Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  Luke looks over his shoulder and out the back window. “Whoa,” he says, impressed with his little brother’s score in spite of himself. “The mother lode.”

  We are stopped on a curve in the road. A curve that must have been too much arc for at least one truck that came through here recently, overloaded with firewood.

  “Unbuckle,” I tell Luke. “He can’t carry all that by himself. Owen, you too.”

  So far on today’s excursion, Owen has been incommunicado, his iPod functioning much like an invisibility cloak.

  “What about you?” Owen asks.

  Good question. What about me? And soon all four of us are stooping over the stray logs like a murder of crows at a fresh roadkill banquet. I guess I am no longer above jumping out of the van myself and picking up unclaimed firewood. I guess I am not too proud to log-pick after all.

  For a moment then I see my family as a stranger driving past might see us through his car window. We are a tall, blond woman in a thin pink Goodwill sweatshirt that bears the slogan “Barbie Dumped Ken” in white stitched-on script. The dark roots in her hair have grown out too far—poverty or carelessness or both, but certainly not a fashion trend.

  She loads her arms up with firewood, stacks it high until she’s holding the top log in place with her chin. Her eyes are wide; the whites big like a scared dog. This drive-by stranger couldn’t know that she’s scanning the top log for wolf spiders. But they couldn’t miss seeing that she is accompanied by three boys.

  The smallest boy has a runny nose and his coat is unzipped. He has to run to keep up with the woman, which he does. This is an almost impossible task, since he is little and since he carries a big log under each arm, but somehow he manages.

  The middle boy stays back at the pile and loads logs into the outstretched arms of the biggest boy. This middle boy is wearing a black hat, black T-shirt, and black gloves with holes in some of the fingers. There’s a quilted camouflage vest, too big for him, snapped up over the T-shirt. He’s thin enough to be called skinny, and yet there are wiry muscles in his bare arms.

  Once the biggest boy has taken on the largest load of logs, he walks with purpose toward the minivan, chin up, an intense gaze focused straight ahead. He’s appropriated all the accoutrements of a teenager: longish hair, acne, braces, an iPod, and an aura of mortification, imprisoned as he is by his present company.

  One by one this foursome heaves their load into the back of a minivan, the biggest boy taking the time to steal a look around before he disappears inside. The woman and the little boy follow, but the middle boy adjusts the wood, shuts the van’s rear door, and is the last one to pull his own door closed. Then these vagabonds drive away, spewing gravel from bald back tires.

  This is us. This is what we look like.

  There is an old saying favored by people who live in cold climates and deem wood the superior heating source over all the others—fuel oil, electric, propane, even natural gas—because it is the only one of these that heats you twice: once when you cut it and again when you burn it.

  This is a truism even when you don’t actually cut the wood yourself. I know this because my face is flushed hot and I’m all heated up inside just thinking about us there, out in the open, on the side of the road.

  6

  December 2005

  LONG NIGHTS MOON

  … On some hill of despair

  the bonfire

  you kindle can light the great sky—

  though it’s true, of course, to make it burn

  you have to throw yourself in …

  —GALWAY KINNELL, “Another Night in the Ruins”

  “I just don’t know how you do it,” my mother says from the other end of the telephone, from the other end of the solar system.

  This is my opening. This is my chance to tell her how broke we are and how scared I am. My chance to tell her that the house is so cold in the mornings now when I wake the boys up for school that there is ice on the insides of their bedroom windows.

  My chance to tell her that even though I’ve put plastic over every creaking pane to keep the wind from rattling through, this ice is still advancing. It’s growing day by day like some rare and frosty algae able to thrive, so very unlike us mere humans, even this far north.

  This is my chance to tell her that our refrigerator is always close to empty and that we’re quickly going through our pig and what I’ve been able to freeze from the garden.

  This is my chance to say that I’m not doing it at all, Mom. Not even close.

  This is my chance to ask for help.

  “We’re good, we’re fine,” I hear myself lie. “But—and pardon my French—the laundry is kicking my ass.”

  We both laugh at this shared domestic foible. Three active boys in the country can generate black wood-char stains and sweat-soaked socks that, if you’re not careful, will burn the motor right out of the Maytag you received two decades ago as a wedding present.

  Still, laundry is a safe topic. A constant struggle fought by women the world over, but one no more dire than dirty floors or dusty furniture.

  “You could have the boys help you with that,” she chides. “You don’t always have to do everything yourself.”

  Yes I do. If there was a mantra in my childhood it was a single word: “accountability.” Links might not be flashy, might not be trendy, might drive used cars and wear last year’s coats and choose economy over luxury at every opportunity, but Links keep their promises. They show up on time, do their homework, come prepared, get the job done right, and don’t complain. Links do not default on their duty, whether it’s taking the rag your father hands you on a Saturday morning and rubbing every speck of road tar off his brown Oldsmobile’s grille or keeping your adult life solvent. And I am a Link—even marriage didn’t change that.

  I wanted this house when we could have stayed put in the little bi-level we could afford. I wanted three kids when we could have stopped at two. I wanted the divorce. Me. I made this bed and I’ll either lie in it or die in it, but I won’t ask anyone for help.

