University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The usual things in unusual places: plotting simultaneity in narratives by women

(USC Thesis Other)

The usual things in unusual places: plotting simultaneity in narratives by women

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content The Usual Things in Unusual Places: Plotting Simultaneity in Narratives by Women Emily Fridlund A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) December 2014 1. Table of Contents Introduction “but a moment is room wide enough” 2 Chapter One “the same thing from two different views”: Darwin, Freud, and the Family Novel 21 Chapter Two An Ethics of Coincidence: Virginia Woolf’s Family Novels 44 Chapter Three A Poetics of Multitasking: The Family Narratives of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel 74 Afterword 104 Works Cited 110 Notes 117 Acknowledgements 122 Appendix A: Natural History 123 2. Introduction “but a moment is room wide enough” However, Gwendolen had the charm, and those that feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character – the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies. For Macbeth’s rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the same moment referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the lash of a murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance. —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (42) Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot’s final published novel, begins with the tale of Gwendolen Harleth facing the sudden financial ruin of her family. If a familiar plot for a Victorian novel, it is nimbly and playfully told, bringing out both the coquettish charm and the facetious self-regard of Eliot’s young heroine. Like many heroines before her, Gwendolen appears on track at the start of this book to receive a humbling lesson in character followed by that lesson’s reward: a good, upwardly mobile marriage. She gets both, but not in that order. The passage above prefigures one of the pivotal crises of this novel, which increasingly shifts away from its heroine to focus on the eponymous Daniel Deronda. As the earnest, orphaned Daniel begins a quest to uncover his past, Gwendolen — in largely separate and alternating chapters — marries up, discovers her husband Sir Grandcourt’s 3. sadistic tastes, grows to loathe him. By the end of the novel, her charming “iridescence” has transformed into anguished ambivalence. She feels herself torn apart by revulsion for her husband, murderous. “I was like two creatures,” she says of the moments before her husband’s fatal fall from a yacht in Genoa near the end of the book (691). She goes on: “[T]he evil longings, the evil prayers came again and blotted everything else dim, till, in the midst of them — I don’t know how it was — he was turning the sail — there was a gust — he was struck — I know nothing — I only know I saw my wish outside me” (696, emphasis added). Her husband’s fall occurs in the midst of her vicious thoughts. Though Gwendolen feels responsible, the death of Sir Grandcourt appears to be an accident. As Daniel himself thinks when he is told of it, “It seemed almost certain that her murderous thought had no outward effect” (696). And yet what is so striking about Gwendolen’s moment of crisis in this intricately plotted novel is that it opens up several fundamental uncertainties about the relationship of cause to effect, and, more broadly, the relationship of sequence to significance. Daniel is only “almost” certain that the thought and the death are unconnected, underscoring in his slight hedging the moral and psychological tug to see meaningful pattern in coincidence. For her part, Gwendolen, haunted as she is by her hate for her husband, is convinced of the causal connection: “I knew no way of killing him,” she says, “but I did, I did kill him in my thoughts” (695). This moment is vertiginous and surprising because Eliot refuses to come down wholly on the side of either coincidence or causality here, promiscuously entangling the two modes in the production of the scene’s meaning. By emphasizing the simultaneity of Gwendolen’s murderous thought and her husband’s death — alongside Gwendolen’s insistence that that led to this — Eliot shows both the seductive power of causality as well as its limitations in making sense out of certain human experiences. 4. Narrative moments like the one described above — moments stretched wide enough for more than one thing to happen at once, and for more than one conclusion to be drawn — appear at critical junctures in a number of novels and stories, particularly those written after the turn of the twentieth century and, as we’ll see, in particularly resonant ways in narratives written by women. The news of the death of Septimus Smith, to take one well-known example from Virginia Woolf, abruptly interrupts Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts as she is relishing the excitement of her party. The young veteran and the middle-aged wife have never met; their plots do not intersect beyond the brief mention of the man floated in the party’s idle chatter. Nevertheless when Mrs. Dalloway hears of his jump from a high window, she feels “[s]omehow it was her disaster—her disgrace” (185). Or, to take a more recent example, Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home traces the nearly coinciding experiences of the author’s coming out and her father’s apparent suicide. These two stories interweave and swim on the page, one overlapping the other just as the written text overlays the visual images. And throughout the memoir Bechdel wrestles with the possibility of a connection between the two momentous events, saying — poignantly, revealingly — “I could not help but assume a cause-and-effect relationship” (59), even though that assumption “is perhaps illogical” (84). Gwendolen’s hate and her husband’s fall from the yacht, Mrs. Dalloway’s party and Septimus’s death, Bechdel’s coming out and her father’s suicide — all three depictions of coinciding events in narrative pose a wrenching question regarding the intersection of time to significance: When two things seem to happen at once, or nearly so, what, if anything, does it mean? * My aim in the discussion to come is not so much to answer this question but to attend to a 5. few intriguing texts that call attention to and trouble its possible answers. My motivation comes from a sense that too little has been said about narrative simultaneity and its peculiar fretwork of poetics and ethics. 1 I am fascinated by the way writers figure simultaneous events within the sequences of scenes and words that make up books, and, more importantly, the ways such writers consider the meaning, or meaninglessness, of temporal overlaps and collisions and contradictions. Thus this project began, and remains at heart, a study of at-once-ness: the co- incidence of happenings, the ambivalence of feelings, the intersections of fortune and disaster and banality. In the following pages I take up books by Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro, and Alison Bechdel in order to see how writers of narrative portray coincidence in the broadest of terms, that is, as the simultaneous occurrence of more than one action or event. I have chosen to focus primarily on women writers because, as feminist scholars Susan Lanser, Nancy Miller, and Rachel Duplessis have taken pains to show, women have held, and continue to hold, a unique stake in experimenting with narrative conventions associated with probability, causality, and the real. Furthermore, within this focus on women writers, I look specifically at family narratives in an effort to investigate how the related notions of causality and descent have influenced the formation of narrative conventions, especially during and after the nineteenth century. As we’ll see, the challenge of suggesting the simultaneous within the linear — within lines of text as well as within successions of generations — very often requires formal experimentation. I am interested in canvassing differing approaches to the project of depicting at-once-ness, and the ways in which these differing approaches can result in jarring and unexpected texts that can be easily misread. In thinking about how, however, I also hazard some reasons why these writers choose to depict simultaneity, and why coinciding events in twentieth- and twenty-first-century narrative, 6. especially, reveal a view of the world that is fundamentally more anarchic, and less ostensibly meaningful, than the sort of coincidence portrayed by earlier writers in the English language. Coincidence in the work of storytellers from Shakespeare to Dickens tends to hint at the lily- white glove of some magician at work — most likely Fate or God, sometimes the writer himself. As critic George Levine and novelist Ali Smith have pointed out, coincidence in such works tends to disclose a grander order shimmering just beyond or behind the page. 2 By contrast, coinciding events in the texts I track often point to the disorderly above all else, to the unaccountable and inconclusive. I suggest, first, that simultaneity as depicted in these books tends to diminish a sense of teleological progress and, second, that these works engage both the chaotic and creative possibilities of chance. As we’ll see, these two qualities result in stories that challenge some of the most basic conventions of the family novel, and narrative more generally. And yet, as Gwendolen’s crisis shows, considering simultaneity in narrative almost always involves thinking more about causality as well. Therefore it is here, in Eliot’s last novel — a Victorian book preoccupied with themes of inheritance and choice — that I want to launch my investigation into narrative simultaneity with a reprisal of a few influential views on narrative causality. Though Eliot’s narrator insists in the first playfully written chapters that “we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment,” by the end of this novel that very proposition seems, if not wholly overturned, then tellingly and intentionally called into question. * In “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Roland Barthes cogently articulates the problem I see at the heart of Gwendolen’s crisis. “Everything suggests,” he says, “that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after in narrative being read in narrative as what is caused by…” (73, author’s 7. emphasis). It is a remarkable assessment. Barthes puts forward the idea that the organizing principle of narrative — plot — tends to arise from a logical confusion, a post hoc fallacy. It could be said that we read in anticipation of retrospect, not so much looking forward from cause to effect, but, more precisely, looking backwards from effect to find a cause. 3 As early as Aristotle’s Poetics, success in narrative has been evaluated by the extent to which causality seen in retrospect holds sway. Thus Aristotle disdainfully deprecates merely episodic plots, saying, “I call a plot ‘espeisodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence” (18). The soundest narrative beginning for Aristotle is the cause “which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity”; likewise, the end is the effect “which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it” (14). What Aristotle does not say in this discussion of causality is that the “probable or necessary” in narrative is almost always a matter of interpretation. For when E. M. Forster claims in Aspects of the Novel (1927), “‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot” (86), he identifies not a necessary but interpretative force — “grief” — that argues a causal link between those two sequential deaths. No causal link need exist between the royal deaths, but for Forster it is the completed causal chain, “the final sense,” that allows the reader to “come up against beauty” (88). In other words, Forster, like Aristotle, yokes the believability of the causal chain to his overall aesthetic judgment of the narrative. It is not the mere existence of a possible causal link, but that link’s persuasiveness judged after the fact that results in narrative “beauty.” I imagine, for example, that Forster’s sense of the beauty of the royal plot would remain intact even if the meaning were slightly changed and told thus: “The king died, and the queen died of guilt.” Perhaps, however, it would be a little less beautiful to him if the story went, “The king died and 8. the queen died of happiness.” Or worse: “The king died, and the queen died of lust.” No doubt causal links could be established in all these plots, with a little crafty storytelling or a lot more interpretative work. My point is that as arguments made in retrospect, causal connections tend to gain or lose force insofar as they line up with sequences familiar to the reader — that is, insofar as they appear to repeat known processes and are therefore, as Aristotle says, “probable.” It is this notion of plot as an interpretive force that Peter Brooks describes in his influential 1984 study Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Breaking away from the fussily taxonomic approach that dominated midcentury debates among structuralists, Brooks reasserts plot’s importance in narrative, defining it as “the logic and dynamic of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation” (10, emphasis added). Interestingly, Brooks never explicitly links plot to causality, the way Forster does, focusing instead on the “activity of shaping” or “that which makes a plot ‘move forward,’ and makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that holds the promise of progress toward meaning” (xiii). Nevertheless, the kind of shaping that undergirds this plotting process is by implication a causal force in Brooks’ writing. By taking for granted that narrative is a form of “explanation,” Brooks’ theory tends to work best for mysteries like those about Sherlock Holmes or personal origin quests like Great Expectations: stories that seek to answer, bit by bit, questions of why. Brian Richardson in Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (1997) makes the case for cause and effect as the basis of narrative more bluntly: “I argue that causal connection, however intermittent, deferred, or oblique, is a necessary condition of narrativity” (37). Though, as his title suggests, Richardson is extremely interested in the “unlikely” — in probability and chance — he resists any wholesale skepticism of cause and 9. effect among theorists like Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, or Roland Barthes, and especially among feminists. “The idea of cause,” he argues, “like the concept of number of the notion of space, is in itself gender neutral and ideologically indifferent, even though historical individuals have repeatedly invoked false causes, skewed various numbers, and delimited spaces in order to suppress women” (47). For this reason, he contends, causality “must not be reduced to or confused with teleology, naturalistic notions of probability, or patriarchal master codes” (47). His swift write-off of feminism here strikes me as a curiously brusque argument to make about a force that he freely admits involves a good dose of subjectivity and interpretation: “In many respects,” he says straightforwardly at one point, “interpretation and causality are two sides of the same coin” (43). Brooks insists he is primarily concerned with the narrative “line of intention” (xiii); Richardson argues that causality involves “interpretation” (43). And yet the persistent fuzziness in both authors’ writing around these notions of interpretation and intent — who intends what, for whom? — reflects a noteworthy imprecision about the operations of pattern recognition on which their theories of narrative depend. 4 Brooks’ verbs in particular tend to be passive, and his participles (such as the act of “plotting” he is so interested in) unattached to any identified agent. Who sees the pattern? we might ask. Who or what shapes it? And how can the layers of “intention” or “interpretation” be extricated — between writers, readers, characters, and the operations of the text itself? If plot is really plotting, as Brooks says, then when the king dies — followed fast by the queen — who sees “grief” as a reasonable cause of her demise? What kinds of human experience make that story seem more plausible, and thus more beautiful (to use Forster’s phrase) than many, many others? 10. To ask such questions is by no means to reject causality as an essential narrative concept. 5 Instead I want to begin to suggest some of the very real complexities that attend the post hoc logic Barthes calls the “mainspring” of narrative — that is, when we read effect to cause and when we fail to see these backwards-made causal links as subjective interpretations shaped by broad cultural consensus. To speak of cultural consensus, moreover, is not to conflate causality in any slick way with patriarchy or cultural hegemony, though an undeniable relationship between such forces has existed historically. Rather I want to point out that an important aspect of “plotting” for writers has always involved engaging readerly expectations about “probable” causes, just as Aristotle and Forster and Richardson claim; because of this, writers of all stripes reflect and push back against ideas about causality that have arisen out of changing dominant discourses regarding “the real.” 6 The French narratologist Tzvetan Todorov speaks to this idea in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, in which he describes the hesitation readers and characters feel when encountering literary events that diverge from their expectations (41). His interest is in the fantastic, but his larger point is that all narratives are situated within a vast field of literary conventions, and as such engage the reader’s expectations based on previous reading experiences — experiences which are constantly evolving over time. Susan Lanser, author of Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, makes a similar, if more politically charged, point. She reminds us that reading always reflects cultural investments, and as a result novelistic structures are “site[s] of ideological practices made visible in textual practices” (6). Lanser therefore focuses on the need for female writers to “strike a delicate balance in accommodating and subverting dominant rhetorical practices” (7). Likewise, Nancy Miller argues that “the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience” in 11. fiction are not in fact eternal verities (46-47). They are better described as an amalgamation of belief systems, scientific discourse, and cultural norms, and because of this, Miller says, they tend to represent “organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture” (46-47). Here, then, is where formalists like Barthes and Todorov and feminists like Lanser and Miller help fill in gaps left open in the conversation about causality developed by theorists of plot like Brooks and Richardson. Narrative structures and cultural contexts can be read as mutually constitutive, and for this reason, are reciprocally implicating and reciprocally revealing. 7 * As we’ll see, one of the principal advantages of depicting events that happen simultaneously in texts is that writers have an opportunity to put on display the way “organizations” of “the dominant culture” shape characters’ assumptions about causality. This, in turn, gives rise to occasions for readers to pay closer attention to their own assumptions, and at the same time, consider the ways meaning is made, or not made, through interpretive leaps of faith. “I did kill him with my thoughts” (695), Gwendolen insists in her despondent confession near the end of Daniel Deronda. Conversely, Daniel believes that her “momentary murderous will cannot…have altered the course of events” (699). Gwendolen explains the death one way; Daniel explains it another. Vitally, it is Daniel’s perspective that informs this late portion of this book. The reader does not experience the death of Sir Grandcourt through Gwendolen’s eyes, except as it is filtered through her explanation to Daniel, and filtered again through the narrator’s close third-person focalization on Daniel. His interpretation may well seem more “probable” due not only to his assertion of Newtonian physical laws, but also — and more importantly to understanding the fictional reality of the narrative, which need not follow such physical laws — due to the structural shifts that privilege his interiority in the aftermath of Gwendolen’s crisis. 12. Readers here are more closely connected to his perspective because his response is the one that controls this section of the book. 8 And yet, beguilingly, the moment in the yacht assumes a vertiginous quality for the very same formal reasons that align the reader with Daniel’s perspective. The reader, like Daniel, is not privy to the scene in which Sir Grandcourt falls from the boat. We therefore cannot know for sure how or whether Gwendolen’s thinking affected the fall: beforehand (when she wishes for his death), during (when she sees her wish improbably realized), or afterwards (when she hesitates to help him). Because the event is not depicted in scene — within the sentences and paragraphs that describe the action — we have only the syuzhet (or the story’s discourse) to work from, which limits and complicates access to the fabula (the story itself). We have only competing interpretations, Gwendolen’s and Daniel’s, and because Gwendolen’s faltering confession is offered initially, she controls the reader’s first imagining and first impression of what happened on the boat: “I don’t know how it was — he was turning the sail — there was a gust — he was struck” (696). Only later does Daniel step in to insist on his interpretation: “With your quickest, utmost effort, it seems impossible that you could have done anything to save him” (699). The narrative structure stretches the moment “wide enough” for readers to see both possibilities — both the potential consequence alongside the probable inconsequence of Gwendolen’s thinking. In presenting this crisis under such conditions, George Eliot puts pressure on narrative causality, both engaging and challenging assumptions that underpin effect to cause (or the post hoc fallacy), and presenting causal logic as, quite possibly, a matter of belief. This late moment in Daniel Deronda also resonates in revealing ways with the novel’s larger concern over the connections of inevitability to chance. As we’ve seen, Daniel concludes that Sir Grandcourt’s death “was inevitable,” despite — or because of — its accidental quality 13. (696). Inevitability, it turns out, is Daniel’s watchword in this book. 9 As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that his Jewish past will be his destiny, that, quite apart from his mother who felt wretchedly trapped by her religion and culture, Daniel will gratefully and happily accept “the effects prepared by generations” (663). Blood for him links the past with the future, pushes his plot forward through time, and results in an ending that ultimately returns him full-circle to his roots. 10 His plot reveals his preoccupation with — as William Gass describes them in “The Nature of Narrative” — “[m]yths of origin” (9). Such myths, Gass suggests, make blood the first cause, lineage the archetype of plotting through time for men, and narrative ends determined in a profoundly teleological sense by beginnings. 11 Origins are not only Daniel’s preoccupation, but that of any number of Victorian characters, from Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff to Charles Dickens’ Pip. In “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Michel Foucault elegantly describes how this kind of “obsession” with myths of history pervaded storytelling in the century of Darwin: “with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its preponderance of dead men, and the menacing glaciation of the world” (1). The “essential mythological resources” of nineteenth-century plots, Foucault argues, are found in the second principle of thermodynamics: entropy. Seen under this lens, Daniel Deronda will not change in any revolutionary fashion — he will not become a man made of new materials — but instead dig up and rework old ingredients inherited from his buried dead. It is, one could say, inevitable. Gwendolen, by contrast, is the one truly changed through the course of her experience. She is, to begin with, gradually but definitely reshaped through her guilt and penitence after her husband’s fatal fall from the yacht. Furthermore, the early foreshadowing of a romance with Daniel is cancelled by his marriage to the Jewish Micah. Unlike her Middlemarch predecessor 14. Dorthea Brooke — who marries a second time after her stunted first marriage — Gwendolen ends this book conspicuously uncoupled. What is so stunning for a novel that starts with the conventional conceit of the spoiled young heroine is that Gwendolen’s crisis in the boat opens for her a truly unlikely course, one that does not end in the female equivalent to taking up the mantel of one’s lineage: that is, marriage. While Daniel’s outcome is foretold by blood, Gwendolen’s remains, at the novel’s close, genuinely up in the air. And that moment in the boat — the perilous coinciding of her murderous thought and her husband’s death — ultimately proves crucial to the abrupt disruption of the more conventional paths she has been following as a social climber and a tortured, resentful wife. It is a change brought about by what Daniel would call an “inevitable” stroke of chance — a change in the wind, perhaps — but also, Eliot makes plain, by Gwendolen’s extraordinary interpretation of the moment. The link she forges between the two events, however illogical to a character like Daniel, and however improbable to the reader, is an essential part of what makes new life possible. Without the chance tragedy there would be no occasion for transformation, and without her hateful wish there would be no need to transform. As we’ll see, narrative coincidence operates in similarly accidental, disrupting, and often creative ways for female characters in a number of significant twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives. What this critical moment in Daniel Deronda hints at is the way meaning made in such moments is often subjectively ordered, and further, the way that logic which supports causal links is persuasive only insofar as it is persuasive to the individual. By these means, Eliot reveals how a moment might in a sense be “room wide enough” “to kill and not kill” at once, making space in narrative for simultaneous impulses and contradictory interpretations of events, and in 15. the process, a moral and psychological reality that has gendered implications for how this crisis, and the events of this novel, come to mean. * “We are in an epoch of simultaneity,” Michel Foucault declared in 1984, more than a century after Daniel Deronda was published. This pronouncement appears in the same essay in which he identifies the “essential mythological resources” of nineteenth-century plots in the second principle of thermodynamics. Geology, natural history, evolution: all contributed to an entropic view of the world for the Victorians, one in which the masterplot — in fiction and science alike — involved digging things up. Victorian gradualism, argues George Levine, “popped up in geology (on a Newtonian model), fought its way into biology, and was the groundwork for nineteenth-century ‘realism’” (5). More relevantly to my project, “real” or probable causes, as established under a nineteenth-century model of fiction, influenced ideas about narrative “realism” and causality deep into the twentieth century. That the masterplot of the nineteenth century should influence the masterplot about plot itself in the twentieth is unsurprising. As Peter Brooks describes it, “Our common sense of plot” comes from a variety of sources, but most of all, he says, “it has been molded by the great nineteenth-century narrative tradition that in history, philosophy, and a host of other fields as well as literature, conceived certain kinds of knowledge and truth to be inherently narrative, understandable (and expoundable) only by way of sequence, in a temporal unfolding” (xi-xii). That is to say, as knowledge came to be understood through the narrative logic of “temporal unfolding,” narrative came to be read through the nineteenth-century fascinations with geology, evolutionary biology, and history. When we look at narrative theory, therefore, we can see how the conceptual framework 16. of history — or as Levine puts it, “Victorian gradualism” — has profoundly infused not only our stories, but our theories of plot. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not least because, as Foucault describes it, “our experience of the world” near the turn of the twenty-first century “is less that of a long life developing over time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (1). Though Foucault does not say it directly, the opening of his essay suggests that the crucial mythos at the end of the twentieth century is closer to relativity, to Einstein’s story, in which time is no longer understood as a linear unfolding of events, but as points of intersection in networks of experience. If linear diagrams of the family tree were the presiding topoi of the century of Dickens and Darwin, then we might do better, now, to look to something closer to the heterotopias Foucault proposes, such as vacation villages or brothels — or better still, the World Wide Web — all with hatchworks of connections made diagonally across class, race, and blood. We might locate our topoi in the radiating, frost-like images of the Internet created by Bill Cheswich and Hal Burch, whose ambitious project was to collect and display routing information across a world of online connections. And we might need our stories to do so. We might need our stories about stories to do so, as well. The project to come is an attempt to understand the relationship of simultaneity to plot and to rethink the way meaning is made in stories when events seem to happen at once, rather than (only) as the result of. Chapter One offers some background to this undertaking, considering simultaneity, first, in the context of narrative causality and the cultural context that reified it. As we’ve already seen, causality has long been assumed to be the foundational logic of narrative, and as we will see, this is a logic that echoes not just post-Enlightenment scientific theory but the fields of evolutionary biology and psychoanalysis, both of which gained wide cultural currency 17. at the close of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. Darwin and Freud have been used to lend authority to an axiom that seems, at heart, narrative: that the past (whether in the form of natural history or parental influence) leads to the present and future. I argue, however, that women writers have a compelling stake in considering logics of time that deprioritize descent in favor of other ways of organizing events. Taking my cue from feminist critics such as Gillian Beer and Elizabeth Grosz, I make the case that there is more than the logic of descent in the stories plotted by both Darwin and Freud. I use Virginia Woolf’s family novel The Years as this chapter’s touchstone, and I show how the familiar logic of if-then — of cause and effect, of succession and inheritance — is often less significant than the more chaotic possibilities of meanwhile. Narrative simultaneity in The Years undermines teleology, I contend, disrupting family plot structures that enforce both patriarchal and heteronormative temporalities. This more general conversation about how culture intersects with theory provides a jumping-off point for a deeper consideration of Virginia Woolf in Chapter Two. The centerpiece of this chapter, and of the dissertation itself, involves my paired close readings of Woolf’s family novels: To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Years (1935). Situating my discussion within a broader conversation about the relationship of agency to feminism, I examine narrative coincidence as an ethical rather than aesthetic aim in Woolf’s fiction. I show how Woolf’s earlier novel Mrs. Dalloway points the way to such a reading: writing about more than one actor acting in the same time frame provides an opportunity for Woolf to show meaningful human interaction outside a show of force — that is, outside the effect of one person on another. Thus To the Lighthouse and The Years, together, intentionally trouble the discourse of descent while deftly drawing the reader’s attention to the way simultaneous happenings engender meaning differently from those that are causally connected. Simultaneity becomes a means by which Woolf opens up 18. her plot structures to unexpected shifts in attention and direction, and to the ethical (and political) recognition of time as a field shared by many inhabitants at once. Chapter Three broadens my examination of simultaneity to North American women writing about family in the latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. While touching briefly on a number of writers in this chapter, I concentrate primarily on the short stories of Alice Munro and the graphic narratives of Alison Bechdel. Both writers, like Woolf, trace the influence of family on the development of daughters. However, where Chapter Two focuses on more than one actor acting at the same time, Chapter Three highlights examples of a single actor performing more than one action at once. I consider multitasking in this sense as a potential poetics, one of particular interest to writers like Munro and Bechdel, whose projects involve representing the simultaneous layers of an individual’s experience in time. As we’ll see, there persists a tension in both writers’ narratives between the desire to be free of the past and the peculiar weight of the mother figure and the past she represents. This ambivalence about maternal inheritance is distinct from the logic that drives traditional inheritance plots, which is to say, the classic nineteenth-century family narratives informed by paternal lines of descent. Multitasking as a mechanism of plot, I suggest, makes it possible for Munro and Bechdel to feature such tensions in their narratives, and to play in explicit ways with the related ideas of determinism and interpretation. * “Its obvious that one person sees one thing & another another,” Woolf wrote in her diary while composing The Years, “& that one has to draw them together” (Diary 4 282). It is obvious, but extremely difficult to do in narrative form. Here lies the crux of my interest in the books that I will examine in the following pages: in this “epoch of simultaneity,” in a time of increasing 19. awareness of the coexistence of multiple subjectivities, how do we begin to draw together and make stories out of the varied events and experiences happening everywhere at once? Of course a writer like Woolf, whose works appeared just after first-wave feminism and world war were both leveling nineteenth-century understandings of human experience, could not have foreseen how our contemporary cultures and technologies have remapped human connection in ever more networked, non-linear ways. Even Alice Munro, who began writing in the sixties — and who is an inheritor of and contributor to a number of second-wave feminist attitudes — does not often write explicitly about life in a Wikipedia-Facebook-Twitter age. The writers in this study were not all equally influenced by the particular heterotopias that are now reshaping human and other kinds of connection. I want to suggest the opposite: that their works might influence how we encounter the contemporary moment. I want to put forward the possibility that their depictions of simultaneity might perhaps have special relevance to those of us perched in the second decade after the turn of the twenty-first century; that asking how and if meaning might be drawn from an awareness of the many things happening at once is perhaps an increasingly pressing question; and that considering the ethical and political ramifications of at-once-ness has become ever more necessary, even as it becomes ever more difficult. In fact, the difficulty of making meaning out of simultaneity is one of the running themes of this study. Over and over again, writers have struggled in their works, and in their works’ formal approaches, to render the acausal, and over and over again some of their most ambitious attempts to do so have been read as missed opportunities or as failures by critics. Even George Eliot, writing in the early evening of the nineteenth century, met with an ambivalent critical response after publishing Daniel Deronda. This was not only because of its portrayal of Judaism, which has been well-documented, 12 but also because her nineteenth-century readers had to 20. grapple with the erosion of some of the familiar causal chains they had come to associate with her novelistic realism. Terence Cave argues they had to, in this book, “learn all over again to read romance, but to read it through, and not against, realism” (xxviii). It is my sense that Eliot’s depiction is less backwards-looking than Cave suggests, less Gothic in the whiff of magic it gives off than remarkably modern in its committed portrayal of one anguished psychology in a struggle with itself, and with other psychologies. “A moment is room wide enough,” Eliot reminds us near the start of her novel, “for the loyal and mean desire, for the lash of a murderous thought and the sharp backwards stroke of repentance” (42). In the pages to come I will be on the look-out for more of such wide-enough moments in narrative: for depictions of simultaneity in which moments are stretched open deliberately and conspicuously to include more than one feeling or action at once, multiple points of view, and various coinciding weathers and events and subjectivities — and even contradicting realities. . 21. Chapter One “the same thing from two different views”: Darwin, Freud, and the Family Novel They talked, she thought, as if Abercorn Terrace were a scene in a play, but not real in the way she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel she was two different people at the same time; that she was living two different times at the same moment. —Virginia Woolf, The Years (159) Well of course its extremely interesting having to deal with so many different selves. —Virginia Woolf, Diary 4 (329) Here is one Virginia Woolf story, among the many Virginia Woolf stories told by readers and scholars. Let us call it the Bad Book story, for the sake of convenience. Or, to use Woolf’s own language, let’s call it the “horrid book” story (Diary 4 238), the “impossible eternal book” model of fiction, in which, as Woolf’s language suggests, a writer wrestles with a difficult project over a number of difficult years (Diary 4 334). The gist of the Bad Book story is simple enough. Sometime midcareer — at, say, the age of forty-nine or fifty — the celebrated Bloomsbury author takes on an innovative, ambitious, demanding project, full of thorny, wearying, intractable problems, and the book, after an extended period of composition and 22. revision, enters the world to initially mixed reviews that grow ever more dismissive. Critics are baffled and, on the whole, disappointed. One reviewer says the book is “not a story” at all (McCarthy), and another calls the book, cuttingly, “a document of purposelessness” (qtd. in McNees lxxv). Woolf’s own husband admits it is “not really as good” as her other books (qtd. in McNees lxxiii), and — after early drafts of the book are examined and taken into account — it is declared almost universally to lack unity, force, and vision. 13 Virginia Woolf’s “impossible eternal book,” The Years, was published after more than a half-decade of work in 1937. She was fifty-five, and it was the last of her novels she would see published in her lifetime. Today, The Years sits uneasily in her canon, bearing little outward resemblance to her career-making books from the twenties. For one, it is longer, baggier, more fragmented — veined through with multiple intersecting characters and plotlines. For another, it exhibits at least a generic kinship to a handful of multigenerational family novels written in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, such as Middlemarch (1871), Howards End (1910), The Clayhanger Family (1910-1918), and The Forsyte Saga (1906-21). Like those books, it takes up several generations of an upper middle-class British family and marches them down through the decades. Indeed, The Years generally eschews the kinds of voice experiments and scrambled chronologies found in so many other modernist (and Woolfian) novels, instead unraveling its years in a faithful record of time’s sequence. One contemporary reviewer put it this way: “Unlike some of her other books, The Years is not experimental. It is written ‘straight’” (Anonymous 104-105). This very “straight” novel, however, is also a very queer one. Its origins reflect one of Woolf’s most radical experiments in form. Its earliest iteration, The Pargiters, was a peculiar amalgamate document Woolf called her “novel-essay” — a hybrid of fiction and criticism — and 23. even after Woolf shunted the essay portions from her later drafts, compacting her arguments into fictional scenes, the book never lost its early multi-generic aims. From the beginning, Woolf meant the book to be comprehensive and inclusive, to have breadth and depth without being totalizing. The book was to include everything, she insisted in one particularly exuberant diary entry: “history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate, & so on” (Diary 4 152). The force of Woolf’s ambition as she articulates it here, and elsewhere in her journals, is staggering. In fact, within just a couple weeks of calling what would be The Years a “horrid book,” she writes in her journal, almost breathlessly, “I don’t think I have ever been more excited over a book…. My cheeks burn; my hands tremble” (Diary 4 241). Such comments suggest that there might be more to the Bad Book story so often told about this work, another way to think about its distinctive aims and unusual challenges. This other story might take into account the way The Years was at times a thrill, as well as a trial, for Woolf to write, and the way the thrill came in part from the basic experiment at the book’s heart. For, even after she abandoned the essay portion of her “novel-essay,” Woolf remained committed to the goal of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on her subject matter. Here is how she describes the book’s basic undertaking in her journal, not long after extracting the critical portions: “Rather an interesting experiment—if I could see the same thing from two different views” (Diary 4 173). In her introduction to The Years, Eleanor McNees cites this passage as evidence of “a new method” that Woolf “sought and was frustrated by” (lvi-lvii). Yet what is so salient about Woolf’s “experiment” as she describes it here is not its novelty in the author’s papers, for her diaries are peppered with similar comments, but the consistency of this goal through the course of her career. Over and over again, Woolf articulated a version of this 24. yearning for her fiction: to see the same thing from two different views. Though she knew the novel’s form to be fundamentally limited by temporal sequence — by words and scenes strung in horizontal lines across pages — Woolf, it seems, wanted layers. She wanted coinciding voices and events, multiplicity, chords. 14 In the months before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, Woolf wrote in a letter to painter Jacques Raverat that she wanted to achieve the effect of “simultaneity” rather than the strictly linear “railway” type of sentence she associated with contemporary novelists (qtd. in Bell 106); likewise, when describing her vision for the end of To the Lighthouse, she made it clear that she intended Lily Briscoe to finish her painting just as Mr. Ramsay reached the lighthouse at last (Diary 3 106). Even a cursory reading of Woolf’s papers reveals the writer’s sharp longing for multiple vantage points in her fiction, for stereoscopic vision and simultaneous depiction. And yet depicting simultaneity was particularly challenging in a book like The Years — a book told “straight,” a book with its own “railway” structure of generational descent of daughters through decades. The holograph draft of the novel begins with the Pargiter family tree inked out in Woolf’s spidery lines, and the narrative apparatus appears to mimic this structure of familial descent through time. The Years traces a branching but unidirectional track down through history, generally refusing to depict time in terms of flashbacks or narrative returns, and rarely relying on what we have come to identify as the modernist literary techniques found in her earlier works. The chapter on 1907 comes after the chapter on 1891 and so forth, just as one generation of Pargiters gives way to the next. This staunchly linear temporal structure appears on surface to be directly at odds with Woolf’s explicit goal of seeing “the same thing from two different views.” Why then does Woolf invoke and remain so true to that most traditional of 25. novel forms, the family saga? And how does she — indeed does she — achieve the effect of depicting simultaneity within this strict narrative sequence? * Let me put off considering answers to these questions for just a moment and, by way of oblique rumination, turn to a very different “impossible eternal book”: Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It took twenty years of gestation and thirteen months of frenzied composition before the fifty-year-old naturalist finally published the fruit of his life’s research. It was 1859 — the year Virginia Woolf’s paternal grandfather died, the year A Tale of Two Cities was published. Though the impact of Darwin’s work has proven profound, both scientifically and culturally, his 1859 introduction articulates with surprising candor and poignancy just how “imperfect” and unfinished Darwin feared his theory to be (3). He concedes within the first three paragraphs of the book, “I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived” (4). Darwin’s worries over the book’s controversial content no doubt overlapped with and exacerbated his struggles to find appropriate modes of articulation and organization. This is a point Gillian Beer brings home in her important study of Darwin’s work, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. She says in her 2000 introduction to the Second Edition of her book, “the intellectual and emotional excitement generated by The Origin of Species was partly the outcome of Darwin’s struggle to find a language to think in” (xviii, emphasis added). Trained as a literary critic rather than a scientist, Beer underscores the way Darwin’s argument is bound up with, and pushes back against, literary conventions of nineteenth-century Britain — which was his own origin, of course, with its own 26. ineluctable inheritance of culture and language. Thus even as he was upending popular, long- held beliefs, he was also drawing from the reservoir of rhetorical practices available to him, like other educated Victorians, through the history of his own reading. Culturally speaking, at least, The Origin of the Species can itself be seen as an example of descent with modification. 15 This, then, is one reason Darwin’s “impossible eternal book” makes for a fascinating study when paired with the work of a writer like Woolf. His struggle to find a “language to think in” corresponds with the kinds of formal challenges faced by any writer intent on modifying, and transforming, inherited modes and ideas. For Darwin at least, The Origin’s formal hybridity makes for ambiguous, idiosyncratic, multivalent prose — writing potentially open to wide interpretation. In some places, for instance, he dryly catalogues his observations in a rambling style that plods its way from evidence to conclusion. In other places, there is an urgent, almost sermonizing quality to the paragraphs. “How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man!” Darwin exclaims near the beginning of Chapter IV. “[H]ow short his time! and consequently how poor his products will be…” He concludes: “Can we wonder, then, that Nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions…?” (70). Passages like this feature one of the more surprising rhetorics at work in The Origin of Species, which is the voice of a man keenly aware of the evangelical nature of his project. Here’s the basic claim behind Darwin’s pitch, which not infrequently slips from cool argument to impassioned supplication: only that which is “profitable,” he promises, will “tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring” (52). Whatever stylistic hat Darwin wears, this idea of inheritance is key. All the “exquisite adaptations,” all the “beautiful adaptations” (51), come down to the infinitesimally gradual differences that accumulate over the generations of a species’ evolution. It is the slowness of this 27. process of change — the basic continuity of diverging species as they descend through the ages — that can sometimes strike a conciliatory note in this revolutionary book, a reassuring strain of conservatism. There is at times a logic at work in The Origin that appears to justify the way things are, the mere existence of current natural forms, through past processes of natural selection. This logic focuses on the way one thing leads to another to the next in a Newtonian universe in which, biologically speaking, inheritance is the mechanism — the gravitational pull, the fixed causal force — that explains how we got from where we were to where we are now. Another way of putting this, of course, is that Darwin’s theory can be framed as a scientific theory, but it is also an explanatory story. As such, it justifies not the ways of God to men, but the ways of Nature, and, as in Milton’s epic, the author’s job is not only to relate events, not just to lay out the buried bones of history. His job is also to convince the reader that what happened indeed adds up to the way things are now. For this reason, The Origin of Species could be said to draw from the same logic that underpins so much of narrative: the logic makes plot plot. * Take, for example, Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches. Darwin’s basic observation is that it is not enough to say that one type of finch appeared on the continent, and then another unrelated type appeared on the islands. That is a catalogue, merely, or at best an organizational strategy for stuffing the birds and arranging them on the proper shelves in a museum. It does not account for the remarkable similarities between finches. Why, Darwin asks, “should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America?” (322). What Darwin makes clear is the way the continental finch led to the big-beaked island bird through a series of gradual, 28. observable modifications, and it is this logic — the logic of causality — that arguably makes his case so narratively compelling. Royals might be described in similar terms to finches. “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story,” E. M. Forster tells us in Aspects of the Novel (1927). By contrast, “‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’” is a plot.” He explains, “The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it” (86, emphasis added). I like Forster’s definition of plot for its pithiness and clarity, but, as we’ve seen, his is by no means a unique notion in the development of theories of narrative. As discussed in the Introduction, Forster essentially restates in new terms Aristotle’s point in The Poetics (“Of all plots and actions the epeisodic are the worst” (18)), and his definition dovetails with the influential fabula / syuzhet distinction set up by the Russian formalists at the beginning of the twentieth century. All three are different ways of discussing a similar basic dichotomy — the episodic versus the tragic, fabula versus syuzhet, story versus plot — and it is the latter term in each pair that is generally favored. 16 Brian Richardson goes so far as to say that causality is a compulsory element in storytelling, “a necessary condition of narrativity” (37). In this hierarchal way of thinking about narrative, a chronological list of events may provide plot’s raw ingredients, but it is the infusion of causality that renders such sequences more than laundry lists, more than episodes or fabula alone. According to Forster — and the vast majority of theorists of narrative — “plot” is that which transforms temporally organized items into causal chains. What interests me is the way this kind of narrative logic borrows credentials from, and also subtly reinforces, the causal logic that underpins Darwin’s hugely influential work on lineage and inheritance in the mid-nineteenth century. As many cultural historians have pointed out, this historical moment in the West saw not only fertile cross-pollination between sciences 29. and arts, but also the gradually increasing standing in public discourse of scientific explanations over religious ones. More to the point, Darwinian logic began to infuse the cultural imaginary at a critical point in the novel’s “rise”: Beer brings this idea home in her study, arguing that, as a result, “[e]volutionary ideas proved crucial to the novel during [the nineteenth century] not only at the level of theme but at the level of organization” (6). According to Beer, this is largely due to the fact that evolutionary theory and narrative share in common an obsession with change over time. Therefore, evolutionary theory had powerful “imaginative consequences” for writers (2), offering, at least initially, “new authority to orderings of narrative which emphasized cause and effect” (6). George Levine makes a similar argument in Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. He puts forward the idea that the “central tradition of Victorian realism” relied on a belief in gradual causation as the basis for change. “Novels as much as geology,” he writes, “depended on the apparent plausibility conferred by the idea that all events can be explained causally” (15). This emphasis on causality had especially profound “imaginative consequences” for the family novel of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Think of any number of long, sprawling, intricately plotted books from the period — Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Bleakhouse, The Forsyte Saga — in which time’s passage proves meaningful through one generation’s effect on the next. Cause and effect, inheritance, descent: all intersect in these family novels, which, like the theory of evolution itself, hold the branching family tree at their centers. 17 In such books, family is not only the subject matter but a basic ordering feature of narrative time, providing the conceptual basis for “plot” as Forster describes it. Over and over again, the small-beaked finch gives rise to his big-beaked descendants; children inherit their dead parents’ fortunes and failings; “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.” What Forster’s — and Darwin’s — plots reveal is the 30. way causality transforms time’s everlasting succession into something meaningful, rendering such sequences as fill novels not arbitrary, not mere catalogues of stuffed birds, but long, elegant chains connecting present and past. Indeed, evolutionary logic so infuses Forster’s thinking on this subject of plot that it colors his very metaphors of evaluation. He says rather playfully in his introduction, the “story” is the “backbone or may I say a tapeworm” (26), while the “plot” is “an organism of a higher type” (30). * It is the “tapeworm” quality of The Years that seems to baffle readers most. While Woolf’s penultimate novel offers up a formal likeness to Victorian and Edwardian family novels, The Years shows little investment in descent as a plotting mechanism, or cause and effect as a narrative conjunction linking events in the present to those in the past. On its face, The Years traces several generations of one family, the Pargiters, in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century; at the same time, one of its most conspicuous aspects is its refusal to transition smoothly from point A to point B, from one moment in narrative time to the following one. This is not to say that the book is anything but temporally coherent, for, as I’ve said, the chapter on 1907 comes after the chapter on 1891, which comes after the chapter on 1880, and so forth. Rather, chasms are continually and unpredictably opening up between narrative actions. This is a book perforated throughout by interruptions: there are sentences breaking off, innumerable ellipses and dashes, thoughts disrupted or impinged upon by outside events, and scenes ended without any sense of closure. These interruptions in The Years attenuate the domino effect that usually occurs when the weight of the past falls hard onto the next generations. Except for the occasional repetition and echo, there is a strong sense of disconnect 31. between generations, fragmentation within conversations, and discontinuity between and within scenes. But why? To return to the first question that began my rumination on The Years, why does Woolf turn to the family saga in the first place? It might seem enough to say that Woolf invokes this form only to refuse its traditional logic, and that she does so as a means of undermining the sort of novels, and the sort of family structures, that she finds so noxious to literary and cultural change. Woolf, it could be said, had a vested interest in sabotaging the literary structures she inherited, which, because outmoded and patriarchal, afforded women writers little in the way of meaningful inheritance. Such a reading would be in keeping with arguments Woolf makes in her nonfiction essays. In A Room of One’s Own, for example, she playfully wrings her hands over the garbled work of a hypothetical novelist, Mary Carmichael. She writes of Carmichael’s odd, awkward prose, “First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating” (106, emphasis added). Woolf goes on to describe the vexation such ruptures incite in the reader, sounding very much like her own critics of The Years, a book she would not begin for another two years: …[T]he effect was somehow baffling; one could not see a wave heaping itself, a crisis coming around the next corner…. For whenever I was about to feel the usual things in the usual places, about love, about death, the annoying creature twitched me away, as if the important point were just a little further on. (119) Like Carmichael, Woolf plots the usual things in unusual places. She relentlessly interrupts her own text in The Years, resisting narrative crisis and “baffling” her readers. And she does this not 32. by denying them unity or vision (as her critics argued), but plot as Forster defines it: a clear pattern of cause and effect. She rebuffs the reader’s desire to see “the wave heaping itself.” This, in barest-bone terms, recapitulates many of the feminist readings of this book. Rachel Duplessis bases her reading of twentieth-century female novelists on this very Mary Carmichael passage, arguing, convincingly, that breaking the sequence in The Years is “a critique of narrative” and its patriarchal “orders and priorities” (“Feminist Narrative in Virginia Woolf” 324). Similarly, Liisa Saariluoma makes the case that The Years’ fragmented form is “a consequence of the demolition of the ideological basis of the family novel” (296). Such arguments arise out of a feminist project that seeks to identify female resistance to the patriarchal tradition that has shaped the Western literary canon. Such arguments are persuasive and important, but they often do not go far enough. They account for Woolf’s interest in the family novel and for her resistance to (and obvious undermining) of the form. However, they do not well address Woolf’s own caveat in A Room of One’s Own: breaking the sequence should not create ruin alone. The “right to break,” she tells us, is won only when breaking is done “for the sake of creating.” What, we must ask, does The Years create? One scene suggests an answer near the middle of the book. The scene begins the 1917 chapter, when Eleanor, a prominent figure in the novel’s cast, breathlessly arrives at her cousin’s dinner party in war-time London. She is introduced to a man she does not know, Nicholas, a “foreigner,” who speaks to her as if he were “in the middle of a sentence that he wished to finish” (265). “…we were talking about Napoleon…” he says, his words set off by trails of ellipses (265). I will examine this scene in greater detail in Chapter Two, but for now let me point out that Eleanor is baffled by the sudden plunge into political discussion. Nevertheless, she finds herself filling in when Nicholas hesitates. She adds her own word, “fit,” to his half-spoken 33. point: if we do not know ourselves we cannot make religions and laws that fit. And it is by this quietly extraordinary means — a chance encounter, the spark of unlike minds thinking the same thing at the same time — that a brief, transitory, and apparently true moment of communication takes place. This exchange stands out, in part, because so many of the conversations in this book are so obviously miscommunications. Even this conversation just barely misses being another disconnect, for it is not obvious how or why Eleanor and Nicholas come to their understanding. There is a random, even mysterious quality to the way meaning is made between them: Nicholas’s words “floa[t] together” in Eleanor’s mind to make “one intelligible sentence” (266). Their connection seems coincidental, and I mean this in both senses of the word: as simultaneous occurrence and chance correspondence. Eleanor and Nicholas seem almost by accident to be thinking about the same thing at once, for Eleanor had been brooding about the war on the omnibus just before her arrival, and Nicholas had been arguing about “the psychology of great men” before Eleanor arrived (266). They have just met, but they come very fast to the same conclusion. It is the very unlikeliness of their interaction, their inadvertent understanding born of Eleanor’s interruption, that makes their connection both so resonant and so fragile. For it does not last. Before long, Nicholas looks “puzzled,” and Eleanor worries that “she had not made her meaning plain” (267). Connection in The Years is made only to dissolve again. Meaning is made, and unmade, just that fast. Yet Woolf does not leave their conversation there. She turns to it again in the novel’s final chapter where we learn that the Napoleon conversation has been going on for almost two decades and has swelled to include at least five characters, probably more, in countless interactions. We see Eleanor’s nephew, North, repeating to his cousin Sara what Nicholas told 34. him, and Sara, who has apparently heard Nicholas’s theory before, repeating the theory for North, now incorporating Eleanor’s word, “fit.” What began, then, as a chance connection — a coincidental meeting of minds — has branched out into a proliferation of connections between different generations, family members, and friends. In a family novel rife with interruptions, Nicholas’s and Eleanor’s conversation advances an alternative type of tie to blood or inheritance, another way of binding individuals together. Their exchange suggests the way meaning is sometimes made laterally rather than causally: by means of coincidence, iteration, and chance. * Chance bothers Darwin. “Descent” may be the most obvious logic that underlies Darwin’s story of life, but this logic is profoundly affected and qualified by the prepositional phrase he attaches to it: Descent with modification. Modification is as essential to his theory of evolution as descent, and yet what clearly troubles Darwin in The Origin is that he cannot account for the cause of modifications in species. His frustration with this problem is a running theme through his work. “Variability is governed by many unknown laws” he says (37), and later, “Our ignorance of the laws of variation are profound” (137). In particular, he worries that he has too closely aligned the idea of modification with the idea of chance, and reminds his reader that this “is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation” (108). He assumes that this “cause” is simply yet to be discovered, which was true in a way, for Gregor Mendel’s theories of genetics were not widely applied until after 1900. 18 Yet even after Mendel’s theory of genetics (and the later discovery of DNA) gained broad acceptance, random and chance mutations in genes remained part of what accounted for the “modifications” observed. In a way, then, in speaking of modification in terms of “chance,” Darwin was not wrong. 