The River Queen (7 page)

“Well, if we aren't, someone will let us know,” Jerry says with a wave of his hand.

“We'll get a parking ticket,” Tom quips.

“Besides if we get away early enough, they won't come and charge longside.” This feels a little dicey to me, but then I'm a person who is uncomfortable with library fines. I mumble something, but Jerry ignores me. He's annoyed because a fishing boat has tied up in the middle of the dock, but after some maneuvering, we sidle alongside. It turns out to be a very peaceful place with just the gentle ripple of water and wind. Two kids fish off the pier.

Jerry pauses to admire the levee, an old stone wall that's fifty years old. “Don't make'm like that anymore,” he says. It is our first mooring, and, as we secure our lines, Tom executes a fancy looping motion with the rope. He makes circles with his fingers as he pulls the line around like some cowboy doing lariat tricks. He gives a tug on the knot and practically lifts the boat out of the water. “That should hold,” he says.

“How'd you do that?” I ask, but he just gives a shrug. Then he picks up the rope and does it again around my ankle. “Easy,” he says, giving my leg a yank. The boys want to clean up, which in this case means take bottled water and splash it on their faces. But I want terra firma under my feet. Just eight hours on the river and I'm wobbly as a colt.

In the dusk I cut across a small park, illumined with amber lights and dotted with picnic tables, facing the river. A cool breeze blows as I scamper across the railroad tracks and head to The Depot, which was once the old railroad station and now, after all the floods, is the only restaurant in town.

“Hotel California” is playing. I take a table near the back and wait for the boys. Tom's gone to walk Samantha, and Jerry says he's going to get gussied up. There's a pool table, and several dead animals hanging from the wall. There's also a female bartender and four people at the bar. A woman with bleached blond hair, sitting at the bar, is laughing loudly, and a few moments later when Tom and Jerry arrive she comes over to take our order.

“So what'll you have…?” the blond woman asks.

Jerry asks what's on draft and Tom orders his usual—a diet Dew. I'm contemplating a vodka tonic when she says, “You want the same thing as your husband?” pointing to Jerry.

“That's not my husband,” I say as Tom gives a big cough under his breath. Jerry's got his face buried in the menu.

“I'm hungry,” I say and they both agree. “I'll have a cheeseburger, medium rare.”

Tom pipes in. “I'll have two but cook 'em well.…” He gazes at me sheepishly because he knows I'm paying for dinner, which is part of our agreement. “One's for Sam.”

The blond woman stares at us, perplexed. “Oh, I don't work here,” she explains, slurring her words. “I just thought you guys looked like you needed a drink.”

Johnny Cash comes on with “I Walk the Line” as our real waitress—a large woman in a very small miniskirt—comes to take our actual order. Neither Tom nor Jerry can bring themselves to look at her. Afterward Tom says, “That was the biggest miniskirt in the world.” Jerry laughs his head off. I grimace and look away as the drunken woman, who is now dancing with a man at the bar, gives me a wave.

Our burgers arrive. They are pretty tasteless and Jerry makes a face. “Tastes like your foot's asleep,” I say and they howl.

“Did you make that up, Mary?” Jerry asks.

“No, my dad. He said things like that all the time. If he didn't like something, he'd say it tastes like the bottom of an owl's foot.”

“The bottom of an owl's foot. Well, that's a hoot.” Tom groans and Jerry goes on, not skipping a beat. “Where'd that come from?”

I shrug. I actually think it is a Yiddish expression, but I don't want to say so. I have not told them that I am Jewish. We haven't discussed our politics. This is the heartland after all and some things may be better left unsaid. “Oh, my dad. He always said things like that.”

“Musta been a funny guy.”

“Yeah,” I nod, thinking of my father's dry sense of humor. “You know, he lived along the river in the 1920s. In Hannibal, Missouri, and Quincy, Illinois.”

They nod, chomping on their burgers. We have thus far exchanged little personal information and it is the first time I have mentioned my father. “He said he spent time on an island somewhere in between. On a farm.”

Jerry nods, picking at his fries. “I see.”

