I remember the exact moment when I fell in love with Marilyn, not as my dad’s wife, but as a separate individual that I’m lucky to have in my life. We were shopping for shoes somewhere on Michigan Avenue—Nordstrom or Bloomingdale’s. The salesman unwrapped boxes and sat across from us. “Where are you from?” he asked Mare.
“Alaska,” she said.
“Ha!” he said. “Sarah Palin!”
I am not Alaskan. I cannot and do not speak for Alaskans and Lord knows I’m no fan of their former governor, but: Dear Lower Forty-Eight: That shit’s getting old.
Marilyn smiled. This was not her first rodeo. “Are you from Illinois?” she asked the salesman.
“Chicago, born and raised,” he said.
“Remind me: how many of your governors are in jail?”
Four—out of the past seven. Plus thirty aldermen and some fifteen hundred others—that’s not a typo, fifteen hundred—convicted in the past forty years of bribery, extortion, tax fraud, embezzlement.* It was early 2009, immediately following the presidential election, and Marilyn and I had been talking about politics. We talk about politics a lot: abortion, education, gun control. To say that I am left and she is right is incorrect and oversimplifies us both, so I’ll leave it at this: even though we see some things differently, it always feels like I’ve learned from her as opposed to fighting her. In our country’s current mess of a political discourse, I walk away from our conversations thinking, It’s possible. She’s patient. She listens. She loves my dad and she loves my son and on the phone that day, her husband on a helicopter and scared out of her mind, she pretended I didn’t swear. She knew I needed to say it.
Maybe she needed to hear it.
“I’ll come,” I said, reaching for my laptop. How fast we hit autopilot: call your boss, call your babysitter, book your flight.
“Talk to your dad first,” she said, explaining that he’d call me before they took him into surgery. Like most Alaskans, she’s pragmatic: flights are expensive, travel is complicated, worry when the time comes. I am a midwesterner: we worry always about everything. I paced my living room, waiting for the phone to ring and imagining the worst. I knew Dad had been at moose camp, my uncle Chuck’s setup on the mainland, but I’d never been there. In the absence of information, we substitute what we already know, so I pictured my dad on Barometer Mountain on Kodiak, its two-thousand-some elevation gain spread with wildflowers and ridiculously amazing views. He’s wearing camo overalls, 7mm rifle at the ready, eye on something four-legged, almost has it, almost there, and then—a sort of tingle, like firefly wings on the inside of your skin, running up his arms, down across his chest, circling around his heart like a washcloth in a fist, squeezing tighter, tighter, body locked, and all you can see is sky. Look up: the ceiling is all clouds. So white. So close. The inside of your skin.
Chuck and my brother, Thomas, were there to help. The clinic in Glennallen sent him by medevac to the hospital in Anchorage.
Again.
For surgery.
Again.
* * *
My third dissection was a bust. I got out the knife. I got out the cutting board. I got out the charts I’d printed from the Internet and reached for my heart.
I don’t know about your freezer, but ours is a god-awful mess. My dad brings us fifty-pound boxes of vacuum-sealed fish and steaks wrapped in butcher paper, and then stands in front of the open top freezer of our city-apartment-size fridge, perplexed. He forgets that we don’t have a second chest freezer in the basement or the garage. He forgets that we don’t have a basement or a garage. Then he gets this very determined look on his face like: Dammit they’re my kids. I have to help them. And then he takes everything out of our freezer and puts it all back in with great strategy and expertise, like how secret agents in the movies build bombs inside suitcases. The result is a hundred-pound wall of meat intricately stacked inside 6.08 cubic feet, and everything else is jammed in the inside of the freezer door.
What happens next is life. You pull out one salmon filet and the stack comes crashing down. You make juice popsicles that spill before they freeze. The cap to the vodka doesn’t get screwed on all the way. Ziploc bags don’t get zipped. Opened bags of frozen peas upturn. Food goes bad. There are . . . smells, and somebody starts collecting animal hearts for reasons not yet understood.
That is the freezer I expected to see.