35. My point is not to put pressure on scientific findings to form a theory of narrative. I only mean to suggest that Darwin’s lodestar, his own guiding theoretical model, always included more than descent alone. To state the obvious, “descent” without “modification” would make species’ reproduction a study in mass replication. “Descent with modification,” by contrast, offers up at least two different ways to see the “imaginative consequences” of Darwin’s work — that is, the kinds of logic that evolutionary theory employs to connect species and events in time. If we focus on “descent,” then the logic that is featured is cause and effect, brought about through systems of intergenerational inheritance. And, as I suggested earlier, descent under natural selection can sometimes look an awful lot like ascent in Darwin’s writing, a honing of positive traits, a ladder or pyramid of progress. Here’s how Darwin describes this process late in his book: “The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature” (278). If, however, we focus on the importance of “modification” in The Origin of Species, then a slightly different story appears to take shape. This other story is one whose central metaphor is not a ladder or a pyramid, but a web, and whose principal features include abundance, change, and the existence of countless disparate forms. Modification is that which allows for, no ensures, proliferation. Here’s how Darwin describes that web of co-existing individuals: “[T]he structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet hidden manner, to all other organic beings…” (64). Gillian Beer makes clear what can be compelling about this second kind of logic. “[I]ts eschewing of fore-ordained design (its dysteleology),” she says, “allowed change to figure as its only sure determinant” (6). Making a parallel observation, feminist Elizabeth Grosz turns to The Origin of Species to articulate a model for change that is radically unhinged from a model of 36. progress. In her reading of Darwin — and in sharp contrast to a Social Darwinian perspective — “evolution is a fundamentally open-ended system which pushes towards a future with no real direction, no guarantee of progress or improvement, but with every indication of proliferation and transformation” (26). Beings, according to Grosz, are “directed into a future for which they cannot prepare and where their bodies and capacities will be open to recontextualization and reevaluation” (29). Beer and Grosz bring home just how differently the same thing can be seen from two different views. On one hand, Darwin’s evolutionary theory can reasonably be said to describe the succession of individuals in time through inheritance and descent. At the same time, Darwin can be seen as offering a description of the way chance modifications burgeon out, forming a vast system of coexisting, contemporaneous, simultaneously evolving beings. * Sigmund Freud also struggled with the ideas of chance and coincidence. Indeed, it is difficult to consider conceptualizations of family and narrative in the early twentieth century without at least touching on (to use Beer’s phrase once again) the “imaginative consequences” of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories alongside Darwin’s evolutionary ones. As Beer points out, Freud himself makes the case that he is Darwin’s cultural heir (9), and though he complicates ideas about family — shifting from a strictly biological to a psychological focus — his work can be seen as shoring up evidence showing intergenerational causality at work. Freud downplayed the effects of heredity in favor of the effects of childhood experience. The idea that the child gives rise to the adult was not an invention of psychoanalysis, of course, but Freud summoned the specter of the child in adult life with uniquely haunting specificity and energy. Like Darwin, whose theory displaced a Providential world-view of the origin of species, Freud too unseated the power of Providence with the sovereignty of personal history. And it could be said that both 37. theoretical models gained the broad cultural force of a Just-So story, lending additional credence to the narrative idea that what we came from provides primary insight into what we now are. His seminal book, however, begins with a meditation on a very different way of understanding time. Though Freud might be read in some contexts as a classic purveyor of cause-and-effect logic, he is genuinely perplexed in Civilizations and Its Discontents by a type of human experience that seems to go beyond causal explanations — a spiritual feeling a friend of his describes as “oceanic” (11). Not a religious man, Freud tries to account for this transcendent sentiment in psychoanalytic terms, saying such a feeling in adults must be a holdover from infantile times, not just causing, but continuing to exist alongside, later forms of the ego. Perhaps unsurprisingly (given his affinity for Darwin), Freud first turns to natural history to illustrate this point. He writes, “In the animal kingdom we hold to the view that the most highly developed species have proceeded from the lowest; and yet we find all the simple forms still in existence to- day” (16). Likewise in mental life, he says, “everything is somehow preserved” (16). Then, leaving natural history for archeology, Freud puts forward the following extraordinary thought experiment: Now let us, by flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases continue to exist alongside it. (18) For Freud, the human mind preserves the past not just in ruins and buried strata — as one might expect in his invocation of archeology — but also in the simultaneous occurrence of the old and the new on the same site. If the city were really like the human mind, he says, then “[w]here the Coliseum now stands, we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the 38. Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day…but on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa” (18, emphasis added). Freud’s primary purpose, of course, in conjuring this vision of Rome is to show how the human mind experiences the past. What is stunning is that in the process of doing this, he cogently and eloquently frames a problem of representation. For in the next paragraphs, he goes on to say — almost regretfully — that his thought experiment is “absurd” because “the same space cannot have two different contents” (19). He laments: “Our attempt seems an idle game. It has only one justification. It shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms” (19). The mind may be capable of experiencing two things at once — “two different contents” in “the same space” — but it remains, Freud insists, extremely difficult to represent this. Woolf, I would argue, understood this problem all too well from working with narrative. She, too, was interested in describing what it felt like to be “living two different times at the same moment” (The Years 159), and yet the formal constraints of narrative limited her options for doing so. Unlike pictures, narratives are bound by sequences; such sequences allow for (one could say necessitate) a sense of time passing, as reading itself takes time. However — as with Freud’s picture of Rome — the depiction in narrative of the subjective sense of more than one thing occurring at once, of simultaneity, is often thwarted by the very sequence that implies time’s forward movement. It is the sequential nature of the form, arguably, that makes it so tempting to conflate consecution with consequence, to commit the Barthean post hoc fallacy of seeing what comes after as the result of what came before. In narrative, as in painting, two moments in time (the time of the “Coliseum” and the time of the “Golden House,” for example) cannot easily be written to “play” at once. Written on top of each other, such words would be 39. nearly illegible, meaningless. Simultaneity in fiction — the coinciding of the past in the present, as well as the coinciding of different subjective experiences — is an enormously tricky thing to indicate. * But perhaps not altogether impossible. Freud’s thought experiment inspires a return to Forster’s poor moribund royals and a related narrative experiment. “‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot,” Forster reminds us (86). But what would happen if the emphasis fell somewhere else — not only and not always on causality, as Forster prefers, but on another type of narrative connective tissue? What if we told the narrative like this: While the king lay dying, the queen unexpectedly passed away. What does this do? How does underscoring the coincidence of these two events change the reader’s experience of the mini-narrative? Such a story suggests a better sense of the dysteleological change that Elizabeth Grosz offers in her reading of Darwin’s plot, the potential for abrupt shifts in narrative focus and more than one possible outcome. Or what if Forster’s story were plotted thus: As the queen lay dying, she kept remembering the king’s death many years before. This is not exactly “the Coliseum” written on top of “The Golden House,” but it suggests in narrative terms the kind of simultaneity Freud describes in his Eternal City of the mind. In both revised plots, one death does not cause the other, but the deaths are (potentially) related in ways that proffer other ways for meaning to accrue: through associative frisson, though narrative rhyme and contrast, and through repetition and reverberation. * Let me be clear. It is not my intention to discard causality as a potent and valuable logic in plot-making. There is an ethical quality to considering the very real consequences of human 40. actions, and it remains one of fiction’s great tasks to explore our effects on our children, our communities, and our planet. Rather, I want to suggest — by way of Woolf, but also by way of Darwin and Freud — that there are other kinds of stories that can be told about storytelling. There are other plots about plot. Woolf tips us off to this fact in her writing about simultaneity in her journals, and she challenges herself in The Years, especially, to tell a story about descent through generations that undermines the logic of descent itself. She tells a story instead about descent with modification, of Pargiter daughters like Eleanor making meaning not through reproduction, a system that would erase her name and efface her influence, but through the coincidence and overlap of disparate human experiences. To put this another way, I believe it is through the very elements that made this a Bad Book to so many reviewers and critics — its interrupted quality, its seeming lack of coherence and cohesion — that Woolf enacts her experiment of seeing “the same thing from two different views.” Here, then, is the beginning of an answer to the second question I asked at the opening of this chapter: how does Woolf imply simultaneity within sequence? Narrative interruptions in The Years suggest how strangers encounter the same conversation, how different daughters experience the same mother’s death, and even how the same individual is “two different people at the same time” (The Years 159). What we are left with by the end of the book is a broad-based and transformational experiment in stereoscopy. This experiment — so thrilling and frustrating to Woolf, often at once — involved invoking in “straight” narrative sequence a queer sense of the simultaneous and acausal. My use of the word “queer” in association with Woolf’s narrative approach in The Years is intentional, if anachronistic. Woolf’s feminism, as we’ll see in the chapter to come, increasingly encompassed concerns that moved beyond dualistic, oppositional depictions of sex and gender. We can see in her late fiction and essays, especially, hints of a burgeoning desire for 41. an outsider’s approach to engaging and subverting the cultural conventions of her time. This desire informed not only her understanding of contemporary gender politics, but, more generally, her resistance to the way an individual is shaped and limited by social dynamics that fix relations in exchanges of force. Accordingly, Three Guineas (1938) — which arose out of the excised nonfiction portions of The Pargiters — ends with Woolf’s cool refusal to participate in several systems of power reified by cultural hegemony. Broadening the argument made a decade earlier in A Room of One’s Own, in which she maintained that “the right to break” with literary form must be done “for the sake of creating” something new (106), Woolf here argues against the social structures that support both patriarchy and Fascism, calling instead for an “Outsider’s Society” of women who act without exerting force on others and who live in a state of reasoned indifference (309-311). She concludes that women must fight fascist forms of patriarchy — or patriarchal forms of Fascism — not only by resisting or exiting them, but also by “finding new words and creating new methods” of cultural organization (366). Though vaguely articulated, Woolf’s longing for “new words” and “new methods” intriguingly anticipates the third-way approach to feminism advocated by later influential theorists of sex and gender. In her 1981 essay “Women’s Time,” for instance, Julia Kristeva identifies two types of temporality that might be associated with women: cyclical — including “cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm” — and monumental — “without cleavage or escape, which has little to do with linear time (which passes)” (16). Kristeva goes on to say that these female forms of subjectivity present a problem to a masculine conception of time: “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history” (17). She maps feminism as a struggle, first, for women to “gain a place in linear time as the time of project and 42. history.” Later, she says, second wave feminists “almost entirely refused” linear temporality (19). Kristeva closes her essay by passionately advocating for a third position (or wave, or generation): one that does not imply only fight or retreat, whose aim exists parallel to that of the first two generations, and which attempts to create its own meaning-making systems — systems that recognize feminism as but “a moment in the thought of that anthropomorphic identity” (35, author’s italics). This description of the nascent possibilities seeded by feminism opens itself up to the discourse of queerness (and its relationship to time) worked out by theorists like Michel Foucault in “Friendship as a Way of Life” and Judith Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. 19 In her 2005 book, Halberstam sketches out the basic conditions of heteronormative temporalities in terms similar to (though not the same as) Kristeva’s depiction of masculine time. Halberstam writes that the heteronormative “time of reproduction” is governed by marriage and the biological clock; likewise, “[t]he time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next” (5). For Halberstam, the plotting of a heteronormative adulthood involves codifying the intersections of the biological and economic developments that line up with reproduction and inheritance — that is, with those readings of Darwin and Freud that enshrine descent. Unsurprisingly, Halberstam sees this as problematic. One of her most incisive points, however, is that our ability in the twenty-first century to describe and critique such heteronormative temporalities is extremely well-practiced. We are, unfortunately, “far less adept at describing in rich detail the practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification” (4). Thus under the different (but overlapping) rubrics of feminist and queer theory, Kristeva and 43. Halberstam both express a yearning for new ways to plot human subjectivity in time, ways that go beyond re-inscriptions and rejections of patriarchal or heteronormative temporalities. What I’m suggesting is that Woolf’s late novel The Years offers hints as to how such alternative temporalities might be worked out in fiction, and it does so by taking up and representing the daughter’s position in, and relationship to, her family. As we’ll see in greater detail in the chapter to come, over and over again the novel interrupts itself to establish a queer sense of time as a field shared by many inhabitants at once. It unsettles the discourse of descent while drawing the reader’s attention to the way simultaneous happenings generate meaning differently from those that are causally connected. In doing so, it paves the way for depictions of alternative bonds of human connection and for other ways of thinking about the relationship of the individual to time — and the relationship of time to meaning-making itself. In the next chapter, then, I will look closely at Woolf’s family novels, To the Lighthouse and The Years, in an effort to trace more precisely the author’s career-long practices of narrative refusals and narrative reimaginings. The representation of time in these novels carries both ethical and political implications, as we’ll see. Examining the unusual plots in the two novels together will allow us to witness late Victorian daughters working out modifications of the self in relation to marriage and family, and as such, doing so within — and ultimately beyond — the familiar narrative convention of descent. 44. Chapter Two An Ethics of Coincidence: Virginia Woolf’s Family Novels Here is one unpresuming scene near the middle of Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa, in her room alone — and in the middle of her day-long preparations for her party — happens to look out the window. She catches a glimpse of “the old lady opposite” and watches the stranger go about her daily routine. “Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had so often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear again into the background” (126). The white-capped lady appears at first to be offered up for setting’s sake, for the establishment of scenic texture. But no. The scene swings open, as if on a hinge. Woolf’s language widens out. “Why creeds and prayers,” Clarissa wonders, why “mackintoshes,” when faced with the “miracle,” the “mystery,” of this unknown lady going about her unknown life? “[H]ere was one room; there another,” Clarissa thinks, with unabashed reverence. “Did religion solve that, or love?” (128). “Love—” But here, Woolf tells us at the long end of her dash, “the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben” interrupts Clarissa’s thoughts (128). The strange solemnity of the moment dissipates, the clock returns Clarissa to her day’s chores, and the old lady in the 45. window opposite effectively recedes again from the reader’s attention. Indeed she might well be written off as just one of a myriad of backlit details in this brief, crowded, extraordinary novel if that same old lady did not turn up for a second time, unexpectedly and in relief, at the novel’s climax. Old ladies opposite, it appears, are part of Woolf’s special project. 20 For, at the height of Clarissa’s party — and just after she has heard of the suicide of the shell-shocked soldier, Septimus Smith — she once again parts her curtains and looks out. “Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared right at her!” And then in quick succession, Woolf draws together three characters with no obvious narrative connection, that is, Clarissa Dalloway in her party dress, the soldier who has recently leapt to his death, and the old lady preparing for sleep. “The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but [Clarissa] did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light!” (186). Note the brevity of Woolf’s clauses, the way the striking clock connects and divides the sentences syntactically, and also divides and connects the characters semantically. Though no causal logic appears to join the night’s events, Woolf nevertheless brings her novel to its highest pitch around experiences linked by their shared interval in time, and she does so without jettisoning the temporal sequence that drives both clock and sentence. It is my sense that it is no coincidence that we return to the old lady opposite at this key moment in the narrative. Or rather, it is coincidence — co-incidence, that is — that appears to matter to Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. Many critics have discussed the broadly dichotomous structure of this book, the bold arrangement that braids the disparate plights of the mad soldier and the middle-aged wife. 21 What interests me is the way these two acausal plots are triangulated in the end, correlated alongside the isolated, quiet movements of Clarissa’s unknown neighbor. 46. The old lady opposite plays a pointedly iterative role, reminding the reader of Clarissa’s earlier reverence for the separation of neighboring rooms or, as Woolf puts it, “the privacy of the soul” (127). 22 That is to say, in dwelling, mid-novel, on the coinciding lives of Clarissa and her neighbor, and in doing so in direct opposition to the plots of religion and love, of force, a specific code of ethics begins to surface in this book, one that acknowledges consequence in coincidence itself, in the seemingly inconsequential. Religion and love will not, Mrs. Dalloway implies, solve the mystery or explain the miracle of the ongoing separation and puzzling proximity between old ladies opposite and wives at parties. Or wives and young soldiers. Or wives and dead men. But that does not mean those separations and those proximities aren’t significant. It is in the blunt fact of coexistence — and the recognition of it by Woolf’s characters, and the depiction of it in the temporal structure of the novel — that a striking ethos emerges, one that is echoed not only in the author’s later novels, but also in her nonfiction writings about politics and women. * The chapter to follow will take up Virginia Woolf’s family novels To the Lighthouse and The Years in order to trace the intersections of poetics and ethics that arise out of instances of narrative simultaneity. Such instances open up for Woolf the means by which to represent “consequence” in ways that minimize the force of causality, a force whose logic — as defined by writers from Aristotle to Richardson — tends to measure the value of narrated events by their weight on, or their influence over, the events that follow. As we’ll see, characters such as Lily Briscoe and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, or Eleanor Pargiter and Nicholas in The Years, affect each other minimally in causal terms: they are linked instead by the moments they share in time and by the specific narrative structures that depict those moments. Thus, though these two books on surface pay homage to the familial tree as it branches through time — and the influence 47. of parents over daughters — family is largely the narrative occasion for these novels rather than its engine. A closer look at the temporal logics that undergird To the Lighthouse and The Years reveals how narrative simultaneity in these books undermines cause-and-effect and complicates plots of inheritance. At key moments Woolf explores the dysteleological possibilities of lives lived at once rather than because of. Mrs. Dalloway points the way for reading instances of simultaneity in Woolf’s later books, and for interpreting such instances as arguments about human relations as much as they are modernist aesthetic experiments. The narrative relevance of the old lady opposite in Mrs. Dalloway can be located in the very lightness of her actions, in the fact that what she does has no measurable effect on Clarissa, just as the death of Septimus Smith appears to alter very little in the busy progression of the party. In the cases of both her neighbor and the dead man, part of the wonder Clarissa feels comes in her bewildered observation that, despite everything, her party just continues on. “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” (183). There is no doubt something Breughelian about such an observation, and indeed, Woolf scholars have tended to describe the more crowded scenes in her novels as diffusive or (to use a well- worn Bahktinian term) centrifugal. 23 And yet the old lady opposite occupies no “untidy spot” in a corner of Woolf’s oeuvre. Auden’s “leisurely” turn from disaster — with its darker modernist antecedent in Yeats’ widening gyre — is a poor analogue for Woolf’s interest in and attitude towards simultaneity. In Woolf’s novels, acausal coincidences tend to invoke few gently ironic reminders of the amoral blitheness with which we live our lives. The old lady opposite in Mrs. Dalloway invites not just a recognition of how often we turn away, but also, more insistently, a curiously reverent turning towards. 48. Thus the chapter to come reads against the grain of many modernist and post-modernist attitudes towards simultaneous depiction — attitudes which tend to scold or despair in the face of apparently (that is, causally) unrelated events. Coincidence in Woolf’s work need not indicate some Higher Cause at the helm, as might be suggested by a pre-twentieth-century text, but it also needn’t indicate ethical failure. One way to begin to understand the complex ethical attitudes revealed by Woolf’s narrative coincidences might be to turn to Anne-Lise François’ Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. François’ project examines texts in the Western literary canon that work outside a logic of appropriation and effect, exploring characters that exhibit what she calls “nonappropriative contentment” (xvii). Focusing specifically on the “open secret,” François more broadly questions conventional notions of agency within literary- critical frameworks; what is interesting to me is the way her observations dovetail with feminist scholarship that problematizes the idea of agency within political-historical frameworks. In the last couple of decades, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and Saba Mamood have put pressure on earlier feminist assertions about the female need for “agency,” assertions that presuppose acts of resistance or aggression in the name of a cause. 24 As Mamood puts it — in her probing consideration of Cairene women — feminist scholarship too often “elides dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance” (15). Though François’ Open Secrets focuses on a fairly narrow set of Western canonical texts, and though she is not overtly invested in post-structuralist feminist politics, her work nonetheless brings home one of the primary problems facing both the narratologist and the activist when analyzing events that do not appear to affect much. How do we, she asks, “evaluate, recognize, and name a dramatic action so inconsequential it yields no peripeteia and seems to evade the 49. Aristotelian definition of plot?” (3). The old lady opposite in Mrs. Dalloway merely climbs the stairs, prepares for bed, parts her curtains; her dramatic action, as it were, offers no turning point that arises out of Aristotle’s understanding of plot as a probable or necessary sequence of events. Yet Woolf tells us, “Somehow one respected” the old lady’s actions (126). “There was something solemn in it” (126). “It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing room, to watch the old woman, quite quietly, going to bed” (186). The language of fascination and respect accorded to the old lady underscores Woolf’s sense of the enigmatic value to be found in unobtrusive acts and inconspicuous actors. François’ question about the legibility of actions that yield no peripeteia echoes against Mrs. Dalloway’s: “Did religion solve that, or love?” (127). Or, to restate François’ question in more explicitly political terms: can we fathom the meaning of actions that cannot be gauged by conventional means, by their influence over others? Or, to put her question in the terms of my own project: can simultaneous actions and events, which by definition cause nothing, be described as “plot” at all — as I’ve so far been doing? What has become clear to me in my research is that such questions make it tempting to frame Woolf’s interest in simultaneity in terms that are essentially a retreat from plot, and even from narrative itself. Woolf’s well-documented enthusiasm for other art forms (everything from poetry to opera to painting) make extra-disciplinary analogies and non-narrative explanations readily available when describing her writing. The visual arts in particular have been mined by critics eager to explain Woolf’s experiments in structure and style. 25 Certainly for much of her professional career Woolf pursued conversations with painters, and one conversation that stands out for its lively back-and-forth about simultaneity is an exchange with the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1924. Quentin Bell, in his later assessment of this epistolary exchange, 50. highlights Woolf’s piqued response to the suggestion that linearity in writing precludes painterly effects. Woolf makes the case that writers might achieve simultaneity within lines of text if they try: they need first to recognize that “people don’t and never did feel or think or dream for a second [in a linear way]: but all over the place, in your way” (qtd. in Bell 106-107). That said, Woolf does not appear to want merely, as Bell suggests, to translate the possibilities of painting into narrative terms. Even as she borrows her language from Raverat (writers should produce “those splashes of yours” (106)), her point seems to be that, contrary to the tradition established by “Bennett, Galsworthy, and so on,” simultaneity is not the prerogative of painters only. Writers, she says, must think up ways to write beyond the “formal railway line of the sentence” (qtd. in Bell 106), even as sentences remain their medium. 26 That problem — of writing around the sentence’s “railway line” even while using it — continued to goad and frustrate and inspire her. We can see her wrestling with it, for instance, when she wonders in her journal how to complete To the Lighthouse almost two years after the Raverat exchange. Here Woolf’s language resists metaphors, visual or otherwise, taking up instead the work-a-day writer’s vernacular of sentences and plotting. “At this moment,” she writes, “I am casting around for an end.” She would like to depict the consummation of her two plots — Mr. Ramsay arriving at the Lighthouse, on one hand, and Lily finishing her painting on the other — at once. But how to achieve this effect without too much “chop & change”? “[C]ould I do it in a parenthesis?” she wonders to herself. “[S]o that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?” (Diary 3 106). Comments like this one make Woolf’s interest in simultaneity worth thinking through in terms of the problems and potentialities peculiar to narrative. This is not to say that other art forms did not fuel Woolf’s imagination, nor that non-narrative genres fail to provide illuminating 51. analogies for describing the author’s work. Rather, it is my sense that interpreting Woolf’s simultaneity through the optics of other genres too often obscures the very questions Woolf found it most valuable to think through, questions that situate the human perception of simultaneity within the temporal structures of the sentence: which is to say, the clock. Words mark time (for words and sentences take time to read) just as a clock does, just as the calendar does, just as years do. And time is at the heart of all Woolf’s work. It is simultaneity within sequence that provides one of the central tensions of Woolf’s novels, the way time moves forward, yes, but also the way each moment always connects otherwise disparate events and people and actions. As we’ve already seen, the old lady in the room opposite in Mrs. Dalloway acts in quiet tandem to Clarissa, even as Clarissa considers the death of the unknown soldier, even as the clock continues to strike: “The young man had killed himself; but [Clarissa] did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light!” (186). The point here is not exactly that time is not linear. It is linear, ineluctably so. But it is not just that. By plotting simultaneous events within sequence, by drawing attention to that which is happening at once rather than only because of, Woolf opens up for the reader a dawning recognition of coincidence as an alternative way of perceiving and organizing experience, one that has important ramifications for both storytelling and sense-making. Moreover, reading Woolf’s interest in simultaneity through the lens of the visual arts tends to aestheticize her choices, thus occluding the way her narrative structures engage ideological investments. Plotting simultaneity has political ramifications as well as narrative ones, and, as we’ll see, these ramifications become all the more overt in Woolf’s books about parents and daughters. We might expect novels like To the Lighthouse and The Years to trace 52. intergenerational slides of influence through time, and to some extent they do. But they also trace the coinciding experiences of more than one action or event in a single time frame. In so doing they encourage an enlarged awareness of the ongoing lives of those who, like the old lady opposite, would otherwise go unseen. The narrative emphasis shifts. The sentence breaks. In the middle of the party, in the middle of an action or a line of dialogue, we take an unexpected look out the window. “[A] book,” Woolf writes, “is not made up of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses” (100). Those uses, she goes on to make plain — here in A Room of One’s Own and even more forcefully in Three Guineas — tend to justify the conventional practices that consolidate power in the hands of those who already have it. 27 Narrative depictions of coincidence, by contrast, allow Woolf to draw attention away from these conventional plots, those of religion and love (or orthodoxy and marriage), in order to consider plots of coinciding, simultaneous, and synchronized experiences. These are plots that bring home the ethical and political consequences of paying attention to that which appears to affect very little. Let me return, then, to a version of the question I posed at the outset of this project: when two things seem to happen at once, or nearly so, does it mean anything? And let me rephrase that question in more explicitly narrative terms, as I did in my discussion above: can simultaneity be talked of in terms of “plot” at all? The answer to both questions — at least in the case of Woolf’s fiction — is yes. A closer look at To the Lighthouse and The Years will show why. * To the Lighthouse is Woolf’s first, brief, impressionistic take on the family novel. It proffers a portrait of a large, complex late Victorian family, in which Mrs. Ramsay, the 53. matriarch, provides the narrative center of gravity. She so affects the other characters (their opinions of themselves and their interactions with each other) that she seems at first to be both more and less than the novel’s protagonist. She is like weather, which is pervasive and mood- changing, or the Lighthouse itself, with its remove and ever-sweeping beam of light. Throughout the long first section, The Window, Mrs. Ramsay reassures her husband, restores Mr. Tansley’s self-confidence, blesses Minta and Paul’s courtship, and calms her children. She holds the scattered members of the household together with a kind of omnipresent energy, a creative intensity that culminates at her dinner party when the lamps are lit. “Some change at once went through them all,” Woolf writes of that moment, “and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there” (147). Mrs. Ramsay secures her houseguests and family members against formlessness — “that fluidity out there” — assembling a dinner-table social structure that assigns meaningful roles to each individual. The social conventions of the party offer a superficial means by which guests initiate and structure deeper forms of human connection. 28 That Mrs. Ramsay’s means of creating connections in To the Lighthouse are both conventional and temporary, and that they enforce traditional nineteenth-century expectations of gender, make her feat no less compelling. “There is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this,” the painter Lily Briscoe reflects, referring especially of the roles women must play in soothing the egos of men at the table. “Yet,” she thinks, “it is also beautiful and necessary” (155). Of course one of the most noticeable aspects of To the Lighthouse is the way it establishes Mrs. Ramsay as the novel’s center only to steal her away in the middle of the second section. The reader’s investment in Mrs. Ramsay in the first part of To the Lighthouse is radically thwarted by her untimely demise, which occurs — famously — in a dependent clause between 54. brackets two-thirds the way through the book. Partway through the novel’s starkly lyrical second section Time Passes, Woolf writes: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” (194). This is a remarkably difficult sentence to parse, one that interrupts its basic sense — Mr. Ramsay stretched his arms out, but his arms remained empty — to bury then disarm its alarming news: Mrs. Ramsay having died. Though Mrs. Ramsay’s death changes much for the reader (and for her husband and for her children), it is represented here as a narrative nonevent, as something that has already occurred and is not quite the point. Its appearance in the text has the sly quality of an intentionally placed afterthought, one that, due to the very lightness of its telling, its anticlimactic quality, refuses rather than reinforces the reader’s earlier investments. And, in keeping with this sense of anticlimax, many of the plots set into motion in the book’s first section are similarly diffused as the novel wears on. Through the course of the last two sections of the book, we learn that both of Mrs. Ramsay’s oldest children — her daughter Prue and her son Andrew — have also died. We learn that the marriage so eagerly anticipated by Mrs. Ramsay between Minta and Paul has soured. The courtship Mrs. Ramsay cultivated between Lily Briscoe and William Bankes has evolved into warm friendship, not romantic love. With so many plots rendered obsolete or irrelevant by the beginning of the novel’s third section, The Lighthouse circles not only Mrs. Ramsay’s absence but also a kind of narrative vacuum. The prose transitions into the ever quieter expository modes of retro- and introspection, and these shifts are made alongside a change in focalization. The narrative attention settles for longer and longer stretches on Lily Briscoe, the iconoclastic female painter, who has returned to the sea cottage — along with Mr. Ramsay and a couple of his children — ten years after the evening the 55. first section closed. Lily resumes a painting of Mrs. Ramsay she began before her death, and her actions near the end of the book braid with Mr. Ramsay’s daytrip to the Lighthouse. It is under these conditions, tracing the twinned activities of painting and sea voyage, that Woolf attempts to create for the reader “a sense of reading the two things at the same time” (Diary 3 106). Emptied of its organizing force, the narrative pace slows. There are few interactions in this third section, almost no conversations, more descriptions of breezes and waves. No one speaks for pages at a time. And yet, quiet as these pages are, there is nevertheless a dizzying quality to this final section of the novel. For, even as the narration burrows inward and reaches back in time, growing arguably more interior, the free-indirect discourse swings back and forth between two distinct and exact physical locations: the boat on its way to the lighthouse and a patch of land on the shore. In the boat sit Mr. Ramsay, with his penknife and his book, and his two sullen children, Cam and James. On the lawn stands Lily Briscoe arranging her paint brushes and easel. What makes these last pages so perceptually vertiginous is the way the narrative oscillates so persistently and repeatedly between these two discrete points in space, showing boat from shore and shore from boat. Looking out at one turns into squinting out at the other. We sit in the boat with Cam, for instance, seeing the waves “all around them, tossing and sinking,” along with the myopic details of a “log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on another” (284). Then within sentences we see that same boat from afar, this time growing “more and more remote” until it is “swallowed up in that blue” (284). Likewise, Lily paints “with the hot sun on her back” (260), poised on a lawn that looks “rubbed out” and “unreal” to those watching from the water (248). Over and over again, near becomes far becomes near again. “So much depends upon distance,” Lily thinks at one point (284). Distance matters, Woolf shows us, because it 56. attenuates the influence of one individual over another, even as it requires more empathy and imagination. The attenuation of the effect of effect appears part of the ethical argument advanced by the novel’s simultaneous depiction. For The Lighthouse begins, tellingly, with Lily avoiding Mr. Ramsay on the lawn because of his unbearable, dictatorial influence over her and her painting. As she is setting up her easel on the lawn, she thinks, “Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you” (223). The repeated let here has the incantatory force of a wish or a prayer, and, hauntingly, it echoes Mrs. Dalloway’s prayer-like reverence for the old lady opposite: “Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop; then let her, as Clarissa had so often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains, and disappear into the background” (127). The difference between Mr. Ramsay and the old lady opposite, of course, is that while she climbs and stops and disappears, he “permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself” (223). He, like Charles Tansley in the novel’s first section — like so many men in Lily’s life — demands attention and sympathy. His very presence imposes inescapable influence, insists on the social logic of cause-and-effect inscribed by gender: his effect over her. That’s why Lily yearns for the kind of privacy that Clarissa Dalloway’s old lady opposite so freely, so generously, so unknowingly grants. It is also why when Mr. Ramsay leaves with his children in his boat Lily is finally able to pursue her own painting and her own plot unimpeded. It matters a great deal “whether people are near us or far from us,” Lily thinks, “for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay” (284). He no longer has quite the same power to bear down on her as he did, to, as Woolf articulates more fully in Three Guineas, engage her in a private exchange of “tyrannies and servilities” based on the hierarchal roles of sex (364). 29 57. “[S]o much depends upon distance” for Lily for another reason as well. Simultaneous depiction in this section of the novel shows how increased distance between actors acting in the same time frame requires greater imaginative labor to comprehend. That is to say, holding in mind that which has little effect on the self — that which is happening only contemporaneously — is work. After a long afternoon of watching Mr. Ramsay’s boat, for instance, Lily grows tired, even exhausted: “[T]he effort of looking at [the Lighthouse] and the effort of thinking of [Mr. Ramsay] landing there, which seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost” (308). For Lily, effort over time is needed to look for and imagine Mr. Ramsay traveling further away, even as she continues to paint. Thus to describe an experience of reading these pages in inertly visual terms ignores the way the prose travels sentences between its poles, between boat and shore, and thereby sets a perception of simultaneity against an equally powerful perception of time passing. Time ticks on in this section and we can see it doing so on the page. As readers, we can measure the amount of time that has passed by the increasing smallness of boat from shore (“There was a brown spot in the middle of the bay” (270)), or the growing distance of the land from stern (“The line of the distant shore became fixed” (272)). By the same token, in shunting the reader back and forth between these two systematically-traced progressions, Woolf also forces an acknowledgement of the at-once-ness of happenings, the coincidence of actions, and the relative nature of progress itself. This is because each shift in perception undercuts for the reader the apparent totality of any one character’s experience of progression. The importance of Lily or Mr. Ramsay (or his children) shrinks to an almost imperceptible smallness — contracts into a dot on the water or on shore — only to expand again in the next paragraph or section to encompass everything. As readers we 58. cannot consider one plot progression (boat or painting) without also tracking the progress of the other, even as those progressions interrupt each other, and even as it becomes increasingly plain that the two plots have no real effect on the other. This is especially clear at the novel’s end. Just as Lily is about to finish her painting, she looks up from her canvas and wonders, “Where was that boat now?” (300). The narrative answers her question by turning then to Mr. Ramsay reading in his boat, and after a few more paragraphs, he springs “as if he were leaping into space” to the rock of the Lighthouse. Then Lily thinks, guessing at his actions from a distance, “He must have reached it”— only to return once more to her painting (308). The ending of To the Lighthouse does not make use of parentheses, as Woolf suggested in her diary it might: it creates a sense of stereoscopic vision by seesawing back and forth between its plots and ultimately giving Lily the last word: “I have had my vision,” she says (310). The novel’s first words, by contrast, are Mrs. Ramsay’s. It is worth noting in this juxtaposition the way Lily Briscoe inherits from Mrs. Ramsay much of the book’s narrative attention: lines of influence appear subtly redrawn. 30 True, Mrs. Ramsay’s death makes little happen in a traditional narrative sense. Few of her plans or plots from the novel’s first section see fruition by the novel’s end, and, as it turns out, her dinner-table social structure, as “necessary and beautiful” as it seems initially (155), binds neither her family nor her guests in a lasting way over time. What her death does in narrative terms is open up room on the page for a shift in focalization. Her abrupt departure from the novel’s pages makes it possible for To the Lighthouse to take a lateral turn, as we’ve seen, one that opens up space for Lily Briscoe — the spinster painter — who, unlike Mrs. Ramsay’s children and husband, existed previously only at the periphery of the Ramsay family and on the periphery of the narrative itself. 59. Simultaneity as a temporal structure, though, makes peripheral vision a habit of mind. The logic of simultaneity that dominates the novel’s final pages, a logic that encourages the reader to engage in the labor of looking around (as it were), propels a greater awareness of who might be left out of those structures of narrative connection we’ve have been trained by convention to see, especially those erected around marriage and clan. This is not to say that Lily Briscoe is not deeply affected by what happens to the Ramsay family. Indeed she feels very keenly the loss of her old hostess and friend, a woman whose social grace and feminine power Lily admired: “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she thinks as she works on her painting, “feeling the old horror come back—to want and want and not to have” (300). And yet it is essential to understanding the unusual elegiac quality of this book that Lily is not in fact a member of the Ramsay family. Or, rather, Lily could be described as Mrs. Ramsay’s daughter-but-not. She receives something of a diagonal legacy from the dead woman, one that has very little to do with the conventional lines of inheritance associated with Darwin or Freud, that is, with genes or upbringing. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay’s actual children, Cam and James — conscripted by their father to participate in his stubborn journey to the lighthouse — Lily is free to stay behind on shore and paint. Her inheritance, it turns out, is not teleological or inevitable, but moral and aesthetic. She sees Mrs. Ramsay not primarily as a mother, but as a mother-figure to “think back through” as she paints (A Room of One’s Own 99): as someone imagined as much as remembered. * If Lily Briscoe is a daughter-but-not, Eleanor Pargiter by the end of The Years might be described as not-but-a-daughter. She begins the first 1880 chapter of The Years, however, as a young woman sequestered in an upper middle-class London drawing room with her three younger sisters. All of them are fidgeting and restless. All of them are waiting impatiently for tea 60. to boil, and waiting too — just as impatiently — for their bedbound mother to die. As in To the Lighthouse, the family matriarch passes away without much fanfare in this book. But unlike Woolf’s earlier family novel, The Years grants the death of Mrs. Pargiter no understated sense of shock, no sleight-of-hand, mid-book disappearance. In the first chapter of The Years, Mrs. Pargiter’s daughters merely circle the shuttered house, unable to register much feeling at all for the imminent death of their mother. The free indirect discourse travels roughly between characters, showing the fragmentary nature of their private intentions, the way their actions disintegrate into ellipses, their speech into dashes. “[T]his room; that room,” Eleanor considers, for instance, upon returning home from volunteer work to the idle busyness of the drawing room. Her sisters are competing for an invitation to a party, and Eleanor’s mind wanders back to the room she has just left behind: “There was the old Jewess sitting up in bed in her hot little room; then one came back here, and there was Mama ill; Papa grumpy; and Delia and Milly quarrelling about a party…. But she checked herself” (29). “[T]his room; that room” recalls something of Mrs. Dalloway, with its nod to the mystery of separate lives lived at once, but the phrase here implies little of Clarissa’s reverence for the old lady opposite. “So many things going on in her head at the same time” make Eleanor irritable, unfocused, exhausted (29). She must check herself. She must try to focus on the room at hand. The domestic restrictions placed upon these daughters means that their words and thoughts are, like Eleanor’s, continually cut off at the quick: by a “stick grat[ing] in the hall” (12), or by the servant coming in with a tray, or by their mother’s moans in the room overhead. Far more than in any of Woolf’s other books The Years is punctured and disturbed and riven through by these sorts of interruptions. Dashes are ubiquitous. Ellipses crumble the ends of sentences. There exist forty-seven occurrences of the word “interrupt” (or “interruption”) in the 61. text of the novel itself, as if Woolf sought to imprint her own method in the reader’s mind even as she practiced it. “We cannot,” Woolf writes in an early draft of this book, “understand the present if we isolate it from the past” (The Pargiters 9): but the final version of The Years profoundly evades this early promise of a coherent, unbroken line drawn down through history. History in this book bumps and jogs. This appears not simply due to, as several critics have suggested, the excision of the essay portions of Woolf’s planned “novel-essay.” 31 Interruptions occur on every level of narrative line, from sentences in dialogues to larger lurches between sections. The novel skips eleven years, for example, between its first and second chapters (1880 to 1891): the doleful funeral that ends the former appears to have little bearing on the frenetic omnibus ride and birthday party that dominate the latter. Similarly, the novel jumps a full sixteen years between the second and third chapters, after which it offers, in quick succession, a cluster of five shorter chapters that cover the seven years just before and during World War One. And though we see little glimpses of Eleanor all along the way, and though characters like the cousins Maggie and Sarah turn up with increasing regularity, the basic tempo of the narrative until its end is one of abrupt starts and stops. Therefore, despite its adherence to chronological order, and despite its surface similarity to the traditional family novel, The Years — even after shedding its original hybrid structure — resists ready classification as a saga about family. The novel refuses from the start to meet many of the expectations associated with the genre it has taken up. It elides causality even as it appears to describe descent. In other words, by failing to show clearly how one generation leads to the next, by instead showing how consecution persists without apparent consequence, Woolf declines to validate the illusion of the passage of years as meaningful in and of itself. On one level she shows the family saga as a form to be inadequate. As Liisa Saariluoma convincingly 62. argues, “[t]he meaning of what happens” in The Years “is not found in a causal sequence. External time, mechanical time is for her ‘empty’ time, not a parameter organizing events in a meaningful way” (293). The most immediate result of the erosion of causal ties is a peculiarly flat tone for much of the book. Saariluoma suggests that the reader cannot look to traditional causal arcs — conflict, crisis, resolution — as cues for discerning which events are more important than others. This flatness, in turn, destabilizes the typical narrative hierarchy of turning points associated with family life, a hierarchy that privileges events like births, marriages, and deaths. These familiar crises are (as with Mrs. Pargiter’s funeral) stripped of the usual flourish, and the narrative attention thickens instead around concrete, quotidian, disrupted experiences. As Saariluoma puts it, the “[t]he fragmentariness” in the book “ensues from the fact that in Woolf’s vision, belonging to a family does not provide people with a basis on which the meaning of their lives can be built — nor can such a basis be found elsewhere” (296-297). The plot of The Years implies that it is the family structure itself that fails to provide fully meaningful lives for Victorian daughters. That said, the project of this novel does not seem to be one of fragmentation for its own sake. As she does in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Woolf in The Years makes use of the narrative tools available to her in her medium and her genre — the left-to-right sequence of text, along with the linearity of chronological sequence — to show acausal ways for meaning to accrue. She does this not only despite but also through the narrative interruptions that perforate this book. This point needs emphasis. For the word “interruption” (so often repeated in this text) implies a collision of one thing with another, the impingement of one thing by another. And it is the other thing that Woolf appears interested in so much of the time, or more precisely the contact between the two things: the way those things touch or overlap each other. In her brief 63. introduction to simultaneity in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Uri Margolin describes three basic methods of representing simultaneous narrated acts, honing in on one method, “repeated undercutting, sometimes with ever increasing frequency,” as the most difficult to read and interpret (par. 6). We’ve already seen in Mrs. Dalloway how undercutting can divide and connect at once: “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” (183). And we’ve seen in To the Lighthouse the way braiding simultaneous events risks, as Woolf describes it in her diary, “chop & change” (Diary 3 106). In fact the technique of “undercutting” renders interruption and coincidence powerfully related ideas. They can be seen as describing the same experience told from “two different views” (Woolf, Diary 4 173). Whereas one emphasizes break, the other emphasizes connection: but both are ways of seeing a moment in time when two events seem to come together. Let me return to the 1917 chapter of The Years to show what I mean. This chapter stands out for the way narrative interruptions begin to transform the novel’s sense of “chop & change” into something else: a series of surprising, evocative coincidences. That is, Eleanor’s early mood of distraction, her “this room; that room” frustration (The Years 29), increasingly conveys some of the narrative resonance of “here was one room; there another” (Mrs. Dalloway 128). The chapter opens with a middle-aged Eleanor Pargiter outside at night alone, riding the omnibus through wartime streets and picking her way in the dark to her cousin’s house. She walks in from the still, cold, moonless night to her cousin’s sitting room “ablaze with light,” from a silence so intense it seems to “muffle sound” to a cluttered little room alive with ongoing conversation (265). In the disorientation of her arrival, she is introduced to a man she does not know, Nicholas, a “foreigner,” who speaks to her as if he were “in the middle of a sentence that he wished to finish” (265). The chapter continues, haltingly, in this vein. Just as Eleanor feels that 64. Nicholas’s words begin to make sense to her, their exchange is interrupted by a third character, Renny, reentering the room and bringing drinks. Later, dinner is interrupted by another guest, Sarah, arriving late. Even the First World War is portrayed as an annoying, if ominous, disruption. When the air raid sirens wail, Eleanor feels, with irritation, “as if some dull bore had interrupted an interesting conversation” (273). All these distractions  the late arrivals, the soup, the drinks, the war itself  interrupt Woolf’s characters, so that few dialogues or scenes seem to lead with logic to the next. Even so, as Lucio Ruotolo argues in his book The Interrupted Moment, the chaos derived from such interruptions occasionally leads to unexpectedly creative moments. Ruotolo sees Woolf’s interruptions as democratizing agents, eroding a system of attention that privileges any one character or consciousness or event. He writes, “The subversion of omniscience moves [Woolf] finally with The Years and Between the Acts to envision an egalitarian society without constricting hierarchies or patriarchal leaders, where each new interruption emerges, however anarchically, with a promise of renewal” (17). Though Ruotolo warns against being misled by “the poignancy with which Woolf’s language arouses a comforting sense of artistic wholeness” (12), his project invites a reading of the narrative fissures in this book as sites of “inventive impulses” (1). We can sense just this kind of nascent creativity in Eleanor as she struggles out of her insular meditations on the bus and attempts disjointed conversation with Nicholas near the beginning of the 1917 chapter. Eleanor has, as Woolf tells us, “no idea what they were talking about,” only that it has to do with Napoleon and great men (266). Nicholas attempts to explain only to stop short. “We were saying—” he begins, “I was saying we do not know ourselves, ordinary people; and if we do not know ourselves, then how can we make religions, laws, that—” He breaks off. He tries again, dashes now overtaking his speech, “that—” (266). 65. “—that fit—that fit,” Eleanor jumps in. Discernment comes to Eleanor in a flash. She suddenly knows what he means, or thinks she does, despite having never met him before and barely understanding his sentences. For it “seemed to her what he said was, ‘We cannot make laws and religions that fit because we do not know ourselves’” (266-267). “How odd that you should say that!” she exclaims to Nicholas, “because I’ve so often thought it myself!” (267). Eleanor’s next sentence attempts to make even more sweeping connections, drawing together her ride on the omnibus, with the War, and with Nicholas’s comments on Napoleon. “I mean,” she begins (267), then pauses. She seems to glimpse a set of bridges linking incongruent feelings and events, only to sense those bridges dissolve again at the moment of their articulation. And yet, despite her unfinished sentence, Eleanor’s excitement here reveals the possibility for meaningful connections generated out of  not in opposition to  the juxtapositions embedded in interruptions. I would argue that narrative interruptions represent not only, as Ruotolo suggests, Woolf’s aesthetic and political response to “wholeness,” but also her attempt to reconcile the limitations of her chosen medium to her sense of time as a field that includes many experiences at once. When Eleanor first steps across the threshold and interrupts Nicholas, for instance, her helplessness attests to the simultaneous occurrence of the quiet night on the street and the lively indoor conversation. “It was the light after the dark,” Eleanor thinks, “talk after silence; the war, perhaps, removing barriers” (269). Her disorientation itself calls attention to the concurrent existence in different spheres of darkness and light, silence and talk. Similarly, when the party’s conversation over dinner is punctured by air raid sirens, the party-goers must face the fact that these two events are connected in the sense that they share the same moment in time. As one character says, “I have spent the evening sitting in a coal cellar while other people try to kill each 66. other above my head” (279). Both the dinner party in the cellar and the bombs overhead are part of these people’s experience, and the moment one interrupts the other is a exposure, of sorts, of the simultaneous existence of the multiple layers in that experience. The sirens wail, conversation falters, forks are inspected, people try to kill each other. These things, Woolf would like us to see, happen all at once. Thus interruptions in Woolf force us to see how no thing (no speech act or thought or even historical event) exists in a vacuum or in isolation. In a crucial way, interruptions are the means by which Woolf articulates, within the bounds of sequential narrative, some suggestion of the complexity of contemporaneous layers within any given moment. Woolf describes a version of this logic of layers in a 1935 journal entry, saying of The Years, “[I]n this book, I have discovered that there must be contrast: one strata, or layer cant be developed intensively, as I did I expect in The Waves, without harm to the others” (Diary 4 347, emphasis added). Noticeably, her description of the book here is geological: it suggests the laying down of distinct (“there must be contrast”), but contiguous and parallel, layers. If time is often conceived as a line running from left to right, and  in novels  the horizontal stringing of words across a page, then Woolf’s journal description of The Years in 1935 suggests an indicative desire for verticality, for depth, for some articulation of the fuller dimensionality of events’ happenings. In that same journal entry, Woolf offers another description of the book, one that directly relates to her struggle for form. She says, “…a kind of form is, I hope, imposing itself, corresponding with the dimensions of the human being; one should be able to feel a wall made out of all the influences…” (347). This unusual description of her novel is pertinent to our discussion of simultaneity because interruptions also show how “influences,” everything from Napoleonic history to German bombs, might be said to affect Woolf’s characters simultaneously 67. from the outside. In this way her characters are formed in part by what could be called negative space (to briefly borrow a painterly term), defined as much by what interrupts their thoughts as by their thoughts themselves. In the broadest sense, a “wall made out of all the influences” might be understood as the socio-political context or ideology that underpins history, the implicit, pervasive forces that, in an Althussieran sense, cannot ever be fully escaped and fundamentally shape all human action and interaction. Thus the air raid sirens in The Years expose several contemporaneous layers of human experience, yes, but the sirens also unavoidably synchronize the movements of all Londoners, sending them scurrying to their basements and cellars at one time. Eleanor looks out the basement window and sees “people’s legs and skirts as they went past” (273): simultaneously performed actions like this make the pervasive effect of the war visible to both Eleanor and reader. In a similar way, Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway notices the how the old lady opposite moves at the sound of the striking of Big Ben “as if she was attached to that sound, that string.” She “was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound to move” (127). Both Big Ben and the air raid sirens might be read as concretized examples of the multiple intangible forces (fascism, patriarchy, capitalism, social norms) that affect Woolf’s characters, sometimes with a puppet-like pull. Simultaneity not only reveals actions that exert no causal force, therefore; it also makes visible the larger, often unseen forces — the “wall made out of all the influences” — that coordinate disparate actors acting together in time. As compelling as the sirens are, however, simultaneity as a narrative logic in The Years continually destabilizes all hierarchies of human experience, ensuring that no one event in any time frame remains preeminent for long. Though the air raid in the 1917 chapter of The Years conspicuously disrupts the dinner conversation at first, making Eleanor think “some dull bore had interrupted an interesting conversation” (273), the “interesting conversation” between guests 68. later — and strikingly — interrupts for a while these characters’ experience of the war. The narrative attention shifts, and shifts again. As the bombs continue to fall, as the dinner party wears on, Eleanor gets caught up in discussing the possibilities of Nicholas’s “New World” order that “fits” people better than that of Napoleon and other great men. Nicholas argues, essentially, that the conventional means of human association (family and religion and capitalism) cannot account for the way the soul “wishes to expand; to adventure; to form—new combinations” (280). Listening to him talk, Eleanor feels herself grow increasingly hopeful, enthusiastic. “He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her” (281). In fact she is so absorbed in these musings that when she leaves the house at last and heads for home, she marvels that “I’d forgotten the raid!” (284). Woolf shows us how the simultaneous occurrence of war and dinner-party conversation make “new combinations” possible, bringing into chance correspondence otherwise unrelated ideas from unrelated people like Eleanor and Nicholas; at the same time, “new combinations” such as these make it possible for Woolf’s characters to begin to think past the party and the war, past plots of force like “religion” and “love” (Mrs. Dalloway 128), and thus begin to imagine futures less determined by the old forms of meaning-making. * Two years after The Years was published in 1937, and just two years before her death in 1941, Virginia Woolf set out to write in a systematic way about her own family in the unfinished memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” In these conversational and intimate notes, Woolf moves quickly through the events of her childhood, describing the early, shard-like memories of her home and her siblings, and then dwelling a little longer on the effects of the death of her mother when she was thirteen. “To be family surrounded,” she writes musingly, evocatively, “to go on exploring 69. and adventuring privately while all the while the family as a whole continued its prosaic, rumbling progress; would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and skeptical of the family—?” Or — she then puts the question another way — “Did those deaths give us an experience that even as it was numbing, mutilating, yet meant that the gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking us seriously…?” (137). What’s interesting here is the way the intact family in Woolf’s autobiographical writing is figured as progress. It is understood as “rumbling” in the background and providing a sturdy, reliable structure for private adventures and explorations. “To have been tumbled out of the family structure,” by contrast — to have the family (in Woolf’s words) cracked, mutilated, and gashed — is to violently interrupt its “prosaic rumbling progress” and to become skeptical of what it ever had to offer in the first place (137). The lexicon of brokenness in this passage reinforces the gloss of tragedy that has long been applied to the deaths of Woolf’s mother and half-sister, Stella, in the writer’s childhood. “The usual formation,” Hermione Lee explains in her 1997 biography of Woolf, “is that her father’s death was a blessed release…and her mother’s ‘the greatest disaster that could happen’” (79). But, as Lee points out, this formation fails to account for Woolf’s ambivalent attitude towards the relationship of the artist to the mother in her body of work. To see the breaking up of the family structure as tragedy only ignores the way the above passage in “A Sketch of the Past” frames that disintegration as also potentially valuable to Woolf’s sense of herself as an individual and as a writer. And it ignores the way, in other places, Woolf hints at the complicity of the Victorian mother in upholding patriarchy, her legacy as one of male dependence on daughters. 