Truck (2 page)

If you stick with the Year in Review approach, it is easy enough to accumulate anecdotal evidence that the emancipation of women was pro
gressing apace in 1951. Truth was, when the boys came marching home, we repossessed Rosie's riveter, tossed her a trivet, and did our best to get her back in the kitchen. Irma Harding cut a strong figure—you could easily imagine her clicking briskly down a marble hall to some office somewhere—but she remained the creation of company men, and to gauge their perception of the sexes we need only consider the slogans International Harvester dreamed up to headline the 1951 advertising campaign. Tagline for trucks? “
Every model Heavy-Duty Engineered!
” Refrigerators? “
They're femineered!
”

Under threat of a compulsory bikini wax from Germaine Greer and the editors of
Bitch
magazine, let me state for the record that the term
femineered!
is a real time-warping mind-bender. The sexism is one thing, the blitheness quite another. Cheery condescension meets leering futurism. I understand now why my favorite nursing professor went all Valkyrie on me when I referred to my lab partner as a
girl
in 1987. I always thought the sisterhood of second-wave feminists who ran the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire School of Nursing were a tad uptight, but
femineered!
goes a long way toward explaining their frame of mind.

If I had a bra, I'd burn it.

 

My truck is an ugly truck. I picked it up in college, bought it for 150 bucks from a guy named Ron. Ron used the truck to haul firewood—it wasn't even licensed for the road. The truck body was originally a hearty red, but at some point Ron swabbed it with a coat of pink primer. He used a six-inch-wide paintbrush. There were a lot of drips and runs. In other spots the primer is spread so thin that the bristle pattern is highlighted in hairline streaks of surface rust. When he finished, Ron signed and dated his work, daubing a knockoff Playboy bunny beneath the spare-tire bracket.

The front end of the truck is blasted with rust. The grille has deteriorated to the point that the headlights wobble in their sockets. You can stick three fingers through the gaps in both front fenders. The bumper is bent. Before I parked it the last time, the radiator was blowing green mist. The front windshield is cracked in the vertical, and rain leaks around
the weather stripping and streaks the dash. There is a boil the size of a grapefruit on the left front tire. The speedometer never has worked, and the deck of the bed is so riddled with holes that you could load half a yard of gravel and over just three miles of bumpy road, sift the sand from the stones. To a large extent, the truck is, as they say, shot.

On the other hand, I've never done a thing to that old six-cylinder engine beyond changing the oil, and yet it has always spun smooth as an antique safe dial. The cab doors close with a seamless click, just like they must have done when the last line worker tested them fifty-some years ago. The lugs on the back tires are fat and nasty, no wear at all. The wiper blades run off the vacuum system, so they bog some when you punch the accelerator, but then you back out of it and they whip-whip-whip as if they're making up for lost time. You could pop corn on the in-cab heater. And after six years at a dead stall in my driveway, all four tires are still holding air.

I bought the truck when I was in my final year of nursing school. For the next three years it was my sole means of transportation. I drove it to school, I drove it to work, and I drove it up north to visit my folks or go deer hunting. There were problems. The truck tended to lock up and refuse to crank when the engine was hot. If I switched it off, I'd have to wait an hour before it would start again. It was a little light in the rear end, and didn't handle so well in the ice and snow. Sometimes the headlights blinked on and off. And I used to run out of gas a lot. The gas tank was huge, but the gauge never worked. I stashed a curved stick behind the seat and took readings with that. I'd thread it down the angled gullet of the fill pipe, then draw it out and estimate my range of travel based on how much of the stick was wet. The calculations were inexact: If you were the guy who jumped out of his car in 1989 to push me through the stoplights at the intersection of Clairemont and Fairfax, thank you. Ditto the Samaritans of Hastings Way and Eddy Lane. And here's to the boys at Silver Star Ambulance Service: When I misread the stick and stalled at the troublesome convergence of Birch Street and Hastings Way, they spotted me and sent a uniformed EMT dashing through traffic to rescue me with a can of lawn mower gas.