What I saw instead was very clean, bleached white, organized, and nearly empty: two ice cube trays. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s (flavor: Americone Dream). A neat, small stack of fish. A neat, small stack of steak. No hearts.
I texted my husband. Who else would’ve been in the freezer?
Where is my heart?
A beat or two passed.
?
The deer heart. That Dad sent.
oh i cleaned the fridge
He texted in all lowercase, sans punctuation.
I see that. Where is my heart???
I used three question marks so he’d know I meant business.
He texted back with five.
?????
The conversation overlapped, thumbs flying.
THE DEER HEART.
i threw out a ton of stuff
IN A ZIPLOC.
it was going bad, freezer burn
I NEED IT.
YOU CAN’T JUST
THROW MY STUFF OUT.
wait are you actually pissed
YES I’M PISSED.
why
why
i don’t understand why
I didn’t understand, either.
* * *
My dad hunts big game, and is gone weeks at a time tracking moose, elk, caribou, whatever license he drew in the lottery run by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Sometimes it’s a family thing: Dad, Chuck, my cousins, and their friends setting up camp, hauling gear in four-wheelers, cooking over open fires, navigating trails in twos or groups. But sometimes he’s alone at twenty-five-hundred-feet elevation with just a backpack, a rifle, and, to keep his daughter happy, an iPhone. When he first moved to Alaska, not long after I left for college, he built a boat in his backyard: twenty-eight feet of welded aluminum with a bed, a GPS, and a Dickinson diesel heater. It took him three years. He had to learn how to weld. He’s always been into fishing and now he takes people out on the ocean, the ones who come to Alaska for a quote wilderness adventure end quote. Before that, he was the elementary school principal for the children of the Coast Guard, and before that, he was the middle school principal in Chelsea, Michigan. He was my middle school principal in Chelsea, Michigan.
If you have not had the pleasure of your parent administrating school governance while you are going through puberty, here are a few fun anecdotes.
I was waiting outside my dad’s office. A girl walked out and we locked eyes. I could tell she’d been crying. Later, at the football game, she held me down by the neck under the bleachers and told me she was going to shave my head. I remember the thick of her palm on my throat. I remember our team must’ve done something great because everyone above us stood up and cheered. I remember wondering, randomly, when she was going to shave my head.
I remember the fear—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked.
Fast-forward to adulthood: This same girl sent me a friend request on Facebook. I’ve been staring at her name in my inbox for a year.
My freshman year in high school, I’d walk the ten or so minutes back to Dad’s office at the middle school to get a ride home. There were girls, a couple years older, who followed me every day in their car. They’d go like five miles an hour, all of them leaning out of the front and backseat driver’s side windows, staring at me. I kept my eyes straight ahead. To this day, I’m not sure who they were, let alone what I did to make them mad. I wish I’d known. I wish I’d stood up for myself in some spectacular way, telling them off or keying their car or taking them on at the ALL-VALLEY KARATE TOURNAMENT and when my leg gets hurt in the semifinals my awesome guru coach uses
an ancient pain-suppression technique in the locker room and the jerky asshole coach tells my opponent: Sweep the leg, Johnny! But I do a crane stance and we’re all friends in the end.
That didn’t happen, of course.
I kept walking. I pretended I wasn’t scared.
Later that same year, in gym class, I hit one of those girls in the face with a softball. It wasn’t on purpose. I was just shitty at sports. But still, I was sure she would kill me. After school, I asked my dad for help, and we drove back to the high school, its open, outdoor campus weirdly designed for California, not Michigan. I thought he was going to talk to the gym teacher, but instead we went to the baseball field and threw balls till it got dark. Can you picture him, still in his suit and tie, slamming a fist in his glove and trying, through sheer force of will, to summon forth some sort of athletic ability from his awkward, acne-ridden, bookwormy dork of a daughter? In my memory, we were out there for hours. We were out there for years. Hell, we’re out there today. “Power doesn’t work without aim,” he told me. He’d said the same thing when he taught me to shoot, the two of us meandering brush lines, low-growth forests, and farm fields in search of a partridge, a pheasant, anything to aim for, to work toward, to hit, a final effect after all this cause.
