy had no idea when her father was born. Reaching out to touch his hand, she tried to summon her will to ask permission for the movie, but a lump took over her throat and she tapped his knuckles lightly instead. He turned his hand over and caught hers before she could slip it away.

  “Why don’t you ever want anything?” he asked. Emmy stood and glanced through the open doorway at her sister, who seemingly hadn’t heard Christian’s question.

  “I do,” Emmy said, bringing Christian’s warm plate of food to the table and sitting back down. She hadn’t known she was allowed to want something, and his simple query sent her thoughts flying through a list of stanched desires, rolling up to the edge of wanting one thing very badly: to go to that movie.

  “You’re eighteen now, Emmy,” he replied without picking up his fork. “Your mother’s kept a tight rein on you, and I reckon that’s all right.” He paused and Emmy waited as he stared at her, hard. “You need to speak your mind.”

  Emmy cleared her throat, but a small gurgle came out when she tried to speak. She cleared it again. “Well, my friend, Bev Langer, is going to a movie tomorrow night—The Ten Commandments, the one with Charlton Heston?” she began, then stalled. He nodded for her to continue, so she took a deeper breath. “I was wondering if maybe … I could go with?” She exhaled. Picked at a stain on the tablecloth, making a mental note to rub some baking soda into it before washing it in the morning.

  Christian smiled slightly and continued eating. Emmy wondered what he might be thinking, if he was trying to come up with a way to square it with Karin, whether he’d wait the half hour until she came home to give an answer. Emmy forced herself to not look at either the clock or her Bulova, playing instead with the stretchy metal band as it pinched at the skin on her wrist. She focused all her energy on keeping her eyes on her father. She knew that if he looked up and met her gaze he would never say no.

  “I’d be back right after the movie,” Emmy offered, not sure how to read her father’s silence. “I can get all the chores done, I’ll get up extra early, and I can teach Birdie to help bake the bread.”

  “Movies cost money, Emmy,” Christian replied without looking up.

  “Bev said it would be her treat, for my birthday. Oh, please, can I go, please?” She sprang up from the table and went to the icebox to get a bottle of milk. Her birthday had just passed and, as usual, they had done nothing to mark it. Mentioning it to her father made her feel ungrateful, and her hand shook a little as she carefully poured half a glass, keeping the rest for the morning’s porridge. The price of milk had recently dropped and they needed to sell most of the farm’s production to keep things going. There was a time when they’d had so much fresh milk that Emmy couldn’t stand the sight of it, particularly the thick layer of cream that would float on the top of the pitcher and would have to be either scooped off or pierced to release the milk below. Now that it was dear, she licked her lips at the thought of the small glassful that she set in front of Christian. She hovered over his right shoulder, swaying with the keen excitement of having asked for something, feeling as though she didn’t deserve it. She shifted from foot to foot. Her father had fallen into a steady rhythm eating his meal, and not until the last drop of gravy had been cleaned from the plate, the final boiled potato speared and chewed, the bottom sip of milk consumed did he look directly at her.

  “I’ll want to meet this…”

  “Oh, thank you thank you thank you, yes, of course, I’ll have Bev come in before we go. Oh, you’re the best!” She hugged him so hard he choked and laughed, clasping her around the waist, then pushing her gently away.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay I can?” she asked, picking up a dishrag.

  “Okay I’ll ask your mother, but you’d better make sure the kitchen is clean. Don’t give her a reason to say no.”

  * * *

  Saturday broke with a distinct chill in the air. Emmy rose at five to get an early start on her chores. She hadn’t really slept at all with the potential excitement of an
evening away from the small house and its Saturday night airing of the Good News Broadcast on the radio and the smell of frying doughnuts in the kitchen. Sure, she’d gone out before, but not once without her parents and never to a function that wasn’t church sponsored. She had taken quite a chance asking this small liberty, and as she crept down the stairs she couldn’t still her pulse from throbbing at her temples.

  The kitchen light was on. Emmy slowed her step, clasped her hands together. She saw her mother standing at the sink, wrist deep in dark water.