As ugly as the truck was the day I bought it from Ron, it has only gotten worse with the years. More rust. Bigger holes. A couple more dents. One windshield wiper is missing. I was driving on the freeway in a blizzard and the blade was icing up, so I rolled down the window, reached around, and, timing the wiper—an old Wisconsin wintertime motoring trick—grabbed and snapped it every time it came past. The idea is to knock the ice loose. On the third try, I mistimed the grab and the wiper came off in my hand. I drove the rest of the way with my head out the window, squinting against the snow and dipping my head back in the cab at regular intervals to shake the ice-cream headache. The other wiper is still intact, but held in place with athletic tape.

In 1989, I took off for Europe and left the truck behind my grandpa's barn. It must have weathered the dry docking fairly well, because I remember driving it to work in the early 1990s, but sometime around 1992 it developed that radiator leak and I parked it again. In 1995, I moved north to New Auburn and had to have the truck hauled up on a flatbed. A local mechanic got it to run one more time, but the radiator still leaked, and then the gas tank rusted through, and that was that.

I am homing in on forty years old. Another twenty years and I'm looking at sixty, and these days, twenty years seems like next Tuesday. I feel young but pressed for time. I am beginning to get a sense of all I will leave undone in this life. It makes my breath go a little short. I'm not desperate, just hungry to fill the time I am allowed. To cover new ground. I could be wrong, but I don't think I'm having the vaunted midlife crisis. I'm not trying to reclaim my youth or recapture the past. I just want to get that truck running. The past belongs where it is, as it is: an essential, fault-riven foundation for the present. I don't expect that truck to take me anywhere but down the road. I don't plan to, as my cousin used to say,
cruise chicks.
Although I'd be a stone-cold liar if I said I didn't think sometimes of blowing down some back road with a woman over there on the right-hand side, her eyes turned toward the fields passing by, a hint of upturn at the corner of her mouth.

This is not going to be a restoration project. I don't want to rehab this truck only to spend my weekends with a chamois and a bottle of polish. I don't want to circle the fenders nervously, checking for dings like some
pastry chef searching for hair in the cupcakes. I just want to patch a few holes and punch out a few dents. Scrub the rust down and lay on some paint. I want to get this truck running so I can, as the boys in high school used to say, go “bombin' around.” Ramble off to my brother's farm and return with a load of barnyard dirt for my backyard garden. Drive up Old Highway 53 to the IGA to buy potatoes and bacon. Hammer down the swamp road in the moonlight. I want to bump down a logging trail in November and back the truck up to the gutted body of a whitetail, the cooling meat destined to feed me in the year to come.

I'll have to get with it, because I tend to sit on stuff long past the hatch-by date. Which in most cases is fine. There is enough ill-considered hastiness in the world. Trouble is, at some point you keel over and croak. The man with differently sized eyes standing in my yard asking to buy the truck—he wasn't the first. It happens two or three times a year, someone knocks on the door and wonders if the thing is for sale. They all get the same answer:
no
. I want to fix it up. The squint-eyed man looked at me like he didn't believe it would ever happen. He squinched that bad eye down extra tight, spit again, and then he got in his own truck and headed back home to Chippewa Falls, where for all I know there is an International refrigerator in every home and the streets are paved with gold.

 

On behalf of the brand, I apologize for the whole femineering thing. It's like the big farm kid trying to fashion a homemade valentine from a beer carton using a pair of tin snips. International was never about the ineffable essence. “For many,” reads the copy on the back of
International Truck Color History,
“International Harvester means handsome, sturdy, no-nonsense trucks.”

Handsome. Sturdy. No-nonsense.

Irma.

Back to the
Color History:
“…International trucks have an earthy, wholesome quality that makes them attractive.”