* * *
“You’re doing what with deer hearts?”
I’m drinking martinis with Randy, the chair of the creative writing department where I teach. This is the man who gave me: Love in the Time of Cholera, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and Memoirs from the Women’s Prison by Nawal El Saadawi. He took me to Sister Spit to see Dorothy Allison. He took me to the Goodman Theatre to see The Odyssey. He took me to The Dragon’s Den to hear Stanton Moore. He taught me how to listen. He taught me how to teach. He was the first person to show me that my writing had value and, in the same breath, challenge me to make it better.
“I’m dissecting them,” I told him.
“I see,” he said. “Why the hell are you doing that?”
I tried to explain: blah blah metaphor blah. Randy waited patiently as I talked myself in circles, finally arriving tipsy at the truth: I’m afraid he will die. I’m afraid of the mountain. I’m afraid for his heart.
“Have you told that to him?” he said, which in retrospect is a very good question but at the time seemed insane.
“You can’t just say it!” I said.
“Sure you can. It takes”—he counted on his fingers—“five words.” He studied me for a second and said, “For you, a thousand.” He grinned. “Maybe ten thousand.”
It was nice to see him relaxed. It was nice to talk about something besides the college. “You want to find a job that’s not a job but a calling,” he’d told me when I first started teaching there, and it certainly felt that way: radical pedagogy, diverse student body, what bell hooks called education as the practice of freedom. Then the new corporate leadership: faculty jumping ship, fired or forced out. It wasn’t a job but a heartbreak.
We had another drink and he told me about cutting up cows on his family’s farm in Minnesota. Ever since I started this thing with the deer hearts, everyone wants to talk about meat. About butchers. About dissection and hunting and organ donation and blocked arteries and invasive surgery—our battered, aging bodies, so beautiful and mortal. I love these stories, how one opens the door for another.
We paid the check and got our calendars, trying to schedule a meeting for I don’t remember what. I suggested the following Friday morning, but he couldn’t. Something about a doctor’s appointment. Some tingling in his chest. Nothing to worry about. Everything is fine.
That Friday afternoon he had emergency quadruple bypass surgery.
I blame the college.
I blame the mountain.
Crazy or not, it’s easier with somewhere to aim.
* * *
I texted my father, asking if he could send more hearts.
How many? he wrote back.
One would be great!
Or two!
Five?
My phone rang.
He explained that he was out of hearts and of course he’d love to shoot me a deer or two or five but he couldn’t because deer weren’t in season. Question: “Does it have to be deer? Would—” he paused to consider his words. “—this thing you are doing work with caribou? How about elk? Sheep?”
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know what this thing I was doing even was.
The next day I bought pig hearts from a butcher in Rogers Park. They were smaller than the deer hearts; at home on my cutting board they looked like valentines. I sliced through the veins, white and thin like dental floss, and remembered: the frogs I dissected in high school, where they’d come from and how they’d died; my son’s uncle Lott and uncle Ryan taking him to an organic farm in Indiana, playing with pigs and chickens and cows that would later be slaughtered; waiting until the pheasant took off into the sky, the barrel of my rifle following it into the sky; waiting on the table in the paper robe, a doctor’s fingers on my moles; waiting on a different table in a different robe, a doctor feeling for the cyst that swallowed my ovary; different table, different robe, a doctor taking blood and blood and blood; different table, without the robe, naked and open and terrified.
“Mommy?”
I looked up. My son, now eight, had just come in from swimming. Raw meat was piled on the counter. I wore blood-smeared rubber gloves. My laptop was open, playing a video of open heart surgery, the live organ pumping, sucking, and stuck with needles.
“What are you doing?” he asked suspiciously.
The pause was long.
Finally: “I’m writing an essay.”
He eyed the meat. “That’s an essay?”
I tried to explain, a task since Montaigne. “It’s a kind of question,” I finished.
“Okay,” he said. “Did you find the answer?”