70. What’s more, this description of family disintegration reverberates against much of Woolf’s earlier writing on literary convention and form, suggesting that in both cases — in both family and literary structures — interrupting the “prosaic rumbling progress” in the author’s mind presents opportunity as well loss, especially for daughters. Undoubtedly breaking and creating are connected throughout Woolf’s writing about writing. For it is also in “A Sketch of the Past” that Woolf puts into words what she calls her “philosophy” or “constant idea of mine,” which is that the violent blows of human experience do more than merely cause discomfort and pain: they reveal “some real thing” behind “the cotton wool of daily life” (72). Such experiences are what Woolf calls “moments of being,” and what is so startling about these moments in Woolf’s conceptualization of them is that the “sudden shocks” expose a pattern of connections rather than just chaotic fragmentation. She goes on to say that “we—I mean all human beings— are connected with” this pattern: “that the world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about the vast mass that we call the world” (72). She clarifies: “But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock” (72). Again and again under different formulations, Woolf shows breakage as an indispensable part of revealing “the thing itself” obscured by convention: the two experiences — blow, followed by awareness of order and pattern — are interdependent in her thinking. Insofar as depicting simultaneity within sequence involves jarring shifts — and insofar as simultaneity in Woolf’s fiction makes “new combinations” legible through coincidence — simultaneity as a narrative logic can be read as one way Woolf opens up plot to the unique meaning-making possibilities she ascribes to “moments of being.” Indeed, reading her narratives through the lens of simultaneous plotting helps us better understand the peculiar triangulation of 71. Clarissa, the old lady opposite, and Septimus Smith at the end of Mrs. Dalloway. And that triangulation helps us apprehend the way the shock of death in the middle of Clarissa’s party exposes a connection no plot of causal force can explain, a “moment of being” in which Clarissa feels an almost ecstatic affinity for the unknown soldier. Likewise, reading simultaneity helps us recognize the way the blow of Mrs. Ramsay’s death connects Lily to Mr. Ramsay in incongruent but coinciding forms of grief, and it also helps us understand the uncanny way Eleanor’s word “fit” fits Nicholas’s sentence during the war. These scenes, and others like them, show how in the recognition of simultaneous actions — or in the interruption of one person’s plot by another’s — all that is needed to get to meaning is a moment. And if that is the case, Woolf’s novels oblige us to ask, why not look for a string of such moments over time? If that is the case, would not “plot” be better defined as, not a gradual accumulation of little effects, but a series of coincidences — chance, arbitrary, iterative, abrupt, but also potentially and temporarily meaningful? * “Does everything then come over again a little differently?” Eleanor thinks late in The Years. Notably, the novel ends with yet another party, a long, fragmented depiction of Delia Pargiter’s reunion in rented rooms. Eleanor in the mid-1930s is auntish, playful, elderly, and she encounters Nicholas at Delia’s party with the warm enjoyment of seeing an old friend. As in their first meeting during the war, she feels she “knew exactly what he was going to say” before he even speaks. The content of their talk now is private, referring outside the events of the book, and is therefore almost nonsensical to the reader. Eleanor imagines him describing a girl as “a ball on the top of a fishmonger’s fountain.” Improbably, just as Eleanor “thought it, he said it” (350). Long since freed from the cloister of the drawing room, no longer a daughter to anyone — 72. not-but-a-daughter now — Eleanor finds meaning, Woolf shows us, in an unlikely friendship with the foreigner (and homosexual) Nicholas. As in their first conversation years ago during the war, Eleanor experiences here again in talking with him the deep pleasure of coinciding thoughts, of coming to the same thing at once. “[I]s there a pattern,” she finds herself wondering then, “a theme; recurring, like music; half-remembered, half-foreseen?…a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible? The thought gave her pleasure: that there was a pattern. But who makes it? Who thinks it? Her mind slipped. She could not finish her thought” (351). If there is a pattern in this book, an idea developed between characters in conversation, a larger notion or theme that ties these people together  if there is, in other words, unity, it is always only half-seen, briefly glimpsed, fleetingly experienced. “Directly something got together, it broke,” Eleanor’s niece thinks late in the book (372). In keeping with this sensibility, the final scene puts forward yet another example of an interruption-turned-coincidence in the narrative action. Morning dawns, and the party-goers move outside to the street to say goodbye. We see Eleanor responding to her sister Delia with a sentence that trails off into ellipses: “The roses? Yes…” she murmurs, for she is not really paying attention to her sister’s words. She is instead watching a girl in a tweed traveling suit climb from a cab and follow a man to the door of another house. “There!” Eleanor murmurs. Once again, the narrative thread is broken by the depiction of simultaneous events occurring at the periphery of the main action, by the girl in the tweed traveling suit going about her completely opaque life down the street. Eleanor’s reverence for the peripheral view as it comes into focus here is almost exactly Clarissa’s: neither causal interest nor family connection, and neither religion nor love as well, can account for the intense satisfaction Eleanor feels for this unknown girl going about her unknown business. “There!” she says again (412). 73. Of course Eleanor is now herself the old lady opposite: grey-haired, elderly, unassuming. Yet even at the end of her long life, even now that so much of Eleanor’s experience is behind her, conclusive meaning has yet to be assigned to her story. The novel cants provocatively future-ward. “And now?” Eleanor asks (412), returning her attention to her sister and throwing open the ending of this novel, inviting the reader’s participation in creating the “Present Day.” This is a history that ends looking forward rather than back, an intergenerational saga of family that features friendship as much as (or more than) the ties between parents and children, or husbands and wives. It is a story that shows the consequences of seemingly inconspicuous actions, of that which happens at once rather than only because of, and of that which is undertaken by chance instead of just in the name of a cause. “Why creeds and prayers,” asks Clarissa, why “mackintoshes?” when “that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery: that old lady, she meant” (Mrs. Dalloway 127). “There,” Eleanor murmurs, as if in agreement, watching the young couple as they exit their cab, as they “opened the door and they stood for a moment on the threshold” (The Years 412). 74. Chapter Three A Poetics of Multitasking: The Family Narratives of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel The penultimate story in Alice Munro’s first collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) ends with an achingly opaque scene, a brutal half-revelation whose power is both enabled and absorbed by the characters’ engagement in simultaneous, quotidian tasks. At the end of “The Peace of Utrecht,” two adult sisters, estranged, are making a salad in their childhood home years after both parents have died. The older sister, Maddy, has stayed behind in the small Ontario town, first to look after her aging mother, and later because of an inertia she cannot explain. The younger sister, Munro’s first-person narrator, has recently returned home for a brief visit with her two small daughters. The sisters “reject each other, and as for the past” — the narrator tells us — “we really do not share it at all, each of us keeping it jealously to herself, thinking privately that the other has turned alien, and forfeited her claim” (190). They have little to say to each other, having taken such forking paths. “No exorcising here,” Maddy insists, so the sisters agree neither to dredge up the past nor to excavate the painful vein of difference between them (191). It is only in the story’s final scene that the narrator attempts to break this tacit silence. “Don’t be guilty, Maddy,” she says softly, and it appears that she wishes to absolve her sister for 75. the way their mother was treated near her death (209). Maddy replies, somewhat tartly, “I’m not guilty.” But — noticeably — she says this over her shoulder, turning off the radio, asking about the raspberries. She changes the subject, goes to get a bowl from another room, returns. “I couldn’t go on,” she says then, as out of nowhere: “I wanted my life” (210). As she says this, she loses her grip on the bowl and a broom must be fetched, the shards swept up. In effect, all the little tasks undertaken as these sisters talk — cleaning the berries, planning the dinner, getting the broom — both enable and deaden the thrill of intimacy between them. Multitasking in the most commonplace sense of the word here, as elsewhere in Munro’s fiction, offers her characters an unobtrusive avenue for revelation, all the while obscuring any final profundity such an occasion might seem to extend. * Multitasking is an equally apt description of much of the narrative action depicted in Alison Bechdel’s 2012 memoir, Are You My Mother? The book’s early panels, for instance, show a long-faced Alison alone in her car, struggling to come up with ways to tell her mother that she has written a memoir about her dead father. In voice bubbles, we see a distracted Alison trying out various explanations. In rectangular banners, we are presented with a more narratorial voice explaining why it is so difficult to start this story about her mother in the first place. In the panel’s pictures, we see traffic crowding in around Alison’s car, semis and roadwork signs thickening the visual landscape. It is just as Alison grows discouraged with her practiced justifications — and just as the narrator explains that “the point at which I began to write the story is not the same as the point at which the story begins” (7) — that a truck swerves into her lane, abruptly cutting Alison off. A question mark explodes jaggedly from her mouth. And the 76. complex opening sequence culminates with Bechdel’s observation: “You can’t live and write at the same time” (7). * Cleaning and talking; driving and thinking; living and writing. The types of actions that can be performed at once, and how such actions might be represented in narrative terms, will be both the subject and the problem of the chapter to come. Whereas the previous chapter examined simultaneity via Woolf’s plotting of more than one actor acting within a single time frame, this chapter hones in on the indeterminism available to writers depicting single actors engaging in multiple activities at once. As we saw, Woolf’s simultaneity had both ethical and political ramifications for the women inside her family novels, consequences for what counts as consequential in narrative. “Moments of being” offered a way to think about the events in Woolf’s plots as loosed from the demands of cause and effect, and from the implied force of one person over another. Multitasking, by contrast, considers narrative action not so much in terms of being, but of doing; as such, it tends to raise rather than circumvent questions of causality and determinism. In the pages to come, therefore, I would like to track some of the ways Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel discernibly layer the actions performed by their characters. I want to consider how multitasking as a poetics, for these writers, showcases an experience of time as a dense network of simultaneously available causes and outcomes. Multitasking is not a word typically applied to narrative, of course — a relatively youthful word, it was first coined in the 1960s among computer scientists to describe the apparent capacity of a microprocessor to process several tasks at the same time. It was only in the 1990s that the word was increasingly generalized to describe a set of longings and anxieties about the way the human mind works, or doesn’t work, as the case may be. Psychologists, 77. cognitive scientists, and social critics have all contributed to the growing clamor that surrounds the word in the popular imagination of the new millennium. The idea of multitasking, still sometimes deployed in casual terms to suggest increased efficiency, now more and more appears to suggest a pervasive disquiet about our collective failure of focus. A 2005 study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, for instance, suggested that multitasking poses a threat to workplace productivity (qtd. in Rosen, Christine); likewise, a 2013 study published in Computers and Human Behavior concluded that students switching between texting, Facebook, and schoolwork were distracted enough that learning was significantly and negatively impacted (Rosen, Larry et al.). Nova’s Brandon Keim perhaps epitomizes the alarmist tone that tinges most of the popular reporting about these findings. After going over the research, he damningly decides: “Do two or more things simultaneously, and you’ll do none at full capacity.” This nervousness about what is lost when actions are performed simultaneously derives from a discourse that situates multitasking squarely — nearly unquestioningly — within a rubric of production, capitalism, and efficiency. The overriding conclusion of such discussions is that multitasking induces distraction, and distraction inhibits work. Likewise, these discussions attend almost exclusively to the impact of technology on the human mind, a focus that is unsurprising, perhaps, given the word’s peculiar genesis in computer processing. Multitasking from the beginning was not just about doing two things at once, but about measuring the increased or decreased productivity that resulted thereof. Even the word “task” implies work performed, like sweeping the house or walking the dog, rather than more aimless kinds of action like walking and talking. Thus, despite all the handwringing over multitasking in the press, all the fascination 78. and uncertainty and unrest, there seems to be comparatively little discourse about the kinds of actions performed simultaneously that can’t be measured in terms of production or a checklist. Narrative texts, I’m suggesting, open up ways to consider multiple actions performed at once in terms less exclusively attached to a discourse of productivity. 32 Correspondingly, multitasking as a description of a particular approach to plotting unlocks ways to consider narrated acts in terms less singularly defined by classic Aristotelian chains of causation. As we’ve already seen, many definitions of plot operate under the basic assumption that agents in narrative are performing just one action at any given point in time, and the linearity of texts tends to reinforce such simplifications. Peter Brooks’ widest definition of plot exposes just this sort of presupposition: “plot is the principle of interconnectedness and intention which we cannot do without in moving through the discrete elements—incidents, episodes, actions—of a narrative” (5). It is this idea of the discreteness of narrative actions that a poetics of multitasking usefully problematizes. Reading for multitasking (rather than discrete actions or sequences) tends to multiply the interpretations available in a given text by crossing or confusing what might otherwise be read as individual lines of narrative progression. And because of this, a poetics of multitasking tends to foreground acts of interpretation themselves as essential parts of the story. Indeed, the kinds of tasks that are possible to perform at once — and the consequences of multitasking on the types of stories that end up getting told — are pressing concerns in narratives by writers as varied as George Eliot and Alison Bechdel. George Eliot’s narrator in Daniel Deronda, for example, makes the case that the book’s capricious heroine, Gwendolen, displays “various, nay, contradictory tendencies.” A character like Gwendolen may feel simultaneous emotions, she explains, but she cannot “kill and not kill in the same moment” — that kind of multitasking is impossible. To support her point, Eliot argues that Macbeth’s rhetoric 79. about the impossibility of being many things at once refers to “the clumsy necessities of action and not the subtler possibilities of feeling” (42). Here Eliot is referencing the horrific scene in Shakespeare’s play that occurs in the aftermath of the discovery of King Duncan’s slaughter. Macbeth speaks of the impossibility of being many things at once to hide his murder of the king and, more pressingly, to justify the killing he does acknowledge — of the two chamberlains he has framed for Duncan’s death. Disingenuously, Macbeth asks, “Who can be wise, amaz’d, temp’rate, and furious, / Loyal, and neutral, in a moment? No man” (II.iii). Macbeth’s stated motive for killing the chamberlains is revenge, and his rhetoric is telling not because we are meant to take him as any kind of authority on the human condition (he is lying after all), but because his cover-up reflects what he believes to be the ethos of his listeners. The action itself, he wants Duncan’s supporters to believe, attests to the singularity of his emotion and purpose: his love for the king. By contrast, simultaneous, competing emotions, he implies, would have led only to inaction and ineffectiveness. No, no, he had to act because he only felt one thing. I linger on Deronda and Macbeth because part of what appears to be at stake in both is the difference between feeling and action, and the extent to which that difference matters in plots that show the complexity available within a single character’s experience. Eliot draws a sharp line between feeling and action early in Deronda, stating what appears to be obvious — you cannot “kill and not kill at once” — and yet she makes that claim by citing a murderer who in fact links thought and action so closely that he conflates them. Moreover, as we saw in the Introduction, even Eliot draws away from the bright line separating thinking and acting by the end of the book, offering at Deronda’s climax a complexly rendered scene in which Gwendolen comes as close as possible to seeing mixed feeling and contradictory deeds as one and the same thing. Gwendolen longs for her husband’s death and also hopes he doesn’t die. When he falls 80. from the yacht, she does in a way, in failing to act, kill and not kill at the same time: “[T]here was a gust — he was struck — I know nothing — I only know I saw my wish outside me” (696). The extent to which Gwendolen’s internal conflict is eerily externalized here — and the extent to which her ambivalence blooms into an interpretation of her husband’s death so utterly at odds with Daniel’s understanding of the same events — is the extent to which Eliot hints at the way conflicted feeling in characters opens up narrative to mutually exclusive, simultaneously available stories. “You cannot live and write at the same time,” Alison Bechdel states at the beginning of her 2012 graphic memoir Are You My Mother? (7). And then, in a move very much like Eliot’s, she soon turns that statement on its head: “Another difficulty,” she says, “is the fact that the story of my mother and me is unfolding as I write it” (10, emphasis added). If it is obvious (as Woolf claims) that more than one thing happens at once, and if it is possible that more than one thing can be felt at once (as Eliot states), it seems less clear to these writers of narrative what kinds of actions can be performed at once, and, furthermore, the degree to which feeling and doing operate in significantly different narrative registers. Forster tells us that “plot” occurs when the king’s death produces the queen’s death, via grief. But how might the queen’s contradictory feelings of sorrow and relief, should she live, require different ways of reading her plot? How might we understand her simultaneous weeping and excited planning? If we take multitasking out of its usual context of efficiency and production, and if we consider not only easily coordinated tasks like listening and walking, but also competing actions like weeping and planning — or in the case of Eliot, killing and not killing, or in the case of Bechdel, living and writing — we begin to see that the difference between things done and felt in narrative terms diminishes considerably. For the purposes of discussing multitasking as a plotting device, this 81. point becomes salient. Why? Because narrative depictions of multitasking tend to disengage specific causes from inevitable effects, offering a range of simultaneous activities followed by a range of potential consequences: a multiple-choice experience of existence in which it is often unclear which feeling or which action determines which outcome. This allows writers to play in explicit ways with the relationship between determinism and interpretation. And such ideas are of interest, as we’ve already seen, to women writers attempting to reconcile the familial and cultural inheritances of daughters with the potential for more open-ended futures. What the family narratives of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel underscore is the way this attempt at reconciliation involves a deeply ambivalent negotiation when it comes to daughters’ relationships to, and inheritances from, their mothers. Simultaneously performed actions in several of Alice Munro’s stories, we’ll see, can be read as modifying conventional lines drawn between cause and effect; they help reveal the mother’s influence as both significant and indeterminate, impossibly weighty and impossible to pin down. Working in the notably less traditional form of the graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel also creates plots that show what she calls the “layered complexity” available to a single agent in a moment of time. 33 This is a complexity that, I argue, is especially well-suited to writing about a mother she experiences as both an obsession and an absence. I want to bring these two very different contemporary writers together in the following pages in order to suggest the range of ways multitasking might be read as a novel means of understanding action in plot, and as such, as a poetics. In different ways, both Munro and Bechdel show how multitasking in family narratives often erodes the boundaries between past and present, between internal and external, and between feeling and action, and these erosions allow for the depiction of alternate, even contradicting realities — the prerogative of daughters who become storytellers. 82. * “The material about my mother is my central material in life,” Munro said in a 1994 interview with the Paris Review, “and it always comes the most readily to me. If I just relax, that’s what will come up.” 34 I began my discussion with Munro’s early story “The Peace of Utrecht” not because it is exceptional but because it is typical: throughout her fourteen published collections there are several similar explorations of the maternal legacy, especially in “Ottawa Valley” and “Friend of My Youth,” which — together with “The Peace of Utrecht” — make up some of Munro’s most “personal” (as she puts it) or autobiographical writing. 35 All three stories reflect upon what might be understood as a uniquely female albatross, that is, a daughter’s memory of a chronically sick mother. Nostalgia and guilt are equally rigorously interrogated, and as a result all three stories rework the classic boundary lines between past and present, and memory and imagination. “The Peace of Utrecht” is the earliest-written in this triad. Its final scene performs the kind of lateral movements on the level of plot that — on a larger scale — Munro leans on for momentum in her later stories. As we’ll see, multitasking here gently unhinges cause from effect, and subtly levels out distinctions between action and reaction. As we’ll also see, there is nothing especially flashy or experimental about how Munro renders these results. In fact, it is in part due to this story’s outwardly pedestrian structure that I want to examine how Munro uses multitasking to lever open the uncomfortable relationship established between the present and the past. From the beginning, “The Peace of Utrecht” is interested in the sticky connection between what has been done and what can be imagined. Helen cues us to this in the opening pages when she tells us that there remains a veil over their mother’s past around which she refuses to look. “Oh, she was not resigned” to her illness, Helen cautiously admits: “she must 83. have wept and struggled in that house of stone (as I can, but will not, imagine) until the very end” (199). Though Helen can, she won’t imagine the worst particulars of the excruciating, drawn-out illness of her mother, and this pattern of willful denial extends to the experience of the older sister who stayed behind to care for her. The longer she was away from home, Helen explains, the harder it became to “re-create” in her mind a picture of her mother’s suffering: it was “too terrible, unreal” (201). This disorienting feeling of the unreality of her past — of the terrible incongruity of her mother’s illness set against the “holiday world of school, of friends and, later on, of love” (191) — leads her to long for gentler, less bitter memories of their mother. The only extended italicized section in the story appears when Helen asks Maddy, “Do you ever remember what she was like before?” She means: before their mother was sick. Helen appears to want to recuperate a less burdensome maternal legacy. But Maddy replies, cuttingly, that you would have to be away a long time to have “those kind of memories” (202). What is telling is that nearly every time the narrator thinks of the past in any detail in this story, she is doing something else at the same time. The effect is subtle, almost unnoticeable on the level of plot, but the multitasking structure makes it possible for Munro to reveal to her readers a great deal of the past while focalizing through a character who admits she does not want to imagine it. There is a trap-door quality to performing two unlike tasks at once, and we see this, first, when the narrator shows her two small girls into the bedroom at the back of the house where she and Maddy used to sleep. “As I was talking to my children I was thinking—” the narrator begins. The paired verb phrases, talking and thinking, usher the revelatory sentence quietly along: “but carefully, not in a rush—of my mother’s state of mind when she called out Who’s there?” (198, author’s emphasis). Helen describes a memory of her mother calling out from the couch as she used to do when she was sick: “I was allowing myself to hear—as if I had 84. not dared before—the cry for help—undisguised and raw and supplicating—that sounded in [my mother’s] voice” (198). The controlled relinquishment of control in these sentences (“I was allowing”), and the proliferation of dashes indicate both the pained hesitation and passionate release that appears to accompany this memory of her mother. The second episode of flooded memory occurs on the heels of this first and gives the story its title. Helen describes lingering in her childhood room as her daughters fall asleep and filling the time by idly opening drawers and closets until she comes across a paper in the washstand she wrote as a student called “The Peace of Utrecht.” Upon seeing her student writing, the past washes over her. This is no carefully monitored release into memory, as before, but a Proustian re-immersion: “I felt as if my old life was lying around me, waiting to be picked up again” (201). The sights and smells and sounds of her youth are all suddenly available to her, the “raw spring air” and “the muddy yards just free of snow” and the “immense pale wash of sky” (201, 202). Helen says, with a kind of perplexed awe, “And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time…had been transformed into something curiously meaningful to me, and complete” (202). The memory remains curiously meaningful to the reader as well, because at no point does the narrator try to explain it or account for its overwhelming power. A forgotten high school paper opens a door to a lush and vivid, yet banal, world — a world apparently impervious, due to its detail, its “complete[ness],” to explication. These two earlier scenes prepare the way for the final one, which, as we’ve seen, also contains a vexing tug between exposure and opacity. At this point in the story, Helen has just returned home after visiting elderly aunts. The aunts have revealed the wretched story of how the sisters’ mother ran away from her care facility in her last days, the facility where Maddy had sent her to stay. And so it is here — with her children playing under the kitchen table and her sister 85. making a salad — that Helen attempts to speak to her sister of that last chapter in their mother’s life. “Don’t be guilty, Maddy,” she offers (209). The scene continues with Maddy’s piqued response: “I’m not guilty,” she said. “Where did you get that? I’m not guilty.” She went to turn off the radio, talking to me over her shoulder. “Fred’s going to eat with us again since he’s alone. I got raspberries for dessert. Raspberries are almost over for this year. Do they look all right to you?” “They look all right,” I said. “Do you want me to finish this?” “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go get a bowl.” She went into the dining room and came back carrying a pink cut-glass bowl, for the raspberries. “I couldn’t go on,” she said. “I wanted my life.” (210) Ten sentences separate Maddy’s first response (I’m not guilty) from her apparent confession (I couldn’t go on), sentences that absorb, in the narration of small tasks performed, much of the import implied by those lines. Moreover, within that sequence, it seems left intentionally uncertain which events, precisely, lead from one to the next. Is it the narrator’s blunt comments, or fetching the bowl in another room — that is, the doing of other things — that opens the door to Maddy’s stunning confession? And even the drama of Maddy’s reveal is almost immediately dispersed by her dropping of the bowl and the incongruity of her laughing response. “Oh, hell, oh Hel-en,” she says, using an “old foolish ritual” phrase of despair shared between the sisters. “Go get me a broom,” she instructs (210). But instead of getting the broom, it is now Helen who speaks as out of nowhere: “Take your life, Maddy. Take it” (210). It is unclear whether it is Maddy’s revelation, or the broken bowl, or the allusion to their old private language — or all 86. three — that leads Helen to address her sister’s situation so openly at this particular moment. Actions and reactions blend together here. Disjuncture becomes a mode of connection. These are extremely subtle obfuscations on the level of plot, and I do not mean to argue that causal logic is entirely ousted here, or even that multitasking offers much more than an indirect means of communication for taciturn sisters. Instead I want use this scene to suggest how multitasking as a mechanism of plot applied at this climatic juncture complicates any easy sorting of the story’s events into surface action sequences (the proairetic code, according to Roland Barthes) and the occurrences that involve the plot’s larger enigmas (the hermeneutic code). And this slight uncertainty about which actions lead to which emotions, and vice versa, is part of what lends this scene its oddly indigestible quality. That is to say, the interweaving of actions and reactions, and the overlapping of quotidian tasks with dramatic revelations, results in a curious leveling of difference between the kinds of experience being described. The breaking of the bowl and the search for a broom absorb, to some extent, the emotional potential of the revelations. Likewise, the revelations harden in a conspicuous way to contain something of the straightforward busyness of the domestic tasks the sisters are performing at the same time. Revelation does not reverberate for long, and reasons remain inscrutable. “But why can’t I, Helen?” Maddy asks in the very last sentences of the story. Why can’t I leave? she means. The story will not say. * If Munro’s depictions of multitasking in “The Peace of Utrecht” call into subtle question the way one thing leads to the next — and the difference between revelatory and quotidian tasks, or what is done and what is felt — Alison Bechdel’s portrayals of multitasking in Are You My Mother? do so, as we’ll see, much more conspicuously and elaborately. Throughout the memoir, 87. Bechdel painstakingly renders the concurrent experiences of remembering and of growing up; of dreaming and talking about dreaming; of writing and writing about writing and justifying that writing to her mother. As the opening near-collision scene shows, almost every panel in this book traces more than one story at once, depicting the conflicts of filial love and guilt, alongside the traffic of Alison’s daily life, together with her struggle to understand the nature of narrative itself. “Every moment that we’re living and having experiences, we’re bringing to bear all the other experiences we’ve had,” Bechdel says, in a 2012 interview in The Comics Reporter about the making of this book. This “layered complexity,” she goes on to say, is what is “so exciting to me about graphic narrative.” It is Bechdel’s “layered complexity” — and its relationship to both daughterhood and narrative time — that I want to look at more closely here. Witheringly, revealingly, New York Times critic Dwight Garner has critiqued Are You My Mother? for its failure to provide a “real narrative.” To some extent he seems to be talking about subject matter. Garner compares Are You My Mother? unfavorably to Bechdel’s 2006 book, Fun Home, a bestselling graphic memoir about the author’s closeted bisexual father and her own experience of coming out. (This is the book we see Alison struggling so anxiously to tell her mother about at the beginning of Are You My Mother?) In contrast to Fun Home — with its heavy-hitter literary themes of paternity, inheritance, sexuality, and death — Are You My Mother? considers the less overtly dramatic story of Bechdel’s own subject formation through her maternal connections, her relationships, and her art. But if Garner is unimpressed by the subject matter in Bechdel’s second memoir, he seems to see the book’s narrativelessness even more pointedly as a failure of structure and plot. “With its freight of therapy sessions, dream sequences, and quotations from other books,” he 88. says, “Are You My Mother? is like an undistinguished edifice by a builder who forgot to remove the scaffolding.” No real narrative, indeed. It is my sense that Bechdel’s refusal to remove the “scaffolding,” as Garner puts it, reflects not only her insistence on offering a kind of metabook about the making of narrative, but also — and more importantly — the strong feeling of temporal simultaneity which informs her relationship to her living mother. Structurally, as well as thematically, Bechdel’s mother book is quite different from her memoir about her dead father. The earlier memoir deploys a more classic inheritance plot, drawing the reader in with dramatic inquiries into the cause-and-effect relationship between father and daughter. Fun Home troubles the question of whether any part of Alison’s homosexuality might have been learned or inherited from her dad, along with the difficult inverse of that question: whether, as Bechdel puts it, “I caused my father’s death by telling my parents I was a lesbian” (84, emphasis added). In keeping with this logic, Fun Home begins and ends with an iconic illustration of descent, with Bechdel and her father playing — and exchanging — the roles of Daedalus and Icarus. In a similar way, Alison spends much of the memoir reading her father’s books, rehearsing stories about and by literary patriarchs like Fitzgerald, Proust, and Camus in an effort to better understand not only her father, but herself. It is telling to me, however, that even as she’s reading her father’s library, she’s developing her own canon of lesbian and feminist narratives — of other stories with logics quite different from the Daedalus-Icarus tale — and by the end of Fun Home, she admits that she never finished reading her father’s favorite book, James Joyce’s Ulysses. She opens Are You My Mother?, conspicuously, with a very different guiding modernist voice, that of Virginia Woolf, whom she quotes saying, simply, “For nothing was simply one thing.” 36 This, along with Bechdel’s 89. playfully querying title, cues the reader to expect no singular line of descent in this story of mothers and daughters. From the start, we see there will be the potential for multiple influences, for lines of descent that are cross-pollinating, randomly intersecting, and multifarious. This book about daughters and mothers promises to be less about inheritance and more about the search — for new forms, for new ways to understand the self in time, and for new ways to depict the “layered complexity” that defines the daughter’s relationship to her mother. * Let me put this more functionally. Are You My Mother? combines the linear left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequences we associate with literary texts with the simultaneity of the visual in a way that allows meaning to accrue not only through consequence, but also — and often more compellingly — through coincidence and association. Graphic narrative could be said to be particularly well suited for plots of this kind. Hillary Chute, in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, helps explain why this is the case. She borrows cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s observation that comics make use of “time as space” to point out the way panels or frames promote sequential pacing and narrative rhythm (7). In comics, we are guided by the syntax of panels the same way sentences and paragraphs control duration in texts. However, “[b]ecause comics represents time as space on the page,” Chute goes on to say, “authors such as Spiegelman have been able to push the conventions of comics’ spatial representation to powerful effect by, say, palimpsesting past and present moments together in panels that are traditionally understood to represent only one temporal register” (7). For this reason, graphic elements can engage the reader in more than one temporal register at once, with the potential for suggesting the achronological or simultaneous. 37 90. Are You My Mother? makes frequent use of such palimpsesting techniques, as we’ve already seen in the near-accident sequence that opens the book. I want to focus for a moment, however, on something else in Bechdel’s narrative: the only full centerfold spread arranged without any panels or gutters at all. This unique spread occurs near the end of the first chapter, “The Ordinary Devoted Mother,” and it depicts five photographs of Alison as a baby in her mother’s arms (32, 33). The photographs show just the side and back of her young mother’s head, featuring instead the baby’s face, whose gaze is fixed on the half-seen mother’s. Because the spread is marked by a breakdown in framed moments, and because causal sequence is overtly questioned here, these two interconnected pages offer a gloss that might be used to understand how time is anatomized and shaped throughout this narrative (see Figure 1). Interestingly, Alison herself does not appear in these pages. Instead we encounter her implied presence, which we ourselves inhabit as viewers, and at first glance that view is chaotic. Only gradually does the image organize itself into a writer’s desk: ink-stained pens and wire- rimmed glasses on top of and beside the photos. Undoubtedly, this is a very messy desk — but Bechdel’s white rectangles of text draw the eye, eventually, into sequence and order. The white rectangles stand out because they are overlapped by nothing, and so we begin reading, following the text — stepping-stone style — across and down the pages. Bechdel admits at the top left, “I don’t have the negatives [of the photos], so there’s no way to know their chronological order. But I’ve arranged them according to my own narrative” (32). The text boxes first establish, then comment on and direct this photographic narrative. The mother’s half-seen face is reflected by the baby, causing the infant to smile: we see, as Bechdel describes it to us, the way “rapport between my mom and me builds until I shriek with joy” (32). The mini narrative could be said to climax in the image of the baby’s wide open mouth. 91. But the story on the page is not quite so simple as that. For, almost immediately after the sequence of photos is established and their chronological order posited, two striking graphic features break in and interrupt it. The first is a perfectly centered red box on the left-hand page that shows the carefully highlighted words of Donald Winnicott, the child psychologist who is one of Bechdel’s muses in this book. The quoted portion of his writing is just a scrap, beginning midsentence: “…ordinarily,” the highlighted portion goes, “the woman enters into a phase from which she ordinarily recovers in the weeks and months after the baby’s birth, in which to a large extent she is the baby and the baby is her…” (32, author’s emphasis). Bechdel’s following comment plays with Winnicott’s use of the word “ordinary.” She says, “for a long time, I resisted including my present-day interactions with mom in this book precisely because they’re so ‘ordinary’” (32). The second interruption of the photographic sequence is the bright red “DRRINNG!” of a phone, followed by the voice of Bechdel’s mother in jagged voice bubbles. “Hi, I was at the gym. Had to get my laps in.” She goes on: “I couldn’t believe Lady Gaga on the Grammys last night. Puhlease. I like punk. I like weird!” Her mother expounds on Lady Gaga’s thighs. She describes reading Sylvia Plath’s journals and relates them to a dream about Alison’s dad — even as the photos continue to track down the page, showing the baby-Alison breaking into her delighted laugh — and even as Bechdel continues to comment, saying of the baby’s sudden worried face in the final photo, “Then the moment is shattered as I noticed the man with the camera.” This is, presumably, the “moment” in which the baby catches sight of her father. Thus Bechdel brings the photographic narrative to its dark resolution, invoking the unseen presence of the man lurking over her mother’s shoulder. We see neither parent’s full face, but the baby acts 92. as mirror: “At the age of three months,” Bechdel says, “I had seen enough of my father’s rages to be wary of him.” What I think is so remarkable here is not just that the photos have been arranged according to Bechdel’s “own narrative,” as she tells us. It’s that the arrangement itself is interrupted — and interrogated and intentionally complicated — to create a sense of time that reveals the simultaneous layers of Bechdel’s own narrative. In other words, the logics of causality and simultaneity interact, strive for prominence, and ultimately produce a curious sense of time, in which the clock both runs forward and seems stopped. For, on one hand, there are a series of temporally arranged sequences that rely for meaning on cause and effect. The organization of the photographs is the best example of this, suggesting the way chronologically- arranged points in time become resonant to Bechdel when they reveal the parents’ effects on the daughter. (Intriguingly, the photographs also reveal the way causality is itself used to guess chronology.) Her mother’s present-day voice on the phone and the commentary in the boxes similarly rely on left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequences in which one thing leads to the other to the next. On the other hand, however, all these sequences are braided together visually and graphically in a way that complicates left-to-right progression and straight-forward causal connections. The photos tell a story of the past, yes, but they also exist all at once on a desk — side by side, overlapping — in a kind of textual present. They appear to be arranged in a very particular moment on that desk, and we as readers are therefore offered a glimpse into the verticality of that moment. Because of this, at any point in any of these sequences we might stop and look down and around, rather than read forward. The focal point in the last photo, as just one example, seems to be the baby’s wary eyes, but we also see the older mother’s voice superimposed on her younger 93. self in a way that allows her insult of Sylvia Plath — “spoiled brat” — to reverberate uncomfortably against the maternal scene; we see Bechdel’s conclusion about her father hovering rather ominously over her mother’s right shoulder, edging her out; the photo itself sits on top of the ruler, looking temporary and provisional, but also weighed down by a tool in the far right corner of the page — and by the difficulty, the mess, of the creative process itself. Several different routes to meaning might be traced in these non-linear, acausal proximities and associations. This seems part of Bechdel’s point. There is a story that can be told, the photos suggest, one that captures isolated moments and hints at causality in the gaps. The process of telling that story is itself another story, however, or another set of stories, and those stories involve the coordinated and competing tasks of looking, remembering, reading, listening, arranging, and creating. Bechdel’s first-person perspective engages and implicates the reader in all these activities, so that we as viewers are also looking at the photos, while reading about them, while hearing the voice of Alison’s mother, while examining the desk’s ephemera. Bechdel’s multitasking is recreated here as a complex experience that the reader, too, must somehow negotiate. * This spread in Bechdel’s book suggests how multitasking as a poetics might be seen as particularly well-suited to a poetics of metanarrative. In part this is because reading for multitasking in narrative helps us consider actions not only in a single temporal register moving from action to reaction, or cause to effect. It draws attention to a small cosmos of simultaneously performed activities that interact with and shape a small cosmos of possible effects, including the way a story like Bechdel’s ends up getting told. A certain fascination with this process is at the heart of this memoir, and indeed, when her mother calls the memoir a “metabook,” Alison 94. readily agrees (285). Though Bechdel’s narrative is not a work of fiction, of course, she does seem committed to what Mark Currie suggests is the basic purpose of metafiction: to see the way the world of meaning is made out of constructed systems (7). That said, “metabook” is a fairly blunt description of the multiple layers of action and representation that make up the plot of this book. Bechdel’s narrative goes far past frame and story, I would argue, beyond differentiating between the levels of constructing and the constructed, or the telling and the told. Reading multitasking as a poetics helps bring home more clearly — as we saw in the baby photo sequence — the powerful way Bechdel’s experience of her mother is always compacted by the composite layers of remembering, of reading, of writing, of talking. Another way of putting this is that the maternal legacy for Bechdel can itself be understood as an archive — journals and reading alongside photographs, memories alongside present-day conversations — and the story of the inheritance of that legacy necessarily involves all the ways she makes meaning out of it, or fails to do so. A remarkably similar project drives Alice Munro’s short story “Friend of My Youth,” from the 1991 collection by the same title. As in “The Peace of Utrecht,” this story probes the dark corners of a daughter’s memory of her chronically-ill mother. There are many parallels between the two works of fiction: both involve pairs of sisters; both interrogate the female role of caregiver; both pit gentler memories against more haunting ones. But I think this story proves especially resonant when read beside Bechdel’s memoir of her mother. Munro’s multifaceted short story takes up its own maternal archive, in a sense — a story the narrator has inherited from her mother’s youth. What to make of that story, or how to make her mother’s story mean, is the narrator’s central quandary. And because of this, a peculiar mode of multitasking, similar to Bechdel’s, generates and sustains the composite structure by which this short story accrues its own “layered complexity.” 95. “Friend of My Youth” begins with a dream sequence. In a hushed, meditative, slightly abashed tone, the narrator explains how she often dreams of her long-dead mother. “In the dream,” she says, “I would be the age I really was, living the life I was really living, and I would discover that my mother was still alive” (3). To her surprise, her mother in this dream is not the sick, needy presence the narrator remembers. Her relief over this is mixed with regret. “I would say [to my mother in the dream] that I was sorry I hadn’t been to see her in such a long time— meaning not that I was guilty but that I was sorry I had kept a bugbear in my mind, instead of this reality…” (4). Many readers of this story have analyzed this opening dream sequence as the introduction to the story’s frame. 38 It is a frame, in the sense that a good portion of the narrative material in this story, about fifteen pages, is devoted to a tale only (apparently) tangentially related to the narrator’s mother. This particular frame, however, contains the main motors that turn the tensions in this story. In this way, it is no more a frame than Bechdel’s desk in the baby- photo sequence — but before we take a closer look at it, let me retell the story within the story so we can see how Munro’s narrator arranges her raw materials. As a young woman (we’re told), the narrator’s mother went to work as school teacher in a small southern Ontario town, where she lived with the sisters Flora and Ellie Grieves. During her stay with them, the younger sister, Ellie, was married to a man called Robert Deal — who, we find out, was in fact originally engaged to the older sister, Flora. The grim little story offers a second turn of the screw. After Ellie Grieves’ many miscarriages, after she got sick and died at last, it was her nurse — and not Flora — who ended up marrying Robert. And the three continued to live in the divided house together even after Flora was jilted for the second time. “The Maiden Lady” is what the narrator’s mother says she would have called this story. “If I could have been a writer—then—I do think I could have been; I could have been a writer— 96. then I would have written the story of Flora’s life” (19). There is a touch of Bechdel’s mother in this depiction of thwarted ambition, of the young woman who has given up her artistic dreams to be a wife and mother. 39 Munro’s narrator, however, rejects “The Maiden Lady” outright. She says, “I knew, or thought I knew, exactly the value [my mother] found [in those words]” (19). In the way of a rebellious daughter, she derides her mother’s desire to make Flora into a noble, virginal figure, “one who accepts defection, treachery, who forgives and stands aside” (19). She wants nothing of her mother’s worship of such pious victimhood. “I had my own ideas about Flora’s story,” she says. “I didn’t think that I could have written a novel but that I would write one” (20, emphasis added). Much is communicated in this tense shift from past conditional to future subjunctive. The narrator blatantly rewrites her mother’s legacy; she rearranges the photos of her desk, as it were, presenting Flora’s actions in another pattern altogether. “I saw through my mother’s story and put in what she left out. My Flora would be as black as hers was white. Rejoicing in the bad turns done her and in her own forgiveness, spying on the shambles of her sister’s life” (20). She gives Robert, who “never has a word to say” in her mother’s version of the story, a voice: “But he was the one who started everything in secret. He did it to Ellie” (21, 22). Sex squirms onto the page in a way that she knows would have offended her mother, and this knowledge gives her intense satisfaction: “What made Flora evil in my story was just what made her admirable in my mother’s” (22). But the narrator does not stop there. She questions the validity of her own story as well. She owns that her witchy Flora is, in a way, just as typical and just as clichéd as her mother’s maiden. Both are constructs of their own contexts as women: “The odd thing is that my mother’s ideas were in line with the progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in mine. This in spite of the fact that we both believed ourselves independent” (22- 97. 23). Having thus advanced several versions of this story, the narrator then describes how her mother receives a letter “from the real Flora” saying she has left her country house and is clerking in a store (23). This image of “the real Flora” offers a fresh pivot point for the narrator’s imagination. Here the earlier received and revised versions of Flora give way to an almost purely counterfactual version, a Flora invented rather than interpreted. She now imagines Flora as someone utterly ordinary, someone who “might rent a cottage on a lake for a week, learn to swim, visit a city” (25). The narrator goes on: “I might go into a store and find her” and then corrects herself. “No, no. She would have been dead a long time now.” But this correction does not terminate the vision, and the story’s stinging, final turn depends on the persistence of this fantasy of ordinariness. For, after positing at least four adaptations of Flora (the first lengthy description, followed by her mother’s virginal heroine, followed by her own black witch, and the store clerk version), this last figure of Flora collapses in a dizzying flash into the figure of her mother. “Of course it’s my mother I’m thinking of,” she tells us, her understated tone pulling against the reader’s surprise. “[M]y mother as she was in those dreams, saying, It’s nothing, just this little tremor” (26). The image is delivered, at first, as a kind of grace note. There is intense relief in imagining for her mother the quiet, ordinary existence of the store clerk, of the woman who rents a cottage and paints her nails. But, the narrator says, turning the image on its head yet again, she also feels “slightly cheated” (26). Here is the full passage: Yes. Offended, tricked, cheated, by this welcome turnaround, this reprieve. My mother moving rather carelessly out of her old prison, showing options and powers I never dreamed she had, changes more than herself. She changes a bitter lump of love I have 98. carried all this time into a phantom—something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy. (26) There is a satisfying sense of narrative rhyme in this passage, for on one level it points back into the story of the sisters, to Ellie’s many miscarriages. But it also turns the tables so that the daughter becomes a mother too. She is a mother, however, who has staked her entire existence on the premise of a child which does not, and could never, exist. The “bitter lump of love,” which has shaped not only her understanding of her mother but also her understanding of herself, may be, she recognizes, no more real than the witchy Flora, or a convenient story, or a phantom pregnancy. The arrangement and rearrangement of the archive of materials allows the narrator (and the reader by proxy) to make this connection. Several Floras flourish in this story without fully fading: the victim, the villain, the harmless old lady. And more than one iteration of the narrator’s mother persists as well: the sick version, on which the narrator has staked her existence, and the gentler, dreamed version, who, like the store-clerk Flora, survives as neither villain nor victim. Here’s my point. In the story’s terms, no iteration of Flora, and no version of the mother, is finally chosen over all the others. To some extent they all exist; to some extent they are all questionable. This is multitasking in the widest sense of the word. We see the same character performing apparently contradictory actions in basically the same temporal register — a Flora who both triumphs and suffers, a mother who both accuses and forgives — made possible by a narrator who holds in the mind at once several competing, mutually exclusive realities. The maternal legacy is depicted as being potent, unsettling, and very real — without being determined or altogether determining. * 99. In a Paris Review interview from1994, Alice Munro describes her desire to do a story with “alternate realities.” She explains how the impulse came to her while she was writing Friend of My Youth: “Maybe it has something to do with age,” she explains, “Changing perceptions of what is possible, of what has happened—not just what can happen but what really has happened. I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives.” 40 In her article titled “‘A Different Tack’,” Gayle Elliot analyzes “Friend of My Youth” and makes a related observation about Munro’s narrative goals and practices. Elliot writes, “Munro explores not only memory but the processes by which people account for and make experience” (77, emphasis added). This shift from memory to the processes by which people remember means that Munro’s narratives do not “conjure unitary meaning from what is, essentially, a formless and chaotic past, but telling and re-telling stories, from a variety of angles and viewpoints, affords opportunity for retrospection, and, occasionally, for revelation” (80). Telling and re-telling affords opportunity not only for retrospection and revelation in Munro’s work, I would add, but for a suggestion of the kind of “disconnected realities” Munro says she longs to engage, for narrative structures that move not just from then to now, or from cause to effect, but through the versions of reality that seem to simultaneously and acausally persist. Metafiction toes the line with science fiction in Munro’s conceptualization of time, in a sense, without ever transgressing the generic borders of what we tend to call realism. There is a touch of Freud’s Eternal City in such projects. In Munro’s short fiction, as in Bechdel’s graphic memoirs, the narrative challenge does seem to be to represent the Coliseum superimposed on top of Nero’s Golden House, the Piazza of the Pantheon overlapped by the one first built by Agrippa. Both writers show an experience of time, and daughterhood, in which “nothing that has come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases continue 100. to exist alongside it” (Civilization and Its Discontents 18). In such a conceptualization, the old doesn’t just lead to the new — the mother doesn’t just raise and affect the daughter in a causal chain through time — but the old and the new coexist in the daughter’s mind, alongside the perceptions and interpretations of others. This “layered complexity” (in Bechdel’s words) — or these “disconnected realities” (in Munro’s) — arise from an understanding of the mother that is heterogeneous, multifarious, and amalgamate. And understanding the mother this way depends on finding ways to represent the human mind as a multitasking agent, one capable of — unable to stop — engaging multiple, simultaneous memories and interpretations. * “But it’s hard to figure out what the story is,” Alison Bechdel complains in her memoir, and no wonder (28, 29). There is no temporal beginning or end to Bechdel’s tale, and certainly no first cause and final effect, only layers and layers of present and past, and the shifting series of narrative frames Bechdel offers. It is telling to me that, like Munro’s story “Friend of My Youth,” each of Bechdel’s chapters open with dream sequences: lush scenes drawn over velvety black. And it is interesting that both the beginning and end of this memoir show Bechdel driving while talking on the phone (or thinking of doing so) with her mother. Very few actions suggest the simultaneity of daily life better than dreams and phone conversations. In both, the action of the body and the drama of the mind run on distinctly parallel, but sometimes curiously correlative, tracks. An individual is literally doing two things at once, and sometimes those things collapse in a causal intersection — as we saw in the near-accident scene that opens Bechel’s memoir — and sometimes they remain incompatible and almost entirely separate. In the memoir’s final car conversation there is, revealingly, no near collision. Bechdel’s anxiety over her mother’s reaction to her writing is quelled when her mother quotes to her over 101. the phone a passage from Dorothy Gallagher. “The writer’s business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story,” she says, “Not, you may note, to serve her family or to serve the truth, but to serve the story” (283). Though her mother begins this book saying Bechdel has “too many strands” (28), she ends on a note of grudging acceptance. “Well,” she says at last, “it coheres” (285). This coherence comes, I believe, from Bechdel’s dogged determination to offer both sequence and simultaneity, to teach the reader (as we saw in the baby photograph scene) to read and look both horizontally and vertically. And those vertical layers, those coexisting narrative strands, frequently create an experience in which time as a linear progression is itself seen as an illusion — and “growing up” is better understood as growing out, as taking on multiple influences and tracing multiple lineages. The memoir’s poignant final scene makes this plain. It shows a very young Alison pretending to be a crippled child, and her mother bending over her to fit her with imaginary “special shoes.” Says Bechdel, “I have always thought of the ‘crippled child’ game as the moment by mother taught me to write” (287). Though Bechdel’s mother did not always offer her daughter the affection Alison wanted and needed, and though she did not always give consistent attention and encouragement, Bechdel points out that there was something enormously powerful in the “gap” between them — in the break in the line of inheritance (288). It is the interruption in intimacy, what hasn’t been given, that paradoxically connects daughter to mother. This is the space that art comes from. And this is also a place where, for Bechdel, other mothers fill in. Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Donald Winnicott, Bechdel’s lovers, her beloved therapists — all appeal to Bechdel with their different narrative lines, and all are her (often simultaneous) influences. In this way, the form of the book (which is plotted as a search for form, as well as a search for self) 102. effectively mirrors Bechdel’s subject matter. Says critic Katie Roiphe — in stark contrast to her colleague, Dwight Garner, in the New York Times — “In a sense, Bechdel’s innovative form lends itself to the subject; graphic memoir can reproduce the layering of thought and mimic strands of simultaneous life… Things happen at the same time. Associations are made. The past is superimposed on the present.” By combining sequence and graphics, causal action and multitasking, Alison Bechdel sets wheels on her “scaffolding” and sends her superimposed images rolling in time. “It’s hard to figure out what the story is,” she says, but that is because there are so many stories available at once. * It’s hard for Munro’s narrators to figure out what the story is, too. For both Bechdel and Munro, the mother is a persistent and layered, and also elusive and traveling, figure; she is both too close and too distant to delineate with clarity. She changes continually without seeming to change. The ending of Munro’s story “Ottawa Valley” brings this home especially clearly. Let me conclude by quoting the story’s final memorable passage in full: The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get: it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same. (Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You 246, author’s emphasis) 103. The mother figure in this passage is both “too weighty” and too “indistinct,” a haunting influence refusing to be either exorcised or fully represented in art. It is clear from her diction that the writer-narrator cannot tell the story of her mother in any traditional sense. The logic that links daughter to mother here is one that flagrantly resists a linear narration from one generation to the next, or from past to present. Instead, the writer-narrator lists a range of tasks she has performed to tell the story of her mother, tasks that involve a mutually contradictory set of goals: “To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her.” These verbs, as we’ve seen, could be applied equally well to Bechdel’s project, and to the multiplicity of tasks undertaken — often at once — to capture her mother in narrative form. For both writers, the mother-daughter plot powerfully resists the logics of causality and descent as described by Aristotle, Forster, and Brooks in the Introduction. There is no direct line to draw from ending to start and few backwards-made links to connect effects to causes. In ways that foreground ambivalence and uncertainty, in ways that honor indeterminacy alongside influence, Munro’s and Bechdel’s narratives feature instead logics in which the past is not altogether distinct from the present, in which memory and imagination comingle and collide, and in which, to return to Eliot, “a moment is room wide enough” for multiple feelings and actions to be plotted at the same time (42). 104. Afterword I’ve been describing multitasking thus far as a mode of plotting, as a way of representing the events and actions that comprise narrative texts. There is, of course, another kind of multitasking at play when it comes to the composition of these narratives. As we’ve seen, Woolf’s first iteration of The Years, The Pargiters, was a bold experiment in writing fiction and nonfiction at the same time. As such, her writing process itself evinced a multitasking sensibility, her notebooks swinging between imagined scenes and expository argument, between invocation and analysis. And even after Woolf excised the critical portions, saving them for her nonfiction essay The Three Guineas, she remained committed to extensive research and reading even as she wrote and revised her fictional work The Years. Likewise, Bechdel was composing her first memoir, Fun Home, even as she was working on the weekly syndicated comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. Munro was writing her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, while she was raising two small girls. Multitasking in this extra-textual sense — that is, as a writing practice — could be said to inform, to varying degrees, many of the works that I have discussed in this project. And so it comes time to say that while I was writing this critical dissertation, I was also — intermittently, erratically, discontinuously — composing my novel Natural History. Many days in the last months were divided in half: mornings for the novel, afternoons for reading and 105. critical writing. I often felt the “chop & change” Woolf describes as a possible effect of moving back and forth between two plots, along with the resonant, half-articulate sense of unexpected correspondences (Diary 3 106). Given this division of my days, given this constant shuttling between tasks, it was unsurprising to me to realize at some point that even as I was writing about inheritance and daughterhood in Woolf’s, and Munro’s, and Bechdel’s works, I was also writing about a daughter in my novel, one with her own fraught relationship to the various mother- and father-figures in her life. No doubt some of the same predilections and curiosities drive these very different modes of articulation and exploration. In fact, when I was revising my novel, I wrote out a single question on an orange Post-it note and stuck it my wall. It is the question that opens the Introduction to this critical dissertation — When two things happen at once, or seem to, what, if anything, does it mean?— but I meant the question to apply, in different ways, to both projects at once. In this sense, these two projects might be described as different kinds of meditations on possible answers to a similar question, as, in a way, the “same thing from two different views” (Woolf, Diary 4 173). That said and having come this far — having analyzed simultaneity in the works of several writers I admire — I come to a point, too, when it is important for me to acknowledge that what draws me to simultaneity is, on some level, that it is a logic that also resists full explication. What simultaneity eludes as a temporal logic remains as salient as what it illuminates. This is not to say that simultaneity as a plotting device isn’t potentially meaningful or ethical or beautiful, as the bulk of this project has sought to show. It is to say, rather, that when two things seem to happen at once, or nearly so, illegibility often remains as crucial an element as resonance, mystery as correspondence. And so a secondary and more practical set of questions vexes my thinking about simultaneity in both projects. How can I write in a way that 106. allows different ideas and events to coexist in time, or on the page, without forcing those ideas into definite tracks of influence, and without fully explaining the logic that allows them to bind together or create tension? How can I suggest meaningful resonances in my sentences and paragraphs without lining up the dominos and watching them fall? How to both show and tell? How to plot associations just as carefully and thoughtfully as cause and effect? Causality, it could be said, is about the explicable, the explainable. By most definitions of plot I’ve discussed, causality is the logic that proposes answers to questions of how and why things happen the way they do. Grief is the causal link that explains the death of Forster’s queen; without grief as a conjunction, narrative meaning may still be possible in this plot in all the ways I’ve discussed, but the queen’s reasons for dying remain obscure, uncertain, and difficult to trace. Causality is the logic of the medical examiner, of the coroner’s report, of the court case. It is the logic of symptoms and arguments, and, as such, it is privileged by science and law and academia and history alike. It would be too glib to say it is the logic of patriarchy, for, as we’ve seen, even eminent patriarchs like Darwin and Freud grapple with and cogently describe acausal forces like coincidence and chance. My point is that reading for narrative simultaneity — even in the works of Darwin and Freud — means acknowledging temporal correspondences without finally eliminating some measure of the indeterminate, the unaccountable, and the unpredictable. It means there might be very real connections between actions in time that are irreducible beyond the fact of their simultaneous occurrence. There might be events in narrative about which the most powerful statement that can be made is, Woolf reminds us, “here was one room; there another” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 127). This, then, is what Woolf and Munro and Bechdel teach us: at the heart of the irreducible fact of simultaneity is that which rests ever uneasily between meaning and meaninglessness. This 107. is the mystery that Clarissa Dalloway feels when she glances out her window, the disorder which is part of the order of noticing the old lady opposite going about her day. “Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing table” (127). The point Woolf makes in this scene is that contemporaneous forms of being cannot easily be “solved” by religion or love — by orthodoxies and explanations — or by the conventional plotting strategies that arrange meaning between people (127). Indeed, Bechdel goes so far as to suggest that this kind of reverence for coincidence — for two things seeming to occur at once — is itself part of what she has inherited from her mother. Early in Are You My Mother?, Bechdel quotes from a letter her mother has written to her. “I dream about brain tumors and babies,” her mother writes: “I am staring out my dirty windows at the lilac buds.” Her mother tries to analyze why she had put these two disparate pairs of things together, and then — making a more sweeping connection — she links herself to her daughter, asking, “Why do you and I do that?” Bechdel notes with pleasure the tradition she feels she has here been conscripted to join, the way she has been linked to her mother’s practice of coincidence-seeing and pattern-making. She says, “The search for meaningful patterns may well be crazy, but to be enlisted with her in it thrills me. ‘Why do I do that?’ I am carrying on her mission” (31, emphasis added). Something similar might be said of the plots I’ve traced and the patterns I’ve sought to illuminate in the works of Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro, and Alison Bechdel. It has been my aim to carry out, in a small way, their literary mission. One part of my responsibility to these writers involves altering my approach to reading texts by looking for plots that operate not only outside cause and effect, but outside a variety of familiar and traditional plot configurations. The other part is much harder yet: it involves transforming my ways of thinking about and writing narrative 108. itself. It requires cultivating a writerly habit of glancing out the window, occasionally, as an ethical and aesthetic practice, and plotting with a deeper awareness of and respect for peripheral vision. 109. Figure 1. Are You My Mother? pages 32-33 110. Works Cited Anonymous. “How Time Passes” (in Time 12 April, 1937). Ed. Eleanor McNees. Virginia Woolf Critical Assessments: Volume IV Critical Responses to the Novels The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts; Essays; Critical Evaluations; Comparative Studies. East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. S. H. Butcher. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997. Auden, W. H. Selected Poems: New Edition. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003 Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” Narrative Theory: Major Issues in Narrative Theory. Ed. Mieke Bal. New York: Routledge, 2004 ---. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2012. ---. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2006. ---. Interview with Tom Spurgen. The Comics Reporter, posted December 18, 2012. 111. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth- Century Fiction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [1983] ---. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground – Essays. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press: 1996. Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: The Hogarth Press, 1972. Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Caramagno, Thomas. “‘The sane & the insane, side by side’: The Object-Relations of Self- Management.” Critical Insights: Mrs. Dalloway. Dorothy Dodge Robbins, Ed. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Cohen, Paula Marantz. The Daughter’s Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1991. Currie, Mark, ed. Metafiction. New York: Longman, 1995. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998. [1859] Duplessis, Rachael Blau. “Feminist Narrative in Virginia Woolf.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 21 Winter / Spring (1988): 323-30. 112. ---. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Introduction by Terence Cave. London, England: Penguin Classics, 1995. [1876] Elliott, Gayle. “‘A Different Tack’: Feminist Meta-narrative in Alice Munro’s ‘Friend of My Youth.’” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 20 No.1 (Summer 1996). Ellis, Steve. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Fludernik, Monika. “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Inc.,1927. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Architecture / Mouvement / Continue (October, 1984). <http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf> François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets: the Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961. [1930] Garner, Dwight. “Artist, Draw Thyself (and Your Mother and Therapist).” New York Times, May 2, 2012. Gass, William. “The Nature of Narrative.” Tests of Time. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2002. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005. 113. Halberstam, Judith. In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subculture lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hoffman, Charles G. “Virginia Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions of The Years.” PMLA 84 (January 1969): 79-89. Humm, Maggie. Ed. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Keim, Brandon. “Is Multitasking Bad For Us?” Nova, ScienceNOW. Posted 10/014/12. Kilroy, James. The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form. Gordansville, VA: Macmillan, 2007. Kristeva, Julia, Alice Jardine, Harry Blake. “Women’s Time.” Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981): 13-35 Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992. Leaska, Mitchell A. “Virginia Woolf, The Pargiter: A Reading of The Years.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80 (1977): 172-210. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.: 1996. Levine, Caroline and Marlo Ortiz-Robles, eds. Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth- Century British Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Mamood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 114. Marcus, Jane. “The Years as Greek Drama, Domestic Novel, and Gotterdammerung.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80 (1977): 276-301. Margolin, Uri. “Simultaneity in Narrative.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Huhn, Peter et al. (eds). Hanmburg: Hamburg University. 6 May 2012. <http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/simultaneity-narrative> McCarthy, Desmond. “The Ever-Rolling Stream” (in The Sunday Times, 9 May 1937). Ed. Eleanor McNees. Virginia Woolf Critical Assessments: Volume IV Critical Responses to the Novels The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts; Essays; Critical Evaluations Comparative Studies. East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994. McNees, Eleanor. “Introduction to The Years.” The Years. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2008. [1937] Miller, Nancy K. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction.” PMLA 96.1 (January 1981): 36-48. Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, Random House: 1968. ---. Friend of My Youth. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, Random House: 1991. ---. Interview with Jeanne MvCulloch and Mona Simpson. The Paris Review. The Art of Fiction. No. 137 (1994). <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the-art-of-fiction-no- 137-alice-munro> ---. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. New York: Vintage International, Random House, 1974. Radin, Grace. “‘Two enormous chunks’: Episodes Excluded during the Final Revision of The Years.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80 (1977): 221-51. 115. ---. Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981. Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Roiphe, Katie. “Drawn Together.” New York Times Book Review, April 27 2012. Rosen, Christine. “The Myth of Multitasking.” The New Atlantis, Number 20 (Spring 2008): 105-110. Rosen, Larry D., L. Mark Carrier, Nancy A. Cheever. “Facebook and texting made me do it: Media-induced task-switching while studying.” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013): 948–958. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. Ruotolo, Lucio P. The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986. Saariluoma, Liisa. “Virginia Woolf’s The Years: Identity and Time in an Anti-Family Novel.” Orbis Litterarum 54 (1999): 275-300. Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intentions and Method. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Schor, Hilary. “The Make-Believe of a Middle: On (Not) Knowing Where You Are in Daniel Deronda.” Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Eds. Caroline Levine and Marlo Ortiz-Robles. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Shakespeare, William. “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Hamlet. Ed. Suzanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 1994. 297-331. 27-178. 116. Smith, Ali. Artful. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013. Spivak, Gayatri. Can the Subaltern Speak? New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970. Winnett, Susan. “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure.” PMLA, 103:3 (May 1990): 505-18. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Oliver Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. Vols. 1-5. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. ---. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. ---. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1925. ---. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1927. ---. The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of the Years. Edited with an introduction by Mitchell Leaska. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1977. ---. “Professions for Women.” Speech given at the branch of the National Society for Women’s Service, January 21, 1931. ---. A Room of One’s Own and The Three Guineas. Morag Shiach, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ---. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1985. [1976] ---. The Years. Introduction by Eleanor McNees. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2008. [1937] Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 117. 1 Uri Margolin, in The Living Handbook of Narratology, points out “[t]here seems to be no systematic study of the different kinds of simultaneous actions in narrative and the modes of their presentation, even though close readings of individual texts involving this issue abound” (par. 9). 2 Says Levine in Darwin and the Novelists, “[I]n traditional narrative of the sort Dickens wrote, chance serves the purpose not of disorder, but of meaning – from Oedipus slaying his father to the catastrophic flood at the end of The Mill and the Floss. The order ‘inside’ the fiction might be disrupted – Oedipus’s reign, or the life of Maggie – but the larger order of the narrative depends on such disruptions” (137). Says Smith in Artful: “The resolving force of coincidence, the generosity in the workings of Dickens’s plots, comes straight down the line from Shakespeare’s comedies, backed by the source of Shakespeare’s most powerful forms of magic and coincidence in his late plays, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, plays that fuse category to defy category, where tragedy and comedy coexist, fight it out, resolve in forms of uncanny birth, finding of those who were lost and restorings of the dead to life, usually via a display of working artifice” (178). 3 Though several theorists have taken Barthes to task for the conflation of causality and sequence in this statement (see Richardson, 14, for a good summary), pointing out as evidence the numerous scrambled chronologies that nevertheless maintain causal logic, Barthes’ argument brings home an extremely common tendency among readers — which is, whatever the syuzhet, to suss out the fabula by reading in retrospect from effect to cause. 4 Richardson, in particular, goes to some length to analyze the levels of interpretation that are involved in understanding causation texts, which is why his write-off of feminists — who insist upon a culturally-based understanding of interpretative acts — is so perplexing. 5 Brian Richardson rightly points out that cause is “one of the most neglected and undertheorized topics of narrative theory and criticism” (14). 6 See Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003. 7 This recognition, say Caroline Levine and Marlo Ortiz-Robles, editors of Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, has led to a revivification of formalism in “our postmillennial moment” (2), readers who do not just warm over New Criticism, but instead “aim to show how literary forms matter in the social world, and thus they seek to combine a subtle attentiveness to the workings of aesthetic form with the political and historical impulses of cultural studies” (3). 8 In “The Make-Believe of a Middle: On (Not) Knowing Where You Are in Daniel Deronda,” Hilary Schor convincingly hones in on how these shifts in focalization in the Genoa scene in Daniel Deronda unsettle the reader’s attachment to Gwendolen and pave the way for the novel’s ending: “Our readerly knowledge, if not entirely our sympathies, is being shifted away from Gwendolen and towards her observer; this prepares us (if anything could— and I think Eliot is very aware that nothing will) for the end of the novel, when all focalization moves to Daniel, and Gwendolen becomes a minor character in his plot, rather than a major character in her own” (58). Because of this, Schor concludes that “Gwendolen Harleth is spared” an ending in marriage, and “instead she is offered something far more radical, a chance to continue as she is” (73). 9 Accidents of all sorts become meaningful to Daniel: first, his fortuitous rescue of a suicidal Micah from the river, which propels his research into his Jewish roots, and, later, his chance friendship with Mordecai, who happens to be Mirah’s brother. 10 Brian Richardson in Unlikely Stories suggests that teleology plays such a strong role in Daniel Deronda’s plot that he “does not learn of his Jewish origins until after he is attracted to Judaism” (54): origins are such a strong “cause,” in other words, that cause and effect become arguably conflated and even reversed. 11 Along with Gass, Brooks (as we’ve already seen, and will see more clearly in the discussion to come) is also fascinated by the relationship of beginnings to endings in plot. Edward Said, as well, presses on beginnings in his 118. classic treatise, Beginnings, in an effort to show how narrative openings mark intentional engagements with and divergences from ideology and tradition. 12 As Terence Cave says in his Introduction to Daniel Deronda, “F.R. Leavis’s famous judgment that the ‘obviously bad’ Jewish episodes should simply be cut, leaving a novel to be renamed Gwendolen Harleth, is only the most celebrated example of a critical reflex which is still apparent — however carefully disguised — in many readings of our own day” (xv). Cave gives a good summary of the critical reception of the Jewish aspects of the book in his Introduction. 13 See Charles G. Hoffman’s “Virginia Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions of The Years,” Mitchell A. Leaska’s “Virginia Woolf, the Pargeter: A Reading of The Years,” and Grace Radin’s Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. 14 Several Woolf critics have described this desire for music in Woolf’s writing. As Jane Marcus writes in “The Years as Greek Drama, Domestic Novel, and Gotterdammerung,” “Woolf wanted a form for the novel which would dispense with the conventional plot…. She longed to compose her novel, to score arias, duets, trios, quartets, as for voices and orchestra” (296). In Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, Gillian Beer argues of Woolf’s writing: “What she needed was the power of speaking in chords” (123). 15 Gillian Beer emphasizes Darwin’s debt to the geologist Charles Lyell (17), for instance, and also points out that Darwin was reading Milton aboard the Beagle (29). 16 In “Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present,” Monika Fludernik points out how such binary divisions pervade narrative theory to this day. She writes, “In imitation of de Saussure and phonology, the most fundamental building stone of the narratological edifice became the structure of binary opposition” (38). 17 As James Kilroy, author of The Nineteenth Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form, puts it: “In the nineteenth century, during which the English novel attained an unprecedented popularity, attracting a set of the most serious and talented writers and progressing to become a serious venue for intellectual expression, it focused almost exclusively on family matters” (22). Kilroy goes on to argue that, because the family was perceived to be under threat in this period, the novel “serves primarily a defensive function, propping up the beliefs of the past and attempting to forestall immanent changes” (23). 18 As George Levine writes, “The central problem was the question of chance, a notion that challenged not only teleology but law itself….but Darwin could not accept the idea that ‘chance’ was a cause…” (89). He further points out that Darwin’s “greatest imaginative achievement was the construction of a world whose apparent intentionality and teleology disguise (even in Darwin’s own intentional and teleological language) randomness, mindlessness, and irrevocably mixed conditions” (118). 19 Halberstam opens her book with this quote from Foucault’s “Friendship as a Way of Life”: “How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual way of life?...To be ‘gay.’ I think, is not to identify with the psychological trails and visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define a way of life” (1). Halberstam uses Foucault’s essay as a jumping-off point for considering the possibilities for queer spaces and temporalities. She says, “In Foucault’s radical formulation, queer friendships, queer networks, and the existence of these relations in space and in relation to the use of time mark out the particularity and indeed perceived menace of the homosexual” (1). 20 Woolf writes, tellingly, in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “I believe all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite” (10). 21 See Virginia Woolf and the Real World by Alex Zwerdling (141-143); See The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels (95-117); see “‘The sane & the insane, side by side’: The object-Relations of Self- Management in Mrs. Dalloway” by Thomas C. Caramagno. 119. 22 In Virginia Woolf and the Victorians, Steve Ellis reads the image of the old woman opposite very differently, as a lonely foreshadowing of Clarissa’s own future: “The future Clarissa anticipates is rather the solitary stoicism represented by the old woman glimpsed through the window during her party” (73). 23 Says Eleanor McNees in her introduction to The Years, “…for a reader who comes later to The Years…the novel offers a more comprehensive, if more diffuse, world than one finds in her earlier works. This world, melding fact and vision and moving rapidly in and out of multiple points of view, feels at times as though the earlier three works have been turned inside out, their centripetal movement having become in The Years centrifugal…” (lxvii). Likewise, Liisa Saariluoma writes: “The Years has been dissolved from within; it has become an anti-family novel, in which the disparity of form is an expression of the centrifugal striving of the family members to be disengaged from the circle of influence of the family” (297). 24 See Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak, Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, and Mamood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. 25 For a fairly recent in-depth look at theories related to Woolf and the visual arts, see The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, edited by Maggie Humm. 26 For an eloquent meditation on the image of the railway car in Woolf’s works, see Rachel Bowlby (Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf), who identifies — as I do — the linearity of the image with the kind of masculine understanding of progress that Woolf rejected. 27 “Broadly speaking,” Woolf points out, for instance, in Three Guineas, the patriarchy will continue to “make use of means provided by [their] position — leagues, conferences, campaigns, great names” (321). 28 Interestingly, Woolf makes dinner-table social manners into a broader metaphor about the way conventions initiate human connection literature in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: here she likens social conventions to writing conventions and says, “A convention in writing is not much different than a convention in manners. Both in like and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between hostess and her unknown guest on one hand, and the writer and his unknown reader on the other” (17). It’s worth pointing out that Woolf’s interest in potentialities and limitations of conventions span social mores and literary forms. 29 The full passage from Three Guineas makes the powerful point that the public and private spheres are inextricably linked. Describing a photograph of what Woolf calls a “Tyrant” – in which “behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies” — Woolf argues that the photograph “suggests that the public and private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other” (364). 30 In her treatment of daughters and mothers in Woolf’s writing, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman describes Lily as “the daughter ascendant” (106). Like me, Rosenman points out that “the mother’s death offers the daughter the occasion for art: it leaves a void which must be filled, providing the impetus to create” (106). Yet Rosenman reads Lily as a daughter-figure without spending much time on the important point that Lily is not in fact Mrs. Ramsay’s daughter, a point, I argue, that powerfully complicates the idea of descent in this novel. 31 In “Virginia Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions of the Years,” Charles G. Hoffman compares The Pargiters to the final draft of The Years, and concludes that “the novel fails in its attempt to bridge the years through moments of vision” (Virginia Woolf Critical Assessments 144). Likewise, Grace Radin argues that Woolf’s revisions gave the book a “reverberate structure,” yet goes on to say that the book fails to offer “some perspective that transcends daily life” (cited in McNees liv). As Eleanor McNees writes in her introduction to the Harcourt edition of the novel, those “who first traced Woolf’s revisions and relentless reductions from manuscript to final published novel…generally conclude that the compacting of the factual portion harms the novel’s unity” (li, emphasis added). 32 Poetry “makes nothing happen,” Auden famously asserts in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” yet Auden also offers one of the most apt definitions of plot I have found in what he says poetry is: “a way of happening” (80). When reading for the plot, we would do well to replace “What makes x occur?” with “What is the ‘way of happening’ here?” How does happening happen? For on one hand, if we read for what is produced by narrated events, then 120. depictions of multiple actions performed at once, especially as represented within the lines of literary texts, can sometimes make for plots that appear on face confusing and inefficient: full of tiresome detouring and tedious veerings. In Munro’s story, for instance, Maddy tends to the berries while the reader waits for her dramatic reveal. Helen, our narrator, goes looking for a broom. On the other hand, if we read such acts not in terms of background and foreground actions — that is, not in terms of the proairetic code and hermeneutic code, according to Roland Barthes’ sorting — but in terms of the temporal at-once-ness that is this scene’s “way of happening,” then these tasks come to mean somewhat differently. They offer more than dilatory delay for the sake of suspense, as we’ll soon see, and more than work-a-day scene-making. 33 “Every moment that we’re living and having experiences, we’re bringing to bear all the other experiences we’ve had,” Bechdel says, in a 2012 interview in The Comics Reporter about the making of this book. This “layered complexity,” she goes on to say, is what is “so exciting to me about graphic narrative.” 34 In a 2012 interview with the New Yorker, Munro adds, “My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.” 35 In her 1994 Paris Review Interview, Munro indirectly describes the material from Friend of My Youth (1991) and before as more “personal” when she admits, “I’m doing less personal writing now than I used to for a very simple obvious reason. You use up your childhood, unless you’re able, like William Maxwell, to keep going back and finding wonderful new levels in it. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children.” 36 This quote comes from To the Lighthouse. It is James Ramsey’s observation when he is on the boat, looking at the Lighthouse up close for the first time and comparing it to how it appeared to him previously when seen from afar: “No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too” (277). 37 Chute further points out the way gutters (or the blank space on the page between panels) provide unique interpretive spaces in comics, where the reader tends to “project causality” in an effort to connect the gaps between “the punctual moments of the frames” (8). She argues that these gutters in graphic narrative hold special appeal for feminist writers and readers because the gaps between panels are conspicuous enough to work “outside the mystification of representation” (8). We can see on the page how juxtaposed images involve interpretive leaps. Gutters bring interpretation itself into visual play. 38 See Elliott, Gayle (79) for an example. Though Elliott’s reading of the “frame” is complex, she does conceptualize it basically as a frame. 39 Bechdel describes the anger her mother likely felt at giving up her early ambitions to be a poet or an academic: “By the time The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, Mom was stuck at home with two small children. I guess I would have been pretty angry, too” (172). 40 Here is the full paragraph this comes from, which deserves to be quoted in full: “About five years ago, when I was still working on the stories that were in Friend of My Youth, I wanted to do a story with alternate realities. I resisted this because I worried it would end up a Twilight Zone kind of stuff. You know, really junky stuff. I was scared of it. But I wrote ‘Carried Away,’ and I just kept fooling around with it and wrote that weird ending. Maybe it’s something to do with age. Changing your perceptions of what is possible, of what has happened—not just what can happen but what really has happened. I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives. That was one of the problems—why I couldn’t write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well.” 121. Acknowledgments A special thank you to Bill Handley for first introducing me to The Years and for providing such solid guidance as this project developed into its current shape. I am very thankful, too, to Natania Meeker and Aimee Bender for their thoughts as this project transformed from its original incarnation. I am indebted to all my teachers at the University of Southern California, especially Hilary Schor and T. C. Boyle, who contributed immensely to my thinking about this project during the Qualifying Exam. And thank you, again, to Nick Admussen for your good conversation, wonderful editing, and moral support. NATURAL HISTORY By Emily Fridlund 1. For N. 2. Become conscious for a single moment that life and intelligence are purely spiritual, — neither in nor of matter, —and the body will then utter no complaints. —Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins. —Timothy Donnelly, “The New Intelligence” 3. SCIENCE 4. I. When I think about Paul, now, I almost never remember much of what he said. I don’t think about what I did or didn’t do to him. In my mind, the kid just plops down on my lap. Boom. That’s how I know it’s him: there’s no interest in me, no hesitation. We’re sitting in the Forest Center on a late afternoon like any other, and his body moves automatically towards mine—not out of love or respect, but simply because he hasn’t yet learned the etiquette of minding where his body stops and another begins. He’s four, he’s got an owl puzzle to do, don’t talk to him. I don’t. Outside the window, an avalanche of cottonwood fluff floats by, silent and weightless as air. The sun sets, the puzzle cleaves into an owl and comes apart again, I prod Paul to standing. Time to go. It’s time. But in the second before we rise, before he whines out his protest and asks to stay a little longer, he leans back against my chest, yawning. And my throat cinches closed. Because it’s strange, you know? It’s marvelous, and sad too, how good it can feel to have your body taken for granted. 5. Before Paul, I’d known just one person who’d gone from living to dead. He was Mr. Adler, my eighth-grade history teacher. He wore brown corduroy suits and white sneakers, and though his subject was America he preferred the Russian Czars. He once showed us a photograph of Rasputin, so that’s how I think of him now cyclone-bearded, bullet in the head though in fact Mr. Adler was always white-haired and clean-shaven as a deacon. I was in English class when his second-period student burst in, saying he’d fallen. We all crowded across the hall, and there was Mr. Adler lying face down on the floor, looking like Lily Holburn’s dad after a weekend drunk. “Does he have epilepsy?” someone asked. “Does he have pills?” We were all repulsed. The Boy Scouts argued over proper CPR techniques, while the Gifted and Talented kids reviewed his symptoms in hysterical whispers. I had to force myself to go to him. I crouched down and took Mr. Adler’s dry-meat hand. It was early November. He was darkening the carpet with drool, sucking in air between longer and longer intervals, and there was a distant bonfire scent, I remember. Someone was burning garbage in plastic bags, some janitor getting rid of leaves and pumpkin rinds before the first big snow. When the paramedics finally loaded Mr. Adler’s body onto a stretcher, the Boy Scouts trailed behind like puppies, hoping for a little assignment. They wanted a door to open, something heavy to lift. The Gifted and Talented kids sniffled behind their sleeves, relieved that they would no longer be held responsible for diagnosing Mr. Adler. “That a Doors’ song?” one of the paramedics asked. He’d stayed behind to pass out packets of Saltines to lightheaded cheerleaders. I shrugged. I must have been humming out loud. That paramedic gave me orange Gatorade in a Dixie cup, saying—as if I was he one he’d come to save, as if his duty was to root out sickness in whatever living thing he could find—“Drink slow now. Do it in sips.” 6. The Walleye Capital of the World, we were called back then. There was a sign to this effect out on Route 10 and a mural of three mohawked fish painted on the side of the diner. Those guys were always waving a finny hello, all grins and eyebrows, all teeth and gums, but no one came from out of town to fish—or do much at all—by the time the big lakes froze up in November. Downtown went: diner, hardware, bait and tackle, bank. The most impressive place in Loose River back then was the old paper mill, I think, and that was because it was half-burned down, charred black planks soaring up over the banks of the river. Almost everything official, the hospital and DMV and Burger King and police station, were twenty-plus miles down the road in Whitehead. I remember the day the Whitehead paramedics picked Mr. Adler up, they tooted the ambulance horn as they left the school parking lot. We all stood at the windows and watched, even the hockey players in their yellowed caps, even the cheerleaders with their static-charged bangs. Snow was coming down by then, hard. As the ambulance slid around the corner, its headlights zigzagged crazily over the mural on the diner, and those big happy fish just looked on. “Shouldn’t there be sirens?” someone asked, and I thought—measuring the last swallow of Gatorade in my little waxed cup—how stupid can people be? Mr. Adler’s replacement was Mr. Grierson, and he arrived just before Christmas with a deep, otherworldly tan. He wore one gold hoop earring and a brilliant white shirt with pearly buttons. We learned later that he’d come from California, from a private girls’ school on the sea. No one knew what brought him all the way to northern Minnesota, midwinter, but after the first week of class, he took down Mr. Adler’s maps of the Russian Empire, replacing them with 7. enlarged copies of the U.S. Constitution. He told us he’d double-majored in theater in college, which explained why he stood in front of the class one day with his arms outstretched, reciting the whole Declaration of Independence by heart. Not just the soaring parts about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the needling, wretched list of tyrannies against the colonies. I could see how badly he wanted to be liked. “What does it mean?” Mr. Grierson asked, when he got to the part about mutually pledging our sacred honor. The hockey players slept innocently on folded hands. Even the Gifted and Talented kids were unmoved, clicking their mechanical pencils so that the lead protruded obscenely, like hospital needles. They jousted each other across the aisles. “En garde!” they hissed, contemptuously. Mr. Grierson sat down on Mr. Adler’s desk. He was a little breathless from his recitation, and I realized in an odd flash, like a too-bright light passing over him that he was middle- aged. I could see greasy sweat on his face, his pulse pounding under his gray stubble. “People. Guys. What does it mean that the rights of Man are self-evident? Come on. You know this.” I saw his gaze rest on Lily Holburn, who had sleek black hair and was wearing, despite the cold, a sheer crimson sweater. He seemed to think her beauty could rescue him, that she would be, because she was prettier than the rest of us, kind. Lily blinked. He nodded at her, promising implicitly that, whatever she said, he’d agree. She gave him a deer-like lick of her lips. I don’t know why I raised my hand. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for him exactly. It was just that I felt his need unbearable for a moment embarrassing, all out of proportion to the occasion. “It means some things don’t have to be proven,” I offered. “Some things are just true. There’s no changing them.” 8. “That’s right!” he said, grateful I knew not to me in particular, but to some hoop of luck he felt he’d stumbled into. I could do that. Give people what they wanted without them knowing it came from me. Without saying a word, Lily could make people feel encouraged, blessed. She had dimples on her cheeks, nipples that flashed like signs from God through her sweater. I was flat-chested, plain as a bannister. I made people feel judged. Winter collapsed on us that year. It just knelt down, exhausted, and stayed. In the middle of December so much snow fell that the gym roof buckled under and fell in, so school was cancelled for a week. With school out, the hockey players went ice fishing. The Boy Scouts played hockey on the ponds. Then came Christmas with its strings of colored lights up and down Main Street, and the competing nativity scenes at the Catholic and Lutheran churches one with Mr. Roil’s huskies standing in as sheep, and one with baby Jesus sculpted out of ice. New Year’s brought another serious storm. By the time school started again in January, Mr. Grierson was wearing nondescript sweaters like our other teachers, and he’d replaced his hoop earring with a stud. Someone had taught him to use the scantron machine, I guess, because after a week’s worth of lectures on Louis and Clark, he gave us our first test. While we hunched in our desks filling in bubbles, he walked up and down the aisles, clicking a ballpoint pen. The next day, Mr. Grierson asked me to stay after class. He sat behind his desk and touched his lips, which were chapped and scaling off under his fingers. “You didn’t do very well on your exam,” he told me. He was waiting for an explanation, I thought, so I lifted my shoulders defensively. But before I could say a word, he said, “Look, I’m sorry.” He twisted the stud delicate, difficult screw into his ear. “I’m still working out the kinks in my lesson plan. What were you studying 9. before I arrived?” “Russia.” “Ah.” A look of scorn passed over his face, followed immediately by pleasure. “The Cold War lingers in the back country.” I defended Mr. Adler. “It wasn’t the Soviet Union we were talking about. It was Czars.” “Oh, Mattie.” My name was Madeline. No one ever called me that. It was like being tapped on the shoulder from behind, spooked by gust of wind that brought down leaves from another season. Usually I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak. I pulled my hands into balls in my sleeves. Mr. Grierson went on. “No one cared about the Czars before Stalin and the bomb. They were little puppets on a far-away stage, utterly insignificant. Then all the Mr. Adlers went to college in 1961 and there was general nostalgia for the old Russian toys, the inbred princesses from another century. Their ineffectuality made them interesting. You understand?” He smiled then, closing his eyes a little. I saw his front teeth were white, and his canines were yellow. “But you’re thirteen.” “Fourteen.” “I just wanted to say I’m sorry if this has started off badly. We’ll get on better footing soon.” The next week he asked me to drop by his classroom after school. This time, he’d taken the stud out of his ear and set it on his desk. Very tenderly, with his forefinger and thumb, he was probing the flesh around his earlobe. “Mattie,” he said, straightening up. He had me sit in a blue plastic chair beside his desk. He set a stack of glossy brochures in 10. my lap, made a teepee of his fingers. “Do me a favor? But don’t blame me for having to ask. That’s my job.” He squirmed. That’s when he asked me to be the school’s representative in History Odyssey. “This will be great,” he said, unconvincingly. “What you do is you do a speech about Vietnam War registers, border crossings to Canada, etcetera. Maybe the desecration of the Ojibwa peoples? Or those back-to-the land people, those border cultists that came up here. Something local, something ethically ambiguous. Something with Constitutional implications.” “I want to do wolves,” I told him. “Wolves?” He was puzzled. Then he shook his head and grinned. “Right. You’re a fourteen-year-old girl.” The skin bunched up around his eyes. “You all have a thing for horses and wolves. I love that. I love that. That’s so weird. What is that about?” Because my parents didn’t own a car, this is how I got home when I missed the bus. I walked four miles down the plowed edge of Route 10 and then turned left at Long Lake Road. The left-hand side followed the lake back around towards Bearfin, and the right-hand side turned steeply into an unplowed hill. At that fork, I stopped, tucked my jean cuffs into my socks, and fished from my backpack a pair of woolen mittens. In winter, the trees against the orange sky looked like veins. The sky between the branches looked like sunburn. It was twenty minutes through snow and sumac before the dogs heard me and started braying against their chains. By the time I got home, it was dark. When I opened the door, I saw my mom hunched over the metal sink, her arms elbow-deep in inky water. Her white hair was jet-black at the tips, which gave her a stagy, theatrical look, like someone in a silent movie. But her voice was all 11. Midwestern vowels, all twangy Kansas. “Is there a prayer for clogged drains?” she asked, without turning around. I set my wet mittens on the wood stove, where they would stiffen and no longer fit my hands before morning. My mom nudged a stool with her hip and sat down. But she kept her greasy hands in the air like they were something precious something disconcerting and still alive that she’d drudged up from a pond. Something she might feed us on, a pretty little pair of carp. “We need Drano. Crap.” She looked up into the air, then very slowly wiped her hands on her sweater. “Please help. God of infinite pity for the pathetic farce that is human living.” She was only half kidding. I knew that. I knew from stories how my parents had ridden in a stolen van to Loose River in the early eighties, how my father had stockpiled rifles and pot, and how, when the commune fell apart, my mother had traded whatever hippie fanaticism she had left for Christianity. For as long as I could remember she went to church three times a week Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday because she held out hope that penance worked, that some of the past could be reversed, slowly and over years. My mother believed in God, but grudgingly, like a grounded daughter. “Do you think you could take one of the dogs with you and go back?” “Back into town?” I was still shivering. The thought made me furious for a second, wiped clean of everything. I couldn’t feel my fingers. “Or not.” She swung her long hair back and swiped her nose with her wrist. “No, not. It’s probably below zero out there. I’m sorry. I’ll go get a bucket.” But she didn’t move from her stool. She was waiting for something. “I’m sorry I asked. You can’t be mad at me for asking.” She clasped her greasy hands together. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” 12. For each sorry, her voice rose a half-step. I waited a second before I spoke. “It’s okay,” I said. Here’s the thing about Mr. Grierson. I’d seen how he crouched down next to Lily’s desk. I’d seen how he said, “You’re doing fine,” and put his hand, very carefully, like a paperweight, on her spine. How he lifted his fingertips for a little pat. I saw how curious and frightened he was of the Karens, the cheerleaders who sometimes pulled off their legwarmers and revealed bare winter legs, white and nubbed in gooseflesh. Their legwarmers gave them a rash, which they scratched until their scabs had to be dabbed with buds of toilet paper. I saw how he addressed every question in class to one of them, to the Karens or to Lily Holburn, saying, “Anyone? Anyone home?” Then, making a phone of his hand, he’d lower his voice and growl, “I’m sorry, this connection is truly terrible. Is that Lily talking?” Lily would do a closed-mouth smile into the lip of her sleeve. When I met with him after school, Mr. Grierson shook his head. “That was a stupid thing to do with the phone, right?” He was embarrassed. He wanted reassurance that everything was okay, that he was a good teacher. He wanted to be forgiven for all his little mistakes, and he thought, because I crossed my arms and did poorly on tests, that my mediocrity was deliberate, personal. “Here,” he said, sheepishly, sliding a tiny blue can across his desk. I took a few sips of his energy drink, something so sweet and caffeinated it made my heart pound almost instantly in my fingertips. After several more gulps, I found myself trembling in my chair. I had to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering. “Did Mr. Adler ever show movies?” he wanted to know. I’m not sure why I played his little game. I’m not sure why I coddled him. “You show so 13. many more movies than him,” I said. He smiled with satisfaction. “How’s the project going, then?” I didn’t answer that. Instead I took another sip of his energy drink, uninvited. I wanted him to know I saw how he looked at Lily Holburn, that I comprehended that look better than she did, that, though I did not like him at all though I found his phone-joke creepy and his earring sadI understood him. But the can was empty. I had to put my lips on metal and pretend to gulp. Outside the window, sleet was shellacking every snowdrift, turning the whole world hard as rock. It would be dark in an hour, less. The dogs would be pacing on the far orbit of their chains, waiting. Mr. Grierson was putting on his jacket. “Shall we, then?” He never never once asked how I got home. Mr. Grierson treated History Odyssey like we both knew it was a chore. Secretly, I wanted to win. I was determined to see a wolf. Nights, I went out in my father’s hunting jacket, which was heavy and redolent with his scents, with tobacco and mildew and bitter coffee. It was like wearing his body while he slept, like earning a right to his presence and silence and bulk. I sat on an old bucket near the farthest icehouse and sipped boiled water from a thermos. But it had been years since the last wolf had been spotted in this county all I ever saw were distant logs squirming with crows. In the end I had to settle for a dead one. Saturdays, I snow-shoed to the Forest Service Nature Center, where I studied the taxidermy bitch in the lobby, with her glass eyes and coral nails, her sunken black cheeks pulled back in what looked like a smile. Peg, the naturalist there, pouted when she saw me try to touch its tail. “Uh uh,” she said. She gave me gummy bears and taxidermy techniques, told me how to sculpt eyelids from clay and muscles from polyurethane foam. “Iron the skin, iron the skin,” she warned me. 14. On the morning before the History Odyssey tournament, I sawed down a branch from the old pine behind our house. Needles poured in little whik-whik propellers onto the snow. I took the casino bus to Whitehead after school, lugging my wolf poster and branch past the old people from the retirement home, who frowned at me but didn’t say anything. In the Whitehead High School auditorium, I propped the branch up in a bucket full of Superior stones beside the lectern on stage. I played a tape of howling wolves on repeat. When I gave my speech, I pointed to diagrams of pups in different displays of submission, and I said, quoting from a book, “But the term alpha evolved to describe captive animals is still misleading. An alpha animal may be alpha only at certain times for a specific reason.” Those sentences always made me feel I was drinking something cool and sweet, something forbidden. I thought of the black bitch at the Forest Center, fixed in her posture of doggy friendliness, and I read that part of my speech over again, slowly this time, like it was an amendment to the Constitution. Afterwards, one of the judges poked his pencil in the air. “But. I have to intervene here. There’s something that you haven’t explained very well. What do wolves have to do with human history?” It was then that I saw Mr. Grierson by the door. He had his jacket in his arms like he’d just come in, and, as I watched, he caught the eye of the judge and shrugged. It was just the subtlest shift of his suited shoulders, as if to say, What can you do with kids, what can you do with these teenage girls? I took a deep breath and glared at both of them. “Wolves have nothing at all to do with humans, actually. If they can help it, they avoid them.” They gave me the Originality Prize, which was a bouquet of carnations dyed green for Saint Patrick’s Day. Afterwards, Mr. Grierson wanted to know if we should load the pine branch 15. in his car with the poster to drive back to school. But I was depressed. I shook my head. The winner, a seventh-grade girl in a pantsuit, was getting her picture taken with her watercolor rendering of the sinking of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald. I zipped up my coat. Followed Mr. Grierson as he dragged the drooping branch out a side exit. He javelined it upright in a grainy bank of snow. “It’s like a Charlie Brown Christmas,” he said, laughing. “I want to hang tinsel from it. It’s cute.” He bent down to brush stray needles from his slacks, and on impulse, I thrust out a hand and brushed as well swish, swish against his thigh. He stepped back, did a little shake of his pants, laughed awkwardly. Men can be so ungainly when it comes to sex. I learned that later. But at the time, what I did didn’t feel sexual, let me be clear about that. It felt like grooming. It felt like coaxing a dog to you, watching its hackles rise and fall again, and then you have a pet. I licked my lips, Lily-Holburn style, deer-like, innocent as anything. I said, “Mr. Grierson, would you mind driving me home?” “This where we turn?” he kept asking. Before we got in his car, he’d wrapped a wet paper towel around the stems of the carnations. Then he set the bouquet in my arms, cautiously, as if it were some kind of bracken baby. As we drove the twenty-six miles from Whitehead to my parents’ house, we watched a storm blow ice in monstrous crusts off the limbs of trees so that was part of it, too, the slow- motion sense of catastrophe. Mr. Grierson’s defrosting fan didn’t work very well, so I swiped at the windshield with my jacket’s dirty cuff. “This where we turn?” he kept asking. I noticed he pulled little flakes of skin from his lips with his front incisors. Even in the near-dark, I could see a crack in his lip, bloody but not 16. yet bleeding. That pleased me for some reason. It felt like something I had done to him myself with my wolf presentation, with my pine needles. The turnoff to my parents’ road was unplowed, as usual. Mr. Grierson pulled to a stop at the intersection and we both leaned against our seatbelts to peer out the windshield and up the steep, dark hill. When I glanced over at him then across the car, his throat looked wide and soft as a belly exposed, so I stretched out and kissed him there. Quickly, quickly. He started back. “This way then?” he said, pulling his zipper up and tucking his neck neatly back in his collar. Up on the hill sat my parents’ lit cabin, and I could tell he had fixed his attention there because it was the first thing in sight. “That’s that ex-cult place, isn’t it? I heard some strange stuff about them. You ever met those weirdoes? They neighbors of yours?” He was just making small talk of course still, I gripped my carnations. I felt myself spilt open, like kindling. “They keep to themselves.” “Yeah?” His mind was somewhere else. Sleet popped against the windshield, but I couldn’t see it because the glass was getting all fogged up again. “Let’s get you home,” he said, finally, heaving a huge foul-smelling sigh, and I could feel how tired he was of being responsible for me. “I can walk from here,” I told him. I thought if I slammed the door hard enough, Mr. Grierson might come after me. That’s what it’s like to be fourteen. I thought if I took a few running steps out onto the frozen lake that surely he’d follow me to assuage his guilt, to make sure I got home all right, to push his chalky history hands under my jacket, whatever. But I passed over the frozen creek near the road 17. without a sound, and when I looked back, the car with its brights was turning around, doing a meticulous u-turn in the trees. The Grierson scandal broke a few months after I started high school the next fall. I overheard the gossip while pouring someone’s gritty coffee, working as a part-time waitress at the diner in town. He had been accused of pedophilia and sex crimes at his previous school and was promptly fired at ours a stack of dirty pictures had been confiscated from some former apartment of his in California. That day after work, I took my tips across the street to the gas station and bought my first pack of cigarettes. I stood in the wet leaves beside the curb and smoked, badly, an ugly fury thumping at my heart. What I felt, more than anything else, was deceived. I felt I’d perceived some seed in Mr. Grierson’s nature, and that he’d lied to me, profoundly, in ignoring me the way he did in the car, pretending to be someone better than who he was, a proper teacher. But then, I’d lied to him too. As I sucked on my cigarette and coughed, I thought about Mr. Grierson pulling flakes of skin from his lips with his front incisors. I thought about how it was like a person teething chicken off a bone, how his bottom lip had cracked open but was not quite bleeding. I thought about that and what I felt for him, finally, was an uncomfortable rush of pity. It seemed unfair to me that people couldn’t be something else just by working at it hard, by saying it over and over. When I was six or seven, my mom sat me down in the bath basin in my underwear. It was midmorning, mid-summer. A shaft of light caught her face. She dribbled water on my head from a measuring cup. “I wish I believed in this shit,” she told me. “What’s supposed to happen?” I shivered. 