Earthy. Wholesome.
I pull out my copy of
Freezer Fancies
. Irma's eyebrows are trim but not overplucked. Her hair is pulled back and gath
ered, but not so tight as to eliminate the waves. A ruler-straight part runs the center of her scalp, suggesting that Irma values tidiness and discipline, but the loose curls bobbing above the nape of her neck imply that fun will be allowed. The gathered hair is too informally hung to be termed a bun. You see a little fluff and dangle. Something to shake loose. The carefully combed part speaks of a tight ship, a neat sock drawer and folded underwear, but the curls are there to be let down when the work is done. I am also thrilled with the wash of gray above her left brow. It courses backward in easy waves, and it speaks to me of experience. Whither your sulking supermodels in the face of this bright, strong, touch-of-gray woman! She holds her head erect on a graceful neck, she is wearing nicely turned button earrings, and she has a dimple just below one strong cheekbone.

But above all, I am taken by those eyes. Irma Harding is my Mona Lisa. You will hear Mona Lisa described as enigmatic. Irma looks more energetic than enigmatic. I look at Mona Lisa and I think, there's a girl who would run up your credit card and pout. I look at Irma, and I think, there's a woman who keeps her checkbook balanced. I think, there's a woman who would be pleased to ride in a truck. Shoot, she could
drive
the truck, and I bet she can double-clutch like a full-on gear jammer. You look at Irma's eyes and you think, there's a woman who wouldn't mind a little wind in her hair, a little muss. I imagine Irma riding beside me in the truck, I'd look over there and that part would be holding but those curls would be blown, and she'd be grinning. If those boys at International had kept Irma on board to sell trucks instead of refrigerators, they'd still be in the thick of things. Frankly, I'm not sure she would have put up with their guff. I look at the picture again, reconsider the lines of her jaw and the steadiness of that gaze, and I get the feeling that if a guy messed around with Irma, he'd wind up doing long stretches listening to Otis Redding albums in the dark.

Back in the real world, I am long past conjuring a woman who would even
have
me, never mind
suit
me. I simply have no idea who she might be. I went on my first date at sixteen. Lisa Kettering. I kissed her in the moonlight shadow of a pine tree, and she cut me loose inside of two weeks. Now, at thirty-eight, I have a relationship track record that
can be summarized in a single overwhelming understatement:
the art of going steady eludes me
. And after two decades of having the mirror to myself, I have cultivated an accumulation of tics and idiosyncracies bound to unhinge the most long-suffering angel. Lately I've been in monk mode. No dates for nearly a year. When I met my last girlfriend, I fell headlong. Without sense or reservation. She drove a beautifully beat-up blue pickup, rolled her own cigarettes, and painted her motorcycle John Deere green. You should have seen her in a pair of work boots, backhanding the sweat from her brow. I goobered along behind her like a ridiculous balding teenager. But then came an all-too-familiar time when our conversations went dead between the lines and I got the old gut-sink. For a while I lived in hope—an eggshell kind of hope—and then one day I heard a country music song with a first line that went, “
I won't make you tell me / what I've come to understand…”
and I just thought,
a-yep
.

We plunge into love with a naïveté that ignores all prior humiliations. Thank goodness, I guess. Because we never learn, we reach for love again and again.

T
HE YEAR BEGINS
barren and brown. There should be snow, but the land lies stripped in subzero wind. Among the remains of last year's garden the tan stalk of a dead tomato plant ticks against the spare wooden frame that propped it through the fat green days of summer. The stalk wavers along a brief arc, dipping herky-jerky like the wand of a failing metronome. The plant yielded some good tomatoes. I roasted them in a deep pan with salt, olive oil, cloves of unshucked garlic, and sprigs of thyme. You ladle off the juice every twenty minutes or so and freeze it for a sweet, delicate stock best consumed during snowstorms. The residual pulp gathers body from the garlic and spirit from the thyme. The spent garlic, when squeezed warmly from its husk directly upon your tongue, will slacken your face and make you shimmy.