Just before I was to leave on this journey, I was going through my sets of stacked drawers. I have a dozen of these and each one is labeled for something I am doing. I toss ideas and notes into them. Scribblings on cocktail napkins or yellow pads. Story jottings. One is labeled “Mississippi” and in this drawer I found road maps, dining information. How to rent a paddleboat. News stories from the 1993 floods. Maps, scribblings, articles I've clipped for one reason or another. Some are obscure to me even now. Between “Prairie Islands on the Missouri” and “Mormon Town Flourishes in Illinois,” I found a crumpled sheet of yellow paper. I opened it and read what I knew was my father's shaky hand.

Last spring I asked him to tell me what he could about the river and the places he'd lived as a young man. He was over 102 years old, but he still had his smarts. The more I thought about the river, the more I wanted to ask him. I was sitting, poised with yellow pad and pencil, but he was nodding off to sleep and gave me a wave. I went on an errand and when I returned, I found he'd scribbled something down.

It read, “We had a structural engineer who had twenty acres in the middle of the river. He had a couple dozen cows and milked them every day. They canned and sold the milk unpasteurized to drink. Wife and son ran the farm. This was seventy years ago. We used to boat in summer and sled in winter to cross the river to his farm.”

That was all. I had many more things I wanted to ask him. Where is this island? Who owns it now? Does it have a name? But he was sleeping when I returned and I had places to go. I had to leave. I kissed his forehead, combed back his hair. And I never saw him again.

“Good fries,” Tom says.

“My dad's part of the reason why I've come on this trip,” I tell them. They both nod, then push their plates away.

“Let's get some shut-eye,” Tom says.

“Do you want to shoot a round of pool?” I ask. I'm not sure I really want to shoot pool, but I'm not ready to return to the boat either. But they decline.

“Been a long day,” Jerry says.

We make our way back to the boat. The amber lights glow along the walk across the railroad tracks, through the grove of trees and picnic tables, back to the river. A crescent moon casts its reflection on the slow-moving water of the east channel.

It is our first night together. I wait for Jerry to pull his bed out, but he just lies down on the narrow sofa in his sleeping bag at the helm. Tom has staked out a place on the flybridge under the stars. Once on his air mattress he puts on his headphones, tucks Samantha Jean in (“She's my bed warmer,” he says), and goes to sleep.

I draw the lime green curtain, which is all that separates me from these men. It is the only privacy and safety I have in the world right now and it is flimsy to the touch. Since we are bedding down, I go to the bathroom. I use bottled water to wash, brush my teeth, and flush. When I am finished, I can't open the door. It budges about an inch, but that's all.

I struggle, then try to figure out what is wrong. It seems that the shower door has come ajar just enough so that I am unable to open the bathroom door. The two doors have become locked in some kind of triangulated death grip.

I start to call. “Jerry,” I say softly. Then louder. I know he is hard of hearing and if he is sleeping on his good ear, he won't hear me. I know this because, as a girl, I used to cry out to my father in the night and he never heard me either. I call again, more loudly now. “Jerry!”

Then I begin to bang. Tom is also deaf in one ear and, if he has his headphones on, which he does, he won't hear me at all. I bang and bang. Then I start to shout. Samantha must hear me because she barks and like a chain reaction that wakes Tom, who shouts to Jerry. “What is it?” Jerry calls out, startled.

“I'm stuck in the bathroom.”

“Where are you?”

“The bathroom!” I scream.

He shuffles over and starts fiddling with the doors that have become entwined. “Hmm,” he says, “this could be a problem.”

“It is a problem,” I tell him, but he doesn't reply. He unhinges the stuck doors, slams the shower door closed, and without a word turns back toward his couch, stretches out, and goes to sleep.

I pull back my curtain, grateful to that little dog who saved me from spending the night in the head. After reading for a few moments by the light of a flashlight, I lie there, adrift on the river, aching for sleep. My heart beats like a hummingbird's in my chest. I gulp down an anxiety pill and wait for it to work.

What did Emily Dickinson write? “Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul.” Inside of me it feels as if it is trying to fly away. Shallow breathing is fear, I've heard my yoga teacher say. For months I've woken with this pounding of my heart. At home I take my husband's hand and place it on my chest. I make him keep it there until the racing stops.