18. “Good question,” she said. “You’re a new pot of rice, baby. I’m starting you all over from scratch.” I didn’t want to go home that night Mr. Grierson dropped me off. I thought with pleasure, feeling a necklace of hooks in my throat as I swallowed how I might break a hole in the ice on the lake and just go down. My parents wouldn’t worry for a long time, maybe not till morning. My mother fell asleep each night sewing quilts for prison inmates. My dad eczema- faced, white-hairedspent evenings in the shed cutting up wood from blow-down trees. I never even knew for sure if they were my real parents, or if they were just the people who stayed around after everyone else in the commune went back to college and office jobs in Chicago. They were more like step-siblings than parents, though they were good to me, always which was worse than anything in a way, worse than taking my backpack to the store and buying cereal with dimes and quarters, worse than being called Commie, Freak. My dad hung a swing for me when I was ten from a giant cottonwood; my mom cut cockaburs from my hair. But the night Mr. Grierson dropped me off, I kept thinking, viciously, waiting for my body to plunge through ice: There goes the rice, Mom. There goes the whole pot. After I went to community college and dropped out, after I had been temping in the Cities for some time, I found a national database online, into which you could type any sex offender’s name and track them around the country. You can watch someone’s little red trail on a map of each state, as they go from city to city, as they go from Arkansas to Montana, as they search for bad apartments, as they go into prison and come back out. You can watch them try to give new names and be called out, a flurry of angry posts erupting online every time this happens. You can 19. watch the moral indignation. You can watch them try again. You can follow them to Southern Florida, to the marshes, where, among the mangroves, they set up a little out-of-the-way antique shop, selling whatever, selling junk. Selling rusty lanterns and stuffed ducks, fake shark teeth, cheap gold earrings. You can see everything they sell because people update their posts and give all the details. There are so many people watching. People are updating all the time. “Should I buy a map from a convicted sex offender?” people write, and it seems an ethical, morally ambiguous question. “Don’t I have a Constitutional right to tell him I don’t want him here, selling his postcards at half price?” People write, “Don’t I have a right to tell him to his fucking face?” People write, “Who does he think he is?” 20. II. Papers passed in a pile. That’s what high school was. They went down one aisle of desks, came back around the next, looped slowly to the back of the classroom. The Gifted and Talented kids—transformed now into the Latin Club, the Forensics Team—licked their fingers to extract their portion. They always set to work like the swim team doing laps, breathing from the sides of their mouths, biting down on their pencils. The hockey players had to be prodded awake when the stack came down their aisle, had to be treated with great deference—or else we would lose the District Championship. Again. They woke from their naps just long enough to take one paper and pass the rest on, long enough to dump open bags of chips into their mouths, wipe the salt from their lips, and return to their dreams of Empire. What else would hockey players dream about? It was their world that we lived in. When I was fifteen, I figured this out. They dreamed it into fact. They got the figure skaters to bend double in low-cut leotards, they got the cheerleaders to scream their names in nonsensical rhymes, they got Zambonis to stripe the world as far as you could see—ceaselessly—in perfect swaths of freezing water. We were in a new building that 21. year, a bigger classroom with pale brick walls, but outside it was the same thing it had been since we were children. Winter boomeranged back. Outside: four feet of snow sealed in a shiny crust. Inside: European History, American Civics, Trigonometry, English. Freshman year, Life Science came last. It was taught by our old eighth-grade gym teacher, Liz Lundgren, who trudged over from the junior high at the end of the day in her polar- tech parka and camouflaged snow bib. She took off her parka and draped it over her chair, but she always left her snow bib on indoors. Ms. Lundgren had a tic. Whenever she got irritated or inspired, she switched instantly to whispering. She thought that would make us listen better; she thought it would make us pay attention to protists and fungi; she thought we would try harder to understand meiosis if we couldn’t quite catch all the words in her sentences. “The spores…in absence of water or heat…maneuver in great quantities,” she would murmur, and it was like hearing some obscure rumor that, due to over-telling, no longer held any relevance we could make out. In that class you could always hear the clock tick. From every window, you could see snow blow clean away, in sheets, then drift back again the next day in piles as high as houses. One day near the end of Evolution, a late-season storm brought a huge cottonwood branch down in a wumff of ice. Through the window I watched it cascade to the ground, narrowly missing a small blue car going down Main. The car slid to a stop, backed slowly up, idled for a moment. At the board, Ms. Lundgren was still doing the Pros and Cons of Evolution in a squeaky cursive. The window fogged as I leaned toward it. I leaned back. Someone in a huge hooded parka got out of the blue car, dragged the branch off the road, got back in. Then the Honda drove a wide 22. arc around the perimeter, crunching a few twigs beneath its tires. Minutes after that the sun came out: brilliantly, stunning us all. Still, it was no surprise when we were let out of school a half hour early due to the wind chill factor. I made my way home from the bus stop at a rigid trot. I crunched along the snow-packed trail, felt the wind come off the lake in blasts, heard the cottonwoods groan and sway overhead. Halfway up the hill, my lungs started to feel raggedy. My face changed into something other than face, got rubbed out. When I finally got to the top of the hill, when I slowed down to brush ice from my nose, I turned and saw a puff of exhaust across our lake. I had to squint against all that white to make it out. It was the blue Honda hatchback. A couple was unloading the car. I watched them for a few minutes. Nursing my fingers, scrunching them into inflexible balls. I’d seen them once before, in August. They’d come to oversee the construction of their summer cabin, which had been assembled by a team of college students from Duluth. It had notched pine walls and high, triangular windows. A broad, blond deck that jutted out over our lake like the prow of some ship. From their hatchback, the father had hauled folding chairs and docile cats: one black and fat, the other skinny and draped whitely, ornamentally over his arm. I’d seen them out on their deck, one late August afternoon, bundled head to toe in towels. Father, mother, tiny child. The child’s towel dragged on the wooden planks, and the mother and father had knelt down together, at once, arranging the folds. They were like attendants to a very small bride, doting, hovering. They seemed to be saying something very sweet to the child, who had a high, frightened voice that carried across water. They’d kissed at the child’s two ears. That was the last I’d seen of them. That winter day, though, they returned. I saw the father that evening whisking away at the 23. snow on his deck with a pink broom. Smoke drifted from their chimney, and out came the child and the mother the next afternoon, waddling in their boots and snowsuits. The boy moved unsteadily across the fresh crust of snow, walking over the surface of it for a few steps, then breaking through. When the mother finally lifted him up under the armpits, he was plucked clean from his boots. As I watched, the mother dangled the poor kid helplessly aloft, unsure whether to set him down again or just carry him like that, suspended in socks over the universe of snow. I thought, scornfully—but I felt sorry for them, too—what the hell had they expected? Almost nothing on the lake moved or breathed. It was the worst part of winter, a waste of white in every direction, no place for tourists or city people. Beneath a foot of ice, beneath my boots, the walleye drifted. They did not try to swim, or anything that required effort. They just hovered, waiting winter out with driftwood, barely, barely beating their hearts. We were prepared for another month of winter, at least. We had a full cord of wood stacked against the shed, a dozen muskrat traps set along the north edge of the woods. My dad had drilled a fresh fishing hole that was close to eighteen inches thick. But by the middle of March, the temperature shot to up to fifty and stayed there. Within a couple weeks the roadside drifts had eroded to stalagmite pillars, and all the highways were slithering with water. A wet sheen appeared on top layer of lake ice, and in the late afternoons you could hear the whole thing pop and zing. Cracks appeared. After that first thaw, the family across the lake set up a telescope on their deck—long and spear-like, pointed to the heavens. Beneath the tripod was a footstool, where the child sometimes stood, scarfed, in the evenings, clasping the telescope to his eye with two bare hands. His hat was floppy and yellow, crocheted. Every time the wind started up, it lifted off his head like some weird petal. 24. Sometimes his mother came out in a pink ski cap, and, murmuring, she readjusted the tripod, raising the eyepiece and peering through herself. She brushed the boy’s hat clean of snow. Then, as the evening turned its last shade, I watched them go inside again. I watched them unwind the scarves from their necks. I watched them cuddle the cats, wash their fingers in the tap, heat water in a kettle. They didn’t seem to have any blinds on their enormous triangular windows. I saw their dinner like it was done just for me. I sat on the roof of our shed, gouging out slush from the treads of my boots with a stick. The kid sat in his cushioned chair on his knees, rocking. The mother barely sat at all. She went to the counter and back, she sliced things on the boy’s plate. She made wedges of green, triangles of yellow, discs of something brown. She blew on his soup. She grinned when he grinned. I could see their teeth across the lake. The father seemed to have disappeared. Where had he gone? What early spring brought were lots of icicles. They oozed blue-black water from the school roof. They dripped away the afternoons, synced up to the ticking clock, then going fast as my heart, which I could feel when I pressed my fingers to my clavicle. That year I was doing poorly in school, as always, and as the hockey players dreamed us backwards towards December, and the Debate kids memorized the reciprocal identities, I watched Lily Holburn get abandoned—one by one—by her friends. She’d always been Number Three in a group of four, but since the start of winter, she’d become either Number Five or Number One. It was hard to say which. It was hard to say when exactly the rumors about her and Mr. Grierson had started. But by early March, a space had been cleared around her—like a forest after a fire—and her silence no longer seemed particularly dumb. It was unsettling. Skank, her friends whispered. But under their breath, behind her back. The funny thing was, it was the same thing they’d said 25. before to her face because of her breasts. Because of her thin, droopy sweaters. Now when they talked to her, they were strictly sweet, almost obsequious. They didn’t laugh when she showed up to class without a pencil. They loaned her theirs. They handed her toilet paper under the bathroom stall when she asked for it, hissing, “Do you need more? Is that enough?” In the halls, though, they walked right past her. I had news for her. I wrote it on a note, which I passed to her when the stack of worksheets came sliding down our aisle on afternoon: I don’t care what they’re saying about you and Mr. G. It wasn’t that I wanted to defend her, exactly—we’d never been friends, we’d never been alone in a room together—just that her name had gotten somehow yoked to Mr. Grierson and I wanted to know why. But Lily never wrote back. She didn’t even turn around to at me, just hunched up in her seat and pretended to understand square roots. So I was surprised to find her waiting for me by the back door that day when school let out. She wore an elaborately wound scarf, a red one, and a strange kind of jean jacket that buttoned like a sailor’s slicker from knee to neck. I felt caught off-guard. As casually as possible, I took out a cigarette and lit it—but when I handed it to her she just shook her head and stared out at the glistening, glittering, melting world. “What a mess,” I said, to say something. She shrugged—very Lily-like, very sweet—and I felt a twinge of exasperation. I could see her long pretty throat peeking out from beneath folds of red. It made me glad to see that her jacket was shabby up close, the hem dragging in a puddle behind her. It was far too large for her, and I thought of the child in his towel on the dock, his parents on their haunches whispering. For all her experience, Lily had always struck me as inexplicably innocent. And now she seemed inexplicably superior, drifting just past everyone. Say Mr. Grierson, and up 26. she went. Like a balloon. I took a chance. I whispered, “What’d he do to you?” She shrugged again, her eyes widening. “Where?” “Where?” She seemed confused. I took a step closer to her. “I knew something was up. I could have warned you.” She wasn’t looking at me, and I could see that her hair had been barretted back so one ear was exposed. It was red in the cold—shiny and strangely lip-like. I had a new thought. “You made that stuff up.” “Yep.” We might have been merely standing next to each other on the curb, waiting for the traffic to pass to go our separate directions. We might have been carefully ignoring each other: me with my cigarette, she with an open can of Coke, which she lifted delicately from her jacket pocket. Still, for the moment, I felt very close to her, and it seemed unnecessary to say anything else. The silence between us filled with possibilities. We could hear the trickling of unseen streams, little rivulets coursing down the street and sidewalk. We could hear the salt crystals crunching under car tires. Then Lily shook her Coke out in the snow, and it occurred to me that she’d spoken without any special occasion at all. It occurred to me that she’d only told me because I had no one to tell. It was like dropping a secret into a snowbank. My lips felt clumsy on my cigarette. “It’ll pass, you know. People’s talk.” She shrugged a third time. “You think so? I don’t think so.” She crushed out a hump of slush with her boot, pulled at her scarf till she was pretty as anything, long bent arm cutting geometrical shapes in the sky. 27. She sounded so resigned, almost smug about it. I followed her the next day. After eating my peanut butter sandwich in the last stall in the bathroom, I came out and caught sight of Lily going into the counselor’s office. Just the back of her head, the blue hump of her backpack. She didn’t show up for English that afternoon, but I saw her at the drinking fountain afterward, dark hair fisted in one hand as she bent for a sip. I trailed her when she started up the stairs. On the landing, I watched her eyes move to the clear glass of the second-story window, out of which you could see a few purplish crows towing up trash from the school dumpster. She paused a second to take that in. I could see just the whites of her eyes when she turned her head. Then, as the last bell rang, I watched her walk the length of the darkening hall, which was emptying out around her. From the outside, nothing about Lily had changed. Her clothes were still gaudy and bright: tight sweaters with unraveling seams over baggy, stonewashed, boyish jeans. She still showed too much cleavage. She still walked too much on her toes, like a ground-feeding bird. Lily had always been everybody’s pet. But now people turned away as she passed, wouldn’t look at her. Even Lars Solvin, her boyfriend, turned bright red under his blond beard when he saw her coming down the hall. He was six feet tall, a junior forward on the hockey team, but he found some ingenious way to shrink, to hunch against a nearby locker and examine his sports watch. His buddies closed in around him as she approached, touching the bills on their caps, hitching up their jeans. All of them kept their eyes down—far, far, far from Lily’s cleavage—but the unlucky one closest to the classroom door felt obliged to turn the handle for her. “Thank you,” she said, not smiling, but not not smiling either. I followed her into Life Science, opening the door for myself. 28. For years I’d sat near her in class: Furston wasn’t far from Holburn on the register. For years I’d felt vaguely protective and vaguely resentful of Lily, who was half-Chippewa and poor, who was loved by everybody, whose dad collapsed each Saturday somewhere on Gooseneck Highway and had to be collected up before church. Now I scooted my chair-desk a little closer to hers in class. I watched the green threads on her sweater sleeve quiver as she opened her notebook. She wasn’t taking notes, I noticed, on the short, expendable lives of protozoa. She wasn’t working on a diagram of the essential role of bacteria as the decomposer link in the food chain. She was making slow, snaking spirals with her pen, then filling in the linked loops with dozens, with hundreds, with thousands of smiley faces. 29. III. Who’s watching who? I wondered, when I went out to the dogs one morning not long after that and saw the telescope across the lake aimed straight at my parents’ cabin. It was pointed like an arrow right into the cabin’s heart, into our one window with its rags in the casings. A mold-stained tarp flapped over our front door. I felt my scalp prickle. I looked up. Above me, a pale yellow leaf drifted in a breeze. Higher, then lower, without fully descending. I plucked that leaf out of the sky with a little jump. Then with one hand I slid the skin over the dogs’ skulls—breathing, as I did, on their latches to unfreeze them. Ha, I puffed, making the dogs wiggle and spin, unlatching them one by one. Go, I told them. I set Abe and Doctor and Quiet and Jasper loose in the woods. For a while, I listened to their panting breaths as they loped towards shore. Then, as the rising sun bleached the treetops, I listened to the whole frozen lake groaning under their paws. It wouldn’t hold out for long, I knew. 30. When the last of the ice was drifting ashore in yellow chunks, when the last of the snow lay in dunes on the north slopes, I saw him, the kid from across the lake, crouching on the roadside not far from my house. It was the kind of day when you could leave your jacket unzipped, and as I walked home from bus stop, I was reading a book. I don’t know what. I was into anything with maps and charts. Great Rescues of the Old Northwest, Build Your Own Kayak. I was just about to the sumac trail when I saw him. A bike was overturned in the gravel, balanced upside down on handlebars. A girl was folded over it, fumbling with the chain. As I approached, both girl and child looked up. They had the same dark eyes, the same orange-blond hair. I thought of deer lifting their heads in that coordinated movement they have. I thought of anything running. But they didn’t go anywhere. “Hi!” the boy said, enthusiastic-preoccupied, turning back to his task on the ground. “That’s her there,” he said, sidelong, to the girl. “That’s who there?” the girl replied. “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said to me. Like the boy, she was friendly but distracted. “We’ve gotten ourselves a bit tangled up, I guess.” She laughed easily, set a greasy hand on the boy’s head. “I’m a whiz, as you can see, with vehicles. My husband wouldn’t even trust me with the car, seriously. And he’s not a patriarch or anything, that’s not what I mean.” “Patriarch,” the boy said, without looking up. “A man who is in charge of things, unfairly.” She looked at me for confirmation. “Right?” “Okay,” he said, still busy. He seemed to be stuffing snow-flattened leaves into a black pouch. “Like, I drove the car off the road the first day we arrived, right into a snow bank. Wham. 31. So I said, I’ll stick with the bike. It’s better right?” She seemed to want me to agree with her. She was much smaller than I’d thought she’d be from watching her all those nights through the window—more skinny limbs than body. She was tiny now that I could measure her against myself. She wore a blue University of Michigan sweatshirt with sleeves shoved to the elbows. “You’re our neighbor from across the lake, right?” she went on. “Did I say hi yet?” She turned to the kid. “Did I already say hi to her? I’ve forgotten what it is to talk to people.” The boy stood up. “It goes like this. How do you do!” He rushed forward, holding out a massive black hand for me to shake. The thing was bloated, weirdly twisted—fingers splayed at improbable angles. I shuffled a few steps back. “It’s my Third-Hand Man,” he said. “For survival.” It took me a moment to realize the kid had stuffed a man’s leather glove with leaves, and that he was now thwacking it against a tree trunk, kung-Fu style. After a moment, he sat down again, panting. Spent. “He’s very into that thing,” the girl explained. “So, I’m Patra the Parent. He’s Paul the Kid. And so far, you’re Blank the Neighbor.” The kid laughed. “Blank.” Up close, she looked too young to be anyone’s mother. She didn’t seem to have eyebrows, and she was as skinny as I was—curveless—wearing tennis shoes, leggings, and long wool socks pulled up to her knees. Her hair was the same wispy orange as the kid’s, but frizzy, held down with a blue plastic headband. She smiled like she was unfolding wings. “I’m kidding. You’re—” Mattie, I thought, as a breeze tugged the resins out of the trees. “Linda,” I said. The boy in a crouch on the ground pulled on his mother’s sleeve. “I have something to 32. tell her.” “Just say it.” “It’s a secret,” he whined. “Then just go up and say it!” she urged him forward. I was on one side of the road and they were on the other. “Look before you cross. Though—” she spoke to me, “I haven’t seen a single car go past since we stopped. It’s marvelous. The locals here read in the middle of the highway.” Did she wink then? Was she laughing at me? Was I supposed to laugh? To the kid she said, “Right, left. There you go.” At the trial, they kept asking, “When did you know for sure there was something wrong?” and the answer probably was, right away. But that feeling faded as I got to know him. Paul’s breathy way of talking, the way he had to sit down when he got excited—these tendencies seemed to me, more and more, just the way he was. Paul was fussy and fragile, then whooping and manic in turn. I got used to his moods. He was always getting mistaken for someone older, but he was just four the year I knew him. He had droopy eyelids, big red hands. He had four- year-old plans: see Canada, keep a fish. He was building a city out of sticks and weeds on his deck. He knew the names and relative locations of thirty-six constellations, and could show them to me on his parents’ charts. Almost every piece of clothing he owned had a train on it—Thomas the Tank Engine, his name spelled out in train cars, nineteenth-century steam engines stamped across his chest. He’d never been on a real train in his life. He rode buckled into a plastic seat on the back of his mother’s bike, to the grocery store and to the post office. He carried around that old-man’s leather glove wherever he went, its fingertips worn to purple, palms green with rot. 33. He handed it to me once he crossed the road. He gave me the glove, put his own hands in a fist at his crotch. He made me bend down to hear him. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered. Oh please, I remember thinking. The sun, which had been gleaming, moved off the road into some other part of woods. What was I supposed to do about that? I looked at his mother, who was wiping her hands on her sweatshirt, righting the bike, calling the boy back to her. She walked the clicking bike across the road by the handlebars. A child’s bike helmet dangled by the chinstrap from her wrist. “I think he has to—” I began. But it seemed obvious. The kid was holding his crotch with two hands. It seemed unnecessary to say what he said, to use those little kid words out loud. And anyway, she was already lifting him up, wedging him in his seat, buckling him in. He seemed about to cry out, so his mother kissed him on the forehead, pushed his hair out of his eyes. “No luck with the bike, babe, but I can push you as we walk and sing. How ‘bout that?” She eyed the glove in my hand, so I passed it to her, and she pressed it back into his arms. “There. What would you like to sing, then?” “Good King Wenceslas,” he said, pouting. “Is that okay with you, Linda? Want to walk with us back?” She smiled over his head, and I saw how quickly she shifted between faces, between soothing mother and conspiratorial adult. It pleased me for reasons I could not explain to be part of the latter allegiance. I nodded, surprising myself. When we got to their house, the door was unlocked. Paul turned the handle with two 34. hands. Inside, mother and child stomped on the mat. “Fi, fie, foe, fum,” he growled. “I smell the blood of an Englishman,” she responded. Then they both plopped down on the floor, he in her lap. She took off his shoes while eating his neck. This is a thing, I thought, as they played the ritual out. The cats watched from the windowsills. I stepped off the mat and into the room, and it was like wading into warm water— the heat was jacked up that high. I could feel all the layers of my clothes at once, all that weight I’d been lugging around, and then I could feel those layers sequentially, from the outside in: hunting jacket, sweater, flannel, t-shirt, no bra, sweat. Sweat dragged in a trickle from my left armpit. I shivered. “Well, come on in,” Patra said, standing up in her socks. Their cabin was mostly the one big room I’d seen through the window at night. The kitchen with all its shiny knobs made the inside wall; the lake sparkling in a million itty-bitty fishhooks came through the far windows. All the furniture was new, I could see that, all maroons and creams, all browns and yellows. Corduroy couches intersected in a corner, and a blond table, fresh as a pine log just axed open, stood in the center of everything. The child was leaping in his socks from oval rug to oval rug, in some elaborate game that required all his concentration. Then he was back at my side, saying, “Take off your shoes.” Scaly yellow toes, swampy wool socks, boots. I shook my head. “Take off your jacket then.” I kept it on. The room felt poured in sunlight. The uriney kind, pale and thin and hot. For a second, I worried that my mother might see me here, across the lake and through the window. Then I remembered how black those glass triangles were in daytime. There was nothing for her to see. 35. “Take off your shoes,” he said. “You’re being a despot, Paul,” his mother told him. “Depspot,” he repeated, mechanically. “Like a patriarch, only worse. Telling everybody what to do. Without being voted into power.” Patra was at the counter, filling a pot with water. I remembered how this went. Soon there’d be mugs, plates draped in steam. Soon she’d be cutting things for us. “Let’s cook something,” she suggested. “Come on in, Linda.” Paul clutched at my hand. “Take off your shoes,” he pleaded. “Take off your shoes. Take off your shoes.” I didn’t bend down. I didn’t use a voice especially reserved for talking to children. “No, thank you,” I told him, but too quietly for Patra to hear. Almost hissing. “Let go of my hand, okay?” The kid looked up at me, confused. As if I’d told him to take off his own face. Within twenty minutes, we were eating butter on spaghetti noodles and fluffy green salads made of some kind of lettuce I’d never seen before in my life. The leaves curled up around my fork. I moved stiffly in my jacket, clumsy but careful as I lifted my mug of tea and sipped. My boots still hung from my feet. I buttered my wedge of toast and sweat clean through my bottom layers, through my t-shirt and flannel. I didn’t mind. Deep in my mug, the tea bag floated like something drowned, but it tasted bright as spring, like mint and celery. The steam made by nose wet, my eyes blurry. Patra had cut cherry tomatoes into brilliant red coins. “I’m going to tell Leo about you,” Patra said. “He was sure that it was only old hippies and hermits this far from town. He said, watch out for bears and quacks.” 36. “There is ducks,” Paul agreed. “Leo?” I asked, my eyes swimming. “Dad,” Paul explained. “He’s in Hawaii,” Patra added. “Doing March’s numbers, looking for proto-galaxies. Getting the charts started.” “Oh, Hawaii,” I nodded. I tried to say it like I’d been there recently myself, and found the food disappointing, the locals unfriendly. I shrugged. As if I’d wasted too much time already in my life looking for the so-called proto-galaxies on tropical islands. “Hey!” Patra said to me. “Speaking of which!” She’d been untangling Paul’s noodles with a knife and fork, laying them out in long parallel lines across his plate. She paused. “We should call your mom, right? We should let her know you’re here, in case she’s thinking about fixing you dinner. Here.” She reached back with one hand and pulled something from her pocket. “The Forest Service has a tower—” she gestured vaguely behind her—“and Leo put up a big booster on the roof, so! You can get reception if you go out back, next to the telescope.” “Sometimes,” she added. Cautiously, I took the cell phone she handed over. It was heavier than I thought it would be for its size. Years later I would deliberately throw my cell into the river—I’d rack up a bill so high, they’d cut the service and my phone would be useless—but at the time I’d never held one before. For just a moment I sat feeling its weight, examining its rounded cigarette-pack shape and the rubbery stem of the antenna. Then, careful not to knock anything with my jacketed elbows, I pushed back my chair and crossed the room. Outside on the deck, it was night. Out in the newly cooled air, my jacket felt unbelievably 37. light, almost as if dissolved. I stood still and let my eyes adjust to the rustling darkness. In all those shadows, the telescope seemed oddly alive. A great elongated bird—mutant heron— perched on a plank of wood and watching me. I watched the lake, ignored the telescope. Last of the ice gone, last of the sun browning the choppy surface. A bobbing loon drove down into the water. Finally, having put it off, I set my eyes on my parents’ house. No one had turned on the lights, which was nothing special. My father, no doubt, was drinking beers with Quiet in the shed. My mother stitched her quilts at the table by the stove until it was so dark that she nearly stabbed herself with her needle. And then, as if surprised, as if shocked by another day ending—yet another day handed over—she usually stood up and turned on the generator out back, which turned on the lamp in the kitchen. She did this as if affronted. “Why didn’t you tell me it was so dark?” she’d ask, if I was there, if I was huddled over some last bit of homework. I don’t know why it pleased me so much to let night sneak up like that. I don’t know what it had to do with me at all—but it was true, I almost always did know it was dark, and so it felt like luring her into the same trap over and over. Got you, I thought. The lake at this point was narrow, no more than a quarter mile across. But it was probably three miles around by foot—an hour easily—to my parents’ cabin. There it stood: half- shingled, sided with plywood, side-yard bunkhouse collapsed under a fallen pine. I could just barely make out a thread of smoke pulling from the chimney. I could just barely make out the shadows of dogs swimming through the shadows of pines. Behind me, I could hear voices clearly. Forks clawing plates, dinner getting cold. I held the dark phone to my ear without turning it on. I imagined Patra watching from 38. behind. I took a breath. “No, Ma! I’m fine. I’ll be home in a couple hours. No, they’re nice! Patra and Paul. They’d like me to stay after dinner. They’d like me to play Go Fish. They’d like me to read the kid a story and watch the first part of The Wizard of Oz on a DVD. They’d like me to stay and eat popcorn. No, I don’t know what they’re doing up here. She’s an astronomer or something, or her husband is. No, that’s not mysterious, it’s very scientific, it’s the definition of science. It’s stars. No they’re not going to kidnap me, they’re a mom and her son, not a cult, not a hippie commune or something weird. Oh, they’re pretty innocent, actually. They need guidance and help. They need someone to teach them about the woods.” 39. IV. Which I did. In April, I started taking Paul for walks in the woods while his mother revised a manuscript of her husband’s research. The manuscript lay in batches around the cabin, on the countertop and under chairs. There were also stacks of books and pamphlets. I’d peeked at the titles. Predictions and Promises: Extraterrestrial Bodies. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The Necessities of Space. “Just keep clear of the house for a few hours” were Patra’s instructions. I was given snacks in baggies, pretzels wound into shapes like bows. I was given water bottles in a small blue backpack, books about trains, handiwipes, coloring books and crayons, suntan lotion. This went on my back, Paul went in my hand. His little fingers were damp and wiggling. But he was very trusting, never once seeming to feel the shock of my skin touching his. He wasn’t at all like animals. I never had to win him over. Ten bucks a day, Patra offered, so I quit my weekend job at the diner, where I’d had to wear a paper apron pinned like doll clothes to the front of my sweater. I’d always felt an ache of 40. reluctance, anyhow, when diners left me their mugs and plates, their half-eaten sandwiches. They left behind wet dimes caked in so many tiny, tiny crumbs. Patra paid in crisp ten-dollar bills. After school I took Paul to a place on the lake where the granite was wound in great glistening tracks of quartz. The last hunks of ice clanked at the shore. Superior gulls swooped over us. Usually, we sat on the reindeer moss and ate our pretzels in silence, Paul sucking on his, shining the tips, rubbing them out on the rocks. Sometimes, I smoked a furtive cigarette and tossed it quick in the water. After ten minutes or so, our butts were wet, so I ditched the backpack behind a tree, and we set off. Away from the sun-warmed rocks, the afternoons got pretty cold by five o’clock. But it was April. Though the buds were still hard as arrow tips on the trees, we could smell the syrupy resins from the pines. We could smell the rot of leaves in the ravines. I no longer held the boy’s hand. This time of year, the woods were very empty and soft, very accommodating to little boys who wanted to jump off rocks and logs. I went on ahead, scouting out a path through the mud and brambles. Paul usually brought along the leather glove—he only ever had the one—and he filled it now with stones, now with pine needles. Now with shiny black pellets. “Oh, gross,” I said, looking back. “For The City,” he explained. I raised my eyebrows. “The city needs rabbit poop?” “Cannon balls,” he corrected. He wasn’t as boring as I expected. He said watch out to squirrels, got mad at litter, washed his cannon balls until they dissolved in a beached canoe full of water. I taught him to snap twigs back to mark the path home, to walk on the lichened parts of rocks which were less slippery. To break up the silence, for something to do, I started naming things off for him as we 41. went along. Trailing arbutus. Chickadees. When we came across some beer cans under a greenstone ledge, Paul pointed and I said rust. Sometimes Paul told me about his father’s research (“time is a handkerchief”) and his mother’s job (“she corrects his words”) and The City he was building on the deck. It had roads of bark, walls of stick and rocks, train tracks of flattened oak leaves. “Who lives in The City?” I asked him once. I remembered children from the playground where I’d watched them when I was growing up. Plus, I’d read some books with children in them. I understood that though they could be whimsical and irrational, they were adored for that, and it was appropriate to try to take them seriously. They did things like build cities for fairies. They made up tiny people who came out at night. “Nobody lives there.” He looked frustrated by the question. “Then why are you building it?” He shrugged. “It’s just a city.” “Just a city,” I repeated. I could respect that. He took me for granted. When he climbed up a rock and couldn’t get down, he held open his arms—without saying a word—and I lifted him under the armpits. When he had to pee, which was often, he just said, I gotta go, and I came over and steadied him as he pulled down his pants. The first time I saw his penis, I felt a wave of sympathy and disgust, the way I felt, once, when I came upon a clump of nude baby mice in the hollow of a log. Those mice had blue bulges for eyes, pink tails wound together in a big lump. “Yuck” he’d said, when I helped him pull up his damp underwear and wipe his hands on a leaf. “Yuck,” I agreed. The next time, I pointed at a log and said, “Try to hit that.” Overhead all afternoon we could hear the Canada geese coming 42. back. We could hear them giving directions, laboring through wind currents, setting down their Vs. When the sun was just about set, we turned around, Paul lagging, getting further and further behind, so as the day grew truly cold—miniature winter setting in, the way it does at night in April—I put the backpack on Paul, and Paul on me, and we headed back to his house. His fingers always moved around in my hair and his breath heated up one ear. Once, as I was helping Paul slide off a boulder, we came upon a Mallard nest so far from shore that the chicks could do nothing but waddle in yellow, panicked circles to get away. Paul reached down to touch one. The brown mother winged a few feet away, then waited empty-eyed for the disaster to play itself out. Her feathers gleamed with a faint hint of purple, unruffled and smooth as scales. She did nothing to intervene, and so neither did I, as Paul grabbed at one of the chicks. He had good intentions: he was usually a gentle enough kid. At the last minute, though, he pulled his hand back as if spooked—as if he’d felt something horrible beneath all that fluffy down, something brittle and hard and unexpected. “Oh!” he said. “What?” I asked, newly impatient with him. His squeamishness goaded me somehow, made me a little angry. I wanted him to take the chick and do something heartless and boyish, so I’d have to remind him to be kind. I don’t know. I wanted to be the one to stop him when he discovered the fragile contraption of bones beneath that halo of down. I wanted to intervene on behalf of animals. It irritated that he was so careful and afraid. We stood and watched as the chick waddled off to its mother, and the troop reconvened in a huddle under a pine. For a strange instant, I found myself longing to lift up a rock and throw it at them. I 43. wanted to show Paul something, maybe, make him scared of the right things. Or another time, in early evening. As Paul and I were cresting the last hill, as I was squinting into the darkening woods to make out the path, a couple of deer lifted their heads at once and differentiated themselves from trees. We stared at them, and they at us, for a full thirty seconds without moving. They multiplied as we looked at them. There were three at first, then there were four, then there were five. They were the exact same color as the bark and leaves, grey-brown, but the skin around their eyes was red. I felt the breeze on their backs lift the braid from my chest and set it down over my shoulder. “They’re going to get us,” Paul whispered. He reached for my hand. “They’re a herd,” I reminded him. “They’re afraid of us.” Two more appeared. Paul shivered. “It’s okay, it’s okay. They’re prey,” I soothed. The deer silvered under the wind. Their pink ears twitched. I knew that they would take off in an instant, I could see their haunches tense, but even I had the irrational thought they were about to run right for us. They seemed ready to bear down. Then off they went over the far ridge, white tails lifted. Hopping with that mechanical grace animals have—grasshoppers and birds—as if nothing, save death, could interrupt the repetitive beat of their movements. Branches rattled old rain down on us. We were alone. Fi, fie, foe, fum. Soup from a can, lettuce from a bag. Cat hair on my sweater. The cats creeping from the windowsill to the rug, where they rolled religiously, unlatching their claws on each other. A video of a talking dog, book after book. “Slow down, Paul,” who was gulping apple juice so fast it dripped down his shirt. My hunting jacket hung from a hook, still holding 44. the shape of my hunched-up shoulders. On the roof, squirrels scampering. In the ground, maple seeds and bearberry, leeching down hairy roots. Across the lake—across the lake and behind the shed—dogs. The dogs dragging their chains, getting hungry, waiting for me to come home. My mother across the lake, too, forgetting to turn the light on in the evening and maybe, or maybe not, watching everything. Patra, after Paul went to bed. She came out of the back bedroom with her hair stuck to her face, as if she’d been sleeping. She’d given me a 100-piece puzzle of an appaloosa horse to work on while she gave Paul a bath, and when she came out, blinking, she seemed surprised that I was still at it. “Oh, Linda!” she said when she saw me at the table, surrounded by the scattered debris of the puzzle. I put my hands under the table. I found a thread on my sweater’s cuff to unravel and tug. “Hey,” I told her. She felt bad about forgetting me, I guess, because she got busy fast fixing snacks: microwave popcorn and hard-boiled eggs. She put them into two baggies for me to eat as I walked home—everything white and warm, one light as leaves, the other steaming up the plastic. I put them in my two jacket pockets. “Is it too dark to walk in the woods by yourself?” she wondered then, but only idly, glancing out the window, where a branch clicked the glass. She fished a ten-dollar bill from her wallet and handed it over. “Nope,” I said, rolling the bill into a tube, which I pretended to survey her through, like a miniature telescope. “There you are!” I said. “Ha,” Patra replied. But she wasn’t really laughing. I folded the tube in half. And then, just like that, a gust of humiliation shot through me— 45. as if I were Mr. Grierson making the telephone joke—as if Patra were Lily, humoring me to get done with things. Ha. Even her laugh was saying goodbye. Why didn’t I just leave? All I had to do was blink, all I had to do was lift my mind away from her, and I could already see all those old trees blowing overhead as I walked along the lake, the same-old moon scraping open some clouds and laying down a path of light. Oh, I liked night. I knew it well. For some reason, though, I was finding it hard to open the door. I stashed the folded bill in my pocket with the egg and spent a long time on my jacket zipper. “What’s your husband writing?” I said, at the last minute. “Oh.” She looked reluctant. I put my hands in my pockets, weighed popcorn against egg. “It’s quite interesting, I guess. It’s about space.” “Duh,” I said. She squinted out a little smile, bending over as she did and holding out one hand to the black cat. It came across the rug and landed in her arms just like that—as if tugged by fishing line. So willingly caught. It squinted at me under her palm, gave me a smashed Jack O’Lantern look. “I’m sorry.” She let the cat rumble and hum under her hand. “It’s one of those things not everybody understands. You know Newton?” “They killed him?” She shook her head. “That’s Galileo that got beheaded. Newton was knighted.” “Right,” I said. “Sir Isaac Newton says that space is just space. Like, nothing worth mentioning. Then Einstein is like, no. Objects act on it, it reacts.” She was stroking the cat in a way that made a 46. tiny crackling of static under her palm. “Nothing is something after all. There’s math that proves this, of course, but also observations. Oh, I know it seems like math and observations are opposites—they can seem like that sometimes, my husband gets in all these arguments. But in the grand order of things, they fit quite snugly.” “That’s the book?” I was skeptical. She laughed. “That’s the Introduction. How we have to have trust in—” She paused. “— logic, if we want to understand the true nature of reality. The whole book is more a history of the theory of life. From a cosmological perspective. For a general audience. It doesn’t prove anything new, just shows that our standard of proof is questionable, and so—” She sounded like she wanted to convince me of something she didn’t entirely believe or understand herself. She was looking just over my head, considering how to start over and say it again, whether to bother. She opened her mouth, closed it. “You probably have a degree in English or something,” I told her. She theatrically frowned. “A master’s! You’ve been spying on my past!” I pointed at the manuscript on the counter. “I saw the way you make corrections. Like a teacher.” “Oh, my worst nightmare,” she groaned. “Teaching Milton to high schoolers.” She put her hand on my arm. “No offense.” “None taken.” Then she was back to stroking the cat, and in a jagged motion I reached over to touch him as well. As I did my pocket gaped open, and a few kernels of popcorn dribbled to the floor. “Shit,” I murmured, kneeling down. And just like that, Patra was on her knees, helping me. The cat squirreled under the 47. couch. I watched Patra pop two stray kernels, absentmindedly, into her mouth. Then she caught my eye and her face reddened. “That was gross. Right? That was gross.” In fact she was pretty, her smile lifting me out of myself. “Not really.” I sprinkled a few more kernels on the floor and ate them. When Patra smiled for real, her lips whitened and disappeared into her face. Up close, I saw she had down on her upper lip, brown freckles merging into spots on her eyelids. She had three parallel creases on her forehead, which almost, but not quite, smoothed away when she grinned. She ate another kernel when I set it on the floor, and then another, and another, smiling as she did. For the first time then, for the first time since we’d met, it occurred to me that she might be lonely. 48. V. Here’s what I dream about most, now. The dogs. Trying to get my numb fingers around the tricky latches of their chains. Cracking open the ice in their bowls so they can have a drink. In my dreams, I do it with a stick, or the business end of an ax, or the heel of my boot. There’s a problem, I need to do this fast. In my dreams, I’m always getting back so late. I’m always coming around the last bend of the lake long after dark, pushing away branches, and there they are in a huddle by the house: too small to be dogs, somehow. They look more like rats or crows or scrabbling children—half-crouching in some little ditch of snow they’ve made. They’ve licked the ice from their paws, only to have the saliva seal ice again over the pads, which they’ve chewed until they’re bleeding. They’re whining, their chains are wrapped around their legs: you know how these dreams go. In reality, of course, my father brought them into the shed and fed them when I didn’t come home on time. But in my dreams, I see ice hanging from their muzzles like fangs. I see them catch sight of me in the woods, and their love is ravenous. They lunge and snarl. They’re so happy to see me. 49. It was dogs that found the stash of pictures in Mr. Grierson’s California apartment, actually. I’d read about it in the North Star Ledger the week after Mr. Grierson was fired. He’d subleased his apartment to some college student with a cocaine habit, and, according to the article, the local police had recently started a canine program with funds from a rich breeder of English bulldogs. Everyone was very proud of the program, which defied breed expectations. Our Crimes Editor, Mr. Gregor, must have made some calls to Fertile Hollow, California, because there were lots of quotes about bulldogs in the article. “We misapprehend the true nature of these dogs,” the rich breeder said, “when we put booties on their feet and climb into bed with them. Give them a mission! Don’t make them into Riding Hood’s Grandmother.” It was an English bulldog named Nestle Crunch who, in less than twenty minutes, found a kilo of cocaine in the college kid’s sock drawer and a shoebox of dirty pictures beneath the bathroom sink. There was no question about whose pictures they were, or what they showed. “Minors,” the article said. Minors in fat envelopes addressed to Mr. Adam Grierson of West Palm Blvd. Who knows why he left them there after he came to Minnesota or why, for that matter, he used his real name. The article was fuzzy about the unsavory parts, oddly upbeat and cheerful as it went on, focusing less on Mr. Grierson and his arrest than on the triumph of the dog who found him out. In the end, Nestle Crunch of Fertile Hollow was promoted to Sergeant and given a gold shield, a week’s vacation, and a police hat full of doggie treats. There was nothing in the article—or any of the police reports—about Mr. Grierson and his students. There was nothing anywhere about Gone Lake or a kiss. But that didn’t stop the rumors. 50. I kept my eye on Lily that spring. On my way to school one early May morning, I saw her slide out of her dad’s pick-up truck behind the baseball field. She shoved the truck door shut with a grunt, and a huge cake of ice slid from the undercarriage, exploding. Wet spring snow had fallen the night before, which had the terrible effect of returning everything to a slurry of slush and salt. As Lily’s dad’s truck rumbled off, I watched Lily lick her bare hand and bend over, dampen the salt-stained cuffs of her jeans with her own saliva. Her coat hung open, and her hands were bare, her head was bare, her hair was wet. As I followed her across the field to the high school, I felt I could see her long hair freeze as she walked. It swung darkly, then grew stiff. It looked like something you could crack off with your hands. Inside, she did not go directly to class. All the bells had rung, and I followed her through the empty halls, down the dark staircase, past the closed gym door, past the trophy case with all its bronze boys pointing their nubby toes. She was quiet, but I was quieter still, setting each boot on the ground, carefully—one at a time—as if walking through the woods. I made the linoleum absorb my sounds. Lily’s sneakers squeaked a little. She bought a Coke from the vending machine and stood for a moment gulping it, before wedging the half-finished can behind the radiator. She yawned so wide a second chin appeared on her neck. That was a revelation to me, Lily Holburns’s future fat. I thought by then I knew everything there was to know about her. I knew how Lily’s mom had died in a car accident when she was ten, how her dad dropped her off at school every morning in the baseball field, how she went to a special teacher during homeroom, for dyslexia. I knew that Lars Solvin had broken up with her, recently, just a few days before prom, and by then I knew the details of the rumor about her and Mr. Grierson. He’d taken Lily out to Gone Lake last fall, she’d said, taken her there after 51. school in his car and kissed her. That’s the word I kept hearing in the halls, kiss, and there was something all the more perverse in this, as if she couldn’t bring herself to name anything more explicit. I don’t know why I followed her that day for so long, save that it was easy. As she continued through the empty hall, her hair thawed, and she ran her fingers through it, cutting open the spokes with her fingers. Her sneakers left a grey streak of slush on the white linoleum. I thought, perhaps, she was heading towards the loading dock to sneak out, cut class—but no. She went straight into the girl’s locker room, peed in one of the stalls, washed her hands, cleaned her teeth with a finger, then knelt down at the Lost and Found in the corner. I stayed behind a bank of open lockers and watched her. People had always said that Lily was a little deaf. People said Lily was a little touched, that her mother had been drunk all nine months she was in the womb. People said that’s why Lily was so quiet—she’d been left out in the snow in her car seat like a potted plant, suffered hypothermia as an infant, had never fully bloomed. I saw her rifle through the pile of lost jackets and bras, pull out a pair of black heeled boots, which on her feet made her look, abruptly, older. She looked like an equestrian or college graduate. Elegantly tall, casually looming. She looked like someone who might raise her eyes to mirror and see me standing right behind her. But she did not. She twisted her thawing hair with her fists and squeezed out a trickle of water. Then, with a sigh, she kicked out of those beautiful black boots, threw them back. She stole what no one would ever ask her about, a big pair of puffy blue mittens, which she wedged under one armpit. I watched her pull her damp hair back with someone’s lost barrette and wrap her neck with someone else’s frayed pink scarf. Before tying her sneakers up, she pocketed a purple vial of nail polish. 52. May, and who needs boots anymore anyway? Lilacs were exploding early. Soon crabapple blossoms weighed down branches the way snow once did—white as that, but poofier. Petals caught in Paul’s hood as we walked. Chickadees were doing loops. May, and Paul was getting bored of woods, just as the woods was getting interesting. Wood ducks with their purple bills had come back to stay, as well as beavers. You could see them hauling whole logs across the lake with just their jaws. “Cool?” I suggested. Paul thwacked a stick against a rock. He wanted a swing set, a slide. He wanted a playground with sand in a box and public shovels and public pails, which people at the Department of Parks and Water cleaned off and kept nice. He knew his business when it came to parks. He’d lived in a suburb in Michigan for most of his life, with sidewalks and such. Golden Retrievers fetching Frisbees. He wanted a tire swing, a baseball diamond, acres of mowed grass. “Oh, brother. Another beaver,” he said. “Oh, brother,” I mocked him. Then I felt bad. The upshot being that on a drizzly day in late May, I arranged him in his green rain slicker in the bike seat and pedaled the four miles into town. I had to stand up on the pedals to do the hills, and when I came over a ridge, we careened down through oily puddles wide as the road itself. Within minutes, we were both soaked. At the elementary school, we trudged through the piled pebbles on the playground, and I pushed Paul on one of the two plastic swings. “This what you want?” I asked. “I guess,” he said, after a moment. It clearly wasn’t at all what he wanted. Back and forth he went: I stood behind, watched his hood flap. Some sorrow shoved around in my chest, like a stick in wet sand, and so time passed. Later, I could get that drizzle feeling just about any time I saw a kid on a swing. The 53. hopelessness of it—the forward excitement, the mid-flight return. The futile belief that the next time around, the next time forward, fun would come back, fun would come springing. “Should I push harder?” I asked him. After a moment: “I guess.” School had been out for hours, so at first we were alone in these labors. My arms were getting tired, though the rain began to let up. At some point a young mother arrived with an umbrella, a baby in a plastic stroller, and a little girl. The girl looked older than Paul: she wore yellow rubber boots and a pink rain jacket. When Paul saw her, he lit up instantly. He dumped all the pebbles and twigs out of his leather glove and worked his hand in up to the elbow. He wanted the girl to push him instead of me, and, when she took over, heaving him awkwardly, he got this goofy look on his face, both concentrated and dazed, as if he were trying to watch her without turning his head. I headed for the park bench—not exactly jealous, though not quite generous either. He never said a word to the girl, just sat still and let her fall all over him from behind. I had, then, a very complete vision of him as a fifteen-year-old. I thought I knew the sort of guy Paul would be. He’d be the kind of boy who let himself be pushed on some little kiddie swing by a girl who adored him, who wrote his name in purple pen on her palm and waited for him after school. He’d be the reluctant but radiant star of Our Town, or vice president of the student council in an ironic yet good-natured way. He’d be a mediocre but heroic huddler for the track team. He’d have nice fingernails. He’d have some mysterious Chinese character tattooed on his wrist, which only he could read, which would be slightly smeared because he’d paid a poor Indian on the reservation to do it. His nickname would be Gardner, probably. He’d be the kind of boy known by just his last name. “Higher,” he said to the girl, without any rancor or desire, as if he were doing her a favor 54. by allowing himself to be pushed. Overhead, a prop plane shimmied past the treetops. Across the parking lot, several trucks of senior boys were doing screeching circles through puddles. They had their windows down. They were shouting “Marco!” “Teeth,” the young mother said to me, when I sat down next to her on the wet bench. “Um, hmm,” I nodded in agreement, letting the word arrive like a cleaned fossil from another epoch of meaning. It suited my mood to believe that some words, words like “teeth” or “Marco” needed no further explanation. Then the young woman said, “This bugger’s going to bite my nipple off.” So teeth got its tag and was filed away with all the other mindless small talk, all the obvious things you say to strangers on a park bench in the rain. I sighed and she went on, “Your brother’s quite the lady killer.” “Your girl’s pretty easily killed.” We watched them for a moment in silence. The little girl with the yellow boots was standing too close to the swing, and every time Paul swung back he barreled into her chest. She looked ready to topple over. The woman snorted as the little girl stumbled. “That one’s not mine, thank God. Or the not the way you mean. She’s my sister.” I peeked over at the mother, and saw then that she had pimples on her chin and stubbly, shaven eyebrows. She had spit-up on her letter jacket and a blue pixie stick in the corner of her mouth like some cartoon hick with his piece of straw. She could have been any one of the Karens in my class just a few years down the line, and when I realized this I wanted to laugh but not because it was funny. The girls who stuck around Loose River after high school were always having babies and getting married at eighteen and moving downstairs into their parents’ 55. basements. That’s what happened if you were pretty enough to be a cheerleader, but not smart enough to go to college. And if you weren’t pretty enough, you got a job at the casino or the nursing home. “How old’s your baby?” I asked her then, to be friendly. “Fifteen weeks,” she said. “I’m halfway there. At thirty, I’m not doing this nursing thing anymore, you know? My boyfriend’s afraid of my tits! They gross him out, he says.” I took another sidelong look at her, curious. I thought it was nice that her boyfriend had stuck around, anyhow. It surprised me in fact. The story didn’t usually go like that—usually the girls got married to boys who left town for the army, or for Junior Hockey League—so this Karen must have some secret vein of talent. From the corner of my eye, I saw one breast like a bent, red elbow poking out of her shirt. It was surprisingly long, that’s how it looked: she had a very long breast, with a pimply-looking nipple. “Why don’t you just stop now?” I ventured. “I’m not a bad mother! Studies say mom’s milk is the shit for babies. Plus—” She raised a stubbled eyebrow. “My boyfriend’s happy to stay down there for now. He calls it the better half.” I wondered what that meant. What that felt like. I thought of the face, the neck, the shoulders, the breasts—all left behind, all given up for something better. “Marco!” the seniors yelled from their trucks. “Polo!” another car returned. “What’s he doing to her?” Karen wondered. I followed her gaze back to the playground. The little girl was lying flat on her back in the gravel, Paul’s empty black glove at her side. Had she fallen? Had the swing knocked her down? As we watched, Paul crawled on top of her, his knees spread over her stomach, his palms in the rocks. He seemed to be talking to her very quietly—and though there was no obvious 56. reason to think he was doing anything wrong, I had a sense that there was something predatory in his kneeling stance, something aggressive. The little girl was still, her face turned away from us. Paul looked like he might have been about to kiss her on the mouth. But he was just talking. They were just playing games. “Little… Good… Perfect… Food,” he murmured. For a second it sounded like words from a book, from a fairytale, the words running together so they were hard to hear. Then his sing-song words came clearer: “There is no SPOT where God is NOT.” “What’s he saying?” Karen asked me. “What’s going on?” I wasn’t sure. We stood up together. But for some reason we were hesitant to approach. There seemed something very private about what we were watching, something secretive and excessive that excluded us entirely. The little girl started whimpering slightly, and Paul stayed crouched over her, his stringy blond hair hanging over his eyes. “THERE IS NO SPOT WHERE GOD IS NOT.” “What the fuck?” Karen shot me a disgusted look. “What the fuck is this?” She started forward. “I sit down in a park, and Jesus weirdoes just show up out of nowhere.” “No!” I said, startled. “Freaks just flock to this town, like fucking geese.” “Wait—” I followed her. I felt a rush of defensiveness, and then—like a leaf doing flips in the wind—a rush of relief waiting right behind it. I put my hands on my hips. I felt as if I’d been hiding something from her all this time, and that she’d finally called me out on a lie that I’d been surprised myself I could maintain so long. I had no idea what Paul was up to and, for the moment, I didn’t really care. So we were weirdoes. So Paul and I weren’t headed for a long afternoon of Sesame Street 57. in a basement somewhere or a brain injury from a puck to the head, so we weren’t headed for whatever crushing mediocrity this Karen and her boyfriend and her bald baby had planned. So what. Karen stalked over to the girl, her baby tucked like a sack of groceries under one arm. She grabbed the little girl by the hand and pulled her out from under Paul. For a second, the girl seemed stunned, as if she couldn’t quite breathe, and then she let out the piercing wail of a much younger child, snot bubbling up from her nose. She looked at Paul with a face broken open, with a look of utter love and desolation, as if she’d given him everything in the ten minutes she’d known him, and he’d taken it, oh, he’d taken it anyhow, knowing just how much it cost. I hadn’t planned on asking Paul what he’d been doing to her, but he brought it up. On the bike ride home, he was quiet for a long time. Then after a while he started saying, “That girl, that girl…” So I craned my neck around and said, “What?” “That girl…” “Paul, you hurt her.” I felt obliged to say that. “She fell!” “You held her.” “I healed her.” “Gimme a break.” By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks. By their very nature, they were susceptible to illusions, delusions of grandeur, visions, false beliefs. They indulged in theatrics, believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the 58. world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that’s what you wanted: pretenders who didn’t know they were pretending at all. That’s what I was thinking as I pedaled Paul home. Rain made the breaks squeal beneath us, made the bike tires drone. “Gimme a break!” Paul said. By their nature, kids were parrots. 