The stock and the pulp are in my little chest freezer now, down in the basement where the fuel oil furnace has been firing all day. I can hear the blower kick in, a muffled rumble followed shortly by a huff of warm air through the grate. I am on the second floor at the head of the stairs, standing at a window overlooking the garden, which is comprised mostly of raised beds—loaves of soil contained by rectangular frames constructed from two-by-twelve planks in the manner of a sandbox. The tomatoes that hung from that plant were pale yellow and big as a baby's head. I grew them from a seed harvested from a plant sown by my sister-in-law. She planted her garden in spring and didn't live to see fall, killed in a car wreck in her seventh week as my brother's wife. The tomatoes
are called Amish Yellows. We write “Sarah's Tomatoes” on the little plastic flags.

The windows in this old house are loose. The wind sets them to rattling. Looking down, I have my face close to the pane, so close I raise a little fog and smell that cold window glass smell, the scent of ice and dust. The wind rises and seeps past the sill. I imagine this outside air purling and tumbling through the warm inside air the way water curls through whiskey. My nose is cold at the window. The earth is frozen dirt. I think of the grave.

 

In the post office lobby, down to the Gas-N-Go, at the monthly meeting of the fire department, everyone I meet is bemoaning the lack of snow. Nobody—not even the natives—likes the cold, but cold and white you can take. Snow obscures the grit and covers the trash. Snow pretties up the scene. Renders it bearable. Whereas cold and brown leads to drink and desolation. All around town the snowmobilers are moping, their sleds trailered up and waiting. They drive to the bar in their pickup trucks and pine for a blizzard so they might drive to the bar on their snowmobiles. Even at twenty below, snow brightens the bleak earth. It is a postcard effect, and won't do you a lick of good if you slip and break your hip on the way to the mailbox, but it can be enough to keep you off the sauce. On a more fundamental level, it insulates the topsoil, limiting the depth of freeze. Exposed as they are, my raised beds are extra vulnerable. I neglected to mulch them with straw last fall, and now they are frozen through and through. The last couple of years I have been nursing a haphazard little collection of perennials. Summer savory, some sage, and a delicious cluster of lemon thyme. Now they are almost certainly dead forever.

I am an idiot for failing to mulch. It would have taken me all of fifteen minutes. I'm particularly chagrined about the lemon thyme. It was a gift from my friends John and Julie. Every year they oversee a magnificent garden. They sprouted a cutting, folded it into a moist paper towel, sealed the packet in a baggie, and sent it to me through the mail. I got it to take root and it thrived. By the end of summer I was using it to make
pan-roasted breast of chicken. A little olive oil, a little brown chicken stock, some pepper, and the clean lemony notes of the thyme. Simple. Delicious. Now the green is gone, the bush a sparse tangle of stems.

 

As a longtime bachelor it is a matter of overblown personal pride that less than ten frozen pizzas have crossed my threshold since I bought this house. Sadly, there have been other lapses. A few years back, I had some blood work done. My “bad” cholesterol was mildly elevated. If it gets any higher, my general practice doc said, we should consider medication, but for now, give it a year. Watch your diet, see if you can bring it down. In the isolation of the doctor's office I resolved to eat nothing but alfalfa sprouts and apple wedges. I braced for the pending austerity by grabbing a burger and curly fries for the drive home. For the next year and a half, I paid strict attention to my diet, consuming whole wheat, tofu, baked fish, lettuce, broccoli, all those do-gooder foods. The ones that leave you feeling dietetically righteous.

And hungry. Which is to say after all the conscientious nibbling, I would fling myself off the wagon. Follow the tofu nibbles with deep-fried cheese curds. Lay a foundation of fresh vegetable salad, then brick it over with half a tray of caramel bars. Skinless chicken followed by chocolate of any formation or quality. Carrots and half a bag of mini-doughnuts. And if the cupboard is bare, a mad four-block dash to TJ's Food-N-Fun for a Tubby Burger. Nineteen months later, I had another blood draw and found my LDL up another ten points.