  My mother cannot fathom my life now, anyway. Partly because she has no experience with this kind of instability, but mostly because I won’t let her.

  Laundry, though, is something we have in common. This was one of my chores as a girl. Not washing it—my mother always did that—but folding it and separating it into piles so my brother, Ben, could carry it upstairs.

  After school I’d sit on our yellow beanbag chair in the family room, fold the laundry warm from the dryer, and watch reruns of I Love Lucy. Sometimes my mother would set up the ironing board for the sheets and pillowcases and my dad’s shirts and watch the show with me while she ironed.

  We worked together on the chore back then, so it’s no surprise that she’s reminding me, now that I am a mother too, that I don’t have to do it all by myself.

  “I know,” I say. “You’re right.”

  I don’t tell her how much the boys already do help me. I don’t tell her they help me gather and chop firewood; that Owen and Luke help build fires in the fireplace; that the boys are the ones who hold the plastic tight to their bedroom windows while I seal it to the wood-frame moldings with my hair dryer, trying to contain the ice.

  I don’t tell her Owen helps by carrying armloads of squash up from the basement when he would rather be with his friends playing music, or that he researches cheap vegetarian recipes on the Internet and often helps me prepare them, too.

  I don’t tell her that all three boys help me just by not complaining. Not about their school clothes purchased from the same place I abandoned my wedding dress—Goodwill; not about running out of lunch money in line at the school cafeteria; not about wearing hand-me-down shoes from a friend who also has boys; not about sleeping every night under a pile of mismatched blankets because the thin comforters they picked out to match their rooms a year ago aren’t warm enough now.

  I don’t tell her that my sons exhibit none of the misbehavior and arguing commo
n to most boys and most brothers, because they don’t have the time to argue with me or the energy to fight with each other.

  I don’t tell her that I don’t know how I am going to buy Christmas presents for my sons and for the rest of my family or pay the mortgage this month—the mortgage on the house that she and my father both urged me to sell. I don’t tell her that the $3,000 they loaned me to pay my attorney isn’t enough, that I’ve already burned through every penny of it and now owe hundreds more, and that the billable hours continue to accumulate, because the divorce hearing isn’t until March.

  I don’t tell her that I still dream about Major most nights and wake up when I think I hear brakes screeching and a horse screaming, only to find that this nightmare, while real, is months old, and our house is actually quiet and dark, and my barn is empty and cold.

  I don’t tell her that her daughter is the kind of woman who misses a horse she owned for two years more than she misses a man she was married to for almost twenty.

  “What do you and the boys want for Christmas?” she asks.

  “They could use electric blankets,” I say, “and flannel pajamas.”

  We talk for a few more minutes. Most of our conversations don’t last long, because she is a doer, not a talker, and doesn’t like to waste time on the phone. We make plans to celebrate a family Christmas together at my parents’ house before the actual holiday, so that Ben, who is also divorced, and his daughter, who lives with her mother, can be there with us, too.

  I don’t tell her what I want for Christmas, because even my parents, as capable and loving and solid as they are, can’t fix what I’ve got going on here with a present. With a hundred presents—even ones beautifully wrapped by my mother.

  Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, but we drive down the Wednesday before and spend one night. Ben greets me at the doorway, and I hug him hard. There is a tall birch branch in my parents’ dining room that my mother cut, spray-painted, and decorated with a partridge made out of real feathers sitting in the center of it surrounded by twinkling lights. It is lovely and looks like something out of a magazine.

  In the family room, the same room where I once watched Lucy laugh her way through motherhood and wifehood and figured that this would be what my adult life would be like one day, is a traditional tree decorated with woodland ornaments and encircled at the base with presents wrapped in gold paper and decorated with sparkling silver ribbons. Hanging above the fireplace there’s a colorful felt banner that my mother sewed of a partridge sitting on a three-dimensional wreath made of stitched felt pears and leaves.

  There’s a fire in the fireplace. The house smells like turkey dinner and pie, and my mouth waters.

  The next afternoon the boys get electric blankets and new pajamas and generous donations to their college stock accounts. As they’re opening their presents, my mother smiles conspiratorially at me, reaches behind the Christmas tree, and brings out a cardboard box so large she can barely carry it. My dad is grinning, so he must know what it is, too. The box is open at the top, but a huge silver bow glistens there, obscuring what’s inside until my mother sets it down right in front of me and I peer inside.

  I see two large boxes of laundry detergent, the expensive brand, along with packages of paper towels, napkins, dish soap, dishwasher soap, colorful dishrags and dish towels that match my kitchen.

  My mother sits across from me, her hands in her lap, looking pleased with herself for thinking up this practical gift that is also a reminder of our shared role in life as mothers, of our recent telephone conversation, and maybe, though this could be reaching, of my efforts to clean out my life.

  Because I’ve told her that dirt is my biggest problem, she believes me. Not only believes me, but comes up with the supplies to solve it, at least temporarily. And even presents these supplies to me wrapped, literally, with a bow. I laugh and say thank you to my parents and really mean it. Even though it will not scrub the worry from my mind.