* * *
When I was little, my dad and I spent weekends together. We’d drive the green station wagon to a very specific field with a very specific tree. It had a heavy branch, like an arm, that stuck out from its side and ran parallel to the ground. Dad wore head-to-toe camo, waiting for birds to hit the sky, and I’d sit on that branch and bounce, watching our dog disappear in the underbrush and then leap above it, like he was riding waves.
There were always guns, but they were in my periphery; this was me hanging out with my dad. I was too young for a hunting license. I could shoot, but not to kill. I liked target practice. I liked shooting skeet. I liked the kick in my shoulder, the clay pigeon exploding midair and the tiny hole in the center of the target, proof that I got what I aimed for. “Great shot, kid!” my dad would say. That’s the part I liked most of all.
At some point, I stopped. Sundays were for handbell choir. I played the high bells and could pull off both a four-in-hand and a triple Shelley. And Saturdays were Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, which I’d record on my boom box—yes, boom box—and play nonstop for the entire week. Look: I was almost a teenager. I was, like, busy. I had, like, friends. We went to Briarwood Mall and did I don’t know, nothin’, which in the late eighties meant Hot Topic, Wet Seal, and Orange Julius, and now, I think, is H&M, Forever 21, and Starbucks.
That’s what I told my dad, anyway.
The truth was more like this: I’d just taken a mandatory hunter’s education course. We watched a slideshow on conservationism and Michigan-specific regulations; then we went outside for shooting, blood trailing, and tree-stand safety. I knew most of it already from weekends with my dad. But now it would be different. Now it would be about killing.
Dad paid the six bucks for my small-game license and we went to our field. I remember passing the tree where I’d bounce when I was little. I remember Duchess scaring up a pheasant. I remember watching it climb, reaching an almost fixed point in the sky and then—freeze. A perfect shot.
I so desperately wanted him to be proud of me.
* * *
“Do you remember when I dissecte
d frogs in high school?”
We’re in Alaska for the month of August. It’s sixty degrees on the island, twenty hours of sunshine on the solstice. There’s fishing and hiking and laughing. My son plays with his cousins in an enchanted forest that Marilyn made in the backyard, complete with teeny furniture for fairies. My husband drinks beer with my brothers, laying in the grass to measure distance between bocce balls. My dad paces the living room, phone at his shoulder, calling his neighbors to find me a heart.
“It’s weird,” I went on. “I don’t remember the teacher, or even what year it was, and you’d think I’d have a problem cutting animals because I was a vegetarian in high school. Right? And you took me upstairs and opened the chest freezer and pointed at the frozen venison like: This is the food that we eat, Megan. What food are you going to eat? And I—”
“Hold on,” he said to me. And “Maybe?” into the phone. Then he covered the receiver and asked if buffalo hearts were okay.
I nodded.
“Buffalo’s fine,” he said.
Long pause.
“My daughter’s in town and she needs them.”
Another pause.
“For art.”
* * *
After I stopped hunting with my dad, he started giving me books. He played me Paul Simon and Lyle Lovett. He bought us season tickets to the Wharton Center in Lansing where the Broadway touring companies perform in Michigan. We’d get dressed up, drive the hour or so east, eat somewhere fancy, and off to the show. Les Mis. The Phantom of the Opera. Cats, the glowing eyes before the curtain rose. Once on This Island, the best singing I’d ever heard. The Wiz, the best dancing I’d ever seen.
I thought all of this art was for my benefit, a way to connect away from fields and rivers. But the more I get to know my dad as a person instead of just my parent, I can see that he needed it, too. In grad school, he’d studied the Concord writers—Thoreau, Emerson, Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson. When I was ten we packed the pop-up camper and went to New England. I remember the pencil scratches on the walls where the Alcott sisters marked their growth. I remember how still it was at Walden Pond. I remember my father’s face as he stood at Thoreau’s grave. Years later, I taught Kafka classes for a summer study abroad program in Prague and took my students to the New Jewish Cemetery where he was buried. I’d been in his head for years: journals, stories, letters. I have friends who’ve described this same feeling at Jim Morrison’s grave, or Kurt Cobain’s. Bruce Lee and Sinatra, Michael Jackson and Oscar Wilde and Princess Diana.
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life Page 4