So my willpower rates a big fat zero. But what a repulsive thing to associate with food:
willpower
. As if one would parse out love or oxygen by the teaspoon. When I look at my picture of Irma Harding on the cover of
Freezer Fancies,
I think, sure, she'd make me eat my spinach, but then she would slip me a batch of butter-larded freezer cookies, a basket of shredded coconut balls, or a perfectly engineered chunk of chocolate whipped-cream cake. I would eat them right down, and she would grin at me, drawing one side of her mouth back from that beautiful, tad-crooked tooth, and she would ask,
Baby? Are you still hungry?
And I would say,
Oh yes, Irma, Oh yes I am
.

 

My four seminal culinary influences—listed in order of appearance—are:

1. Jacques, a highly skilled and half-crazed emergency medical technician. We pulled a lot of forty-eight-hour weekend shifts together around the end of the 1980s. Our headquarters were in a funeral home, and in between ambulance calls we prepared our meals in a little kitchen ten feet from the embalming room. Jacques taught me to rub venison with allspice. Sounds simple, but it was my first exposure to red meat jazzed up with something other than Lawry's Seasoned Salt. Jacques's derring-do struck me as
   très haute,
   and opened my mind to further possibilities. Allspice was my gateway drug.
   
2. Jim Harrison and every word he's ever written about food, even though some bemoan all the garlic. More than the words, the
   way
   . Gusto meets reverence.
   
3. Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright. The
   Two Fat Ladies
   . Brought to you by the BBC. I watch and rewatch their five-video box set. Jennifer and Clarissa empower me with broad license and anchovy paste. As an aside, Jim Harrison is on record poor-mouthing the use of butter in cooking, while the Two Fat Ladies lob it in at every turn. With the recent death of Jennifer, we have lost the chance to resolve the issue the way it should be resolved: in a three-way triple-threat steel-cage match featuring spatulas and olive oil.
   
4. Think Like a Chef,
   by Tom Colicchio, whose message I rightly or wrongly took to be,
   regarding recipes, improvisation trumps pedantry
   . Having said that and scorched the cutlets, it is doesn't hurt to recall that Picasso drew a lot of orthodox ladies before cranking out
   Woman in a Hat
   .
   

Riffing off these four muses, I have concocted rosemary-rubbed venison roast served with a red wine and shallot reduction fit to make an atheist say grace, plated chilled leeks drizzled with a dill mustard vinaigrette that left me trilling aloud, and I once faked up a duck soup that I am certain was eligible for several international cooking awards. On the other hand, I have also created frankly repulsive stir-fry eggplant parmesan the consistency of oil-soaked felt, and marinara resembling bloody library paste.

When something is a success, I jot down the recipe and pin it to a three-by-four-foot bulletin board I fastened to the kitchen wall with drywall screws when I moved into the place. These recipes don't qualify as recipes in the formal sense; they're more a record of ingredients that went together well when I threw them together. Measurements, if they are cited at all, are generally denoted in increments of
glug, slosh,
or
tad
. Over the years I've lived in this house, the ingredient lists have accumulated like handbills, shingling over one another so that it often takes a minute or two of leafing and peeking before I locate the one-off venison and parsnips mélange that tasted so good last March. When one of these improvisations turns out, that's when I notice my singlehood. That's when I miss someone. You want to look up from your plate with a smile and just shake your head at the fundamental wonder of food and the civilized joy of convening to eat.

 

I had this moment where I thought I might try baking my way through
Freezer Fancies,
but then I checked my calendar and I will be on the road ten days this month and the dishes are stacking up as it is, so I have decided to choose one recipe and see how it turns out. This decision of course has nothing to do with my schedule and instead is predicated on my inability to stay on task, combined with a healthy respect for baking, which I distinguish from “cooking.” When I cook, I tend to wing it. Baking requires follow-through and exactitude, to which I respond, Hey! Wanna go ride bike? Despite fond memories of working with teaspoons and measuring cups and learning the difference between baking powder and baking soda while making chocolate chip cookies from scratch with Mom, I rarely do any baking.