But some nights if he is tired, I don't want to wake him. I worry I'm becoming a burden. I get up and walk around. When I am this way, I can't read or think or write or answer mail. I'll go to the blue chair in our kitchen by the window. This chair was my father's. He sat and read in it all the time. He watched the news. When he moved from Chicago to Milwaukee, he sent it to me. I can sit in it for hours and just stare outside. I've watched the sun come up in that chair.

10

M
Y FATHER
was living in Sharon, Pennsylvania, when a gypsy predicted his fate. He was dating a “shiksa,” a woman he knew he'd never marry, and she had a nine-year-old daughter. He told me once that he was most fond of the little girl. The woman wanted my father to go with her to a soothsayer to have her fortune told. She persuaded my father to take her, perhaps hoping the soothsayer would tell my father to marry her. He agreed to drive her, but said he wouldn't go inside.

He drove this woman to a neighborhood of tenements and slums and waited in the car. The woman went in and a few minutes later she emerged, distraught. “She wants to see you,” the woman said. Reluctantly my father went in.

The fortune-teller was a large black woman and she told my father that he would receive a letter from someone he loved. In that letter would be a request and my father would accept the offer. He would return to Chicago. He would meet a woman, marry her, have two children, and live near a lake. She also told my father that she'd had nothing to say to the woman who had brought him here. That nothing in her life was ever going to change.

A week later my father received a letter from his brother, Sidney, whose hospital robe I still wear. The letter told him that his architectural business was failing and begged my father to return to the Midwest and become partners with him. My father accepted and left the woman and her nine-year-old daughter behind.

After Christmas my Aunt Ruth, who was married to Sidney, went to Saks Fifth Avenue to return a peach-colored nightgown her husband had given her for the holidays.

The woman who would become my mother was selling lingerie. I picture her helping women pull up corsets, slip heavy breasts into industrial-strength bras. I imagine her telling a bride-to-be that a particular nightie will do the trick. My mother had studied fashion design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a scholarship after a designer from Saks recognized her talent but had to drop out during the Depression when her father wouldn't give her the nickel she needed for bus fare.

My mother truly had an artist's flair. She could do anything with her hands. I recall her quilting my bedspreads late into the night. She spent seven years on these. Or painting a portrait of a woman—half her face black and the rest of it blue. She explained to me that the black was a shadow. Just a few years ago we went to an exhibit of Picasso portraits at the Museum of Modern Art. My mother swept through the gallery. “Now that one, you see, it's very good.” She pointed to a charcoal sketch. “He was very free when he did that. He didn't overthink it.” A small crowd soon gathered around us. They thought my mother was a guide of some kind.

But she never finished school. She returned to Saks and had been selling lingerie ever since. And now a woman she seemed to recognize came in to return a peach-colored nightgown. They had gone to grammar school together, but hadn't seen one another in twenty years. “My brother-in-law has just moved back into town,” my Aunt Ruth said. “Shall I give him your number?”

It took a while for my father to call. When he finally did, he said, “I was going through my pants before I sent them to the cleaner and I found your number.” Hardly the most romantic opener, and perhaps it should have been a sign, but my mother was glad he called. A week later they went on their first date. My mother was not a young woman, in her thirties, living at home with my grandmother, her brother-in-law and sister. She had been waiting for a long time for her life to begin. And he was a forty-four-year-old bachelor. My mother wondered at first if something wasn't wrong with him.

Before leaving on her date, she told my grandmother, “If I don't like him, I'll be home by ten.” At a quarter to ten my father told her he was tired and took her home. When she walked in at ten o'clock, my grandmother said, “Oh, you didn't like him.”

“I'm going to marry him,” my mother replied.

He called her on Sunday from a skating rink and asked if she liked to skate. She loved to skate, she said. In truth she had skated only once before in her life, but she went down to the rink anyway and sprained her ankle. The following weekend he took her to dinner and she ate soft-shell crabs. When she vomited all the way home, she was sure she'd never hear from him again.