59. VI. In fact, Paul and I did not always get along. We respected each other most of the time, and in general we were pretty good at setting up compromises. I gave Paul an afternoon at the diner eating pie, and in return he gave me an hour on the lake in the canoe. The pie he wanted was chocolate mousse, brown filling wrapped in a yellow bonnet of cream. We sat in the back booth of the diner, and I paid from my slowly-growing savings, smoothing out one of Patra’s ten-dollar bills on the table when we were done. No oily quarters and dimes, no waiting around for change, no small talk with Santa Anna, the slightly bearded waitress. “What makes pie so good?” Paul asked as we walked out, a slug of whip cream pulling down his chin. The sugar had wound him up. He was doing a little jig of ecstasy, hopping from foot to foot, flapping his fingertips. “It’s in the name,” I said. “Chocolate?” “Moose.” I raised my eyebrows. Paul looked up at the moose head mounted over the door, antlers wide as a man’s flung- 60. open arms, nostrils big as bowls. The canoe ride was a tougher sell. He was fussy about it from the beginning. He didn’t want to get his shoes wet getting in, so I waded through water with him in my arms and set him down on the hull near the prow, which was more stable than putting him in the seat. I gave him his pretzels and a mildewed life-vest to sit on, sultan-style. I told him to stay still as I paddled, don’t rock back and forth, just look straight ahead. That day the water was still and black, free of shadows and reflections. Paul got so bored he fell asleep. Head down, arms crossed over the portage pads, water clunk-clunking beneath us. I had to carry him back to the house with his legs wrapped around my waist, like a little baby. I had to leave the canoe bobbing in the rocks, where it could have been carried away if the wind picked up. I didn’t have a free hand to tie it. And even then, he was whiny in my arms. Fighting me, and refusing to be put down. Going, “Stop it, stop it, Linda.” As if I had been tormenting him with the pleasure of a canoe ride. With the gift of a perfect day. He was an easygoing kid most of the time. I’m not saying he was especially difficult to manage. But he did have a ferocious streak; somewhere in him there was a sharp line drawn between order and chaos. He did not truck, for instance, with any break in his routine. If occasionally I lingered too long after I brought him back—if Patra laid out an extra plate and showed me how to whisk oil and lemon for a dressing—Paul would grow increasingly rebellious. All through dinner, he’d beg to sit in Patra’s lap, and by the end he’d work his way up and nuzzle her neck. She’d fork lettuce into her mouth with one hand, pet his blond hair with the other. There was one night in particular. Paul was whiney, and Patra was casting about for 61. something other than mosquito bites and bath-time to talk about. I remember how she pushed back her bowl. How she set her chin in her palm and pointed herself at me. “O-kay, Linda,” she said. There was something unsettled about her that night, a frenzy of tiny movements in the skin around her eyes. “Tell me. You’re one of those girls who wants to raise horses or something, be a vet, when she grows up. I can tell. I’m right, aren’t I? That’s what you want to be.” I wasn’t one of those girls, actually. I didn’t think much about the future, but when I did, all I could come up with was the weird image of a semi-truck, white and floating down the highway. Of course I couldn’t say that, I couldn’t say truck driver, so to stall, I looked across the table at Paul, who was inching from his chair onto the floor. Singing: “I want to be a phy-sic-ist. I want to be a phy-sic-ist.” Patra was just teasing, though, I could tell. She didn’t really care what I said, as long as I played along. She wanted something to do before clearing the table, before coaxing Paul towards bed. A distraction before the husband called. “I could be a vet,” I said, offering myself up. “Sure.” “Or, no!” Patra pulled one bent leg under her. “I’ve got something better for you. I’m good at this kind of thing. Let’s see, you, Linda, you deserve something you haven’t seen—a city to explore, you know? A bunch of people trying to get in your doors. You should be—” She snapped her fingers, flashing a grin. “A hotelier. A restaurateur.” She looked so pleased. “A restaurant-er?” Paul asked. I grunted to keep from smiling. “Like a waitress? I did that already.” I held my hands in the air, like, what’s all this, then? “I quit for you.” She widened her eyes, pretended shock. “You left the restaurant business to be a 62. babysitter? That’s a whole lot of pressure for us here, isn’t it Paul? We should give you a better title then. Where did the word ‘babysitter’ come from, anyway?” I shrugged. “An ugly word, right? What about, say, nanny, au pair, governess. Oooh, let’s call you governess.” She was laughing now. “That’s so much better, isn’t it?” “Governess!” Paul shouted from under the table. He waited for Patra to define it, and when she didn’t he fisted out pebbles from his stash in the glove and threw them. “Watch it,” I told him. To Patra: “Sounds like kind of a sissy thing to be. Plus, people will think you’re, like, millionaires or something.” I was trying to keep from grinning at her. “You’re right.” Patra pouted. “Time for my bath.” Paul pouted too. He crawled up from the floor and onto her lap. Patra let him nuzzle her breast while she stroked his hair. She patted his cheek, but her eyes were on me. “You’re right, Linda. You’re right. People here already think I’m a snob or something. An anomaly.” She furrowed her brow, following a new train of thought. “I’m still figuring this place out, what’s what. It’s funny. I’ve been to the diner with Paul four, maybe five times? For lunch? I see the same people every time I go in, and they all look at me, they all smile and say hi. But no one has asked me one thing about myself. Not my name, not a thing. People are nice in a way, but also— ” “Not,” I said. She pulled Paul’s hand away from the buttons on her shirt. He took up her hair instead, winding his fingers up in her blond curls. “Was it a good idea to come here?” she asked me now. “The idea was that while Leo was in Hawaii this spring, we’d come out to the new summer house. Go somewhere quiet and nice. Just me and Paul, as kind of a hideout—” 63. “A hideout from what?” She spun her free hand around in a general way. “You on the run?” I teased. “You rob a bank over there in Michigan?” “Ha, ha, ha,” she said. Paul was yanking on her hair—not hard, but slow and constantly. “If so, no one cares too much what you do here, so long as you keep to yourself,” I joked. “And don’t, like, take all the good fishing spots.” “Hmm.” I winced at how lame a line it was. But that didn’t keep me from trying again. “And as long as you’re not something really unforgivable, like divorced or an atheist or something—” “Gentle, hon.” Patra was prying open Paul’s fingers, pulling out her hair. “—or, or—” “Paul, stop.” She scooted him at last off her lap, patting his rump to offset the burst of irritation in her voice. “Go get your puzzle, Bucko. Let’s do the owl puzzle, how ‘bout?” When he’d left, she started stacking plates and bowls, making noise, moving quickly. Then she sat down again, suddenly. “I really don’t know if it’s such a good thing for us, all this quiet. Why did I think it would be a good thing for us? Maybe it would be better for Paul to go back to school, to be around people who— Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come here in the first place?” She looked up at me then, and there was something I didn’t expect in her eyes. “It’s still a pretty good idea,” I said, unsettled by her guilty expression. On the walk home that night, I kept thinking about the last time I saw Mr. Grierson. Maybe it was because Patra had been talking about the going to the diner with Paul, maybe that’s 64. why he was on my mind. As I walked home through the dark woods, I kept seeing Mr. Grierson sitting alone in a diner booth, wiping his chapped lips with a napkin. He used to come in to the diner for dinner pretty often—I learned this after I started working there as a waitress in the fall. He always had the Eggs Special, scrambled, and he usually read books as he forked his eggs down, fat paperbacks with spaceships on the covers. Sometimes he called me Miss Originality, for the prize I’d won in History Odyssey the year before. “Thank you, Miss Originality,” he’d say, holding up his white mug for more coffee. I usually didn’t say anything to that. Sometimes he’d ask me a few questions about my new teachers at the high school before he went back to his book. Sometimes he’d just ask for cream, his finger on the sentence he longed to return to. The very last time I saw him, though, in early November maybe, I wasn’t on the clock. I’d only come in to the diner after school to pick up my check, so it was probably Friday evening around five, and the first real blizzard was predicted for the weekend. I’d just come from Mr. Korhonen’s, I remember, because I had a backpack full of last-minute winter supplies— margarine, salt, toilet paper, that sort of thing. Flakes so big and wet they looked three- dimensional, like elaborately folded pieces of origami, hung in the air outside the diner windows. As Santa Anna tallied my wages at the register, touching the whiskers on her chin, I brushed melted snow from my hair and pretended not to see Mr. Grierson in the back of the diner. I never knew if the Miss Originality thing was mocking or friendly. I never what to say to him after the History Odyssey Competition was over and I stopped seeing him after class. I remember the diner was unusually empty that day, everyone at home preparing for the storm. The frayed vinyl booths looked especially lonely and cold with all that fresh snow whitening the gray evening outside. Did Mr. Grierson see me standing there? I don’t think he did. He was dividing up his food with a fork and a knife, dumping half his eggs onto a second plate, and only after I’d left 65. with my check did it occur to me that maybe someone had been sitting across from him in the booth, back to me. And only much later when I was walking home from Patra’s that May night did I wonder if it could have been Lily. Occasionally Leo the husband called before dinner was over, Patra’s cell phone startling us all with its Star Wars ring. On those nights Patra pushed back her chair and mouthed THANK YOU in my direction as she headed towards the deck with her phone. I’d finish sucking the ice in my water or the soup on my spoon, whatever: spit it out. THANK YOU meant Patra wanted me to put Paul to bed. So I did, reluctantly, herding him into the bathroom, pleading with him to brush his teeth, threatening him if he didn’t stay under the covers. “You’re supposed to count to a hundred!” he’d yell, when I tiptoed for the door. “You’re supposed to be out cold,” I countered, turning back, pushing him down. “You’re supposed to be nice to me!” He squirmed under my hands. “You’re supposed to be sweet and cute,” I whispered. “You’re supposed to be a lovable little boy. You’re supposed to be lots of things you’re not always.” Once, Star Wars sent the phone fishtailing across the counter just as Patra was finishing Paul’s bedtime bath. Patra dashed out of the bathroom to answer it, a towel slung over her shoulder, and a naked Paul came tearing out from behind her. He darted dripping around the house, scaring the cats, clambering over the couch and under the table. She tried grabbing at him with her one free hand, but it was me that snagged hold of Paul’s scrawny arm. I must have pulled a little harder than I meant because he cried out like he’d been stabbed. He spun around, slashed a fingernail across my face. I could feel the bright stinging trace of it, in an arc from eye 66. to ear. Something revised in me at that point, changed course, and I just lifted him up whole- body—wiggling, naked, everywhere arms—and carted him off to bed. I tossed him down, load- of-logs-like on his mattress. He looked pathetic, dampening his sheets in his naked crouch. He couldn’t breathe around the phlegm in his throat, dragging a few long, gurgling breaths as he glared up at me. “That’s an education.” I felt like my dad. That’s what he said when I’d carried the canoe on a three-mile portage through the mud. I felt like my dad, and at the same time, like the kid who’d carried that canoe, who was desperate and aching and crying from exhaustion. “Be quiet!” Paul yelled. “You want me to be quiet?” I asked him. I could feel the long arc his fingernail had made across my cheek. I could feel the wet shape he’d printed on my flannel. “You want me to be quiet?” His face was marbled, white and red. “I’m a perfect child of God,” he said, eyes streaming. “What did you say?” I grabbed at Paul’s arm. There was something in the sing-song lilt of his voice—like when he’d spoken to that girl on her back in the playground—that made the back of my neck prickle for some reason. “Who are you?” I found myself hissing at him. I must have truly scared him, I guess, because when I let go, Paul pulled his hands in under his butt, sucked in his cheeks, and hunched up his shoulders. He was so naked, his skin seemed like clothes to me. He seemed sealed up in a very tight pink suit, without a wrinkle or a seam to be found. Wet and unfathomably opaque. Smelling of baby shampoo. Of urine. I could hear Patra whoop with laughter all the way out on the deck. I could hear her add something and laugh again. I walked over and closed the bedroom door. 67. “You cut your face,” Paul noticed. “You wet the bed.” I’d noticed, too. He started crying again, then, crying as I’d never seen anyone cry before, crying with his face was all clenched up, no sound, a high-pitched wheezing every time he took another breath. “Calm down,” I told him. “Let’s get you dressed.” “I want my mom,” he moaned. “Not yet,” I said. “My mom,” he begged. “You don’t want her to see this.” I pointed at the dark stain on his sheets. He set his wet eye sockets over his knees and wouldn’t look up. “Come on,” I said. “Come on, okay? Let’s put you in your pajamas.” He dragged his face away from his knees. “The choo-choo ones?” “The train ones, yes.” He lay back as I worked his feet into the slippered fleece. Bit by bit, I got him dressed. Then I stripped the sheets, threw the comforter over the bare mattress, hid the wet sheets in the closet, and turned on his nightlight, which was a caboose shining a warm red light. Together, we lined up his stuffed animals again the way he liked, in two rows against the wall. We opened up Goodnight Moon. All the while, Paul was winding his wet hair with one finger into a worried horn on his forehead. All the while, I was thinking about where my hunting jacket was, which hook it was on, so I could put it on and get out fast. Both of us: guilty and ashamed. Both of us wanting comfort of some kind that we could not give the other. Both of us trying to figure out what to tell Patra, who would come in any minute with what would be, no doubt, a confused, disappointed look on her face. I could say Paul been a tyrant, 68. and he had been—he’d scraped an arc on my face that stung still—but Paul could say, and he wouldn’t be wrong, that I was eleven years older and had everything on him—age, weight, education (as my father would say)—and all he wanted was a half hour with his mother before bed. And all he had in the world was the ability to throw a tantrum. In the rumply-made bed, we sat stiffly apart. Paul pretended to be absorbed, and I pretended to be amused, by the little mouse in the great green room. I turned one page, then Paul turned the next. We waited for Patra’s arrival. But she was distracted when she came in. When she opened up the door, I saw her face was flushed and her lips were wet. She bent down and kissed Paul on the mouth, shoveling his wet hair back with one hand. Then she kissed me as well, just a feathery little peck on the scalp. I felt my heart do something to the skin at my throat, which I hoped she wouldn’t see. “Guess what?” she gushed. We said nothing. “Your dad’s coming next weekend.” I looked up at her. Her teeth shone in the dim light the way an animal’s eyes do in the dark. She scooped up all her hair in two hands and held it above her head for a moment before letting it down—letting it fall to her shoulders—all at once. I could almost hear it come down in the dark, a little whoosh of hair like something set free from a trap. Then she leapt into bed with us. There were eleven years between us all. We were four, fifteen, twenty-six. I’m not superstitious, especially now. I don’t go in for horoscopes or any of that. But at the time, that number gained a special significance to me. I paid attention to it. I noticed, for instance, that 69. when we had our spring pep rally, there were eleven red EXIT signs spaced evenly between bleachers. I noticed that in blackjack, the ace could be counted as a one or an eleven—depending on which is better for your hand. My father reminded me of this rule when we were playing cards one night, the generator off, the lantern making huge shadows of our cards on the table. That night I won from him one of his precious hand-rolled cigars, which I promised not to smoke until I was eighteen. (I have that cigar still, in the glove compartment of my car.) Or try this. After Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus, the remaining apostles were called The Eleven, the chosen. My mother, repeating some sermon, reminded me of that. I felt almost spooked, I admit, when I remembered that the husband—the astronomer who was always gone—was thirty-seven. Though I never got very far past algebra in school, it seemed that such a fixed pattern should have some meaning beyond mere coincidence. It should, shouldn’t it? At the time, I thought about this a lot. I tried rearranging the variables, keeping the constant constant. I wondered what Patra was like at fifteen. I imagined her in high school: shorter than me, even skinnier, better liked. She’d have one close friend—she’d be that kind of girl—someone who’d moved away when she was twelve and left her disconsolate at first, then sweetly, tragically distant. She’d have really excellent pens, probably, and extremely legible handwriting. I imagined myself the husband’s age, thirty-seven (I am thirty-seven: I have a car payment, a PO box), and I imagined the husband as the child. A belligerent four-year-old, with Velcro shoes, a milk moustache, and a temper. I sent Paul off into his twenties by himself. In my mind I gave him a college degree, maybe a master’s, and sent him out into the world with his unicorn hair, with a degree in architecture and maybe one of those admirable ears for music, for Bach or German. I gave him time to be a lady killer for real, to regret his Chinese tattoo. To regret lots of things. You know. To be twenty-six. 70. VII. The husband was scheduled to come just before Memorial Day. His return coincided with the unofficial start of the Season. Walleye fishermen had been trickling in for weeks, but with start of the long weekend they began arriving in caravans. They drove up from the Cities with their campers and boat hitches, with their pickup beds overflowing with tackle under tarps. They set up in campgrounds and rented cabins around the biggest lakes—most out-of-towners back then were still just renters and weekenders. A few were regulars every summer, most had read about Loose River in some glossy fishing guidebook, and all were trying to get a bait shop clerk to slip up and reveal some secret local spot for walleye. All of them were optimistically but predictably dressed, in t-shirts and fleece vests, in elaborately pocketed cargo pants. All of them were squinting as they stepped from their trucks in town to buy gas, to stock up on cigarettes and bug spray. Pretending to know each other, because maybe they’d fried muskie together once, last Fourth of July. Pretending to know us. “Got the spot this year?” they’d ask J. D. in the hardware store, or Katarina the 71. Communist when they were paying up at the gas station. Katarina would always shrug and smile. “Do I look like a fisherman?” she’d ask, batting her heavy-lidded eyes. She did—she wore grey coveralls and a camouflage cap—but no one ever wanted to say so. J. D. would just sell them a map without saying much, making broad ambiguous circles in unlikely places with a ballpoint pen. Tipping his cap, crossing his arms. “Well, thanks. Thank you— Is it Jay?” The out-of-towners had a thing about calling everybody by name, preserving some ritualized belief in small-town hospitality. They called Mr. Korhonen, the Finnish grocer who wore a tie every day of his life, Ed. They called Santa Anna at the diner, Annie. Anne. Sweetheart. “If it isn’t Jim’s girl,” they said to me, “all grown up!” Seeing me at the bank depositing bills in the checking account I’d opened up, or waving at me when I came down the road with my backpack. Complete strangers said this to me, people I’d met maybe twice or three times— years ago, when I was a little kid—back when my dad had occasionally picked up summer work as a guide. As if they weren’t interchangeable to me, like geese, like birds with their reliably duplicate markings. I marveled that I could seem particular, so durable to them. So distinct. That spring, we took our final exams in school with all the windows propped open, dandelion fluff drifting in. The occasional dragonfly died against the pane. May was always such a dissociative time. Everyone tended to have an underwater look in their eyes, especially teachers. It was, no doubt, so hard to care—if anyone ever cared to begin with—about the Law of Cosines told the twentieth time. About the sum of the area of the square of the hypotenuse. Even the Debate kids were in a frisky state, giving up cosines for poetry and mix tapes, for 72. arguing over the secret meaning of Oasis lyrics. Lily’s desk, by then—by exams—was empty. She took a pair of turquoise earrings from the Lost and Found on Tuesday (I’d followed her there, again), but the rest of the week she was gone. Friday afternoon, I wrote the essay portion of my Life Science exam in less than twenty minutes: three paragraphs on the cellular basis for reproduction. Then I scratched my name on the cover, slipped my blue book into the pile on Ms. Lundgren’s desk, and took off into the blissfully mild afternoon. I stopped on the way out of town to buy licorice and cigarettes at the gas station, and I smoked two in a row—strolling through milkweed along the highway, watching bees and monarchs rise—and then, on impulse, I chucked the pack into the bed of a red pickup as it passed. As I did, three white pelicans floated overhead, like a reward for good behavior. Go, go, I thought at them, exhilarated. They flapped their wings in unison, disappeared over trees. From three to five, I sat with Paul on the warm wood of the Gardners’ deck, watching ducks arrive in droves, watching geese skid into the lake and snake black necks beneath the surface. I pointed them out to Paul as they came, though in my heart I kept hoping for more pelicans. Or for something even rarer to arrive, like a falcon. I gnawed licorice, and Paul got busy stacking piles of stones. He shuffled around on his sweatpants knees, arranging strips of bark into lanes. He was changing his city from a mediaeval village into the modern capital of Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon. “Most likely place, ‘cept for Mars, to have life,” he explained. “How do you know?” “In the Goldilocks Zone.” 73. “The what?” “Not too hot, not too cold.” “Ah, I see.” I nibbled a twist of licorice. Then I remembered, “But no one lives in The City, right? Isn’t that what you said?” He nodded without looking up. “Hasn’t been discovered yet.” On the deck, he’d pulled apart all the geometrically intersecting walls and roads, all the towers and moats, and made what looked like just a random assortment of leaves and stones— what the wind could have left, or a big rain. He kept picking up a certain pocked maple leaf and setting it down somewhere else, perfecting some design only he could see. To me, it just looked like a part of the deck that hadn’t been swept, like woods come back. Which is why when Patra came out, she walked right over Europa’s capital. Paul howled for exactly one second, Moooom!, then lay on his back in the ruins of his city and refused to speak. “What is it?” Patra asked, at first amused. Then exasperated. She crouched down and kissed at his chin. “Kiddo, what is it, what did I do?” but he wouldn’t open his eyes. She looked over at me, sitting with my knees at my chest, and though it would have been simple to say what she’d done wrong, I kept quiet. I wasn’t sure how to explain Europa’s capital to her without it sounding condescending, somehow, without speaking as if Paul wasn’t there. I shrugged. “Okay,” Patra said, “Paul the Kid is taking a time out. This kiddo here is having a rest, because he’s so excited that his dad’s coming tomorrow. Am I right?” It was clearly Patra who was so excited. That afternoon, she had gone into town and cut her hair instead of working on the manuscript. She’d gone to Nellie Banks—who’d gone to beauty school—and it was strange now to see Patra’s hair feathered and short, curled up under 74. her ears. It seemed to move with a different gravity than it did before, Europa’s gravity perhaps, shifting complexly as she spoke, shimmering in the late afternoon light. She’d made a special effort to look nice, though it wasn’t for Paul’s sake, of course. Or mine. Slowly, deliberately, I put on Paul’s leather glove and had it walk on two fingers over to him, sniff his knee like a tiny animal. “Hee,” he said, sitting up. When he did, I saw his face was pouring with sweat. It gathered in a big drip at his chin. His pupils seemed to take over his eyes, flying saucers coming in. He swayed. “Okay, then,” Patra said. As if Paul had made some argument to which she’d given in. She scooped him up in her arms, and her voice scrabbled up an octave—“Fifiefoefum”—then came back down slowly, on stairs: “I. Smell. The blood—” She chewed his neck, and when he half-smiled, she said, “Hey, little man. Hey, kiddo. What does CS tell us?” “I smell the blood.” “There is no spot where God is—” “You’re the Englishman,” he told her. Patra nudged open the sliding door with one knee and went inside, Paul in her arms like an excess of infant—all dangling limbs—and the white cat darted out just as the door closed. Patra didn’t notice. The cat made a break for the far side of the deck, then stopped abruptly, as if coming to an unseen boundary. The end of Europa. The start of the woods. “What?” I asked it. “May as well try the world.” It turned around to look at me, wary. Ears back, whiskers trolling the air. Wondering if I was friend or foe, whether I would chase him or just let him go, wondering which was preferable. The cat took one crouching step, then turned back to look at me. Took another, turned 75. around. I menaced it. “What do you think I’m gonna do?” It was already late afternoon, already five, but as I listened to a faucet running inside, snatches of a song, the whole day seemed to bear its open jaws at me. There was nothing to do now that Paul and Patra were gone. The sun overhead was still high enough in the sky to feel there fixed forever. The white cat made a wide slow circle around the deck, then sat stiffly at the sliding glass door, waiting to be let back in. Meowing plaintively, going like a clock alarm, without pause. I should have just gone home. I should have clomped down the steps and found the trail, headed for the ridge of red pine, followed by the stand of old birch. Eagle’s nest, beaver dam, sumac trail, dogs. I should have gone home to the dogs, at least, who would have slobbered all over my face and hands with happiness. Instead I stood up, snuck around the side of the house, climbed up the spoke-like branches of a spruce near Paul’s window. Patra lay on the bed with Paul reading a book. I could see their bodies curled up together, Patra’s arm wrapped around him like a lover—like someone who’d been spurned and needed forgiveness. As she read to him, she kept on kissing his one exposed ear, that raw little flower rising from the bedclothes. There, there. Her tenderness was almost terrible. I could feel it—even from outside the room, even in my treetop perch—making everything disappear. There goes the world. There goes the house. Poof. There goes your bed and your body, too. There goes thoughts. His breath moved a few strands of her hair from his face. The wind gave up rustling the trees. The sky clouded over. When he was sleeping, or almost, Patra picked herself up—limb by limb—from the bedclothes and left the room. When she came back, she undressed him as he slept, uncoiling his legs from his pants, and put him in a diaper. 76. I don’t know why that got to me, but it did. Up came a curl of saliva in my throat— something I didn’t expect, a liquid claw—and as it did, the black cat pounced to the inner windowsill. Nonchalantly, not even looking out at me, licking one paw. Still. I was startled, so I left. I thought that would be it till Monday, the way it usually was. But the next morning, I was sitting on the roof of the shed (reading a People Magazine I’d stolen from the principal’s trash) when I saw Patra’s blue Honda coming up my parents’ road. The whole woods was droning with motors, all the weekenders out testing their speed boats, so I didn’t hear the car until it was halfway up the sumac trail. Popping gravel and snagging trees. In a single leap, I came down from the roof—just as the dogs started getting nervous, hauling their chains across the yard and peering down the road. Shhh, I told them. I trotted a little ways through the dense corridor of sumac, and then I stopped Patra’s car by patting it softly on the hood. Patra rolled down her window, leaned out. She didn’t look at all like herself. Her lips were pink as earthworms under rocks, wrinkling up under lipstick. Blush glittered on her cheeks, giving her the look of Karens, of girls despising themselves in mirrors—scratching open pimples, then sealing up the wounds with foundation and cover-up. She looked both older and younger at once. A kid dressing up, or a middle-aged lady trying too hard to look young. She had purple all around her eyes, both eye shadow and bags. “Linda!” she said, relieved. “I didn’t have your mom’s number. Leo’s coming today. I’m supposed to meet his plane in Duluth. But Paul’s—” 77. “But Paul’s—” I wanted to help her out. I wanted, by instinct, to finish the sentences that gave her trouble. To ease her load, to do her dirty work. “Paul’s—” “Fine. He’s sleeping in, he’s actually still at home—” “Alone?” That made her eyes change, a gleam coming over them. “Come with me,” she begged. “Just for the day. Just while I’m away, stay with him.” I had a take-home trig test to finish, a half-cord of wood I’d promised to chop. A whole cooler of walleye that my father had caught needed cleaning. I knew, though, without thinking that I’d do what Patra asked. Here she was, after all, gripping the wheel of her car so tight that her veins popped up in her hands. From the corner of my eye, I could see my mother coming around the hilltop path where she’d been hanging laundry. I told Patra, “Hold on.” “I can come in, talk to your mom.” She turned off the engine, started to open the door. I could hear the dogs’ chains rumbling across the yard, the tarp on the front door going flap-flap in the wind. “Hold on!” I told her. I must have yelled, because she put two hands up. In surrender. “Okay.” I saw my mother squint over at the car, once, before she went inside. I followed her in. The sunlit room swirled with sooty dust. My mother was folding laundry on the kitchen table, a great pile of sun-crisp clothes in a crazy jumble. “That the girl from across the lake? The one you’ve been spending so much time with?” She had a propped-up look on her face, hopeful and suspicious both. Her hair twined around the staticy sheets as she folded rectangles in half, then in half again. 78. “Yeah.” She nodded, not meeting my eyes. For years, she’d said she wanted me to be more like other kids my age. She’d always said to my dad that she wanted me to spend less time on the shed, have more regular girl experiences. So here I was, satisfying her. “She’s nice then?” She meant: She’s not from around here, right? Because at the same time, I think, my mother always wanted me to have loftier ambitions than the local girls, to be just a little superior to them. “Yeah.” “Good. Then have fun.” She went to the shelf over the sink, opened up an old salsa jar, took out four crumpled dollar bills from her stash. She wrinkled her nose at me when I waved her away. “I’m serious.” “Mom—” The bills felt soft as cloth in my hand. They didn’t feel like money at all. “It’s important.” She was smiling knowingly now. I had a flutter in the back of my throat. A warning. “What is?” “Having a little adventure.” “Mom.” I didn’t like how she put that. Like she knew what I was up to when she didn’t know and wouldn’t even ask. Like she assumed I would run off to the casino and get drunk, make myself into an asshole by getting high on four fucking dollars. Like she wanted me to. “I’m just telling you I’ll do the wood tomorrow, okay? I’m telling you to tell dad, alright?” She tossed me my blue flannel from her pile, still warm from the sun, smelling of sun and cedar. “Go.” She went back to folding. “I’m not going to pry, okay? Don’t expect me to ask for her mother’s name, or something. Or give you, like, a curfew. I’m not going to do that.” In the car, Patra drove with one foot on the gas pedal and one foot on the break. The 79. whole car shuddered as it ground through gears, then shot forward in rapid bursts. She was trying to rub a spot off her skirt as she drove, and she had more instructions than usual: Give him two glasses of water before he eats, two crackers at three, tuna on toast at five. I listened but didn’t reply. I was thinking about the bills in my pocket, about the salsa jar on the shelf over the sink. I was thinking about the jars of lures we’d made to sell, and didn’t, about the jars of raspberry jam we’d filled to peddle in the diner on weekends, about my mother folding all those clothes made from other clothes. When I stayed silent, Patra’s eyes flicked over to me, then back to the road. “This okay with your mom?” “Is Patra your real name?” I felt like accusing her of something. I don’t know why. I felt suddenly angry at her niceness, which seemed to have no end, which pulled us all in, like a planet’s gravity. I felt angry at the skirt beneath the spot she was rubbing with her finger, at its byzantine floweriness. She was surprised. “No, actually. I’m Cleopatra, my whole life Cleo for short. Why?” I snuck a peek at her. One black beaded earring lay flattened across her cheek like a slug. “No reason.” “After I met Leo, I changed it. Who could be named Leo and Cleo?” She sounded defensive. “In what world would that work?” It would not. She was right. “Listen, you’ll like him,” she promised. “He’s one of those people you can hear think. You can see him making all these calculations when he talks. He’s that smart.” I wondered. I wondered if I could hear him thinking right now all those miles away, up in the air, in his plane, making his calculations, keeping track of his baby planets in their solar 80. cycles, charting galaxies so far away they were billions of years old before we knew they existed, and arranging the movements of Patra and Paul and me and this car, which, I’d noticed, Patra had washed clean for his arrival. “Sure,” I said. Patra was nervous about having left Paul asleep in his bed. But when we got back to their house, he was up and making himself a sugar sandwich, which he wanted to pack in his Tonka truck and take to his cabin in the woods. His cabin was a chair overturned, so I suggested we set up a real tent—one from their garage they’d never used—on the living room rug. Only a grayness in his skin made me think of how he’d been the day before, that giant drip of sweat on his chin like a spider’s orb. Patra was thrilled. Before she left, she kept kissing his head, rubbing her face in his hair, taking in his scent, like a dog. “Your dad’s going to be so proud!” she gushed. “So happy to see you. Good job, hon.” We spent the day setting up camp. To kill the long hours indoors (I’d promised not to take Paul outside), I taught him everything I knew about fighting off bears, about surviving off bark and berries, about living with just a knife if you had to. Only exigencies and practicalities, subsistence in extremes of hot and cold. Don’t follow a creek expecting it to lead to civilization, I told him. That’s a myth. But find some kind of clean water source before two days are up—if you have to, tie your jacket sleeves around your ankles and walk through tall grass to get dew on the sleeves. Suck it off. (We practiced this, Paul dragging his jacket across the rug.) Don’t be afraid to eat grasshoppers. Avoid caterpillars. Avoid white berries. I taught him how to crawl across ice when it was thin, how to distribute his weight, how to go like a soldier on his elbows. 81. “Here comes a bear after you!” I told him. He crawled for a minute, took a rest. “Here comes a wolf!” “Nothing to worry about.” He was panting. His cheeks were bright red. “They’re. Nice.” “Good,” I said. I lay down on my stomach beside him. At five on the dot, I gave Paul his tuna on toast. Just exactly that: tuna from a can, the water squeezed out, gray meat mushed with a fork over a dry field of bread. Paul barely nibbled this, then went in big for a dessert of broken animal crackers. At seven, I gave him his bath. I filled the water first with stirred-up shampoo, making a boatload of frothy bubbles. Then I pretended to examine a bug bite on my ankle as he tugged off his pants and his diaper. Absentmindedly, I pulled the cap off my scab, which let out a stream of blood like a brand new wound. I took my time swiping my skin clean. Eventually, I peeked over at Paul in the bath, where he was briskly stacking up two towers of bubbles on his knees. We did not talk. Only after I laid out his pajamas, only after I’d wrapped him in towels and tossed away the old diaper and laid out another, did he initiate a conversation. “Are you an explorer?” he asked. The furthest I’d been in a bus was Bemidji, on a school trip to the Paul Bunyan statue. The furthest I’d been in a canoe was a five-day trip up the Big Fork River to a part of Canada called Saganaga. “Not really,” I told him, regretfully. “Oh. Are you married then?” I put my chin in my collar. I thought I knew what he was asking now. He wanted to know what category to put me in, whether I was adult or child, whether I was more like his dad or his 82. mom or himself—or something else, some novel discovery. My fingertips felt heavy on his pajama buttons as I buttoned him up. “No. Not really.” At that, he looked so unreasonably dismayed. I thought of Lily then. I thought of how she went from being treated like a stupid girl to being treated like a serious threat, how she did it in two months flat, and as I did I stole a look into Paul’s dark eyes, which seemed sometimes gray, sometimes green, sometimes almost black. I shrugged at him. “There was a guy once. Named Adam.” “Was he an explorer?” “He was from California,” I said, expecting to impress him a little. “He was an actor. Well, no. Actually, a teacher.” “Sounds like my dad. He was a teacher to my mom in college.” I would have liked to hear more about that, but Paul—now dressed, wet hair dripping down his neck—ran off to slay a bear and drink some dew and start the campfire. At eight, Patra was still gone, so we crawled in the tent we’d set up on the rug and zipped up the fly. “Shoes off?” I said. “Check.” “Hatchet by your head for defense?” He touched the wooden handle of the hatchet. “Yep.” He made a ball of his body in his sleeping bag, tucked his leather glove up under his head, and then, like a stone tossed in water, sank straight into sleep. I lay down on the other side of the tent: it was very warm and quiet in there, it had an underground feeling. I meant to stay 83. awake until Patra and the husband came back, but the tent inside the house muffled all the regular night sounds, so I couldn’t hear the crickets or the owls or anything. All I heard was Paul’s breath against the nylon, a very hushed sound. I heard the black cat leaping off the windowsill, once, his bell jingling across the room. Some time later—a few minutes? a few hours?—I heard Patra, whispering. She was on her knees, halfway in the tent, hanging over us. She was a shadow and a scent, not much more than that, her jacket drooping down from her haunches. “Everything okay?” she asked. “He’s fine,” I said. She crawled in on her hands and knees and kissed Paul’s cheek, then, sighing, lay down between us. Her jacket smelled of fast food and wet woods. She must have come quickly from the car, because I could hear her heart beat. I could hear it pounding and then, little by little, settling down, getting back into its routine. Though maybe it was mine I heard. Maybe I’d woken up afraid of something. “Cozy,” she said. “So much better than sitting alone in a car for seven hours.” I turned towards her: “Where is he?” She shoved out a big breath. “Delayed. Delayed, then canceled.” Patra hadn’t zipped up the tent fly, so I crawled over and did that for her. Laid back. When I did, I could feel Patra’s dry hair beneath my ear on the pillow. I could smell the cool woods in her hair, even over the scent of her coconut shampoo. She was in her jacket, and every time she moved you could hear it, the synthetic fibers crunching under her weight. “I should take him to bed,” she whispered. 84. “Okay,” I said. She didn’t move. She lay so still even her jacket was quiet now. “I’m exhausted,” she whimpered. As she spoke, her voice did a little u-turn in the dark—it drove right from exhaustion into despair, right off some invisible bridge between us. I didn’t wonder what made her sound like that. I didn’t have to guess what upset her. “He’s really okay,” I said. She began to cry. She was breathing and then it was something else. She put her palm over her mouth, trying, unsuccessfully, to stop up the sound. Sorry, she might have said between breaths, or, for God’s sake, or stay here. “Hey,” I said after a moment. “No shoes in the tent.” So I crawled over to her feet and plucked open the buckle on her suede boot. I slipped my fingers in and felt the bony little knob of one of her heels, hot and damp in my hands, in her sock. Then I tugged the boot away. I reached over and pulled off the other boot as well. Her feet in her socks seemed so vulnerable to me, so ridiculously small. I lay them down next to each other. At the other end of the tent, the crying stopped. I heard it turn back into regular breathing. Before I lay back, before I pulled the sleeping bag over Patra and myself, I checked the hatchet out of habit. The wooden handle under my fingers was like a promise fulfilled. I knew, before touching it, everything there was to know about it. Which made me confident and glad. Later when I woke up, I saw Patra had curled up around Paul. Back to me. But I could feel her spine right through her jacket when I leaned in close, all those little vertebrae linked up, all those bones laid out, like a secret. The night had come down hard, finally. Thunder was rumbling far away. Wind had kicked up waves, and I could hear them on the shore of the lake, 85. shoving pebbles forward and back. I could hear pine needles raking the roof. I could hear Paul and Patra, breathing in syncopation. Happy. I was happy. I barely recognized the feeling. So who could blame me for wishing that the husband’s rescheduled plane would drift into a low-lying thunderhead? That it would shunt in sudden turbulence, lose elevation, rise up again too fast? Who could blame me for wanting him to lose his stomach, then his nerves—hunching over his knees and vomiting onto his leather shoes? I’d never been in a plane, but I’d seen them fly overhead a thousand times. I knew the difference between sipping a soda and exploding in flames could be seconds. Less. Death can be easy, in its way. It didn’t feel cruel to wish it on him. I’d seen Mr. Adler go. Afterwards, there would be Gatorade for the grieving. Soon, or soon enough, everyone would move on to other things. I felt the tent I’d built gather us in, Paul and Patra. Patra and me. I slept and woke. I dreamed of the dogs. I dreamed of taking Patra and Paul out on the canoe, currents like underwater hands thrusting the boat around, so we had to fight to go forward. My paddle guiding us towards shore. Or maybe guiding us away from it, maybe we were leaving after all. I slept and woke. Slept. Eventually, just after dawn, I heard something scuffling around outside. It sounded like a raccoon in the trash, or a possum in the brush. It sounded like a slow-moving mammal dragging dead weight, unsettling the driveway stones. Then I heard a car door thump. Very slowly, I sat up and pulled the hatchet from behind Paul’s pillow. I unzipped the tent, tiptoed across all those braided rugs, crept to the front window. There, in the driveway, in the early morning light, stood 86. a man in a blue slicker next to a rental car. He was working a key into his pocket. He looked gaunt and harmless—he was going a little bald—so I didn’t have the hatchet raised up when he opened the door. I just held it in one hand where he could see it, and Patra was right: I could hear him think. I could hear him taking in the dark room and the tent on the floor and the scrawny teenager coming out from the shadows, with a good-sized weapon. Here’s how the story about Lily went. It was simple at first, but, as time passed, as the rumors spread, it grew more and more detailed. Mr. Grierson, last fall, had taken Lily out on Gone Lake in a canoe. Gone Lake was the largest lake of three just outside of town. It was so round that in the center, the banks seemed just a ribbon of black, and in the gloom of a late October afternoon, those banks no doubt disappeared altogether. Everyone could imagine this. It was a good choice, Gone Lake. They both paddled because, Mr. Grierson said, a little exercise builds trust between people. History, posture, elocution, trust. Mr. Grierson steered, though Lily, of course, could have gotten them where he wanted to go much faster. Like all of us, she could paddle a boat like she could ride a bike. Mr. Grierson, the Californian, splashed and tottered. Got his pants soaked, got his shoes wet. So by the time they reached the middle of the lake, the day was gone and the water was oil-black. The sky, clear, was thick with stars. And though it was chilly—though most of the aspens had let loose of their leaves already, so that they caked the boat’s prow—they didn’t wear gloves or hats. They had to set their dripping paddles across their laps, had to warm their hands, in turns, on a thermos lid of steaming coffee. At that point, or at any point along the way, Lily could have tipped the boat over and stranded Mr. Grierson. All it would have taken was a sudden hard lurch to one side. She knew this lake like it was her own pretty face in a mirror; he knew nothing at all. He acknowledged as 87. much. He said he wanted Lily to know how vulnerable he was. How his fate was in her hands, how, if he survived this, if he was lucky enough to teach Lily’s children the history of America twenty years down the line, it would be because of her kindness and mercy. He wanted her to know how grateful he was to her, in advance. Before he unzipped his pants, before he said Just a kiss and pushed her down, he wanted her to know she had a choice. 88. VIII. Leo’s pancakes had chocolate chips and raisins. His orange juice was thick, boggy and sweet with pulp. He played word games as he cooked, Liar Liar and Mental Hangman. Paul’s guesses were the same every time. MOM and PAUL. As he made our breakfast, Leo found lots of excuses for touching people, Patra of course—who was grinning like an idiot, still in yesterday’s clothes—but also Paul, whom he carried on his back as he cooked, as he flipped things with spatulas. And also me. “Here, Linda,” he said, his hand on my back as he ushered me to the table with a plate of pancakes. He wore a bright blue t-shirt and a matching fleece vest. But his shoes were real enough. Red Wing boots. No one had told him to take them off at the door. “Sit, eat!” he said, though I kept threatening to leave, kept saying that I needed to get home, that I needed to brush my teeth and get started on homework. “Sit! Eat!” Paul yelled. He pounded the table with his utensils. Patra had been sitting at the table for a long time already, her legs drawn up to her chin, her red eyes blinking. Her newly cut hair was a frizzy halo of yellow and gold. All her makeup 89. was gone, save a tiny wedge of mascara on one eyelid. She licked maple syrup from her plate with her finger. She lifted up the hatchet with her sticky hands, pretended to take a swipe at Leo when he said all the orange juice was gone. “Fi fie foe fum!” Paul screeched. “Patty,” the husband scolded. But she seemed surrounded by a force field of pleasure, and just grinned up at him. She set down the hatchet and wiped her hands on her skirt. “Who needs napkins?” her husband asked, handing Patra one first. I left when the sun came over the treetops, when it bore a shaft of light and dust into my skull, turning everything else in the room into shadows. Paul was shouting about Europa’s capital, and Patra was saying something about Paul’s “demonstration,” so no one noticed much when I got up for more milk and slipped out the door. Last night’s rain gave the sunny woods a squinty newborn look. It seemed fizzed, fermented—everything shimmering and throwing lights. I was almost out of sight of the house, almost to the tasseled pines, when I heard someone behind me on the path. “Linda, wait!” Patra called. I turned and saw her running awkwardly, stumbling over roots and pinecones. She was still in her socks. I held my breath when I saw her coming like that—long wrinkled skirt caught between her legs, her hair shot through with lights, like a mane. “Thanks!” she said, handing me four ten-dollar bills. My heart sank. I already had four soft, unspent bills in my pocket from my mother. I already had money enough from a month of Paul to buy a kayak, or a bus ticket to Chicago, or pure-bred malamute if I wanted. The problem was, I couldn’t bring myself to want any of these things quite enough. “No, thanks,” I mumbled. Refusing to hold out my hand. 90. “You’ve got to take it, Linda. I’ll feel bad.” She mock-pouted. Mock-stamped her foot. “Okay.” That’s not my problem, I meant. I turned to leave. “I’m going to bury it here under this rock if you won’t take it. I’m not kidding!” I could see she was still buzzed from the conversation inside the house—the back-and-forth of it, the pointless frolic. “Here I go, burying your wages!” she said. “Dig, dig.” She really did. She got down on her hands and knees in the dirt, in her skirt. She went ahead and lifted a piece of granite, revealing a squirming mass of earthworms, woven intricately, writhing skyward. It was like the guts of the woods were showing. “Seriously!” she called. I shrugged. “Here goes your money. Under a rock with the bugs.” “Bye,” I said. Finally, she stood up and shook her head at me, unable to keep from grinning. Hands on her hips. “You’re a pretty funny kid, you know?” Her socks were black with dirt, and so were her palms. “You’re a weird adult.” I arrived home muddy from my walk through the woods. The dogs shimmied around my legs as I made my way to the door. “Mongrels,” I told them, bending down and making sure to touch them all the exact same amount, even old Abe who was my favorite. Two pats on the side of each ribcage. Then I straightened up. I could just catch the rumbling voices of my parents through the screen window, and I thought maybe I’d hear my name, Madeleine—but no, they were talking about a groundhog in the garden. I turned impulsively and went in the other direction. 91. The shed was cool and dark, the roof beam awhirl with startled sparrows. I stood still and listened to them flap. I glanced at the fish cooler but I couldn’t bear the idea—not after last night, not right now—of slicing the ribcages out of a dozen walleye. My hands got so cold doing this work, even in spring. There were so many tiny bones to dispose of, so many bucketfuls of gleaming skins. Doing my take-home trig exam would be no better—would be worse, probably—so I stood in the musty shed a long minute, wavering, before filling my backpack with a few things, tying a crushed rain slicker around my hips, and dragging the Wenona down to shore. The minute the canoe touched water, it moved all on its own. Every stroke with the paddle was almost excessive. There wasn’t a ripple on the lake, not a single wave: you could see clear to the bottom. You could see the walleye rising, the lily pads collapsing under the prow. You could see all the air bubbles winding away in a tail behind the boat. At the far end of the lake, I pulled the canoe ashore, bent down and rolled it up onto my shoulders, my head inside the hull. It took me a second to get the balance of it right before I set off on the rocky portage. The next lake over, Mill Lake, was much larger than ours, its shore studded with RVs and pickups at the National Forest campground. Speed boats wrecked the surface, leaving behind twenty-foot troughs. They didn’t slow down when they saw me coming. They were in a hurry to get to the next fishing spot, green awnings rippling as they went, poles of all sorts whipping around in their attachments at the stern. I was surprised to see a woman in a red bikini bumping in an inner tube behind one of them. The water was still pretty cold. “Hey, hi!” she screamed at me over the roar of the engine, but she was already two hundred feet away by the time she finished yelling. Whatever I said she wouldn’t hear. I kept paddling. After another half-hour, clouds started hunkering down over the treetops, 92. and a breeze nicked the lake’s surface, giving it the look of old skin. At that point, all the weekenders started headed in and tying up their boats, fearing a return of bad weather. They were always confusing clouds with danger, seeing all clouds as interchangeable. They turned on lights in their RVs and tents, making two o’clock seem like dusk. I wound my way through the little stream that connected Mill Lake to Lake Winesaga. From there, Winesaga lay in front of me like an arrow—long and narrow, pointing north. The Reservation was on the far end. When I’d been to out here last, years ago to get some muskrat traps with my dad, the Reservation had been just a few buildings. It had just one paved road and maybe a dozen mobile homes, a pack of roaming lab-mixes. Now, as I drew closer to shore, I saw that all the dogs were behind chain link fences. There was a Taco Bell, a parking lot the size of a football field, and a stoplight. The new casino on the highway had done well. I saw a Heritage Center made from prim, narrow logs and a fish-shaped sign that said Mino-o-dapin! Welcome. I beached the canoe and shunted it discreetly under a buckthorn bush. Then I set off down the asphalt streets, which disintegrated into the front lawns of pre-fab houses. All of them: white, aluminum-sided. All of them bookended with porches and two-car garages, crowned with satellite dishes, fronted with pickup trucks. The Reservation seemed deserted but for a group of boys, who came out of the woods with dirt on their hands, sweater-sleeves pushed up. They carried popsicle-stick crosses they were using as guns. Pow, one of them said. Another held up his cross, saying, Stay back, Leviathan. “Do you know Lily?” I squinted at them. “Holburn,” I added, in case it wasn’t clear. By then, she’d missed exactly three days of class. Last I’d seen her, Tuesday, she’d been 93. handing Ms. Lundgren a pink slip from the principal. She’d been tugging her long black hair out from her jacket collar, pulling it up and over her head, letting it slither down over her hood. Within seconds the door had closed behind her. Ms. Lundgren had turned back to the board and smeared away her chalked notes with a fist. “Why should we tell you?” one of the boys—their Leviathan-hunting leader—asked. “I’ll give you money. I’ll give you a dollar each if you tell me where she lives.” They thought about it. They were boys of a certain age, who didn’t need to confer to make decisions. I watched them stand still for a moment, and then they agreed as if by telepathy, barely lifting their shoulders. “Her dad lives down there.” One of them pointed at the house at the end of the road with his cross. So I handed over all my mother’s bills, flat and warm from two days in my pocket. The moment they were paid the boys turned on me. They held up their crosses and harangued me: “What do you want from Lily the Organ? She’s a wee-wee sucker homo freak. You a homo, too, or something?” I sighed. I’d fielded this question so many times before from eight-year-olds. “A Homo sapiens?” I asked. They shrugged, uncertain. “I am.” “Oh, barf.” “And I gave you homo money, so you can go buy homo medicine—” I turned away from them now, away from their delighted disgust—“which will make you, if you’re lucky, a little more human.” I left them using their popsicle-stick crosses to gag themselves, and headed down the 94. street where they’d pointed. I didn’t approach Lily’s house from the front. I went around the back, where the grass was un-mowed and woods was encroaching. Fir and more fir. But there was a swept concrete patio with a painted wicker chair, and when I looked in the back window, I could see dishes stacked up neatly in the drainer. I could see a pine table with folding chairs pushed in on all sides, a lit fish tank awhirl in bubbles. It was a small house, though tidy and aspirational, with a big TV in the corner and a crocheted blanket over the back of the couch. I saw the pink scarf Lily stole from the Lost and Found on a hook by the front door, tassels trembling in some unseen draft. As I watched it move in the breeze, I saw that the hook it was hung from was in fact a horn, centered on a mounted deer head. The thing had its wide white mouth closed, its white nostrils flaring. It was a taxidermy unicorn. I took a step back from the window. From behind me a man’s voice said, “Lily?” I turned. Someone lay in a lawn chair in the deep shade under a far fir. “Lil, you back? It was Mr. Holburn, and as I watched, he took a deep breath, pushed himself up straighter in the frayed nylon chair. I tried to think of something to explain myself—I’d been picking early Juneberries, I’d lost my way—but then I saw the 40 in his hand, the pile of empties overturned in the moss. It was Sunday afternoon, Memorial Day weekend, so it probably didn’t matter what I said. He wouldn’t remember once I left. There was a bright yellow pine needle hanging from his grey beard. He swung his legs off the lawn chair and started to stand up. “You back now? I’ve been waiting here—” His aggrieved expression drained the moment he stepped out of the shade. That’s when 95. he understood that a mistake had been made, and forgot that he’d made it just as fast, giving in to a long, laden blink of his eyes. When he opened his eyes again, he was squinting so fiercely he looked like he was in pain. “You?” he asked. “Excuse me,” he added, all politeness. “Do I know you?” “Nope,” I said, though that wasn’t quite the truth. I’d poured his coffee at the diner more than once, and years back, when I was twelve, I’d completed against his two sons, and won, in the Two Bears Classic Dog Sled Race. He’d given me a slap on the back at the finish line. He put a palm to his gut, sliding it up his Forest Service t-shirt to his throat. A sliver of belly grinned out at me. “It’s like a tree is growing from my chest, you know? I don’t feel right. It’s like a horn’s coming out of my mouth. Don’t mind me,” he apologized. He turned from me, found another can on the ground to crack open. When he turned back, his brow was furrowed. “You still here?” I reached for my backpack, unzipped. Pulled out a pair of boots. “This is private property,” he explained then. But sadly, as if it couldn’t be helped. “No hunting or fishing allowed.” Did he think I’d pulled out a tackle box or something? A gun? “I’m not hunting.” “No—” he had to search for the word. He had to look at the black and orange sign posted to a tree in their yard and read it. “—Tesspressing.” He giggled. “Where’s Lily?” I blurted. “Lily?” He shook his head slowly, like the world’s mysteries had been piled down on him. “Gone with that DA son-of-a-bitch. She said to me when she left, ‘Keep the house nice.’ And look! I’ve had all my fun outside, like she asked. I did dishes, right? I kept it up good.” He 96. sat back down in his lawn chair, grunting, as if the mere mention of these tasks had drained him. As he sat down, he pointed warily at the thing now cradled in my arms. “What’s tha—?” “It’s—” I was trying to think of some way to explain. Before I could answer, though, he brought his palm over his face like a lid. In front of the house again, I hesitated for a moment on the entryway steps. Then I set down the black suede boots I’d taken from my backpack. I wondered if there was any way to leave a note and decided immediately there wasn’t. Bending down, I arranged the boots under the eaves: toes pointed forward, heels lined up. I gave one of them a quick stroke on the flank before I took off, running, down the road. I’d collected them from the Lost and Found last Thursday after class, carried them in my backpack in the canoe across three lakes, brought them all the way here for Lily. I think I’d meant them as a kind of gift. I think I meant them as some token of secret understanding or agreement. But as I hurried off down the asphalt road, as I headed towards Lake Winesaga and my boat, I glanced back once, and there they stood—the boots I’d stolen for Lily. Their effect against the stark white siding of the house was very different from what I expected. They looked like an invisible, implacable person standing at her door. Accusing, blocking the entrance. The lake, when I got back to it, was silvered by waves. My stomach started rumbling. There was nothing in my backpack, now, save my Swiss Army knife and the rain slicker. I’d brought no provisions. I plucked a little unripe raspberry from a bush near shore and rolled it over my tongue before spitting it out. It was haired and hard. I thought of Paul. I thought of Paul in the cottage—taking down the tent with Patra, Leo presiding with the spatula—and I decided to 97. practice survival, right then and there. I practiced being starving, stranded, being a hundred miles from civilization, from people. I shoved off with my paddle and headed straight to the center of Winesaga, where waves crushed against the prow and mist wetted my face. The boat bobbed, and I dug in deeper with the paddle to straighten my course. To my right, to my left, the black- arrow faces of loons appeared over and over. Or maybe it was the same loon, diving under my boat, trailing me. Loons have been known to do that. This time around the three lakes ran together. They were far less differentiated on the way back. All the RVs on shore looked alike. You could see clotheslines whipping with towels, fishing boats nodding on ropes, the occasional beer can or milk carton skating across the water. To pass the time, to distract myself, I counted eleven (plus one) RVs and eleven (plus one) boats. I counted eleven minus two ducks on the bank, eleven strokes of the paddle to the portage: you can make a pattern, of course, if you fudge. You can take eleven breaths and then hold it. You can see eleven stars coming out over the horizon if you don’t look for more. I only have one real memory from when I was four. It involves Tameka, who was a year or so older than me, who slept with me in a bottom bunk in the bunkhouse until the commune broke up. I remember Tameka had a drapey orange sweater with big alphabet letters, which she rolled into fat donuts at the sleeves. The scar on her left elbow was purple. Her hands were a deep brown on the backs, white on the heels. Of course, there were lots of Big Kids around, faster and bigger than both of us, who moved in a pack and hit. But Tameka was quieter, lovelier. Mine. She bit her nails off into a pile, saved them in a clear plastic baggie that she squashed into a ball and put in her armpit. Her stash, she called it. Don’t tell, she whispered. Of course, I wouldn’t. Of course not. 98. You’re lucky,” everyone was always telling us. The Parents, as they went by with axes. “Lucky ducks?” Tameka wondered. Ducks, I agreed. We flew away into the woods. Here’s what I remember best from that time. For a few weeks when I was almost five, Tameka and I were sick together. We lay in our bed and slept, we swam into dreams and out, we woke up coughing at the same moment. I remember the heat, the endless strangling blankets. I remember sucking the tip of Tameka’s braid. I remember Tameka deciding that we didn’t have to speak to each other anymore: we knew each other’s thoughts just by being in the same world together, she said. The way loons did or the sneaky silver carp—you know how they always dive down at exactly the same moment? They’re mind readers, they see into the future and avert disasters, that’s what being sick is. Okay? In bed, Tameka pulled the tip of her braid from my mouth and waited for me to agree. Okay, then, I thought. After that, I watched Tameka like I was a loon, with a flat button eye that didn’t move, that saw everything across the lake and never blinked. Whenever she lifted her spoon to her mouth, I lifted mine too, and we both swallowed mushed-up rice down into our bellies. Later, when Tameka wanted to scratch her scab, I wanted to scratch mine too—until it bled down my leg and into my toenail cracks. And when the Parents started fighting at Meeting, waving their arms and holding their heads, Tameka and I decided at the same time to sneak out the back door and down into the cattails—that empire of green stalks—and when we came out on the other side we had to squint in the bright sun. We ran up the Big Rocks together, ripping up little swaths of moss with our sandaled feet. We scrambled up the far bank to The Road, and walked all the way to The Highway by ourselves, collecting the good pinecones and leaving the stupid ones, 99. carrying armloads, and—amazed at our newfound strength, our endurance—we kept right on going towards Town. We weren’t afraid of the trucks that blew past us. Gnashing their terrible teeth, I thought. Showing their terrible claws, Tameka thought. I remember one of those truck drivers slowed down as he passed, holding out a long white arm from his rolled-down window. “Hey, watch it!” he called, but we waited until he was close enough to shoot with a rifle in the head, and we did—with our trigger fingers, bam—and screamed, “Be still!” We weren’t worried about him or his little white hand, waving, waving, waving at us from up high. We knew where we were going. We knew in a way we would not say to anyone, a way past explaining, a way like the carp, or like the loons—who dove beneath the surface at the exact same moment and appeared as tiny points on the far side of the lake. One, two. We blew kisses at the deer. We threw pinecones in the road. We watched trucks swerve. One of the Big Boys eventually showed up, yelling at us, coming down the road behind on his bike. We liked how his greasy black hair had blown back and made two weird horns over his ears, like the beginnings of antlers. Tameka and I laughed. He stopped when he neared us. He had a face like he was chewing something he couldn’t get his lips around, and only later did I wonder what it must have been like to be fourteen in that crowd, all those shrieking little kids and whining hippie songs, and not an empty room anywhere, ever. There were always too many of us, too few beds and clean spoons, too few rolls of toilet paper. What was his name? Did somebody send him after us? What he didn’t like was little girls laughing. He was pissed off and he made that clear to us, yelling, “Are you two crazy? Get the hell out of the road!” Then he paused, calmed himself. 