Returning to Earth (27 page)

Flower wasn't impressed. She was making three venison mincemeat pies and said that Clare had driven over to the Canadian Soo (Sault Ste. Marie) to see her father's spiritual teacher for a few days. This was so totally unexpected that I sat there like a lump but close to tears of relief. I told Flower that I wanted to see Clare's shelter but she said absolutely not. She sat down and poured us each a glass of her homemade wine, for which she used wild strawberries and rhubarb. She looked at me overlong and I was reminded again how native people don't fill up all available space with chatter. They don't believe that talking is thinking. This unnerved me and I absurdly remembered a college term paper I wrote on the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. I had read a book by his widow, Caitlin, called
Leftover Life to Kill
, which shocked me. How could these people have a good marriage when they appeared to be drunk every day? The professor told me that I was more than a trifle too bourgeois. Sitting there with Flower staring into my eyes made me feel like a hysterical PTA mother, the kind who used to crowd me as a teacher for ignoring her son whose sole activity was picking his nose and staring out the window as if it were a television screen.

“How could you help her get over her grief?” Flower finally asked.

“I don't know,” I said, a perennial answer.

“What are you doing to get over your own?”

“Getting up in the morning, reading, eating, going to bed at night. That's about all except going out in the snow on skis.”

“The snow is a good thing. I'm not sure there are any books for this. Just don't take up with a wet man.”

“I don't know what you mean?” I had waited for a full minute for her to explain “wet man.”

“A wet man is like a frog way back in the swamp that thinks he is the whole world, that the world starts and ends with him. I notice that most men are like that now. Donald wasn't like that.”

“I just worry that Clare will freeze to death,” I said lamely.

“Smart people have always known how to keep as warm as their bodies want to be.” Now she began laughing so hard tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “I didn't know that was what you were worried about,” she choked out. “I thought you were worried that your daughter would become a bear and be lost to you.” She came around the table. “In the old days a few men became bears while they were living but it was real rare for women unless they made love to a bear.”

Flower sent me home with a venison mincemeat pie and I ate it for lunch with a salad. It was better than any I had
made for my family because she used lard for the crust and her own deeply flavored dried fruit including wild crab apples. A flash of sunlight came through the kitchen window and I felt happy with the only sour note being the stack of textbooks on the counter over by the toaster. I gathered the textbooks in my arms, opened the door to the basement, and threw the books down into the darkness. There was still a faint scent of fuel oil and I had a memory that was dimmed by the wine we drank when it happened. It was June and my parents had moved up to the Club. Mrs. Plunkett, our housekeeper, had the day off and David was off fishing with Glenn, who always smelled like beer. I was fourteen and Donald sixteen and we were dancing in the living room to the Rolling Stones. Laurie was over with her boyfriend and after we searched my father's den for a while we found the key to the wine cellar. We sat at the table in the wine cellar, smoked a joint, and drank two bottles of French wine. Laurie went off in the corner behind a rack with her boyfriend but we could hear her giving him a blow job. I had never done that before but Laurie said that you avoid getting pregnant by keeping boys soft. Donald was laughing and we left the wine cellar and went into a room full of stacked furniture and luggage and necked against the wall and I got grease marks on my pale blue blouse leaning against the wall on a greasy copper fuel line that led from the furnace to the buried outside tank. Donald would rub his prick through my underpants against my pussy until I wilted and his stuff came all over my thighs.

I was amazed that I had thrown the books down the basement stairs but it made the rest of my piece of pie and
salad taste that much better. I opened
Love in the Time of Cholera
to my bookmark on page 47. “It had not been easy for her to regain her self-control after she heard Digna Pardo's shriek in the patio and found the old man of her life dying in the mud.” It happens everywhere all of the time, I thought, but it never quite registers until it happens close to us.

It had become quite evident that I didn't want to teach in Marquette. All I had to do to rediscover this was to flick on the basement light and look down the stairs at the textbooks sprawled there like book corpses that had lost their lives in my private war. Literature textbooks resemble anthologies where all the finest material is left out to arrive at a harmless product. I no longer wanted to be part of a system whose actual intent was to produce reliable employees. You could add on babysitting and the expectation of parents for you to instill a sense of discipline totally absent in the home. The smallest possible light bulb went off in my head when I remembered that in late September a young man who taught human geography at the college had suggested I might tutor some native students who tended to get lost out of shyness. This seemed like a better idea than wandering hither and yon in the Marquette school system. The professor had said that half the native students were new politicized Indians and in your face while the other half were withdrawn. He had introduced me to a brother and sister from Baraga who were bright enough but barely spoke above whispers and suffered from terminal homesickness in addition to being too poor to eat decently. A few were quite traditional and there was fatalism in their early return home from the alien cities of Sault Ste. Marie and Marquette to
areas where unemployment was fifty percent and the rate of alcoholism very high.