  “Once the sun rises we’ll hang these out,” Karin said, pulling a long black dress from the murk and feeding it through the wringer of the white enamel washtub. Emmy took over the task without comment and found the dye bath to be as cold as the kitchen. These were her grandmother’s winter dresses, threadbare, heavy, and widow-worn. Usually they redyed and mended them in the spring before packing them away until the fall, a chore that could take many hours. Emmy didn’t dare ask why they were doing this now, in the dead of January, and instead tried to predict how much time sodden wool would need to dry in cold weather. She handed her mother another heavy dress, then crossed to the cupboard, drawing out the flour tin and proofing bowls. The kitchen would need to be warmer than this to properly raise the dough, but Emmy didn’t start the gas on the range until her mother told her to do so. Her plans began to slip away.

  The women worked in silence for more than an hour, dying, wringing, rinsing, wringing again, and then hanging the dresses on the clothesline behind their house, the thickly fleeced garments flapping and freezing in the cold wind. Emmy didn’t care what the neighbors might think about this solemn process, as their activities often were equally as odd. Old man Luders across the alley had filled his backyard so completely with junk he collected from garbage cans that he had created a maze only he could find his way through. Every day he would load a wheelbarrow full of items for sale, push it around the neighborhood and return not having sold anything but with a clearly increased pile of discards. No one ever saw Mrs. Luders, except for Karin when she would go over and pray with the old woman, who had grown so large that it was unthinkable for her to leave the house at all. There was also an assortment of farm animals to be found in the backyards around them, from laying hens to a couple of goats and even, she had heard but never seen, a milk cow. Having animals in proximity made Emmy miss the rhythm of the farm less, and she was happy to dispatch her chores to the merry crowing of a rooster a few yards away.

  The kitchen eventually warmed a few degrees due to the heat of the two women bent to their work. Karin took the brown crock of cultured yeast from the icebox and handed it to her daughter. Sometimes when Emmy was kneading the Herman mixture into dough she could sense her mother watching her, swelling a bit with the knowledge that she had taught Emmy well. These were the rare times she actually felt that her mother loved her, yet if Emmy ever looked at Karin directly in those moments, the glimmer of warmth would always be doused like a hand-trapped lightning bug brought too quickly into a bright room.

  At six Birdie and Christian appeared in the kitchen, just as Karin set the table with a platter of scrambled eggs and a pot of porridge. Eggs were the one food they always had plenty of, since the farm’s hens produced too many for Karin to sell to local grocers. The larger chicken farms down around Fergus Falls were beginning to undersell her in the new supermarkets and there were those who believed that when the new four-lane highway was built up to Moorhead, trucks would start bringing all sorts of things from farther and farther away. Progress, they called it, but for Emmy’s family it already foretold the opposite.

  “Oh, Mother,” Birdie said as she quickly ate her bowl of porridge, blowing on each steaming bite, “you’ll never guess what happened at choir this week.” Her sapphire-colored eyes held the kind of depth that Emmy imagined an ocean might contain; Birdie’s wavy hair was silky and more black than brown. She favored her father, even as their mother favored Birdie. “I was chosen to sing a solo for the spring concert!”

  “That is a good thing,” Christian said, considerably brighter after his night’s rest.

  “It’s God’s gift, Birdie, not yours. Remember that,” Karin said, punctuating her words with a sharp look at Christian. She got up from the table and began to clean up the breakfast dishes.

  “Yes, of course you’re right,” Birdie said, clearing her own bowl and washing it quickly at the sink, her shoulders slightly slumped as though she was trying not to cry. Emmy swallowed the last mouthful of eggs and went to her sister.

  “I’m proud of you,” Emmy whispered to Birdie. “I know how hard it must have been to stand up in front of all those kids and sing.”

  “Thanks,” Birdie said, her small smile of joy rekindling. “I thought I would die, right there.”

  “But you didn’t.” Emmy wrung out the dishrag and wiped down the oilcloth as Birdie and Christian pulled coats on over their coveralls, ready to head east to the work awaiting them on the farm. The Nelsons paid Maria Gonzales’s oldest son, Pedro, to help with the morning milking, but Christian took care of everything else—the weekly mucking, moving six day’s worth of corn silage from where it was packed into a hole dug in the ground to an old truck bed behind the shed, and whatever else Grandmother Nelson needed done. During the week, Emmy’s parents made the seven-mile trip every morning to do the milking before Christian went on to work at the sugar beet plant and Karin at the Glyndon school lunchroom, returning to the farm for evening chores and then home to eat whatever Emmy had made for dinner. Sometimes she wondered why they all worked so hard on a farm that wasn’t theirs, but then she would simply reason that the fifth commandment rang strongly in Christian, and until his mother was dead and buried he would expect his family to lean toward the homestead as obediently as he had for forty-some years. Karin herded him and Birdie to the kitchen door.