  Because while the boys and I are here at my parents’ visiting, a real-estate appraiser is creeping around the outside of our house and around our property, taking notes and making measurements. His report on the dollar value of the Big Valley will seal the financial part of the divorce.

  “Keep your dobbers up!” my dad tells me, after all the presents are opened and we are packing up. He hugs first the boys and then me goodbye. I hug him back for a long time, and my mother, too. The boys will sleep warm tonight back at home, and will at least have clean pajamas, clean sheets, a clean house. All because of the kindness of my parents.

  As the boys and I get situated in the minivan, my parents stand in their driveway, married now almost fifty years but still with their arms around each other’s waists. My mother likes to say that the first time she saw my father, from a second-floor window of her sorority house, she said to her roommate, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” I can’t remember having any such moment with Mr. Wonderful, and so her story has always sounded to me like something out of a fairy tale. As I look at my parents now, though, standing there smiling and so tight together, it feels real.

  What, I wonder, might they be able to do for us if I could bear to tell them the truth?

  We won’t ever know, because I plaster a smile on my face, and the boys and the dogs and I drive away from the warm house I grew up in, away from my parents’ tidy subdivision, away from Country Estates, and I aim the van for home. The Big Valley, and our messy lives, await.

  The next morning, the day before Christmas Eve, the boys and I embark on a housecleaning adventure. This is a hazardous trek that takes us deep into the long-unexplored wilderness underneath living-room furniture and behind large appliances. It is an excursion that provides us with the rare opportunity to see things previously unimagined by the human mind: half a dusty cinnamon roll, pebbles of moldy dog kibble, and a faded and wrinkled copy of Rolling Stone magazine with Britney Spears in her underwear on the cover.

  Without shame or embarrassment Will admits to ditching the cinnamon roll. He says he ate half, discovered the raisins, got grossed out, knows how I feel about wasting food, and so hid the evidence of said waste under the couch. Good enough.

  But when I wave the crumpled magazine in the air, daring someone to claim it, the suspects all seize up. No one will cop to stashing Britney in the same place half-eaten cinnamon rolls go to die, and there’s nothing to do but continue onward and scrub some more.

  The only actual wildlife we find on this slog through our increasingly cleaner house is small game that’s already dead. A mouse is spread-eagled, dried flat and preserved like snakeskin on the coils behind our refrigerator. Luke is the only one who can stomach prying it off.

  “Someone finally built a better mousetrap,” he says. “It’s called a refrigerator.”

  I stand on a chair and wash walls, then dispatch the rest of the wet jobs—toilet scrubbing, sink scrubbing, mopping, mirrors—and the boys hunt down the dry ones: dusting, rug shaking, and vacuuming. Together we clean the grime from every doorknob, light switch, and stair railing. I do laundry with my newly gifted box of detergent while they clean their rooms.

  Housework is not my best skill, and so this ceiling-to-floor scrubbing is long overdue. It makes the place smell great, though, like a pine forest, but it also accomplishes something else. There’s now a big empty corner across from the fireplace and next to our still-unfinished stairway without a single molecule of dust, cobwebs, or dog slobber anywhere. This corner is close to an electrical outlet, which is also clean, and bordered by pale yellow walls I just scrubbed. I stand back and look at it, filling the space with my mind.

  I see tiny colored lights, I see tinsel, I see ornaments. Because this is where we would usually have put up our Christmas tree by now.

  The realization makes tears shoot straight from my eyes like ammonia from a spray bottle and burn just as bad. Christmas is in two days, and this is the first time I’ve even thought about a tree. The boys must have wondered why we don�
�t have one up yet, especially after seeing the spectacular one at their grandparents’ house, but they haven’t asked me about it. Not once.

  I can’t believe I’m crying over this, but I am. And these tears say, I am a failure. A failure at life, a failure at single motherhood, and, maybe worst of all, at least right now, a failure at Christmas.

  I can’t replicate the mythic Christmas trees of my childhood, or, now that I really think about it, of their childhoods, either.

  There’s no stopping my pity party now, and the tears turn to sobs. I don’t have the money to buy a great big tree, or the strength or sharp saw to cut one down myself. Which is a moot point since we don’t have much to decorate one with, anyway. When we divided up our winter things, Mr. Wonderful got half our ornaments. And our Christmas tree stand. At least, I think that’s what happened to it. Maybe it got lost. But who loses their Christmas tree stand? Who is that irresponsible? It doesn’t really matter, because either way, it’s gone.

  “It’s not that bad, Mom,” Owen says, shutting off the vacuum cleaner and staring at me as if I were about to dissolve. “We’re almost done. You don’t have to empty the garbage. Really. I’ll do it.”

  Without the blare of the vacuum cleaner his brothers hear me crying and, dust rags in hand, come into the living room to investigate.

  “We need a Christmas tree, you guys,” I blubber.

  “What’s so sad about that?” Will asks.

  I wipe my face with a paper towel, then blow my nose on it. Owen, bless his nearly grown-up heart, sees that I am a breath away from crying again and answers for me.

  “Moms are just like that, okay?” he explains to Will. “They get all emotional over Christmas. Because they … love it so much.”