Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  Just a family, heading home, through the frozen dark.

  I unlock the doors of the van and the boys climb inside, pulling their shopping bags in with them. Owen hands me a few dollar bills and some coins, then turns to face the backseat.

  “Tell her,” he says to his brothers.

  No response.

  “Tell her!” Owen says again.

  “We got cookies,” Luke confesses.

  “Two bags,” Will adds. “Oreos.”

  “I told them they weren’t on the list,” Owen says to me, apologetic.

  The car goes silent, waiting for my reaction. We don’t buy store-bought cookies. If the boys want cookies, they have to do the work of making them from scratch. Peanut butter chocolate chip usually, with fork marks across the top, like paw prints.

  “Cookies are cool,” I say in my very best Beavis voice. The boys all laugh. A laugh of silliness, but a laugh of relief, too. “Please hand me one, somebody, before I die of starvation.”

  “Heh-heh—heh-heh-heh,” comes the trio’s reply.

  They are all the help I need. And I feel a little bit better just thinking this thought. We pass no one on the drive back, and eat sugary store-bought cookies in the cold dark together as our minivan shoots home like a glittering missile.

  We are okay, we are fine. I am fine. Mothers are mothers again and children are children. And it feels like there’s no one but the four of us in the world.

  8

  February 2006

  HUNGER MOON

  Awake at last, the body begins to crave,

  not salads, not crisp apples and sweet kiwis,

  but haunches of beef and thick fatty stews.

  Eat, whispers the crone in the bone, eat.

  The hunger moon is grinning like a skull.

  —MARGE PIERCY, “The Hunger Moon”

  The groceries don’t last. The carrots packed in sawdust don’t last. Our firewood doesn’t last. Our money certainly doesn’t last, either. As if I needed any further proof that we are scraping bottom, I’m making Will’s sack lunch for school and have to mine the sides of the peanut butter jar just to get enough of the stuff to make him half a sandwich.

  I hold up the spoon and stare at this glob of caramel-colored paste, looking for a sign. A week ago, our newspaper ran an interview with an Ohio man who said he saw the face of Jesus in his pancake. I don’t see anything in our last spoonful of extra-crunchy, though.

  Even if there were something (or Someone) there, would my cynical brain even allow my heart to see it?

  The boys didn’t get sick but I’m still reeling a little from the flu. Still, we went to a tiny church last Sunday just down the road. Will read the sign on the door and announced this sudden realization: a god and a prince are one and the same. I smiled, thinking how meaningful it was going to be to pray alongside people from our own neighborhood and in the denomination—Lutheran—that I was raised within.

  But instead of a friendly welcome, the Prince of Peace just barred me from taking communion, and right after an usher passed around the collection plate, too. Unless visitors would pledge membership on the spot, no wine and no wafer. This place didn’t feel like our church home after all, it felt more like the rural branch of a stodgy old bank. And our souls just got bounced.

  “But Mom, that was just a piece of the Prince,” Will suggests, wincing at my loud tirade over religious dogma that I miraculously managed to stifle until the car ride home. “Now we just need to find the rest of him.”

  At least one of us might be learning something valuable—forgiveness—on our continuing spiritual quest. I guess it shouldn’t matter if it’s not always me.

  That plain old peanut butter jar probably divines our fortunes better than church rules or a hokey spiritual sign, anyway. And there is a reason the jar was empty. My grocery bill just went back up, because last week we suffered a loss.

  “What’s that smell?” Owen had asked, the first one home from school.

  “What smell?” My head was still congested, and so I didn’t smell anything.

  “Like rotten flowers or something. I think it’s coming from the basement.”

  It was.

  While I was sick with that awful flu, the Big Valley lost power when a thick bludgeon of ice built up on a nearby power line. The electricity was out for only a few hours, not even long enough for what little food we had in our refrigerator to go bad, but long enough for our ancient chest freezer in the basement to die. When the power went back on, it didn’t.