It had begun snowing hard outside and I slouched forward on the kitchen table in a semidoze watching the snow gather in the barberry bushes outside the window. I hadn't noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black. David and Vera were in green Veracruz abutting the blue Caribbean but I had to tend Clare. Coughlin said on the phone that I can't guide her unless I accept her. If I stridently oppose what she's doing she'll oppose me. How can the daughter be more like the father and the son more like me seemingly in full control of all of life's vagaries? I finished my master's degree tending the house with two little kids. Mother said on the phone, “You should have some help.” No thank you. I'd rather be exhausted. Nearly prone I set García Márquez up on the table, skipping ahead. “For the next two weeks he did not sleep a single night.” I've read so much fiction that I used to think my perceptions of life were merely a fiction I was writing, especially after the kids left for college and there was so little noise in the evening. Once Donald was watching
Monday Night Football
when a call came from the state police for help in finding two hunters from downstate in Flint who were lost. Donald was part of the search-and-rescue group for Luce and Chippewa counties and the lost people were usually hunters but sometimes summer campers with cheap compasses or no compasses at all, or children who had wandered away from campsites with mothers weeping that the lost child would be eaten by wolves and bears though this only happened once, near Brimley, when a bear killed a young girl or so I'm told.
The Flint hunters were lost nearby in the Hiawatha National Forest (silly poem). The swamp where the Flint hunters were lost was too thick for snowmobiles so Donald and a friend who was a commercial fisherman and large took off on snowshoes. I worried all night and the state police were parked in our yard at dawn when Donald and his friend returned with the two men over their shoulders. The two lost men weren't very big but they still must have been a burden. I cooked the biggest breakfast possible with the men smelling like pine smoke and snow. Donald had built a huge fire of tamarack and pine in the swamp so that they were fairly cozy. One of the men was of Italian descent and shipped us fifty pounds of Italian sausage, cheese, and salami by FedEx, which we loved. I fell asleep at the table, my eyes opening now and then to see the snow on the barberry bushes forming thick, fluffy white hats. I had seen in a sporting catalog of K's a sleeping bag used by mountaineers in the Himalayas that was good for weather down to fifty below zero. I would order one for Clare. One winter she and Donald camped by a remote lake for ice fishing and said they were never cold one bit.

I stumbled into the living room and collapsed on the sofa wishing I hadn't read Cleland's
Rites of Conquest
but Donald had asked me to because he needed help in understanding how the people he loved were utterly subjugated. What are any of us beneath the unbearable sweep of history including my father the elegant young Chicago gentleman heading off to the Philippines in his tailored officer's uniform only to see ninety percent of his men drop down into war's meat grinder. In my dreams everyone became blind and deaf in heaven and then I was back to earth
dreams where everyone still couldn't see very well, and then I was back as a little girl in this doghouse down the block where I could hide out with this big black dog that seemed to like me a lot. When I awoke and had a cup of coffee and another piece of the mincemeat pie I thought maybe Clare's hut in the woods behind Flower's with its five bearskins was like my doghouse with only David knowing about it. I could sit up in the back and the world was reduced to lawn and forsythia bushes out the opening. If a robin landed or a squirrel trotted by the dog would growl.

Thanksgiving was a full house. Coughlin came north by noon on Wednesday and since deer hunters were still lurking in the woods we skied on the beach all the way to Presque Isle and then around it brushing the deep snow from a park bench and sitting there in the sunlight staring out at Lake Superior, which was only modestly rumpled in a northeast breeze. When he arrived Coughlin had given me the envelope of bear material but I had put it away for the time being. When he asked why I said Clare is coming tomorrow with Flower and I don't want to dwell on her today. While we were out on the park bench a small bank of clouds came across the sun turning our mood somber. He said, “After all, the fact of death is the most brutal thing we humans are forced to accept,” but then the sun came out again and I told him that the day after the burial Herald had said, “Mother, it can't be awful if it happens to every living thing.”

While Coughlin was roasting two nice chickens he had brought up from Chicago following a recipe he got from
David, who got it from Vernice, where you baste the chicken with lemon, garlic, butter, and tarragon, I drove out to the airport to pick up Herald, who was bringing home his Mexican girlfriend, Sylvia. I should have called ahead because the plane was nearly an hour late, a frequent problem for those coming up from Detroit and Chicago. Polly and K and the wayward daughter Rachel were coming in from New York City but the flight from Detroit was booked so they were going to drive the mere five hundred miles from Detroit hopefully arriving by morning. Rachel was refusing to live with her mother so she was going to stay in my little bungalow down the street from Polly's with K to look after her until things
settled down
, as Polly said. I was indeed relieved when David said that he and Vera had decided not to come up from Jalapa but maybe they would come for Christmas.

Sitting there in the terminal wishing I had brought along my García Márquez I pretended to be intently studying the local newspaper, the
Mining Journal
, so no one I might know would approach. I was anxious about meeting Herald's girlfriend. I was so pissed on the phone the other day when Herald said that knowing his family were
odd ducks
he hoped we all behaved well so that his fiancée wouldn't cut and run. I was on the verge of demanding just how we were odd ducks when I suddenly thought Clare hibernating like a bear might fit that category. In any event they were only staying until Friday afternoon because Sylvia wanted to visit a cousin in Ypsilanti, near Detroit. After Herald's disastrous high school girlfriend jilted him Herald has limited himself to foreign nationalities and lately until Sylvia they have been either Japanese or Chinese young
women studying in the sciences. When I questioned him about the idea of a girl working in a fancy strip club and what was he doing there he said several of the girls at the strip club went to USC and that mathematicians occasionally go to strip clubs just like other men.

When they finally came off the plane I was impressed by how attractive they looked both separately and together. She was about five-ten when I'd expected her to be smaller like Vera. In the car she actually gave a little speech about her background so that I wouldn't have to be curious. Sylvia was twenty-two and her father was the manager of a car dealership in Hermosillo and not a very happy man because he would always be a decently paid manager but never an owner. She was the oldest of four children and had
escaped
to Los Angeles when she was nineteen because her mother was a bully and insisted that she marry the son of her best friend. She danced at a strip club four nights a week and during the days she took business courses at a community college in Pasadena because ever since she was a little girl she had wanted to be the manager of a hotel near the Pacific Ocean. She had been out of touch with her family for two years and her parents wouldn't answer her letters. She desperately missed her sister and two brothers so last year she and Herald flew to Hermosillo. Herald put on his best suit and went into the auto dealership just before lunchtime and introduced himself to Sylvia's father and asked for her hand in marriage when he finished his Ph.D. in mathematics this coming June. Sylvia's father called Sylvia's mother and they all met for lunch. It was wonderful because she got to see her brothers and sister again.