100. With two hands, he smoothed down his horns, one, then the other, and I remember how he drew his hair back into a stubby ponytail. Then, at last, he got his mouth to say the thing he was supposed to say. “You’re detracting from our overall positive experience.” He sighed. “We’re lucky,” Tameka reminded him, tapping her own lucky forehead. Twice. “You’re in deep dog doo,” he corrected. The year I was twenty-six, I totaled my car. I was heading back to Duluth after my father’s funeral when I swerved around two skeletal deer and crashed into a stand of aspens. I was just two miles from my parents’ cabin when it happened, three and a half miles to Loose River, and I kept trying my cell phone—even though I knew coverage was spotty here, and even though I was pretty sure my service had been cut because I’d failed to pay my bill on time. I kept opening up my phone and saying, Please. As if the force of desire alone could change the laws of physics, could pull electricity out of the battery or extract cellular waves from regular old wind currents. It would have been an easy walk back to the cabin, where I’d left my mother twenty minutes before. Please work, I pleaded into the dead phone. A few cars drove by and every time they did I ducked down. I didn’t want to have to go back to my mother and explain why I was still around. When those two deer came creeping again out of the woods at last, when I saw them heading back to the roadside to nibble grass, I gathered up my purse and backpack, found my father’s cigar in the glove compartment, and headed off down the road. It was three when I started walking, and long past dark by the time I hit the first gas station. I went in the opposite direction of Loose River, aiming for Bearfin, which was eleven miles further north. At first as I walked, I kept going through the numbers, making a hundred different plans 101. to pay for the car repairs and the phone bill and the boots that—as I went—lost one of their heels. Then at some point, I stopped making plans. Plans just stopped coming to me. In Bearfin, the mechanic who drove out to look at my car offered me six hundred dollars for parts on the spot. I took the cash, got a room in a Motel 6, threw my phone in the river behind the parking lot, and bought a used motorcycle the next morning. I called and quit my part-time retail job in Duluth using a pay phone at the gas station. I didn’t call my mom, who’d installed a landline by then. I let her think I was on my way back to Duluth. It was five hours on the road to the Twin Cities, and the whole way I kept telling myself that I liked the rusty little Kawasaki, that I loved the speed, though the shuddering wind gave me a headache and staying hunched up in one position for so long made my whole body stiff. It was boring and dreary being a biker, I realized. So in Saint Paul, I sold the bike to another mechanic, one with a pierced tongue and a pierced navel, which I found out about because I started sleeping with him after I used the bike money to rent an apartment. That felt good, taking the mechanic home to the studio apartment I shared with a roommate found through a Starbucks posting. I liked sneaking him in, fucking him quietly and quickly in my futon bed, seeing nothing in the dark, getting rid of him by morning. By morning, by seven, my roommate was always up doing stretches, doing yoga before job interviews, improving herself. Once during this period, I woke up to my roommate singing as she opened the windows, and in my groggy state, I called her Patra. “Morning, Patra,” I said, surprising myself. As if Patra were not a proper name, but a feeling I’d once had—a lost feeling come back, something not unlike happiness. My roommate, Ann, who was from a Manitoba wheat farm, studiously ignored this eccentricity along with all my other oddities, my snuck-in boyfriend and shaved head. She’d recently gotten a tattoo of a heart on her ankle, the most aggressive rebellion she could think of 102. against her Lutheran parents, and she sat on our carpet, still humming, cleaning her infected ankle with a folded baby wipe. Only after she finished her task did she set the wipe in the trash and look over at me again: “Good morning, Linda.” As if we hadn’t done these pleasantries five minutes before, as if we could, with discipline, deal with my distressing peculiarities the way you dealt with an unfortunate accent or a child chewing her nails. “Good morning, Patra,” I said, to freak her out, to mess with her a little. Not long after I turned thirty-seven, it occurred to me that I could probably look up Patra on-line. I don’t know why this came to me after so many years, but once it did I spent several hours tracking her down. She’d changed her last name by that time, so she wasn’t easy to find, though eventually I remembered that she’d been called Cleo before I knew her. I found a Cleo Lammer who might have been Patra, but there was so little about her to go off of. Aside from all the articles from the trial, which I didn’t look at, there was a current address in Tucson and a recipe submitted to a baking website for popcorn balls. A little too sticky, one reviewer said. Needs vanilla, another wrote. Dissatisfied, I poked around the University of Michigan website for a while and, eventually, finding nothing more, I decided to look up Tameka instead. I looked up Tameka and saw her life like she’d left it there for me to find, every step laid out in the kind of narrative detail you rarely find on the internet. Tameka Trevor graduated from a high school in Hyde Park, Chicago, went to Wesleyan, became a probate attorney, married a pediatrician from Doctors Without Borders named Wayne. She had two athletic twin daughters, photographed playing basketball in the Wesleyan Alumni magazine. She had a fixer-upper in Edina, Minnesota, which was the home of the Hornets, an upscale suburb of Minneapolis. Her 103. house, pictured in realty shots before she bought it, was flanked by a man-made pond. We’d know each other’s thoughts just by being in the world together, she’d said to me once. I was back in Loose River by the time I thought to look her up. I was taking care of my mother, trying to find a buyer for the property to pay off debts. By then, Tameka had left our world long ago. Or I did. I couldn’t imagine even one of her thoughts. On the Tuesday after Memorial Day, I was a few minutes early arriving at the Gardner house. The weekend’s rain had subsided finally. All the out-of-towners had left till June, and the minute they were gone, the temperature had shot up to eighty. It was a fluke of course, but that plus the rain brought out the first mosquitoes. They descended in any patch of shade. As I walked to the Gardner house, I tried to stay in the middle of the road, in the sun, to avoid them. I had to slap them away when they floated in their doddery, new-born way out of the woods. I was wiping blood from the back of my hand when I saw Patra at the end of her driveway. She gave me a half-smile. She was wearing jeans and her Michigan sweatshirt. Galoshes. “Hey,” I told her, smiling. She came across the gravel, eyebrows up, as if in prearrangement to some agreement she wanted me to make with her. “Thanks so much again for your help this weekend.” “Sure,” I said. Then we just stood there. I could see the mosquitoes threading their way to us from the woods, and I wondered why Patra was out here on the road by herself, if she’d come to intercept me. I hoisted my backpack higher on my back. “Um, I was thinking maybe Paul and I could try swimming today,” I told her. “It might be warm enough.” 104. “Oh, that would be wonderful. Yes. Thank you.” Her most functional smile flashed into place. “But, actually. That’s what I wanted to say. I think we’ll be okay for a couple of days.” Without me, she meant. I glanced at the lake house behind her with its pulled shades, its closed door, its sealed- log façade. All the good windows were on the other side, the direction that faced the lake. And all weekend, those windows had been black with sunlight (the days were getting long now), except for an hour or two in the evenings when Patra and the husband ate in dim lamplight. I hadn’t seen any of them out on their deck for days, and I wondered if they’d driven somewhere together—to the Forest Service Nature Center to see my taxidermy wolf, or to Bearfin to return the rental car, or to the diner in town for a piece of pie. I wondered if they’d gone as far as Whitehead, where there was a playground with two slides. A tennis court. A movie theater. Patra was still smiling intensely. “I mean, we’ll be okay with both Leo and me around, for now. But thank you, Linda.” “Sure.” “I’ll definitely call.” “Great.” I’d never given her any number to call on. Mosquitoes, I saw, were all over Patra now, flickering at her hands and neck. She was waving at her ears. I stood still and let them get me if they wanted. I could feel a dozen or more probing the hair on my arms, and as they did I felt some measure of relief. It felt right, now, to give in to the mosquito feast, to do nothing to avoid them. “Tell Paul I say hi!” I said, pointing my cheerfulness straight at Patra. Aiming precisely. “Tell him I hope he’s feeling better!” Did a look of panic catch on her smile? Maybe I’m only remembering it that way now. “Of course! Sure! He says hi, too!” 105. But when I turned to leave, Patra stopped me. She took a few steps forward, waving a mosquito from her head and slapping one on her arm. “Hey, Linda—” She touched my elbow— “There’s something else.” I waited for her to say what it was. She was very close to me now, and I could see she was chewing her lip, sweating a little. “It’s Drake.” She brushed a mosquito from her eye, waved another from my neck. “Have you seen him?” I thought of the white cat as I’d seen him last, Friday afternoon, meowing like an alarm clock at the sliding door. “No,” I said. 106. IX. In less than a week school let out. There were three long days of war movies to watch— Glory, Dr. Zhivago, M*A*S*H—while teachers sat in the dark back of the class and calculated grades. Lily’s desk still sat empty. All the unclaimed items in the Lost and Found were confiscated by Student Council for charity. All the goose shit was cleared off the football field for graduation ceremony, and the bulletin boards in the halls were stripped down to exposed pushpins, to itty-bitty holes poked in cork. The last day of school began with someone pulling the fire alarm during homeroom, so we all went out to the parking lot—and stood for ten minutes on the puddly concrete—then shambled back inside again. When the final bell rang that afternoon, the seniors flung their notebooks out the open windows. They’d made a plan of it, I guess. You could hear them whooping one story up, pushing back their chairs and thudding around. Everyone rushed from Life Science to join them, the sophomore hockey players and Karens, but I stayed put at my desk and watched all that paper come down outside. It fell surprisingly slowly, it seemed to me, catching drafts. You could see exams and tests and notes 107. and graphs. You could see years of education whisking down, whirling over parked cars and across Main, and ending up in gutters and creeks, draped soggily over logs and drainpipes. When I stood up there was just Ms. Lundgren left rewinding Project X on the VCR. “Have a good summer,” she said, crouching in front of the TV consol. “Summer doesn’t technically start for another week,” I told her. “True,” she acknowledged, glancing up. “Have a good spring, then.” The days gaped open after that. No school, no job, daylight going on and on like it would never quit. I cleaned all the fish in the cooler and did the north-forty wood the first day, then I dithered about in the boat for a few more, catching carp near the beaver dam. I filled the net without trying, cleaned all the tackle one morning, took a comb to the dogs and brushed away the mats leftover from their winter coats. One afternoon I walked the six miles into town and bought toothpaste and toilet paper at the Pamida. My mom gave me a rubber-banded roll of ones and fives for this purpose, and afterwards I went to the bank, where I filled out a pink slip at the counter and withdrew two twenty-dollar bills. The woman at the counter asked if that was how I wanted it, and I said yes. At the market, I splurged on a bag of green pears for my mom (“Argentina,” the label said) and a jar of Skippy for my dad. Then I went into Bob’s Bait and Tackle, lifting glittering lures from his bins, unhooking them from my sleeves, leaving with nothing. I paused outside in the sun. I went into the diner then, where I grabbed a pack of grape Bubble Yum before I could ask Santa Anna for cigarettes. I stuffed gum into my mouth the whole way home, chewing until my jaw hurt. Twilight and more twilight. By then the stars were already doing their summer bit, the Summer Triangle sliding north, as well as Scorpius, with its splay of pinchers and curled hook. 108. After dinner I sometimes took the canoe out and lingered until dark—especially on overcast nights, especially after nine, when twilight finally halved, and then halved again, sliding the sky through epochs of orange, then epochs of blue and purple. Then epochs of violet. The days just never seemed to get done. I huddled low in the boat and listened to the water cluck at the hull, the aluminum thud dully against the wood pilings. Sometimes, at last, a lamp would go on inside the Gardner house, and I’d see Patra through the window at the counter, Leo with his arm around her, and not much more. With Leo home, Patra went to bed earlier. With Leo home, Paul didn’t spend time anymore on the deck or the dock, though the water had warmed up and it was possible now to go swimming. I tested it out one evening, after the lights in the Gardner house went dark. I wadded up my t-shirt and jeans and underpants in the boat, then slipped into the water so fast it was like being gulped. Stirred-up rotten algae from the bottom of the lake congealed around my left leg. I kicked a little ways away from the boat, and floated, dismally, on my back, my tiny hard nipples pointing up at Scorpius. Scorpius pointed back at me. I knew I was very white from six months of winter: my chin and nipples and kneecaps all floated atop the water. After a moment, the moon slunk out from under a cloud, sprouted a tail of light across the water. It wouldn’t have been hard to look out any window in the house and see me. I was right there to be seen. Before swimming back to the canoe and getting dressed, I considered creeping ashore and knocking on the bedroom window, really scaring them. I felt the mucousy thickness of the water slide beneath me—how many years of summers had I’d lain on this lake? I considered creeping ashore, sliding open their back door, sneaking inside and taking something of theirs, but instead I took a deep breath and dove down. I moved through warmer and cooler clouds of water, kicking hard, finding the silky cold mud at the bottom with my hands. I thought of Mr. Grierson 109. in the diner again. I could see Lily with him one minute, but not the next. I could see the black back of her head over the vinyl booth, Mr. Grierson looking across at her. But then it was just Mr. Grierson alone with his book, with his paper napkin and eggs. Outside the diner windows, snow had been falling. The fluorescent lights had been buzzing, the coffee machine clucking away. At the bottom of the lake, I felt the water temperature grow colder, and I put Lily in that booth and I made him beg her. Don’t tell, don’t tell. I felt the shiver of all the air bubbles I’d created, beetling up around my arms and legs. I felt them rising up from the roots of my hair. Then, after a dark interval, my body followed. Teeth chattering in the canoe, I got dressed again. Paddled across the lake, washed the muck from my ankles with a hose, climbed the ladder to the loft over my parents’ bed, and masturbated, miserably, my wiry pubic hair catching around my fingers. I slept soundly, I always did then. By morning, order had come back to the woods. The rising sun had set down predictable shadows over everything, long and straight as bars. All that was left of the night before was the damp hair on the underside of my braid, a miniscule fleck of algae on my thigh. You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there’s always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. I don’t know. The days are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters. One day, about a week after school let out, I went to check the blackberries along the lake path to see when they’d be ready to pick. I wanted to be sure to get to them before the summer 110. people did, before the bushes were stripped bare by half-assed day-trippers. I’d been walking around for about an hour, finding no good berries, when I heard the sound of a gunned motor coming down the hill path towards the lake. There was a long, anxious rustling in the trees. I stopped, waited to yell at whoever it was for going off-trail and trashing the wilderness. But it wasn’t a tourist—it was my dad who appeared in a cloud of dust and leaves. He was riding the ATV he’d traded in for the dog sled last spring, and he lifted up an orange-gloved hand as he approached. Hello. He was in shirtsleeves, and his face was bright red. Sweat in dirty lines flowered around his neck. “Hey, kid,” he said, releasing the engine. I humphed at him. Got on. Though half the time that summer that ATV didn’t work at all, half the time it did, and for ten minutes that afternoon, I sat behind him on the hard leather seat as we rumbled through the woods destroying everything we touched—smashing ferns and golden rod and baby white pine and sumac fronds—and it was wretched, and it was so delicious, too. The next afternoon, after the fish cooler was stocked, after the wood was all chopped and stacked, I decided to take the dogs out into the woods. It had been a while since I’d gone very far with them, since March probably. Jasper and Doctor sprinted on ahead, pouncing on every trembling leaf and fern. Abe and Quiet—both almost as old as I was now—were slower and more select in their chases. Their preferred pace most of the time was an amble. They pried open the pressed quilts of leaves with their snouts, tasted every paddy of deer droppings. I took them up the ravine, where I’d taken Paul all spring, and the younger dogs leapt clean over logs and boulders. The older dogs hopped up and off. I lingered atop, looked around. All around me, dogs 111. were rolling and sniffing, squatting and urinating, scarfing down scat. Their joy at being off their chains gave me an ache beneath my ribs. It was always so, so simple to please them. But even the older dogs in the early summer could be unpredictable. By the time we’d walked for an hour in the ravine, they were disappearing in the woods for longer and longer periods. Tearing off after a scent, coming back for a pat, going further out, taking risks—and before long, even old gray-muzzled Abe had found some squirrel that needed treeing. For long stretches, I could only hear them scuffling leaves as they tracked a scent. Time after time, I thought about shouting after them, calling them back. And time after time, they returned on their own in twos and threes, tongues lolling, grazing their wet noses against my knuckles. They came back loping, their upper bodies rocking, their legs swinging gently, as if dangling an inch above the ground. Then away they’d go again sprinting, hunkering down and using gravity properly. Once, they were gone for more than twenty minutes, long enough for the woods to return to its pre-dog state, for birds to alight again on branches. Then all four dogs came thundering back at once like they’d made a plan of it, like they’d organized at last into a real wolf pack, and I saw they were chasing something small and white. It shot up a spindly little birch, which bent down double, dropping silver leaves in a pat-pat-pat. The dogs were throwing their paws in the air, flinging saliva up in glistening loops. I felt their desperation, their joy, their pitilessness. All of it. In the tree, the thing’s hackles rose in a dramatic yellow-white arch. “Oh, Drake,” I said when he hissed at me. “How did the world go for you, then?” The world, it appeared, was going crazy down below, all four dogs leaping and nipping. I gave the dogs a few choice words, shushing them. Then I turned my attention to the cat. “What now?” I asked him. But it seemed simple enough. I just shimmied up a rock next to the tree, 112. pried Drake free, easy as pie, and got him to latch onto me instead. Twenty claws sunk like twenty hooks into my bare skin. It wasn’t so bad being caught like that. I slid off the boulder and started walking, all four dogs following behind. They spun circles of ecstasy, panted miserably, did their endless orbits of triumph. So when I knocked on the Gardners’ door, there we all were. Four panting dogs and one freaked-out cat, Patra looking a little shocked, and me—me, trying to keep from grinning. “Found him,” I said. I turned then, lowered one hand to the dogs, so they lay down on the gravel—reluctantly but happily, because they thought this meant the cat was theirs. “Stay,” I said, feeling like some mini-god, some deity of dogs. I wanted Patra to see this, the control I had. Then I slipped past her with the cat and went on in. 113. X. The interior of the cabin was darker than usual. The summer foliage was out in full, shading all the west windows. Though it was midafternoon, there wasn’t a patch of direct sunlight in the main room, not a square of it. It took me a moment to see Leo in the easy chair in the corner, and a moment more to see Paul there, too, on his lap. I saw Leo with his chin balanced on Paul’s head, and Paul wrapped in a quilt, his orange-blond hair parted over each of his eyes. Something about those two inverted Vs of hair exaggerated some especially childish look Paul had. Had he always been so young? Arranged in his quilt on his father’s lap, he looked only a little past toddlerhood, just a little bit past being a baby. Patra moved behind me, closing the door. At that, Drake sprang from my arms. No one said anything as the cat crept, ears back, around the couch, then flattened and disappeared underneath. With the cat gone, with the door closed, the room took on a hush. That was Leo, I could tell. That was his influence. “Well, thank you, Linda,” he said. And Patra from behind: “That’s a relief—isn’t it, hon?” To me: “That’s such a relief.” 114. She wasn’t whispering. She was just speaking carefully. She was wearing the same thing she’d been in when I’d seen her last, her blue Michigan sweatshirt and leggings. In one hand was a browning, half-eaten apple, which she set so tenderly in the trash it was like she was finding it a nest. “Want a glass of water or something, Linda? Want some juice?” In his cocoon of blankets, Paul said, “Some juice?” I looked over at him again. “Is he still sick?” I learned in that moment that this was not a question I was allowed to ask. From his chair, I could see Leo frowning up at me, as if I’d said something rude or inept, and Paul, as if prompted to mimicry without even seeing his father’s face, frowned too. They really looked nothing alike. Paul was round-faced and blond-haired, like Patra. Leo the astronomer was gaunt and balding, lightly bearded, with curls of grey hair sticking out from behind his ears. He looked like one of those men from another country or century. He wore glasses, which had slipped to the tip of his nose, which made him seem, though he was sitting, like he was looking down from a perch. He wore black slippers. His khaki pants were rolled up once at each cuff. Patra put her hand on my arm, a gesture that might have been a friendly warning. “Paul’s fine,” she said. Leo nodded. “He’s had a demonstration, in fact. Right kiddo?” As if to prove something, Paul pulled one arm out from under the quilt. It was covered to the elbow with the leather glove, which he moved like a puppet. “We’re going to see the Tall Ships tomorrow,” he said. “The Tall Ships?” I asked, confused. “You know those old fashioned boats with the sails?” Patra asked. “The Maritime Festival in Duluth?” Leo added. 115. Patra continued, “We thought we’d do a little trip. We thought a trip to Duluth would be nice. A change of pace, right? Have you been, Linda?” “To Duluth?” I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to admit that. “To see the Tall Ships?” That was an easier question to answer. “No.” Later, in preparation for the trial, they kept asking why I didn’t pose more questions from the beginning. What was your first impression of Dr. Leonard Gardner? How would you describe the couple as parents? What kind of care, exactly, did they provide? It was hard to explain that I didn’t ask questions because they were both only exceptionally, almost excruciatingly kind. When Paul started talking with such excitement about the Tall Ships, Patra came over with a glass of amber-colored juice and kneeled in front of him. He slurped down the juice within seconds, handed the glass back to her. But she did not stand just yet—she lay her head down on his quilted lap. Leo stroked her hair and Paul did, too, with his one gloved hand. I felt ashamed to see this, and at the same time, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I could do nothing but stand there, stupidly, sweating and scratching my bites. Finally one of them murmured something, and Patra scooped up Paul, carried him off into the bedroom. I went into the kitchen and found an empty baking dish in the sink, which I filled to the brim with water for the dogs. As I was doing this, Leo stood up too. I could hear his knees creaking from across the room. He walked almost silently, though. He moved on padded soles across rugs. Not a single window was open, though it was hot this time of day and very humid. There was a strong smell in the house I hadn’t noticed a week back, when I’d been there last. It was not a bad smell, just intimate and particular—achingly sweet, full of unexceptional secrets: kitty 116. litter, laundry detergent, gas from the stove, maybe the slightest whiff of sewage from the bathroom. Leo came into the kitchen, sat at the table, and asked a few distracted questions about my family. “Twenty acres along the east shore,” I said, when he asked about the range of our lot. “They’re mostly retired,” I hedged, when he asked what my parents did for a living. “Good for them!” he said, cheerlessly. Tucking a piece of grey hair behind his ear, like a girl. At the trial, the prosecution asked, “And did you ask any questions in return?” The prosecution asked, “Weren’t you curious about him?” I was and I wasn’t. It was hard to explain how ingrained a habit it was to pretend that I understood what was happening in other people’s lives before explanations were offered. How I took in information differently, how carefully I watched Leo pour a glass of apple juice for himself and swirl it around without taking a sip. I watched as he set the glass down on a magazine, as he lifted up the juice container Patra had left behind and wiped the sweat from the bottom with his sleeve. I learned fast that he was finicky and earnest, his mind not the marvel that Patra had made it out to be, but exceptionally well-organized, exceptionally disciplined, so that he could make small talk with me about my parents, ask a reasonable series of questions, without seeming to take in even one of my answers. The pattern of the conversation, the rhythm of small talk, he knew by heart—better than that, even. He put me on guard, without ever seeming very curious, without ever giving away his real aim. “Do you have many siblings then?” “None.” “But you’re fond of children?” “Well—” 117. “Some, surely.” He raised his eyebrows, offering the correction to me. Then he smiled. As he did, I could see his moustache change shape, spread out across his face. “Paul says you’ve taught him to eat grasshoppers.” “Ummm.” “He’s grown attached to you, it seems.” “He’s gotten used to me,” I said. “You’re being modest.” I shrugged. “He doesn’t really have a lot of options.” “He’s a pretty particular kid.” Leo swirled his juice around in his glass. “And Patra says you’ve been a big help to her, too. She says she can’t imagine what she would have done—” I waited for him to finish that thought, but he was finally drinking his juice, drawing it down in modest swallows. As his throat worked he seemed to be turning something over in his head. “How about this?” He set his glass down. “Why don’t you come with us this weekend to Duluth. It would be nice for Paul, I think, and it might even give Patra and me a chance to have dinner out or something. I think she might need a little break. What do you think?” By the time I went out with the baking dish of water, not even old Abe was waiting for me on the driveway. I’d been inside for more than a half hour—I’m not sure what made me think the dogs would just stay. I set down the baking dish, sloshing water over the sides, and headed towards the aspen trail along the shore. I didn’t bother to go back inside to say goodbye. I’d already made arrangements with Leo for the morning, and home was an hour away. Even in the shade of the aspens, the sun was hot, so by the time I got back, I could feel the sweat of the afternoon on my neck and in the wet patches of t-shirt beneath my armpits. My mother came out 118. of the house, and I could see the front of her smock was smeared black with dirt. She was twisting a bud of loose skin on her elbow. “Oh, here comes Madeline! Oh, she decides to come back!” “They’re here?” I asked. But I could see the dogs for myself, chained to their stakes by the shed. They were standing up stiffly, not whining or barking the way they usually did. Eight reflective black eyes, watching me to see what would happen. “You know how traffic is on the 10 in June, don’t you?” She squinted at me, let go of her elbow. “It’s lucky none of them got hit. What happened that you lost control of all of them at once?” I was about to tell her about Drake—about rescuing the cat and returning him safe—but when I opened my mouth something else came out. “I was having a little adventure, mom.” I watched her brown eyes squint at me. “And this is part of it, actually, but it’s the boring part between the exciting bits, where the girl does the same predictable dialogue with her mother.” I got down on my haunches and roughed up Abe’s neck. I heard my mom go inside—a single flap of the tarp—and guilt swooped over me and away, like one of those birds of prey blacking the sun for an instant. Then I was just angry at the dogs, which felt better. I could see that their legs were covered in thistles and burs, that their coats had dried in front with spikes of mud. “You’re getting wild,” I told them. Which was true, I felt. I waited until I was done drying the dishes that night before I told my mother that I was going with the girl across the lake to Duluth for the weekend. “Tell your dad,” she said to that, giving me a look I couldn’t read, so I went out to the shed after the dishes were put away and sat 119. with my dad for an hour listening to a ballgame on the radio. Twins versus Royals. As we sat together on overturned buckets, my father drank three Buds, methodically, measuring each sip out, making them last to the final inning. Then he crushed the cans into flat disks, one after the other, as the announcers described the weather in Kansas City, the heat wave that had followed a thunder storm, which had knocked out so much power they had almost canceled the game. Almost, but not quite. I told my dad about going to Duluth just as he was standing up. He nodded, turned off the radio, went to the cooler and opened one more beer—as if reconsidering his prospects for the evening, as if changing his mind about something. “That front’ll be coming east by tomorrow night.” “I know.” “I thought we might get some walleye up in Goose Neck tomorrow.” “I know.” “The out-of-towners will be taking over soon.” “I know.” “Superior sure is pretty in a storm, though. Have you seen that?” Never. They picked me up at seven the next morning. I’d thought a long time about what to bring the night before, had laid out my second pair of jeans and rooted through my mom’s thrift- store bag for something other than an old t-shirt to sleep in. I found a baby blue slip my mom had collected for scraps, and though it was musty and wrinkled and too big in the chest, I thought it might pass for proper pajamas. I’d also packed my toothbrush and comb, and just before bed— 120. with the hose in the dark—I shaved my legs with my dad’s razor. The hair had grown fine and long, and the first stripe that was gone felt magical beneath my fingertips, a track of shorn skin like a silk ribbon affixed from my ankle to my thigh. I’d finished most of the first leg before I realized there was blood from a cut I couldn’t see or feel in the dark. I only knew it was blood from the greasy way it slid between by fingertips, and how it smelled. I was too disheartened to do the second leg. Instead, teeth chattering, I quickly washed my hair with the last of the shampoo and a little bit of lemon dish soap. I rinsed off my one pair of sneakers and set them out under the pines to dry. Then I turned off the hose, coiled it up, draped it over the wheelbarrow. I squeezed out the wet rope of hair that hung on my chest. When I slipped into the back seat of the blue Honda at seven, Paul was asleep in his car seat. As Leo did a three-point turn, Patra twisted around and mouthed from the front, “Good morning!” She handed me a bran muffin, still warm, crumbling from its waxed paper cup onto my lap. “Mmm. You smell good,” she said. My mouth was already full of muffin. The dry crumbs filled up every bit of space between my teeth and tongue, every empty place available. Patra grinned. “Good, eat up. Leo never likes to stop. He’ll drive straight through anything. Tornadoes, floods. Breakfast and lunch.” “I stop! When we get there. Just say where ‘there’ is, in advance, and I’ll stop.” “Then ‘there’ is lunch. ‘There’ is twelve o’clock on the dot, okay?” “That’s when there is, then. It’s agreed.” On the highway, all the familiar points disappeared within minutes. I saw the lake in flashes between the trees, blue-grey showing through cracks of green. In Loose River, we went 121. past the high school just as the sun broke over the treetops, turning every surface into a flat knife of light. Stop signs and windows flared up as we drove past them. Leo and Patra wore dark sunglasses, but I just sat squinting, feeling dizzy and excited. Then we were on the interstate, going seventy, and Leo and Patra were talking quietly about something I couldn’t quite hear. I wanted to roll down the window, feel the speed on my face, but I held back. Midmorning, Paul woke up—squinting and stretching—and I gave him one of Patra’s bran muffins, which he held between his knees and did not eat. His eyes were slowly unpinking. “Are we in Duluth?” he asked. Hmm mmm, I said. Outside, the pine forest was unstitching, opening up into aspen groves, into grassy farms dotted with hay bales. We played a halfhearted game of Rock Paper Scissors. We played I Spy with My Little Eye. At one point, I said, “I spy a purple water tower,” so Paul craned his neck to look out his window. “I don’t see it,” he complained, setting his forehead against the window. “Let’s do mental I-Spy” “Okay.” He closed his eyes and spied his own purple water tower. He spied Thomas the Tank Engine and Duluth. After that, there was a long, indecipherable silence—while Patra fiddled with a car vent, while Leo drove through a brief rain shower—and somewhere just past the last farm it occurred to me that Paul had dozed off again. I couldn’t blame him. The car was warm and rumbling. Quietly, I ate Paul’s dry muffin and watched the pine come back, rising up along the roadside in an unbroken wall of green. We hit construction just outside of Duluth. After an hour of sitting in traffic and dust, windows up, Leo pulled off the highway for lunch. “See?” he said to Patra. “I stop.” We ate at Denny’s, where I opened the huge glossy menu and ordered—after long deliberation—soup. I was nervous about chewing, about cutting up my food with a fork and a knife. Leo sat with Patra 122. on one side the booth, and I sat with Paul on the other. Patra guffawed when my French onion soup arrived in a bread bowl as big as my head. Warily, I prodded the thick boat of cheese that floated atop the brown broth. I kept gouging out bites with my spoon that made long sagging loops of cheese from bowl to mouth. All around the restaurant, I could see other families like ours, booths with two parents on one side and two kids on the other. Paul gulped down his glass of milk, so Patra ordered a second—shaking her head, laughing at me as I struggled with my soup. “Want a bite?” I asked, when she finally reached out and plucked the string of cheese that webbed from my bowl to my mouth. She wrinkled up her nose, bringing the freckles together into a brown smudge. “Who could manage to eat that without looking like a— A baby bird or something?” “A baby bird?” She smiled. “Sucking up worms.” Leo was a more focused eater, tucking his BLT into his mouth in careful sections. But once he was finished, he turned to me, wiping his moustache with a folded napkin, and within five minutes, he’d asked me more questions than Patra ever had. I let my soup cool as he spoke. I licked the salty spoon, but did not attempt another bite. It suddenly seemed too treacherous. “What grade will you be in, then, Linda?” “Tenth,” I said. The question felt like a rebuke—of the way I ate my soup, of my childishness. Leo pushed his plate to the edge of the table. “What college are you considering?” “College?” “Or, well, what subject do you like most?” He crossed his arms on the table. 123. “History.” I couldn’t, at the moment, think of anything else. “Ah. American or European? What historical period do you like?” “The history of, um, wolves,” I said, but the minute the answer was out, it sounded foolish. I sipped the tiniest bit of soup from my spoon. “You mean natural history?” “Yep.” “So biology actually?” “Biology, I guess.” His two elbows scooted forward, bumping his empty plate. “I had to take some molecular biology courses in graduate school. In my line of work, everyone is always looking for extraterrestrials, of course. As if the universe matters only when endowed with a narrowly carbon-based definition of life.” “In the Goldilocks Zone,” I tried. Repeating what Paul had said—Paul, who’d just left in Patra’s hand to go to the bathroom. “That’s right,” he said, surprised. He folded his hands on the table, and you could see the straight planes on his fingernails where he’d cut them. “I’m not saying the molecular biologists are wrong,” he went on. “That’s not exactly what I’m saying. But I’m a scientist, too, and I think those folks tend to focus on an extremely limited set of questions.” He had a way of watching me very closely, and not seeming to watch me at all. He was a teacher, of course, probably a good one. He was one of those teachers who set up hidden traps. Like all teachers, he wanted me caught, but he wanted to lead me there, first; he wanted me to go on my own accord; he wanted me to feel like I’d made the discovery myself, that I hadn’t been lured in. 124. His chin was in his palm. “Let’s do a thought experiment.” My parka slithered off my lap. “A scientist always starts with premises, right?” He twisted the wedding band on his finger. “But so often they start with unproven premises and go awry, like the world is flat, or the human body is made up of four basic humors.” I wanted to reach for my parka, but resisted. “But of course we’ve learned that if you want to be a real scientist, Linda, you have to be more rigorous than that. You have to figure out what your premises are, first, before you decide what’s true. A biologist should always start by asking, for instance, what are the conditions we assume are required for life? And why do we assume that and not something else?” It seemed to be my turn to speak. He was waiting. “You mean—” “I mean, you have to ask yourself, from the beginning, what do you think you know?” The twenty acres of land on the east side of Still Lake. That’s still what I know best. We had red and jack pine up on the hilltop, cottonwood and birch at the bank. Three old growth white pines rose up in a feathery band over the log cabin. When I sold the south half of the lot, at last, it went for less than a forty grand, even though the market wasn’t bad. We had no dock to speak of, which brought the value down. We only ever had the ten feet of rock and sand that could be used to beach the canoes. Plus, the old commune bunkhouse—under the collapsed pine by the road—had long since returned to woods. Raccoons holed up there for years of winters. Summers, it was ridden with humming hornet nests. The log cabin was more substantial than the other buildings, at least, and we kept it even when we sold everything else; it had been built in the twenties, by a trapper who knew his business. It had a stone foundation and old growth logs 125. daubed with pine resins. It was ten-by-twenty feet, with a little bedroom behind the woodstove and a loft—where I slept all those years in my wad of army surplus sleeping bags. By the time I was in high school, we had a generator out back and a hot water heater, but both were unreliable, bought second-hand. The shed was less substantial than the cabin, just plywood nailed to two-by- fours, just salvaged bits of the ruined bunkhouse repurposed into walls. Inside, my dad kept the fishing poles and axes, a chainsaw, traps, bags of discount dog food, tools in buckets, rifle, radio, snowshoes, sawhorses. We had an outhouse behind the shed. We had two canoes. A rowboat with an outboard motor. We had an overgrown vegetable garden in a clearing on the hill, enclosed with chicken wire to keep out groundhogs and deer. Nearer the lake was reindeer moss, granite veined with quartz, lupine. We had walls of sumac along the dirt drive, until the county required that we widen the road and we cut most of it down. Our hotel rooms in Duluth had bay windows and views of the lift bridge and the bay, green hills rising up behind. The carpets and walls were a uniform white, and in each room a red silk poppy stood in a vase on a lacquered desk. A mirrored bathroom connected our two rooms, with columns of fat white towels and soaps wrapped like candy bars. I didn’t really have anything to unpack. I just climbed with my backpack onto one of the high, soft beds and watched as Leo and Patra moved between rooms, unzipping bags. They were searching for Paul’s socks, for his panda puzzle and hat, and as they did my gaze snagged something on the bedside table. The Mighty Fitz, the book was called. A hotel book. I pulled its cool weight onto my lap, began reading about the taconite ship that sank in 1975. For a half hour, I turned the book’s slick pages, studied black-and-white photos of the ship rising up from waves, then colored photos of the ship’s eroded lifeboats recovered years later. I was especially 126. interested in a huge diagram of the broken ship, the bow shown upright and turned the other way from the facedown stern. A lamp clicked on—the room was darkening. I could hear Lake Superior lapping the shore outside, enticing, so I slid off the bed and moved across the room to where Patra was now on the floor, sorting clothes. I convinced her to let me and Paul go for a walk by promising to be back before seven-thirty. “Seven fifteen,” I revised. “Let me get his jacket on, though,” she nodded. “Let me zip him up. Let me get his hat.” Behind the hotel parking lot, I found a rickety wooden staircase that led down the steep, barren bank to the water. As we descended, stair by stair, I could see brown waves dragging stones in and out of a granite cove. Lake water misted our knuckles. Gulls hung overhead. When we got to the water’s edge I let go of Paul’s hand. I tried teaching him to skip stones, but he just lobbed them in so they sunk straight down. “Like this,” I said, curving my wrist and sending one out, watching it bounce on the water four times. Five. Six. Further out, away from shore, Lake Superior was a deep turquoise-blue, almost black near the horizon. The far shore was impossible to see in the darkening evening. My dad was right. Night was arriving early because clouds were advancing from the west. There was the trawl of stones and then a hiss, as a wave leaked out between the tiny pebbles and another one came in. Paul had his hands in his jacket sleeves, and even so he was trembling. His lips were grey-blue, the color of carp. It occurred to me, then, as the sun went down, that I hadn’t really looked at him since morning. He’d been sleeping in the car. And when he was awake, he’d been turned into something of a pet by Leo, who’d carried him around, who’d talked over his head, who’d given him Lego bricks to play with. I bent down and looked at him. “Everything okay?” “Everything okay,” he repeated. 127. “We should go in?” “We should go in,” he said. Shivering, setting the round cuff of his sleeve over his nose. Inside again, Patra fed us dinner. She’d ordered room service for two, toasted cheese sandwiches and chocolate milkshakes with bent red straws. Each of our rooms had two queen- sized beds, so there was a football field of bedclothes between us, a dozen blood red pillows, bowls of peppermints in plastic twists on the nightstand. I sucked my shake in bed and watched the weather channel on the big screen TV, the storm front a pixelating haze passing to the south. It would just miss us, I saw, with the tiniest jab of dismay. Patra lay in the bed opposite, stroking Paul’s head as he slept. Eventually, Leo came in from the other room and tapped his bare wrist with a crooked finger. They had a reservation at the hotel restaurant downstairs, so when Patra glanced over at me—beached on my private shore of blankets and pillows, across the room—I whispered, “Go.” THANKYOU, she mouthed. She kissed Paul, tugged at her drooping socks, and left the room. A moment later, Leo poked his head back in and said, “We’ll be right downstairs if you need something.” As if I didn’t already know that. I crawled off the bed and crossed the room to where Paul was sleeping. Brushed crumbs from his covers, clicked off the lamp. Then I went into the bathroom and scratched open one of the tiny bars of soap with my fingernails. I didn’t know how much time I’d have before they came back, so I didn’t risk taking a bath—though I was tempted. Instead, I stood under scalding water in the shower for one magnificent minute, letting needles of water pluck open some feeling of woe, some feeling of desolation I hadn’t known I’d felt. A capsized feeling, a sense of the 128. next thing already coming. I toweled off, put on the cool thrift-store slip. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror for the fog. I couldn’t make out whether I looked more like a little kid trying too hard or a teenage girl with secret worries, like boys and college. Back in the bedroom we shared, Paul was snoring lightly. In the hotel dark, I could see a tuft of his blond hair poking up from the pillows. I arranged my limbs on my own bed so they were splayed out, exposed. After a moment, I changed my mind and put my legs in a coil, and I waited for Patra to find me like that. Curled up in my nightie, facing the wall. Unconcerned about anything. I didn’t sleep of course. I listened to the unfamiliar sound of traffic on the road, and real waves, Superior surf crashing into real Superior boulders. I could hear the squeals of girls at the bar across the parking lot, and the elevator humming up and down through the walls. When Leo and Patra returned at last, they left the lights off, so I never knew for sure if they looked in on us. The cool slip barely covered my thighs, and I was shivering by the time I heard a thump in the other room, followed by a stiff muffled cry. My newly shaved leg scratched with goose pimples when I touched it, reaching for the covers. For a second it felt like someone else’s prickly leg in bed with me. “Ah!” someone said through the walls. That’s when I slid from the bed and crept through the bathroom on my bare feet. I pushed open their door and went through to the other side. It was dark, but the window blinds were open. A streetlight was shining in. At first I just saw Leo all alone on the bed, sitting up at one end and looking out the window—as if waiting for some signal, some comet or celestial appearance in the darkness of the heavens over the city. Then I saw Patra on her knees on the floor in front of him, Leo’s hand on her head, and so I thought of Lily and Mr. Grierson. They changed there in the dark as I watched them. They were 129. Lily and Patra, and Leo and Mr. Grierson at once. They were husband and wife, they were student and teacher—they were frightened bully and beautiful Lily. They were both. She looked so small on her knees, hunched over, laboring at something on his lap. “Please, please,” she said, so I might have even gone in, I might have even interrupted them, if I hadn’t seen him push her away, gently, the way you push an overly affectionate dog. If I hadn’t heard her say to him, just as gently, “Stop being a baby, Leo.” She was playfully mean: “Relax. I know you like that.” I found out later that Lily had left town in May to make a statement at Mr. Grierson’s hearing. She’d gone into Minneapolis, where there was a federal court, but when Lily got on the stand, when the prosecuting attorney prompted her to tell the story about Gone Lake, Lily finally confessed that she didn’t know Mr. Grierson very well at all. She confessed that she’d never spoken to him alone, except for once, when he gave her extra time on an exam because of her dyslexia. According to court documents, the attorney pressed her on this. “Didn’t he take you out on the lake?” The attorney asked. “Didn’t you say that in your original statement?” He was flustered, no doubt, and had little patience for a victim who was going to take it all back at the last moment. He tried to convince her that she was afraid, that she was lying now, on the stand. He asked the judge: “Why would she say what she did if it wasn’t true?” Lily didn’t answer that. It was a rhetorical question for the judge to consider, not her. Here’s the statement Mr. Grierson made in his plea bargain. “I have done many, many things. Let me start again. I can’t face my own thoughts. They are not thoughts I want to face, and it’s just a relief— How do I put it? It’s just a relief to have what I’ve feared the most said out loud. I’m ashamed, no argument. But I’m relieved, okay? I didn’t touch that girl, but I thought 130. about it, I thought about it, I thought about it, I thought about it. I thought out worse things than she said.” In the morning when I woke up, Paul was gone. The door to the bathroom was shut tight. I slunk out of the slip and got into my jeans and shirt, opened the bathroom door. Saw through the tile-and-mirror corridor to where Leo sat in a cushioned chair in the other room. “Good morning,” he said, glancing up from a book. “What are you reading?” I asked. To stall, to give me a chance to look around. I saw Patra’s open suitcase on the closer of the two beds. The white strap of a bra draped out, along with the mauve sleeve of a sweater. “Science and Health.” “Is that for your research?” “No. Well, yes, in a way.” As he spoke, I moved deeper into the room. I thought Patra and Paul might be cuddled up in a corner with a puzzle. They were not. Leo watched me eyeing the beds, eyeing the door, eyeing the suitcase. “Linda,” he said. “Tell me, do you believe in God?” I looked back at him. “Just a question. Did you think at all about what we discussed yesterday? I’m especially curious about that. What is it you believe—that is, assume—to be true about your existence? That’s the question to start with, of course. What are your premises of self?” “I don’t know.” “You do.” I crossed my arms. 131. “You do. That’s the definition of an assumption. For instance,” he coaxed. “Are you an animal or a human?” His legs were crossed and he was jiggling a foot. He was wearing his black slippers, I saw, so he was the kind of man who packed slippers for a night in a hotel. He was a man who couldn’t be without slippers, which made me sad and maybe a little repulsed by him. “Or are you young or old? What age do you think you are?” One slipper dangled. “Fifteen.” The slipper fell to the ground and he scooped it back on with a snout-like toe. “So then you assume your life began fifteen years ago and that it will end at some unknown point?” “I guess.” “You assume that that is a biological fact?” I nodded, then shook my head—unsure what he was getting at. “Now ask yourself, how do these assumptions about yourself change if you take as your premise that there is a God?” His slippered foot stopped jiggling. He’d gotten back around to where he’d started and could afford to linger. “A thought experiment. Okay? It’s just logic,” he murmured. “If God exists, then what kind of God makes the most sense? Either God is all good, or he is not God. Either God is all-powerful, or he is not God. So logically, if God exists at all, then by definition He must be all good and He must be all powerful. Right? That makes sense, doesn’t it? That makes the most sense.” It did for an instant. A gap slowly opened between his slipper and his heel. He pressed on. “And if we’re saying that God exists—if, that is, God is by definition God—then there would be no place in the universe for evil, for sickness, for sadness, for death. There is only one premise that even makes God possible. So we’ve reasoned our way to the only 132. possible answer. If, in the thought experiment God exists, then how would that knowledge change what you assume yourself?” “Where’s Patra and Paul?” “They’re fine. What’s the most reasonable answer to the question, Linda?” “Where are they?” “We’ll meet them at the harbor at ten. Let’s get back to the question—” “Did something—” I took a step forward. “Did something happen?” “Lin-da.” He parted the vowels very slightly, as with a comb. He pushed up his glasses with a touch of testiness. “Maybe we’ll have to talk more about this another time? That’s fine. Maybe we should start thinking about getting ready to go?” When I didn’t move, he went on. “Patra tells me you’re very mature, Linda, a good listener.” I watched him. “Good company, she’s always saying, and smart. But alone a lot, and I’ve seen that. I know that can’t be easy. I know how it can make a person, a young woman, clingy.” I felt my face getting hot, but I didn’t say anything. “Lin-da.” He spoke so kindly, now, so benignly and intensely at once. “You’ll see, I think you’ll see, that when you start with the premise we discussed—if you’re intellectually honest and just as smart as Patra says—you’ll see that everything you think you know about your existence is wrong.” His brown eyes did a mild blink behind glass. “You’re not lonely, really.” I felt my body tense up. “You know Patra told me something about you as well.” “Is that so?” He was only somewhat interested. “She said you’re so busy with your work—” My voice slipped on a wet spot in my throat. I ground it back into words. “She said you’re gone so much that you hardly exist to her at all.” 133. He frowned. “She didn’t say that.” “Don’t be dense.” And because that wasn’t quite enough to faze him, I sucked in a breath. “Don’t be a baby, Leo.” That stopped him in his tracks. That made him pause, stand up fast. Jiggle his pockets for keys, walk across the room to the closet. He wouldn’t meet my eye after that. He just mumbled, “Let’s not be late, Linda. They took the car. We have to walk.” When I still didn’t move, he said, more insistently, “We’ll meet them at ten, okay? That’s just about forty minutes from now, tops. And we have to walk.” It was irritating how he was closing the door on me before I was even out of the room. It was infuriating the way he kept skipping over now for then—his insistence that I be reassured by Paul and Patra’s appearance at the harbor at ten, almost an hour after I asked about them. But there they were, on a great wrinkled blanket on the grass, and I couldn’t help it. I was reassured. 134. XI. The grass on the knoll in the harbor was tentacled in shadows from the passing ships. Paul and Patra sat sprawled on a blue cotton blanket, legs open, palms back, looking up at the ships as they went past. Leo and I were late by mere minutes, and so we didn’t see the lift bridge lift—though we heard it, clanging its warning across the harbor, and we saw the line of traffic backed up for blocks on Lake Avenue. By the time we’d made our way from the hotel to the harbor, by the time we’d wound our way through the thick crowd on the knoll, the ships were already sliding through the narrow concrete channel. Though there were hundreds of people gathered, the ships passed in near silence—a tall, tidy drift. I looked up, and saw dozens of sails of various sizes and shapes billowing out. The complexity of the rigging was startling, but the boats themselves moved with gorgeous simplicity, as if, having discovered some trick of the wind—having worked out the math of all those angles, the geometry of sails—they made cruising into the harbor at forty miles an hour obvious beyond mention. 