  In the past two weeks I’ve been getting stronger and getting my appetite back, but meat is the last thing I’ve wanted to eat, and it’s been vegetables and brown rice, farmer’s omelets and peanut butter toast. I can’t eat any pork yet, I can’t even stomach cooking it for the boys, so I’ve had no reason to go downstairs and lift the lid on the chest freezer.

  Until now. Until the smell.

  Owen and I approach the white coffin-shaped box with dread, open the top, and are blown back by the sweet, gagging stink of rotting pork. We look down, but it’s too late. A pinkish meat Kool-Aid has leaked out under the freezer and pooled. We’re standing in it.

  “Okay, that’s about the grossest thing I’ve ever seen,” Owen says, holding his hand over his face and race-walking for the stairs. This from the politically aware vegetarian who has watched the most graphic animal-rights videos available on the Internet and has somehow still remained emotionally sound. The smell of rancid pig juice is too much for him, though, and he exits quick.

  I am not a crier. I will not cry. I didn’t cry over our cold house, I didn’t cry when I had the flu, and I didn’t even cry when Rocky was offed. I haven’t cried since Christmas Eve when I thought we weren’t going to have a tree, and I will not cry over spilled meat, either.

  What I feel isn’t sadness, anyway, but shame—the shame of all that waste.

  Some of the meat from our pig we already ate, but the rest was supposed to last us all winter, and now it’s spoiled. I can’t vouch for the other supplies that were sharing the freezer with him, either. Not the meat I’ve bought on sale at the grocery store, not some of the frozen vegetables from our garden, not the big slab of venison from my brother’s deer-hunting prowess. That’s all bad now, too.

  What are we going to do for food? I don’t know. How many times in one year can a mother say “I will think of something” and actually pull that off all by herself? I guess we are going to find out.

  There is still the side-by-side refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen, and the freezer half is packed with the rest of the vegetables from the garden. There is still credit left on the bakery card, and what I’ve canned and stored in the root cellar. But there aren’t going to be any more ham dinners. There’s not going to be any more bacon or pork chops.

  I think of Rocky in his pen, and it feels like his death was for nothing now.

  We still have half our zucchini winnings, so at least we have plenty of bread. But with all our meat gone I have to spend more at the grocery store again. On peanut butter, but on a lot of other sources of protein too, and I am drawn to the two-for-ones, the day-old, the nearly expired, and to that lonely shopping cart of discontinued and dented cans my local grocery store seems to park, for some sadistic reason, in the same aisle as the four-dollar imported spring water from Fiji. Who actually buys that stuff? I almost want to stake out the aisle to find out.

  Instead, I paw through the discount cart weekly like a badger at a rotted log. What can you make with two dented cans of sock-eye salmon? Believe me, you’ll think of something when they’re only twenty-nine cents each.

  The boys learn to approach our dinner table with trepidation, not knowing if they’ll be greeted with chipped beef on toast, salmon puffs (a recipe handed down from my grandma Hain, who had her own penny-saving culinary strategies), fried tofu, or oyster soup. So far, I haven’t tried to make Emergency Steak, but the oyster soup, made from a recipe I find in the newspaper, is just as bad.

&n
bsp; I prepare it according to the instructions and ladle the thin gruel into bowls for dinner, but we all just look at it, transfixed, as if peering at an aquarium exhibit gone wrong. What we see is a half-dozen sickly gray bivalves that seem shocked to find themselves stripped of their shells and floating in a milky sea contaminated at the surface with a buttery yellow scum.

  “Are those baby clams from Big Grandpa’s lake?” Luke wonders out loud.

  Eventually, the whole pot is upended over the compost pile. I sit in my chair and watch out the window. Seagulls, and not crows, are sighted that evening, perched atop the volcano-shaped pile, pecking away at the oyster-stew lava. I call Owen over to the window to watch them with me.

  “They really will eat anything, won’t they?” he says, amazed.

  With our dwindling rations, we probably should have eaten it. Instead, we have microwave popcorn, apples, and of course peanut butter. For dinner. On a Sunday.