It's fun to review
Freezer Fancies,
with its vintage graphics and vernacular. I'm going to take a pass on the Pink Party Cake. Ditto the Ice Cream Bell, the Pink Tapioca Pudding, the Meringue Shells, and the variously complicated Nest o'Balls. Nor shall I make the Ice Cream Man, directions on page 12:
“This gay little fellow will be the life of any party and the kiddies will love him!”
Time has a way of modulating the lexicon. Ultimately, I chose to make the Frozen “Six-in-One” Cookies.
“Your kitchen will develop into an after-school ‘hangout' if you use this assortment of ‘melt-in-your-mouth' cookies!”
I swear I'll call the cops.

The Six-in-One recipe was simple enough, but I modified it, going Four-In-One. I skipped the coconut and the raisin versions, and wound up with four wads of dough: plain, chocolate, pecan, and a cinnamon-and-nutmeg combination. I rolled each dough ball into a cylinder one and three-quarter inches in diameter, sliced a few cookies off for immediate baking, wrapped the remaining cylinders in plastic, and placed them in my freezer. I put the cookies in the oven and brewed coffee.

 

Until I came across
Freezer Fancies
and set out to collect Irma's entire oeuvre, I was in possession of exactly thirteen cookbooks. A comparatively modest collection, but I have my reasons, the main one being, nothing snarls me up like options. I blame this on my genes and my waste-not, want-not penny-pinching proto-Calvinist roots, which imbued me with the feeling that to be in possession of a useful thing and not use it is to allow the devil to wedge his big toe in the screen door of your soul. This line of thinking engenders teetering stacks of hand-washed yogurt cups, bales of folded grocery bags, impassable porches, and the hoarding of broken-handled snow shovels. It follows that the implied responsibility inherent in a collection of cookbooks is overwhelming.

Genetically, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that I am pathologically unable to maintain the process of linear thought. In conversation I rarely plow halfway through a sentence before my attention, best characterized as a dim-witted antelope, spots a flag waving from the topical periphery and skips off to investigate. My brain zigzags like an amped-up puppy bounding around the chicken yard, never able to pick just one bird and stick with it. It's like
Rain Man
in here, minus the apti
tude for math. I have a hard time starting things and I have a hard time finishing things. Once while speaking at a camp for troubled youths on the topic of how they might get their lives together, I looked down at my sandaled feet and noted I had trimmed nine out of ten toenails.

Combine guilt-ridden sense of duty with terminal indecision and you will understand why I resist bringing any more cookbooks into the house. I look at my stack of thirteen, and I hear an austere Depression-era voice in my head, saying,
Hundreds of perfectly good recipes in there, and you haven't even
touched
them
. There is work to be done, and I am
way
behind. I've tallied the workload, and it freaks me out:

 

Betty Crocker's Cooking for One.
A gift from Mom when I got my first apartment. Reminds me of the love we never sufficiently return and thus the very sight of it renders me melancholy. Tears in the spaghetti sauce. Leafing through it now, I note that I have yet to compose Chicken Livers in Toast Cup. Number of recipes: 177.

 

Untitled.
A pamphlet of recipes published by the China Village company and given away as a premium for the purchase of a wok. Got the pamphlet when Mom gave me the wok. Used the wok a lot, but not the recipes. I note my mother has inscribed “
bland
” beside Chicken with Mushrooms. This from a woman who wears her hair in a bun and once eased the family through a lean stretch by feeding us boiled wheat from a plastic trash can. Her idea of
bland
implies an absence of flavor so utter as to create a vacuum capable of bending light. Number of recipes: 11.