  “Have her home in time to go out with Emmy,” Karin said, pulling on a sweater and following them out into the yard.

  As the door closed with a jerked-up shudder, Emmy sank her hands into the lukewarm dishwater, calculating how long she could indulge her disappointment. She had figured her mother would find a way to polish the shine off her very first night out, but Emmy hadn’t considered this possibility, nor could she imagine asking Bev to pay for the extra ticket. Emmy didn’t even know whether there would be room in the car or who else was invited. Maybe Bev would think this presumptuous of Emmy and change her mind about their friendship. But hadn’t Bev already suggested that Birdie come? She was a good companion, and incapable of being disliked by anyone she met. At least Karin had said yes. Emmy picked up her pace with fresh energy. She was going out on the town on a Saturday night. So what if she wasn’t going solo—there were far worse chaperones than Birdie. Besides, Emmy secretly liked the way the girl looked up to her, even if at times Birdie seemed to forget that she was only fifteen, and not eighteen like Emmy.

  * * *

  At four that afternoon, Emmy set down the last of the dress mending and tapped a wet fingertip to the bottom of the iron. It sizzled. Her mother had finally given her a moment of peace, taking a pot of chicken broth down the street to Mrs. Lavold after a quick lunch of coffee with a slice of freshly baked bread. It was a ritual Emmy shared with her mother, to sit down in the middle of their housework and break the first loaf together—a ten-minute repast punctuated with a heavy sigh from Karin as she pressed herself up from the table and back into duty. Though Emmy could think of many things she wanted to share with her mother, it was hard to begin a conversation knowing that Karin wouldn’t sit still long enough to form an opinion. Today was no better than usual, and silence had once again ruled, pressing forward Emmy’s determination not to live like this, not be who her mother was. She would talk to her children, not be a shadow in her own house, cooling the rooms with her presence, giving herself so completely to God that she couldn’t see His creatures around her.

  Emmy shook her head, attempting to clear her thoughts and quell
the burst of nervous energy that always accompanied her cup of afternoon coffee as she ironed the pile of dresses.

  “I wonder if we’ll get popcorn,” she said aloud, startling herself. She’d been to the pictures only a handful of times, and there was never money for treats or snacks. They had once, a long time ago, gone to see a movie called The Robe at the Fargo Theatre and there was a popcorn vendor on the sidewalk outside as well as a candy counter inside. The proximity of the forbidden treat had been endless torture for Emmy, who knew better than to ask for a penny to buy a bag, and now these many years later she could not remember the details of the movie but she could still almost smell the popcorn.

  As she worked the heavy iron, steam rose out of the cloth and warmed her through for the first time that long, cold day. She looked around the tiny living room, which was the only space large enough to set up the ironing board, and wondered why her parents couldn’t have moved them into a slightly larger house, if they were bothering to move them at all. She had learned not to complain, though, as Karin would only conjure stories of her own childhood and how they had lived little better than the sodbusters before them. There was never a hint of fondness when she told these tales, and whenever Birdie or Emmy would sigh over the coldness of the house, Karin was quick to remind them that they could have scant heat or no indoor water whatsoever. She also told them about using rags for personal hygiene or putting milk and meat in pails down the cistern in the summer to keep them from spoiling. But through these tales, Emmy learned very little about Karin’s family, beyond the somewhat surprising mentions of a deceased mother and drunken father. There might have been other children, but Karin never spoke of them. Eventually the girls preferred to meet their small disappointments with silent forbearance, rather than be told the same three stories that no matter how hard they pressed, never revealed Karin’s interior.

  Tithing took part of their family income, and certainly all the missions that her mother supported with small change here and there didn’t help their situation. But where did the rest go? Not to this shabby furniture and cold bare linoleum floors. There was a small rag rug in the middle of the room, woven from old clothes and dishcloths; Emmy recognized a sliver of brown- and yellow-flecked calico from a play dress she wore as a girl. She missed the warmth of her grandmother’s farmhouse and the respite it had provided her on cold winter days after school, doing her homework in the kitchen before her mother would come home and, after supper, take them all back into the shack that was hardly an improvement over Karin’s own childhood home.