  I think of the Sunday dinners my mother and my grandmothers used to cook when I was my sons’ ages. Pot roast, baked ham with scalloped potatoes, chicken pot pie, fried bluegills and homemade coleslaw, barbequed chicken. On my kitchen counter is a recipe box with all these family recipes inside and more. My mother’s seafood casserole and her Impossible Brunch Pie, my grandma Link’s fried chicken, my grandma Hain’s bluegill recipe. I have the kitchen skill to make any of these boy-satiating dishes, just not the money. That broken freezer is going to haunt us for months.

  Lunches for the week are going to be problematic too, I can tell, both by the empty peanut butter jar and by the wide-open spaces in the cupboards. Behind their closed doors, it’s like an open range in there. Checking my work with Finding Utopia, and from the freelance writing assignments I’ve turned in recently, I know that I will not bring in a paycheck for two weeks.

  So that’s it, then. It has to be done.

  The next morning after Owen and Luke get on the bus for school, I sweep fresh snow off my van with a broom and drive Will to his elementary school. Instead of just dropping him off at the front door I park and walk him inside. We separate in the lobby and he heads to his third-grade classroom with a tossed-off “See ya” (I am recently forbidden to hug him in public) and I head to the school office.

  On my list of favorite people, the school secretary falls somewhere south of Nurse Ratched. I have it on good authority that she frightens the new principal. Get a nosebleed, a tardy, or forget your gym shoes and prepare for isolation therapy.

  Every single time I’ve been in the school office there’s been a kid sitting in an orange plastic chair in a small room five feet from the school secretary’s desk, crying softly, or holding a bloody tissue to his or her nose, or both. No one is allowed to speak to or look at this kid. At least, that’s the vibe communicated to lowly moms like me by Nurse Ratched’s raised and frosted eyebrow.

  And this is the woman I have come before today in an attempt to ease my grocery budget shortfall. After standing at the counter that separates her desk from the outside world for what feels like the time it takes to make a transcontinental flight I almost bloody my own nose and go sit in the orange chair—strangely vacant—myself before she finally acknowledges me.

  “Yessss?”

  Several years from now she will get divorced and morph into a decent person in a transformation as complete as the one the Incredible Hulk undergoes when he loses his green-veined muscles and his bad attitude, prompting many moms to nod their heads in understanding, me included. At this moment, though, with the task at hand, that bit of personal growth is unforeseen.

  “I’d like an application for the free and reduced lunch program, please,” I tell her.

  This gets her attention. Am I secretly miked? Because I swear my voice sounds like it was just broadcast over the school PA system. Is the principal’s office door really open, and do I really see her peek her head out and back like a seesaw? Are the children in coats and snow pants holding the folded flag they are about to raise outside at the pole really staring? At me? In the sage words of Henry Kissinger, even the paranoid have enemies.

  Approval for the free lunches is not, I know, going to be a problem. Standing here asking for the application is the problem. My pride is the problem.

  According to the Friend of the Court, which monitors the well-being of children of divorced parents in Grand Traverse County and points us in the direction of help, I now qualify for Federal Food Assistance Programs, the Child Care and Development Fund, Medicaid, the Home Heating Credit, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, the Weatherization Assistance Program, free venison from Hunters for the Hungry, and even government cheese.

  I have applied for none of it. I have told myself that these programs are for other people. For other families. They are for the really poor families, the ones who live in the trailers and campers. The ones who keep their dogs tied on chains and don’t brush their kids’ hair and have rusty roll bars on their trucks and broken refrigerators on their front porches. Not, in other words, for me. Not for us.

  This is the same way I felt about divorce once. It was for other troubled couples, not for Mr. Wonderful and me.

  “Excuse me?” the school secretary says, interested now and pushing her long frosted hair behind her ears. So she can hear me better, I surmise, just in case I grovel.

  “Reduced—lunch—application,” I say, through teeth gritted behind a forced smile.

  “Oh, certainly.” She passes the fluorescent form (a color that matches the bloody-nose chair and seems to scream “failure”) across the counter to me. “Is this for you? Because it has to be filled out by the person who is applying for the assistance. You can’t fill it out for someone else.”

  I don’t answer, but just put my wool gloves back on, take the form, and go. I fill it out at home and make two copies and mail them in to each of the boys’ schools, direct to the principals, bypassing (I hope) Nurse Ratched and her ilk. A week later, all three boys are on the typed list of poor kids that I imagine each lunch lady has laminated and highlighted, hanging next to their cash register.

  This, I tell myself, is only temporary. Just like all the rest of our money problems—the late fees, the pre-pre-foreclosure notice I pulled out of the mailbox today, the empty refrigerator, and my recurring night terrors. All temporary, just quick-fix patches to get us through until I can figure out a real solution.

  If this is supposed to be the universe’s way of teaching me nonattachment, it’s not working. And if everything in life really is only temporary, why are our money problems starting to feel like such a permanent condition?

  Three days after Valentine’s Day I wake up early, get my usual 5 a.m. school-day start going, make the coffee, and plan out my day. Good news: as soon as the kids get off to school this morning, I actually have some work to turn in and some receivables to collect, some paychecks to cash. I also have bills to pay, so this money won’t take my sons off the cafeteria dole just yet, but it’s a start.

  The coffee trickles down and I take a long look outside, waiting for my caffeine infusion. It’s as dark as a buzzard’s eyeball out there, but snowdrifts reflect light from the waning moon, and I can see just enough to make my heart beat hard, like I just took a snowball to the chest.

  This bang inside my rib cage is followed by a perfectly timed retort from above: thundersnow.

  Of course. On the one day I really, really need to be mobile, we’re snowed in.

  Thundersnow is a meteorological novelty virtually unknown outside of the Great Lakes. In this twist on the traditional thunderstorm there is still plenty of thunder and lightning, but snow falls instead of rain and functions much like the silencer on a gun. A blizzard of heavy flakes packs the unsettled air and concentrates the storm’s atmospheric booms into a small area, intensifying them. This one feels like the Big Valley’s own personal storm, whipped up by Thor, the devil, or fate, take your pick, just for us.

  Yesterday’s forecast included a winter storm warning, but forecasts
like that are about as common as ice shanties up here, so I didn’t pay much attention. Now the radio announcer says that an overnight blizzard is still blowing, dozens of school districts are closed, including Grand Traverse Public, and we’ve got two feet of new snow on the ground, some that fell, some that the wind just drifted.

  Lightning flickers and I catch glimpses of what I know is out there, but dread just the same: our impassable driveway.

  I do the figuring in my head. One hundred feet long by ten feet wide by three feet deep if you include the foot of packed snow that was already there when I went to bed last night. Plus work to deliver and a paycheck that’s out there just waiting for me in a nice warm office downtown. All that equals three thousand cubic feet of snow the boys and I have to shovel.

  Everywhere in northern Michigan this morning there are schoolchildren, snowmobile dealers, ski-resort owners, and plow-truck drivers clicking their heels together for joy. Everywhere, that is, but here.

  I used to love winter. I used to take pride in my ability to withstand the cold. I know how to tuck in and layer. I know how to snowshoe, ice-skate, cross-country-ski, and how to carve around moguls on black-diamond ski hills: activities that took hours and hours of winter days to learn.

  But that was when I had parents who took my brother and me on ski vacations and kept a warm house for us to return to, or when I lived in a college dorm with central heating and a maintenance crew, or when Mr. Wonderful and I could afford to heat our house and hire a plowing service.

  Today, I feel more like Sir Ernest Shackleton than a snow bunny, and I just wonder how I’m going to get off my property. Because the Big Valley might as well be that explorer’s doomed ship trapped in pack ice, frozen to this spot, all of us stuck inside and waiting to be crushed.