135. There were nine ships. The whole crowd seemed to hold its breath as they passed—the way people get when a green thunderhead looms, or when a moose with that weighty rack of antlers emerges from woods. And then, just when the last of the ships slipped beneath the raised bridge, a smattering of applause broke out. Not cheers, just appreciative, distracted, almost nervous clapping. People started checking each other, self-conscious suddenly, as if unsure just what had happened or what to do next. Seagulls floated after the boats, wings curved open, unimpressed. Some children started chucking hunks of bread out over the water, which broke the spell the ships had cast. We watched as seagulls seized whole slices of white bread out of the air. “How many boats?” Leo asked. I knew, now, it was a tick of his to make a lesson out of this—out of anything—to seize every opportunity for intellectual improvement. Paul and Patra twisted around, noticing for the first time we were standing behind them on the grass. Patra smiled her welcome, a slick of relief in her eyes. Now that Leo was here, I could see, she was ready to hand over responsibility to him. She was ready to play the part of sidekick parent again, to pull up blades of grass with her fingers. “Did you see them?” she asked. Folding a blade of grass back and forth, making an accordion of it. “Of course.” He crouched down. “Hey, Paul. Hey there, little man. How many did you count?” Paul hadn’t thought to count the ships. There was a white hollow in his throat when he looked up at us. “Nine,” I said. 136. I felt the need, then, to defend Paul from Leo’s good intentions. From above, from where I was standing, there seemed to be something funny about the way Paul was dressed. His steam engine sweatshirt and bright red pants seemed ill-chosen, more appropriate for another season. For fall, perhaps. They seemed to drape over him in an unnatural way, as if Paul had discarded them there and gone off by himself somewhere else to play. His big blue shoes and tiny blond head seemed separate, detached. Leo said, “Paul, do you know what time period those ships are from?” For a second, I felt the need to jump in again, but then Patra opened up a wicker basket on the blanket—revealing elaborate compartments for silverware and plastic cups, for cloth napkins rolled into tubes—and that feeling passed. That feeling was always passing. Patra swung open what seemed like a hidden door in the basket, and out came a silver thermos, which she tilted over cups, one for each of us. Lemonade. She plucked open a blue Tupperware, out of which gnarled strawberries bulged. “Organic,” she emphasized, passing the Tupperware to me. I slit open a strawberry with my teeth and sat down next to Patra on the grass. “There’s room,” she said, patting the blanket, so I scooted in. Leo continued his lesson. “They’re mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Do you know when that was?” “Before rockets,” Paul guessed, blinking his gummy lashes. “Before cars,” Leo said. “And how many sails did you see on each ship?” “The ships went by pretty fast,” I intervened. “A thousand,” Paul breathed. “Fourteen.” Leo said, a tyrant for facts. “Or eleven, depending on the size.” Then he settled into an explanation about wind currents, topmasts and topsails, traditional rigging and 137. nautical miles. He wasn’t preaching, exactly, just giving numbers, just enumerating proofs and particulars. Still, there was something pontifical about the way he talked, something lulling and insistent at once, and as he spoke, I rolled a single strawberry seed over my teeth, hard as a grain of sand, gritty as that, and as unswallowable. After a while, I stopped listening to Leo, who was advancing a method for converting fathoms to meters. I set the seed between two molars and took a sip of lemonade, waiting, as I did, for Patra to notice I was wearing her headband. I’d swiped it from the bathroom counter that morning on the way out. It was plastic, too small for my head, and it felt like having someone’s teeth against my temple—uncomfortable, vaguely threatening—but reassuring, too, like when a dog closes his jaws affectionately on your wrist and does not bite down, but could. My head felt different: I waited for Patra to notice my new head. But Patra had her eye on Leo, who, after finishing his speech about sails, had his eye on a tugboat coming into the harbor. The tugboat captain was waving from the deck at Paul, who—I noticed then, in a disconcerting flash—had his eyes on me. He was saying something garbled about Europa, where there was a sandbox with diggers, where nobody lived, but ships kept sailing, empty, waiting for life. “In the Goldilocks Zone,” he said. Leo laughed, glancing at Patra in surprise. “He’s doing Europa and Michigan, combined.” “He misses home,” Patra explained, happily almost, as if she’d discovered the key to something. “He just misses Ann Arbor, right?” She looked to Leo for confirmation. “Um, excuse me,” said the woman on the blanket beside us. She stood up. She had a stack of paper napkins in her hand, which lifted up one by one like birds and fluttered to the ground. It seemed oddly coordinated, like a magic show for 138. children, in which the trick was a simple application of gravity. I wondered if she was performing for Paul, who often got little performances like this from strangers. I smiled obediently at the woman, which was the wrong thing to do. She frowned and dropped the remaining napkins on the grass in front of Patra and me. “Excuse me?” she scolded, barely concealing her disgust, and I saw then that Paul was throwing up in a bubbly white mass on the grass. Leo set his hand on Paul’s spine, patted down very gently. That woman shook her head at us. “Looks he’s come down with something real bad.” “Thank you!” Leo said politely. The sun kept shining and the wind kept blowing as we packed up the silver thermos and Tupperware, the plastic cups which we shook out in the grass, the black cloth napkins. Patra and I put everything back in its compartment, in its loop of elastic, and shut up all the wicker doors. Patra’s hands were white, but she wanted to put everything away precisely and in order, so we did. Leo carried a listless Paul to the car. As we followed across the grass, children ran in circles around us, chucking food at the seagulls. The children were hatted, shiny with suntan lotion, laughing uproariously at the predatory gulls. They craned their heads back, lost their hats in the wind. More and more of them gathered in the spot we’d left open on the grass, and above them, the flock of gulls continued to swell and spin. The birds were ravenous, undiscriminating. When I turned around for one last look, I saw the children were experimenting. They were tossing into the air candy bars and wax cups, carrots sticks, Jell-O cubes, strawberries, popcorn pieces, packets of gum, paper bags, coins from their parents’ pockets, handfuls of rock. 139. That was June 20th, so summer was spinning around us in full force. The city was crowded with traffic and day-trippers, white toy dogs on leashes, flower and popcorn venders, kids on skateboards rumbling by, old people with canes and walkers, ice cream carts on corners. It was a snow-globe kind of summer day—seagulls everywhere floating down, the sky a high dome of unbroken blue. One day later, on June 21 th , Paul died of cerebral edema. This, I later learned, is similar to what climbers die of at high altitudes, and deep sea divers succumb to, sometimes, as they ascend. In both cases, the brain swells and presses outward against the skull, and the optic nerves are under so much pressure they smash into the back of the eye. The brain literally gets too big for the head, crowds the plates in the skull, rearranges the gray matter. In his bed at sea level, wedged between his rows of stuffed animals and stacks of books, Paul probably had a terrible headache. He probably had a funny sweet taste in the back of his throat. He had diabetic ketoacidosis, I was later told. Later I was told many things. That Paul had likely been nauseous on occasion for weeks before this, that as his brain started to swell in the last twenty-four hours, he probably went blind, lost consciousness, slipped into a coma. That, while this last part was happening, he was left untended for hours in his bed in the cabin on Still Lake—that, instead of taking him to the hospital, instead of giving him the insulin and liquids he needed to survive, Leo had read a book to him and moved pieces around a Candyland board, and Patra had tidied the house and emptied the litter box, and I had carried in from the deck an armload of stones and leaves and pinecones. I’d brought in yard waste in the end, they said, incredulous. What were you thinking? I was asked on the stand. I could not bring myself to say that it was Europa’s Capital, that pile of leaves and rocks on the bedroom floor. I could not bring myself to tell them what I’d meant to tell Paul—who, when I saw him last, had been looking out 140. from his bed with just one open eye. Half his face had been smashed up against a pillow. No one lives in Europa, I’d wanted to tell him, not yet, maybe not ever, but the capital has been built and there are trains that go on the ocean floor, and submarines and floating cranes, and it’s not a city for people—it’s not for fairies or aliens or anything cute and fantastical. It’s just a city, I’d wanted to say. It’s just a city, with trains and diggers and bulldozers and roads. This is how I remember leaving Duluth. Patra needed help folding up the cotton blanket, which we shook free of grass, and I remember how those blades were so green in the sun they were almost blue. When we got to the car, Patra and Leo had a short discussion about what to do next, and it was decided that we head back to Loose River early, that afternoon, so Leo wanted Patra to walk back and check out of the hotel while he waited with Paul in the car. They had a little argument about it, actually, the first argument I heard them have. They didn’t yell at each other or even raise their voices. They just stood on opposite sides of the car and squinted at each other in the sun, first disputing who should stay with Paul in the car and who should go back to the hotel and pay, and then, caught in the orbit of arguing, they switched right into bitter apology, Patra pleading, “I’m sorry, Leo,” and Leo responding, “No, it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have let myself get upset over such a little thing. You stay with Paul, I’ll go back.” Paul waited this out in the back seat. I stood near him in the open car door, near him but not too close. He didn’t want to be touched. “The weather is under me,” he said, so I couldn’t help smiling. “You’re under the weather, you mean.” He was too busy drinking to respond. After going through all the lemonade from Patra’s thermos, and then, sweating instantly from the effort of this, chugging water from a plastic bottle 141. Patra produced—after dampening the whole front of his shirt with some combination of saliva, water, and lemonade, he set his head against the car door, took a shallow breath, and closed his eyes. Patra sat in the back seat with him, so I climbed into the passenger seat up front and turned on the air. It blew hot as breath for a minute or two, then gradually cooled, so we rolled up all the windows and sat in the chilled car, cut off from the summery world outside. I had the impulse then, as my sweat dried, to scoot over to the driver’s seat and pull the gearshift into drive. It would be simple, I thought. How hard could driving be? “He’s not himself today,” Patra said from the backseat. I glanced back at her. I thought she meant Paul at first, but she was staring right out the window in the direction of the hotel. So it was Leo she meant. She unlatched her breath the way people do when they’re about to speak, then closed her mouth again, chewed on her lip. I curled around more fully, peeped at her over the seat. “Is the temp okay?” I asked, coaxing her out. I wanted her to unload her worry, like she did in the tent. I wanted her to need me for something she couldn’t do herself. “Yes, thank you. Thank you, Linda.” She gave a smile that was all forehead. She wasn’t looking at me anymore—she was glancing down at Paul, who’d drifted off. She was petting his arm with one hand. I tested out her gratitude: “Do you want me to pull the car up a little bit? Do you want me to get out of this traffic?” Cars kept honking at us, hoping to get our parking spot. She considered it. “Do you have your license?” “No,” I admitted. 142. “That’s okay.” She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes, and in the bright sunlight I thought I could see her eyeballs moving beneath her pale lids. Oh, there are her black pupils, I thought, triumphantly, frightened almost, but then she shielded her whole face with her hand and whatever I saw was gone. She said, “Leo’ll come for us in a moment.” I didn’t like how she put that. I didn’t like how confident she sounded. I didn’t like how she’d changed with Leo around, how all her gestures had that touch of performance, the way stage actors angle their bodies at an audience and pretend that’s a completely natural way to stand. I didn’t like how deferential she was with him, but also charged somehow, confident that she could draw his attention if she wanted it. Her headband was making my head pound. I could feel its teeth in a cruel crown from ear to ear. I felt just miserable enough to take a swipe at her. “Where’d you guys meet?” Patra opened her eyes. She checked Paul before meeting my gaze. “Leo and me?” I nodded. “Yep.” “He was my professor.” I felt smug. “At the University of Michigan?” “How’d you know?” She’d worn that sweatshirt a thousand times. I shrugged. “Astronomy 101.” She wrinkled up her nose, making a smiley rueful expression I was coming to recognize, and set her hand on Paul’s sleeping forehead. “I thought it’d be easy. I thought we’d memorize constellations, learn the names of planets, that sort of thing.” “Did you?” 143. “We did some of that, sure.” She caught my eye. “It’s not what you think.” I held her blue gaze. “What do I think, Patra?” She shifted in her seat, pushed back on Paul’s hair so he stirred. For a moment, he looked hounded by his dreams, and his face crumpled up as if he might cry out. He didn’t wake up, though. “I’m the one who stayed after class, who, you know, actually asked him out. It was me, not him.” I waited for more. “He was, like— I don’t know. He was bigger than anything else to me at the time.” I found that hard to believe. I found it hard to imagine that slippered, balding man leaving such a mark. He seemed rather lightweight to me, insubstantial—though stubborn, maybe, like a stain. I remembered how his heel bulged out of his slipper, how the slipper was worn and black and ugly. “Once, one of my friends at school ran into him on campus—she was collecting signatures or something, for charity—and she said, there’s something unsettling about him. And I said, I agree! He’s unsettlingly smart. He really is.” She was justifying herself. She was making a case to me, setting up her defenses. She was trying to convince me of something, and as she spoke, I could see her sitting up straighter, finding focus. “Listen, Linda.” She was trying to whisper, so her consonants got especially hissy. “I’m not any good at explaining things, I’m not like Leo in that way. After the semester ended I got him to sit with me in the cafeteria and eat a bagel, and he had an everything and I had a blueberry, and we did that again the next week, and the next, and I remember how he tucked in his pants. You know how that is? How you wait for someone to do this thing, and then he does it, 144. he tucks in his pants again, every time he stands up, and it seems, I don’t know, like you don’t have to go to all the work getting to know him because he does this thing, this one thing, and you can predict it. He was so smart, and I felt like I knew him better than he knew himself, right away. That’s very powerful.” “You liked how he tucked in his pants?” I was intrigued. I was repulsed. “No, I knew how he tucked in his pants. It’s different. And I was flattered. He was just out of graduate school, a big deal on campus for an article he’d published in Nature, and he said to me, oh, maybe, a month or so in, that he hadn’t told me everything about himself. He said he wanted to tell me everything, and, you know, I was nineteen. I was like, oh, he’s a felon or a pervert or something! I was just a kid.” “He wasn’t a pervert,” I said. “God, no. He just wanted to tell me about his religion, he was a third-generation Christian Scientist, and I laughed at him when he said it, I was so relieved. I was really afraid of what he’d say.” By then I could see Leo coming down the street. He was shading his eyes with his hand, scanning the crowd for the car. There were two backpacks over his shoulder, the handle of the big rolling suitcase in one hand. He was half-trotting as he went, his khaki shorts bunching up in his crotch, exposing his white thighs. “What happened then?” I asked Patra, feeling urgent about it now. What I meant was, what are you trying to say to me? I felt that I’d missed something along the way, that the essential part of the story had already come and gone while I’d been looking out the window. 145. “Oh, I don’t know!” She must have seen Leo too, then, because her voice changed— lowered and glazed over, got sweet and cool, almost arch. “I laughed at how serious he was, then I married him. I liked that he was serious, and I thought I stood apart.” Together, we watched as Leo caught sight of the car. He went around back and loaded the trunk. Clearly he couldn’t see us inside, staring right at him, because when he came back around, when he saw his reflection in the car window, he licked his hand and scraped a string of black hair from the top of his bald head, tucking it behind his ear. He plucked his shorts out from between his crotch with two fingers. But that wasn’t all. “Watch,” Patra whispered. An instant before Leo opened the door, he slid his flattened hands an inch beneath his belt, shoving his white cotton shirt in deeper. It was a furtive gesture, and he looked a little flustered, as if he wasn’t sure whether he’d be welcomed back in the car—or what he’d find when he opened the door. He looked like he was hoping for someone’s approval, but didn’t expect it, and so he was preparing, in advance, to rise above us, above everything. Patra said to me, “You think you’re as old as the ages when you’re nineteen, that you’re years past being grown up. You’ll see.” “Everything okay in here?” Leo asked, sitting down hard in the driver’s seat. Patra leaned forward, kissed the lobe of his ear. He swung around to study Paul’s sleeping face, then Patra’s. “We’re okay,” I answered for her. The car ride home reshuffled things. The whole way Leo asked me polite but absentee questions about lake fishing and glacial outcroppings, and it was Patra who whispered to Paul in 146. the backseat and stroked his arm. We sat in the construction outside Duluth even longer this time around. Through it all, through the orange dust and the black exhaust from other cars, Leo spoke to me without ever turning his head, nodding and noncommittal about my answers. I stopped answering after a while, and he stopped asking. An hour, two hours of silence opened up between us. Nobody suggested we stop at Denny’s on the way back. After the construction ended and the traffic cleared, I kept looking for landmarks I remembered from the day before— the purple water tower, the tunnel blasted through the granite hillside. But everything looked different from the other direction, and it was impossible to anticipate when or how these landmarks would appear. I only recognized them in retrospect, the moment we passed, and I had to turn around and watch the water tower receding in the window. “Almost home!” Leo cried triumphantly, when the granite tunnel spat us out. He seemed resolved to this idea long before it was an accurate description of our circumstances. By the time we got to the old familiar highways—the ones I’d walked for years—Leo had been saying “Almost home!” for more than an hour. Then Loose River appeared in early dusk of the deep woods and Leo was elated enough to break into a round of Good King Wenceslas; Patra joined in in an obedient soprano; my heart disobediently sank. “We’re back!” Leo announced when Patra trailed off in the middle of the second verse, so I slid my hands under my butt and imagined the car breaking down or a wretched deer in the road or any kind of calamitous barrier. I didn’t offer to get out and walk up the sumac trail. I let Leo scrape up his car, driving through that corridor of trees in the last of the day’s light. Slowly, slowly, I gathered my things from the trunk. “Night!” Leo said through the open car window, already turning the car around. I didn’t hear if Patra or Paul said anything. The backseat window was rolled up tight. 147. Surely, they said to me later—surely by then you sensed something was off? Maybe. Maybe there is a way to climb up above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things. Maybe this way of seeing comes naturally to some people, and good for them if it does. But to be honest, I remember it all, even now, as if two mutually exclusive things happened: first, it goes the way the prosecutors describe it—headache, nausea, coma, etcetera—and then it comes back to me how it actually was with Patra and Paul—Tall Ships, car ride home, Good King Wenceslas, bed. Though they end the same way, these are not the same story. Maybe if I’d been someone other than who I was, I’d see this differently. But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Wouldn’t we all act differently if we were someone else? “Back early?” my mother asked when I opened the cabin door. I couldn’t see her clearly at first. She was a hunched grey shadow at the table. She had been stitching something or reading—I couldn’t tell. I didn’t say anything to her, just found my way across the darkening room with my backpack and climbed straight up the ladder to my loft. My mother hadn’t yet turned the lights on, of course. So I remember thinking: Fine. Let it be night. It was probably only eight-thirty or nine, almost the longest day of the year, but the cabin was already dark from being covered so completely on all sides by trees. I remember feeling Patra’s headband press against my skull as I lay down, relishing the wonderful ache of it. I remember hearing the click of the lamp and my mother’s curse, before she went outside and fumbled behind the cabin for the generator. I remember how when the lights came on it was like a jolt to the skin, and how my mother stood 148. breathing for a moment at the foot of my ladder. “Madeline?” she asked. She jiggled one of the lower rungs, made the joints creak. I burrowed down into my sleeping bag, fully dressed. “Have a good time in Duluth?” Night, I thought. She jiggled the ladder again. “Madeline?” I could hear the way she held her breath before she sighed, and the way the sigh made a slight dry whistle through her nose. “You doing some kind of Teenager Thing? Is that what this is? Did you have a fight with your friend or something?” After a few minutes, I heard the pine boards creaking as she walked to the sink. I heard her swing open a cupboard, bite into one of the pears I’d bought a week ago in town. Bite, then pause. She was pulling threads of fruit through her teeth with her fingers. She was breathing loudly through her nose and humming the same two lines from two totally different songs, mixing them together. Strange days have found us / Casting down their crowns along the glassy sea. My mother. That night as I lay in bed, that night after Duluth with the Gardners, I remember how loudly the moths buzzed around the two lamps she’d turned on. I remember the desperate feathering of their wings against the bulbs and the window screen, and that endless pear in her mouth, crunch-crunch-crunching. I remember her humming, pushing out more air than sound, and how all that—plus my pounding head—made it utterly impossible to fall asleep. 149. HEALTH 150. XII. “She’s a corporate executive, I swear to God,” my mom used to say to my father. “She’s done an inventory of the pines. The pillows.” Twelve pines, I’d think when she said this. Two pillows and nine blankets. I was probably six or seven when my mom started calling me a CEO, and I could still climb up on my father’s lap in my cotton nightgown and pretend I was smaller, a little girl he could hold and protect—or better yet, a piece of equipment he could use, a wonderful worn tool that needed tending, like the tape measurer he returned with such care to his leather belt. I curled up my legs inside my nightgown just to try it out, put the tip of my thumb inside my mouth and began chewing the nail. “Take care,” my father warned me. “There’s walls of poison oak by the—” For a moment his arms were around me. He spoke into the back of my head, and it was almost, though not quite, like being petted. I could feel his breath on my scalp, his words before they were words in the rumble of his chest. Then he shifted, as if trying to scoot out from under 151. me. He was tired, I know that now. He was tired in a way that made him seem absent, slow, hauling up some gummy dead thought he couldn’t quite identify without putting everything else on hold for a moment. My mother and I waited for him. “She’s got such a pissy look,” my mother finally said, laughing at me. “Look at that look.” “—just don’t go counting things near the highway,” my father finished. I slid very slowly from the cliff of his lap. Since Tameka and the Big Kids left, I almost never even left sight of the bunkhouse and cabin. I let one leg go first, then the other, thinking my father might pull me up. Then I lay on the floor, looked at the wormy brown laces of his boots. “Seriously,” my mother said. “She gave me a list of our dishes. We have eleven spoons.” “Children like to count,” my father said, knowingly. “This one’s got a talent for it.” On the floor, I bit into my father’s boot lace, chewed for a moment. I could tell by the way he cleared his throat that he was getting ready to stand up, head for the shed. There wasn’t ever anywhere to go inside the cabin. There were just two rooms on the ground floor—the kitchen space and the bedroom—plus a stepladder to the loft, where I slept on a goose-feather mattress jammed against rafters. The loft was a particle-board platform. My bed was a pile of army-issue sleeping bags that smelled of mildew and smoke. From the low ceiling hung a yellow cloth with black cats holding cigarettes in an intricate, dizzying pattern. My mom drew this around my sleeping bags when I slept. Unless it was too cold, unless it was winter— when my father slung the old mattress over his shoulder like the body of a disheveled fat person 152. he loved and wished to save. He hoisted that droopy thing down the ladder and laid it by the stove. “Sleep,” he told me, straightening the mattress creases with a wide red hand. “Get a good dream,” he said, patting an old jacket into a pillow-like shape. He was kind to objects. With people he was a little afraid. Winters were especially confining. We were all tied—as if from rope—to that sooty black furnace. Which has a certain romance, I know, if you tell the story right, a certain Victorian ghost-story earnestness that people like, and I’ve told the story that way to the delight of shark-tooth-wearing dates in coffee shops. So many people, even now, admire privation. They think it sharpens you, the way beauty does, into something that might hurt them. They calculate their own strengths against it, unconsciously, preparing to pity you or fight. Like that guy I dated in Saint Paul. Eventually, he got tired of sneaking out of my bed in the morning; he made me come to his apartment to see him. He got me drunk one night, fed me burritos. He laid out tarot cards in rows on his maroon carpet, pointed at the gargoyled face of the Fool and asked me what I thought. Apparently, he’d been a psychology major before he was a mechanic. He had a thing for Carl Jung, as well as an intimate knowledge of carburetors. He wanted to excavate my past. “Isn’t this supposed to tell the future?” I asked, sitting cross-legged on his floor. “It’s tea leaves, babe, not magic.” “Ah. You give me superstition, not the good stuff.” “I promise this’ll be good. Give me a second. What does this card make you think?” “That Fool looks like pretty easy prey, if you ask me. His eyes are closed.” “Okay. That’s perfect. What else?” 153. “Does he have, like, a pig on his stick?” “I think that’s a ruck sack.” “Do my future. I want my future done.” “Who was easy prey in your childhood, babe?” “Did I ever tell you I know quite a lot about wolves?” “Oh, the Girl Scout, I know her. The Girl Scout comes out whenever you’re nervous. ” “Like, I’m your Wolf Expert. Ask me anything.” “Who was easy prey, then?” The truth was, that old wood stove was narcotic and banal to me as a child, so I was drawn to it without seeing it, and hated it without wondering why. The winter I was nine, I lay my cheek against it while reading Mush, a Manual on the floor, and the burn made a bubble of clear skin—a round half globe like the air bladder of a fish—under my left eye. The bubble grew as the days passed, rose up translucently from my face, obstructed my vision when I looked down. If my parents noticed they never mentioned it. At school, I made excuses to go to the bathroom and poke at it in the mirror. Sometimes Sarah the Ice Skater would be there too, leaving class early so she could change before practice. Sucking a Blow Pop with a blood-red mouth, snapping a leotard under her crotch. “Sick,” she’d say, or something like it, peering at my reflection in the mirror and touching her own cheek. And once, coming closer, getting curious, “Did your dad do that to you? Is that the kind of thing they do to you?” I had two chores to do with my dad: chop wood and clean fish. By the time I was ten, I 154. could do whole logs on my own, so my dad gave up that chore for me to do alone. But we did the fish together until I was in high school, working quietly over a pair of buckets in the shed. We used bleached fillet knifes, which we scraped against the sharpening stone before starting—and that was the best part, always, the gravelly, ringing drag of steel over granite. The sound made the hairs on my arms prickle up, my teeth ache pleasurably. Then, there was just the sluice and slop of skins coming off. There were our two fist-sized puffs of breath punching the air side-by- side, my father’s and mine. Ha. Ha. The fish and wood only took a few hours, so I used to make up extra chores for myself. When I was little, I kept track in a notebook of all the pine and oak on our lot. I made lists of our dishes and jackets and toiletries. I wrote down all the good deals at Mr. Korhonen’s on toothpaste and toilet paper so we didn’t run out, and passed these lists over to my mom before she went into town. Later, just before middle school, I saw it as my responsibility to sit with my dad on Sunday afternoons and listen to ballgames and Prairie Home Companion. My dad had told me once that he’d had a class with Garrison Keilor in college, and for years, I imagined Garrison Keilor as one of the relatives I’d never met—I thought of Garrison as my dad’s gregarious little brother, and my dad as the responsible older one who could handle himself better against loneliness and disaster. I didn’t have any chores to do for my mom. She couldn’t bear to have me around when she washed clothes or cooked dinner. She said I put her on edge. She said I was too slow, too judgmental. I watched too closely for little mistakes. She said, defensively, “You act like I’m being wasteful when I take off the littlest bit of potato with the peel.” My mother was inattentively industrious, full of ideas. She had all kinds of do-gooder projects strewn about on the table and chairs, stations of interrupted activity. Quilting scraps for 155. the inmates, quartz pieces from the lakeshore, inspirational quotes she was copying from the Bible onto index cards, thrift store mystery novels, a years-long project that involved reading Russian fairytales from a book she never returned to the library. Her long black hair followed her around as she worked on these projects, fingering the air. It clung with static electricity to everything she touched—stove handles, broom handles, my face when she bent over me. “Are you still cutting that same potato?” she’d say, bewildered, standing suddenly over me. Her hair snapped when she moved away. It especially bothered her when I wouldn’t play her games, when I refused to read out loud or dress up as a dragon in the rags she wound around my body and called a tail. “Roar!” she used to say, coaxing me, pulling my hair. She crossed her eyes, she tried to provoke me. She stuck out her tongue, and I could see a white scum like a layer of moss over the pink. Then I would think: We need toothpaste. I would add it mentally to my list: toothpaste, mouthwash, floss. “When I was little, I wrote a novel when I was your age,” my mother told me. “I put on Macbeth in my parents’ backyard that had a cast of twenty characters! It was funny version, actually.” She scrunched up her face and used an exaggerated British accent: “Out, out damned Scot!” She waited for me to laugh at that, but I wasn’t sure what part was funny. “Here,” she said then, sighing, handing me a wand she’d made from a birch branch rolled in glue and glitter. She wanted very badly for me to cavort and pretend, to show her that I was unharmed, that I was happy. She believed, with all her heart, that it was some combination of Catholic school and television that had stifled her mind and cheapened her natural talents. If she hadn’t spent so much time in training for cotillion, she said, she might have been less angry when she was 156. young—she might have gone to the city and become a doctor or an artist or something. “Look at the freedom you have!” She said this when she was most exasperated, throwing open her arms. As if all her rags and rocks and jars of sand were a form of rarest treasure. As if she had saved up her whole life to acquire this hoard of scraps. Sometimes, to please her, I wore her dragon tail out to feed the dogs, who—for a summer when I was eleven—I was teaching Search and Rescue. They each had a different special object of reward: a broken paddle, a rubber hose, a tennis ball I’d found at the high school courts. I’d unhook them one by one from their chains, tell them to Stay! and hide behind a tree near the lake. But that was too easy for them. They rescued me every time without even trying. So once, when it was Abe’s turn, I went around behind the house and climbed up onto the shed, dragging my dragon’s tail over the broken shingles. I gave the signal to look, a little high-pitched whistle, and I watched from above as Abe went to all the old trees—as he snuffed upwind and down, as he ran in frantic circles around the house. After a while, the other dogs on their chains started throwing in whines and shivers. Abe was still a young dog then, but after twenty minutes, he was panting hard and flinging saliva in wide arcs when he whipped around his head. A half hour passed, forty-five minutes. The other dogs heaved on their chains, joining his distress. I watched Abe’s ribs rise and fall. I watched him try the same spots over and over again, running around the collapsed bunkhouse, trying to overturn my dad’s canoe his snout. He wouldn’t stop looking for me. I sat still on the roof of the shed. As an experiment, I put my own mouth on the scummy rubber fuzz of the tennis ball in my hand. In the moment before I gagged, before I choked and spit it out, I felt lifted up by wings. 157. “Like,” I said, pulling the extra tarot cards into a stack on the mechanic’s carpet in Toronto. His name was Rom. The stud in his tongue flashed at me when he yawned, so I poked his ribs. “Ask me, how often do wolves eat? And I’ll tell you, every four or five days. They straight-out starve. Then they gorge, like—” “I know this one! Teenage girls.” “—they’re never going to eat again. Now ask me, what do they eat? Ask it.” “What do they eat?” “Oh, elk and deer. Also earthworms and berries.” “Keep it coming, Girl Scout. Keep stuffing it all back down in the unconscious.” “And dogs! There was this little town in Alaska, in buttfuck nowheresville—” “Isn’t that where you’re from?” “And they came at night and got someone’s lab. Just chomp. Then the next night, it was a couple of huskies, who never even made a sound. The final blow was someone’s pretty coonhound, one of those long-snouted things, a winner of dog shows. She was eaten right off her chain, just her collar left behind and, you know, her jawbone and tail.” “Jawbone and Tail. An album title.” “Wolves eat most of the bones, usually. That’s a Girl Scouting tip.” “So what happened to Buttfuck Nowheresville? Who saved the dogs?” “No! Who saved the wolves? They were all shot.” The fall I started middle school, my mom stopped calling me CEO and started calling me The Teenager. This was because I was always stealing magazines from the secretary’s office at school, reading People or Us or Glamour. I read about procedures for blow-drying your hair so it 158. looked like a tornado had come into town, and I studied tips for slicking down bangs so they looked wet. I never had any interest at all in trying these looks. What I liked seeing was something so mysterious broken down into steps, pieced together in charts and tables. Or, if there weren’t any new magazines in the office, I got books from the library on ice-age paleontology and the history of electricity. I coveted diagrams of hairstyles or skeletons, ink drawings of angles and equations I didn’t understand. My mother didn’t see me reading these things because I wasn’t doing anything she found interesting. She’d be gluing colored beads on a piece of cloth—or copying a quote on a pink index card, or washing a head of lettuce for dinner—and when she’d glance up, she’d look right through me. I didn’t watch TV until I lived in Minneapolis with Ann, but when I did I recognized the feeling: to look at somebody who can’t look back. Only occasionally did she see me reading and come over and peer over my shoulder. “Is that homework?” she’d sometimes ask, shaking her head in amazement. I knew she wanted me to do well in school, but she wanted me to succeed the way she had—disdaining the whole process. It got to her if she thought I was trying. “Oh, you’re becoming such a Little Professor, aren’t you? We should get you one of those gowns.” She was glancing down at a drawing of a velociraptor in my book, its articulated bones all carefully labeled with arrows. She seemed one part surprised, maybe even pleased, but the larger part was disparaging and contemptuous. “Don’t give me that look!” she’d laugh. I was twelve. My whole life I’d been unintentionally giving her looks she didn’t like. “You’d look good in one of those gowns, like a pope.” She squinted up her eyes at me. “I’m kidding! Listen, I’m not saying there’s no system at all, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that there’s an order on a higher level than school, and it’s worth paying attention 159. to the relative elevation of things. God, man, bureaucracy, worksheets.” She sighed. “When they say at school, do this worksheet, and the next one and on and on, you need to see, it’s really clear when you see, those aren’t steps that go on up higher. It’s just a fake kind of higher. Does that make sense?” “What’s this!” she called out once, when she found a People Magazine left on the table, open to an article about Princess Diana. I was fascinated by her sadness for a while, by how, pretty as she was, she could not keep it to herself. I read about her little boys, her husband’s affairs, her eating disorder, her lipstick pairings, her stockings, her high heels. I found an article after her divorce in which she’d made a list of her morning routine, which included: Think Positively Even If You Have Bad Dreams. That seemed both pitiful and brave to me, poignant. My mother, however, just paged through the slick People pages in utter puzzlement, saying, “Did you read this whole article? I don’t understand you. Seriously, how is that possible? What is there in that thing to read?” Once, at the end of sixth grade, I went to the bathroom, and Sarah the Ice Skater was there with someone else, combing sparkly gel into her hair. It was Lily Holburn, who looked stricken. Her long dark hair appeared soaked and stiff at once, sucked on by some gigantic mouth. It came to a point like a stake behind her back. “Oh, the Freak,” Sarah said when she saw me, but she seemed interested rather than disgusted, searching my face for signs of the popped bubble. There wasn’t any, except—maybe—the spot on my cheek that was less deeply tanned. Lily squeezed shut one eye, a line of gel leaking down her forehead. “Hey,” I said, warily. 160. I knew Sarah was to be respected. I’d heard that she had already landed a double axel, one-footed, fully rotated, and I believed it. Her body was like a pulled wet branch, her muscles holding some weird snap that felt mechanical and little dangerous. Everyone assumed that triples hung in her future, that they followed her magically wherever she went, dangled just out of her reach. Triple sowcow, triple loop, triple flip, triple lutz. That meant Upper Great Lakes, Midwesterns, Nationals, Worlds. Lily, on the other hand, was not what people called athletic. Still Sarah had befriended her at the beginning of sixth grade, had gotten her and two other medium-pretty girls to join Ice Line. It wasn’t charity, Sarah’s interest. Lily had a way of seeming just docile enough to be devoted, and recently she’d been getting a lot of attention from the Pee Wee hockey boys. The Loonettes needed people with poise, Sarah told her, all smiles. Boobs, she meant. Which was why Lily was standing in the sixth-grade bathroom with Sarah’s greasy hands in her black hair, glitter everywhere, a gob of it now on her cheek where my burn bubble had been. The Loonettes had a competition that afternoon in Duluth. “Lil, don’t look at Freaks,” Sarah said, as I tried to squeeze past them and get to the one stall. “Her dad, you know, tortures her for fun. That’s what they do in the Furston Cult. They burn her face and her tongue with wax. They force her to pee outside so she doesn’t know how to use a toilet.” Lily’s brown eyes met mine in the mirror. For an instant, I had the sensation of looking at myself, and when I saw my own narrow, pale face beside hers I was startled. “Her face looks fine.” Lily leaned forward, so Sarah pulled back on her hair like reins. “I’ve seen what they do!” 161. I said nothing. On the floor of the one stall lay all the detritus of a quick change. Jeans, padded bras, a pair of off-white underwear in a wad. I nudged this out of the way with my toe, sat down but could squeeze nothing out. Hiss hiss, went the hair spray—on and on, with no change. They were listening. “Sorry—” Lily mumbled, when I came out, bladder full, humiliated. “—about the clothes.” “Don’t talk to freaks.” Sarah started spraying Lily’s face. “Close your eyes!” Lily did, but Sarah’s eyes met mine as I rinsed the tips of my fingers under the faucet. With Lily’s hair in her hands, she glared right at me, and it was a look like the dogs gave me when they had a meaty bone in the corner of the shed. “Let’s sing,” Sarah said to Lily, who was cracking open her eyes. “Let’s sing One Tin Soldier.” When Lily didn’t join in, Sarah gave her a prodding kick in the shins. “You need to believe in the song,” she said. “I wish I believed in this shit,” my mother said the morning she baptized me. I was six. The skin under my thighs stuck to the metal wash bin where I sat, shivering, in the shed. A slant of light from the doorway caught my mother’s face. “What shit?” I asked. Luke-warm water from the measuring cup dribbled down my hair and back. “Like that. Like, no more saying shit, okay? You’re a new pot of rice, baby. I’m starting you all over from scratch.” “I’m not hungry yet,” I told her. 162. She laughed, helped me out of the metal tub in the shed. “All you got to do, hon, all you got to do is be a kid. You do that, and I’ll feel so much better.” “When’s Tameka coming back?” I asked her. “She’s flown the coop with the others.” I thought about that, how we’d gone off together like loons with just our thoughts down the highway. We’d almost flown the coop then, but they’d sent a Big Boy after us. “Hey, don’t give me that look!” My mother turned me around by the shoulders, rubbed a rough old towel over my back and neck. “Don’t you feel clean, at least?” “I’m cold,” I said. “Just feel clean for a second, okay? Just feel good.” She was crying then, I could tell. I wasn’t facing her, but I could hear her nose dragging with snot. “Okay? Be a little kid for one second. Please?” I wasn’t sure what else I could be. “How hard could it be to smile once?” she begged. Then she crawled around on her hands and knees so she was facing me again. She found the measuring cup, set it on the very top of her head, lifted up her hands. Magic, she breathed. She had tears on her face, a white-lipped grin, hair that was getting wet from the cup. After a moment, that measuring hat clattered to the floor. “Last resort,” she warned. Then she tickled under my armpits, so I squirmed away. “Now, how hard was that?” she said, letting me go, and I was breathing fast and faster, trying to get it going into a laugh. It was very hard. 163. Why does the fool carry a rucksack?” I asked the mechanic, petting his maroon carpet, pulling up on it like grass, going back and forth with my hand. “He’s a vagabond. A traveler.” “What’s foolish about that?” “Well, he’s walking off a precipice, for one.” I hadn’t seen that. I looked at the card again, and it was true. The Fool’s right leg dangled over a cliff, but the Fool had his eyes closed, was just walking along, like, la-de-da. The mechanic leaned in so I could smell his burrito breath: “But it’s not all bad to let yourself fall. Try it?” He pulled me towards him and kissed me then, open-mouthed, so the metal pin in his tongue roamed in and probed my gums. That felt good, I thought. That felt a lot like being wanted. “Wait!” I said, figuring out what he meant. I pulled away from him. “I’m not the Fool.” “But you’re not staying, are you?” I stood up, straightened my twisted jeans. “Not the whole night, if that’s what you mean.” I was thinking about Ann, wondering if she’d notice if I didn’t come back. “I mean for good. You’re going back to Buttfuck Nowheresville.” I hadn’t thought I would. But as I gathered up my jacket from the floor, as I stuffed the burrito papers back in the soggy bag, I found myself saying, “My dad died just a few months ago, you know. And my mom doesn’t even know where I am. I split without telling her anything.” “She’s guilty,” he said. “My mom?” I turned around. 164. “No, the traveler. That girl there with her rucksack.” “Piss off,” I said. “You don’t know me.” He shrugged. “Go on, Fool.” The night I got back from the Tall Ship Festival in Duluth, I lay in my loft for a long time, the lamp by the window drawing in moths, flies, mosquitoes. All of them creeping in through the barest cracks, through some unseen rent in the screen. My mother sat at the table with a book or quilting project, I didn’t know what, waiting for me to come down and talk to her. I could hear her weight shifting, the pine floorboards creaking beneath her. I could sense that she wanted me to climb down that ladder, to let gravity take me by the ankles, to sit with her and tell her about Duluth. She wanted me to want to tell her about my new friend Patra and her family, at last, so she could deride them and their middleclass values, but be proud of me at the same time for getting along so well, for knowing how the world worked, for not fighting it like she had, and did. I could sense her waiting for this. And if I did that, if I told her about the Denny’s soup and the maroon-and-white hotel, she’d make the Gardners seem trivial and bland, utterly ordinary. “Don’t give me that look,” she’d say. “What’s that thing in your hair?” she’d ask. She’d notice the headband right away, and laugh at it, and call me a Teenager. Which I was. What else could I be? So I acted like one. There was a window in the loft, a tiny square of glass, which was propped open in the summers with a wedge of pine. After an hour or so of failing to sleep, I pushed that window open, shimmied out—I was wiry as anything then—and pulled myself onto the slowly swaying white pine. Then I swung myself around and leapt onto the roof of the shed. 165. My dad would hear that and think it was a branch falling down, or a raccoon. He never took account of sounds like me: ninety-pound things blew down in the course of a regular night in the woods. It was nothing. I was nothing. I kept my gaze from traveling across the lake to the Gardners’ place, whose lights would ruin my night vision. I just let night do its work on my eyes. Gradually, objects transfigured in the darkness, actual tree branches got loose from the shadows of branches, and though clouds had come in, I found my way easily off the shed. At first I just wanted to put distance between myself and the cabin, and I found myself heading towards the lake by habit, but once there, my dad’s banged-up Wenonah was just waiting for me to climb in. For the thousandth time, I appreciated the waveless passage that was a canoe ride anywhere. I barely lifted the paddle. The boat moved all on its own. “You wanna know what Jung would say?” the mechanic asked me. “The archetypal Fool is Pet-ah Pan.” He used a British accent to say it. He scrunched his nose. “Blah, blah, blah,” I said. “It’s true. Girl Scout youth in gold-tipped shoes, with a pet and a lunch packed.” I zipped up my jacket, cradled my trash. I felt attacked, and at the same time, so sorry for him. “You said you’d do my past, not the fucking future.” “Same thing, in this case.” 166. XIII. That the house across the lake was darker than I thought it would be, the night sky brighter, that true night had yet to show itself—I noticed these things only gradually. I dug my paddle deep into the leaf-flecked water. It was just June, but fall it seemed had already come to ruin a few aspens. I was still dressed for a day in Duluth. I hadn’t even taken my sneakers off up in the loft, or my good jeans, which were starting to feel tight in the crotch as I shoved in with the paddle. Patra’s headband still pulsed plaintively around my head, as if begging me for something. Please, please, please, it went, as I paddled along. I didn’t mean to go anywhere; I just meant to leave. I could still sense my mother waiting at the table for me to come down from the loft. I could still see the light from the kitchen lamp wobbling from behind me all the way across the water. She was probably still biting away at her pear with her teeth, probably nibbling away at the grainy meat, humming an old song as she did (wanting to wake me up, without seeming like that was what she was doing). “Don’t be such a teenager,” she’d say at last, waiting for me to come down from the loft and talk to her. 167. I let the wind and lake take me. After a few cool minutes, I set the wooden handle over my two jeaned knees and let myself glide. I felt my temples pounding, and it seemed that the ache in my head had moved by then into my jaw and skull, making me queasy, making me realize that we hadn’t stopped for dinner on the way home from Duluth. Breakfast and lunch combined had been a few knotty strawberries, and when this came to me, when I realized I hadn’t really eaten all day, I began to feel truly sick. The sensation came over in a pounce. I could tell the feeling had been hovering over me for hours, just waiting till I was out in the open, out in the lake, before bearing down. I was dizzy, lightheaded. By the time the canoe ran ashore, the world was swinging on ropes when I looked around, everything in sight unsteadily swaying. Still Lake, no longer still at all. I climbed out of the canoe carefully, holding both sides with my hands, and though I hadn’t planned on going there, it didn’t surprise me to find myself creeping over the rocks below the Gardners’ deck. I hardly had a thought in my head. I was just hungry and tired and fully dressed, unwilling to look back at the cabin where my mother sat, eating her pear. I crept around to the front door. Peered in. No, I wasn’t (I told the police later) thinking of Paul. I was thinking of finding myself something to eat. When I saw that the lights in the Gardners’ cabin were off, I figured I could go right in the front door—I knew it was never locked—and scrounge around for some pretzels in the cabinet. I knew I could do this without waking anyone up, chew without making a sound, leave without anyone noticing what had been taken. But once I had that thought—pretzels, maybe a fruit rollup, a granola bar—I realized I wanted more than that, that I would open the fridge and eat out the carton of cottage cheese, fish the last two pickles from the jar with my fingers, suck up all Paul’s leftover noodles from his bowl. I would do all that, and maybe I’d also 168. go into the dark bathroom and pee (silently, trickling it out), slip a half-used bar of lavender soap into my pocket, take Patra’s cell phone from the counter, push Leo’s manuscript under my shirt. I felt almost giddy at the thought. Hadn’t I planned this out long ago? It suddenly seemed I had. But of course it wasn’t a true plan at all: it was just an ache I had, that old yearning to take far more than was reasonable. Fi, fie, foe, fum, I thought, as I spun the cool doorknob, went in. It was a different cabin in the dark than it was in daylight. The main room was hard to make out. What I saw first were the big triangular windows, and through them, the narrow strip of light I’d traveled from my parents’ lit house. At the end of that strip, far across the lake, I could make out my mother’s tiny form framed by our cabin windows. I could see her hunched over the kitchen table, reading. I wiped my feet on the mat out of habit, took off my boots and set them against the wall. I started towards the cupboard in my socks. I was thinking of snacks in crinkly packages. I was hoping for peanut butter granola bars, nestled snugly in dark boxes. The cupboard hinge made a throaty sound, and I had it open, the box in my hands, when I felt a prickling on my neck. “Linda?” I turned. Patra was uncurling from a shadow on the couch. She stood up slowly, a black silhouette against the window, and I had the fleeting, absurd belief that if I didn’t say anything, if I froze in my tracks, she wouldn’t be able see me. “Is that you?” I stayed quiet and didn’t move. 169. “Oh, dear,” she said. She was wearing just a t-shirt, so her bare legs looked white as birch branches in the dark. She didn’t bother tugging the hem over her thighs as she came across the room. “Leo forgot to pay you, didn’t he? Or did you forget your bag in the car? I saw you coming across the lake, I watched you and I thought, I had this thought. She’s come to rescue us, that girl in her boat. Isn’t it weird the things you think in the dark? Isn’t it funny how the mind goes flap flap flap, so you don’t know if you’re sleeping or not, and you think: that girl, that crazy girl in her canoe has come to row us all away somewhere.” “Paddle,” I whispered. “What?” she asked. “You row a boat. Paddle a canoe.” “Whatever, yes.” She put a hand on her head, so her white t-shirt pulled up over her blue panties. “I’m talking nonsense. I must have dozed off before I looked out that window and saw you. Did Leo forget to write a check? Or did you come for something else?” Why did I come? My stomach rumbled audibly, and as it did, I took in the room more fully—bit by bit. I saw the closed picnic basket on the counter. I saw the cell phone in Patra’s hand, the way she stroked it compulsively as she looked at me, as she waited for an explanation. I saw that Leo’s manuscript lay open on a living room chair (pale rectangle on cushions), and I saw out of the corner of my eye that Paul’s door was shut, but there was a crack of light beneath. I heard Leo’s muffled voice talking quietly behind it. Patra reached out her hand to the light switch, so I said, feeling an odd panic about it, “Wait—” “We’re all up, I guess. May as well admit it.” 170. “But—” Some part of me still wanted to creep away unseen. “No one can sleep tonight—” Paul’s door opened then. Leo came out and Patra flicked the switch on the light, so that the two of us, Patra and me, were left squinting in the sudden brightness. Leo stood open-eyed, surprised—no, dismayed—to see me. “What?” he said, and for an instant, a look of real fear passed over his face. I thought of that first morning when I’d stood with the hatchet as he came into the house. Then, he’d taken me as harmless, hardly worth noticing. He’d shaken my hand, introduced himself, and poured a glass of milk for both of us. Now he was acting as if I might be somehow dangerous to him, and maybe I was—I wanted to be—but not in the way he thought. Discreetly, I set down the box of granola bars on the counter behind the picnic basket. I crossed my arms. “Linda?” he asked. “You forgot to pay her,” Patra said. “Did I?” He was watching me intently. “I did. I guess did forget.” Like me, he was still wearing his clothes from the day—his khaki shorts and tucked-in shirt—but he also wore his black slippers. They flapped loose on his feet as he moved across the room to the table and began to write out a check. A sound came from the other room, a murmur or cry. “He’s hungry!” Leo explained, bending over the checkbook. “We’ll have pancakes, I think. That’s one of those foods no one can turn down. He’s ready for breakfast.” It couldn’t have been much past eleven o’clock. I remembered how bright the night sky had been when I paddled across the lake, the clouds a curdled grey above me. At the latest, it was just before midnight now, but for a moment it seemed possible that I’d lost track of time, that the 171. whole night had passed without my noticing. Had I fallen asleep in the loft? Was it dawn I’d seen in the sky? “Breakfast?” Patra looked just as confused as I, just as muddled. “Yep.” He glanced up from his task. “It’s early, but not too. And where is it that says you can’t eat breakfast a little early? Who wrote that rule down?” He ripped out the check and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, and I saw that he’d written out One Hundred and Fifty Dollars. It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life, and yet so flimsy, so much less substantial than the bills Patra usually gave me. In the space for my name he’d written CASH. “Let’s let Linda be on her way.” Patra unexpectedly grasped my arm. “Why not stay for breakfast?” “It’s been a long, long day for her,” Leo warned. “We should have stopped on the way home,” Patra complained to him. “It wouldn’t have been such a long day if we’d stopped.” “He was sleeping. It’s good to let him sleep.” “But he’s hungry now?” “I think he could eat a horse,” Leo assured her. “And since he’s been sleeping all day, he’s not at all tired.” “That’s good?” Her voice splintered. “That’s good.” He took her by one hand, walked her over to the couch, sat her down. Then he crouched in front of her, kissing her face—over and over. He kissed her cheeks, the wrinkles on her forehead, her freckled eyelids. She was still worrying the cell phone with a thumb, but I could sense something in her smoothing out, like a hand over bedcovers after a long bad night. I hadn’t 172. seen Leo like this before, and it was mesmerizing to watch. He brushed back the hair from her face. He said to her, softly, “So I figure, let’s have breakfast, right? Let’s start tomorrow early. It’s not written anywhere that we can’t do that.” “It’s tomorrow?” Patra asked. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” “And we’re just having breakfast?” “Pancakes and syrup and strawberries and milk.” At that, my mouth filled with saliva, and Leo went into the kitchen and started pulling out pots and pans. He paused to put in a CD—“A little music?” he asked over his shoulder—so something classical with strings bloomed steadily into the room. Patra, who’d been glancing at Paul’s open doorway, set down her cellphone on the coffee table. Licked her lips. Once the phone was out of her hands, Leo looked relieved. “Well, bye Linda!” he said to me across the kitchen island. Never looking in my direction, taking for granted that I was on my way out the door. His eyes were on Patra, not me, on her strange jittery walk from couch to hall. “Maybe don’t bother him just now,” he said to her, a pot in hand. “But he’s awake?” “He’s fine.” “He’s awake?” She looked back at Leo. “He woke up a few minutes ago. He’s hungry. He asked for breakfast.” So breakfast is what Leo made. He turned on all the lights in the main room and kitchen, went around flicking every switch he could find. He filled a pot with water to warm the syrup bottle and, within a minute or two, had stirred up a golden batter, which he ladled in bubbly, 173. spreading coins onto the skillet. As he did this, he kept glancing up at me, kept quietly suggesting that I should leave. “There’s your check, Linda,” he said. “Thanks so much again.” “No problem,” I said, as the warm, doughy scent of pancakes filled the room. “It was a huge help to have you, you know. So, thanks. A huge. Huge. Help.” He smiled at me without raising his eyes from his task, so his balding head shown down at me in the fluorescent light. “Let me do something now,” I offered. “Let me pour the milk.” “That’s really nice of you, but I’m sure you’re tired.” “Not really,” I said. “You’ve already done so much.” “You don’t have enough batter?” I asked. “It’s not that. It’s just that I bet your parents are waiting for you.” “I’m getting in the way or something?” “No.” He sighed. “Of course we’d love to have you stay, but—” I met his bluff. I lined up four perfect glasses on the counter, opened the milk carton and filled all four up. I reached up and lifted four plates from the cabinet, pulled them into my stomach and carried them carefully to the table. As I did this, the cats arrived from nowhere and bore down on my ankles with the sides of their faces. Steam from Leo’s skillet fogged up all the windows. I could no longer see out. Goodbye woods, I thought. Goodbye world. The pancakes were sizzling and the cats were meowing and the water was boiling rapidly around the glass syrup bottle. Classical music webbed back and forth through the air. I laid out knives and forks, paper napkins, a plate of sliced butter. As I did these things, I saw Patra lean into Paul’s room, holding onto the molding 174. with her hands. Then she pulled her head out, padded around the living room in her bare feet, straightened pillows, restacked books, folded up a blanket. Abruptly, she turned to Leo and me in the kitchen. “What a good idea. Right? Breakfast.” “And Linda’s here!” she added, coming over and giving me a hug, pushing herself in so I could feel her pointy chin tucked over my shoulder. Little Patra, shorter by an inch than I was— all limbs, all cool, clammy skin in her t-shirt. Then, fast as that, she moved away, kissed Leo on the back of the neck. “Leo, the Larger,” she said on tiptoe, and I could see that some energy she could barely contain was coursing through her, that all her movements had a jerky, outsized exuberance, as if she were struggling to contain something inside herself. She hastily rinsed off the spatula Leo had used for mixing. She washed out the mixing bowl and swiped at the counter with a paper towel, and at some point she lifted an egg absentmindedly from the open carton and squeezed it until it cracked open. “What am I doing?” she asked, holding up her glistening, gooey hand. But she seemed to be laughing. “What a mess!” she exclaimed, swiping her hand on a dishtowel, dragging the towel deliberately and vigorously over each of her fingers. Then she took a deep breath and sat down at the table. “Okay, I’m starving,” she said. “Where are those pancakes already?” I brought Patra her glass of milk and, while Leo went to get Paul, I piled pancakes onto our plates. Leo came out only seconds later, smiling directly at Patra—smiling so wide that her lips curled up too, slightly—and he said, “The little king wants his in bed!” So he turned to leave again, with a plate and glass of milk. Halfway across the room, his head swiveled round. “I got it, Patty. Eat.” I watched her sit back down. 175. Without speaking, she broke off a piece of pancake with her fingers and put it in her mouth. I did the same. I was so hungry, and the pancakes were so warm and soft, still gooey with dough in the middle. You could eat them without chewing much, you could get a lot into your mouth at once, you could almost drink those pancakes down. I kept pushing fluffy pieces in my mouth, and just when I thought there was no way I could get enough, there was no way I’d ever be filled up, I looked over and saw that Patra had stopped eating. Her lips were partway open, and I could see all that half-chewed pancake wedged between her teeth and gums, ballooning out her cheeks, balanced in a frothy mix on her lower lip. She just sat there with her cheeks bulged out for ten seconds, twenty, and then, at last, she deliberately closed her eyes, carefully rotated her jaw, forced that huge pancake wad down her throat. I saw it go. “Patra?” I said, a strange low rumble of fear moving through me. What was Paul like at that point? I was asked later. I remember wondering if Patra would choke. I remember wondering if a person’s windpipe could be blocked by something as harmless and soft as pancake. If that kind of crisis was possible. “Ugg,” Patra murmured. Then she stood up, went straight to the couch, where she curled up. She pulled her scrawny knees up into her t-shirt, lay her head on a cushion. “That’s enough of that,” she whispered. What time was it then? It was either very early or very late, and for a moment—seeing Patra on the couch, my belly full of half-cooked pancake—it felt more insistently like the latter. As I looked across the table at all the crumbs we’d made, all those half-eaten pancake bits, I felt 176. exhausted. I made a ball of my napkin, drank the last gulp of milk in my glass. Stood up. Then I went around the room, flicking off all the lights Leo had turned on. I found the blanket Patra had folded up minutes before, shook it open over Patra’s curled form, and sat down at the other end of the couch. Leo’s music played on. I didn’t say anything to Patra. We just sat looking out the window. My parents’ cabin across the lake was dark now, but the night sky was still bright. Perhaps, I thought, a full moon had risen—or perhaps true dawn had come at last. On the shore, my dad’s Wenonah gleamed like a huge beached fish. “You saw me coming?” I asked. I wanted to hear that story again. “Oh, Linda.” “Have you ever been in a canoe?” “Mmm. Once. But I’m not like you. I’m a city kid, you know?” “I know.” She glanced over at me across the couch. “At camp. They plopped me down in a canoe, and all I could think was, I’m going to fall out. And the more I thought that, the more I was afraid that I’d eventually just tip the thing over on purpose to be done with it. Splash.” “Everybody thinks that.” She exhaled slowly. “I’m trying to get better at controlling my thoughts.” “Everybody eventually tips.” “Do they? Leo never thinks like that.” “Like what?” “Like the worst thing, the very worst thing, could happen.” 177. I didn’t say anything. “He’s a good dad.” “Yeah?” “And Paul! My Paul is such a good kid.” “He is.” She seemed pleased to hear me say that. She lifted the blanket up for me to come under, so I wiggled out of my shoes and let her cover me up. “You know how Paul was born?” she asked, tucking the blanket over my legs. No, I hadn’t thought about that. I’d only ever thought of Paul as fully formed, as a four- year-old arrival from another planet. I never thought of him as an infant, as one of those hours- old, red and wet mounds of flesh—as coming out of Patra. “Let me tell you something, Linda.” And I wanted her to tell me something, I did. “After I got pregnant with Paul I was sick for so long. I had this belief that I was doomed somehow, that everything that could go wrong would, and it did! Leo kept saying, you’re just afraid, you’re just afraid. And I was. I was so worried I’d made a huge mistake.” “You’d just finished college?” “My friends were joining the Peace Corps, starting grad school.” “It makes sense,” I said. “It wasn’t just that I was afraid. It felt really real, how sick I was during pregnancy. There were all these complications. Leo kept pushing me to worry less, kept reading me all his books, but it was just one thing after another, low fetal weight, premature contractions, everything you could think of. Then during labor, I actually felt my heart stop. I actually heard it go thump, thump, thump—” She patted my leg as she said this. “—then nothing else, and that’s when I had 178. this tiny thought, this thought that I’d been wrong to be so scared of this, that God wouldn’t do that. God wouldn’t just stop my heart, would he?” My throat closed up at the idea. “He wouldn’t.” “Later Leo said that thought about God was Paul. That thought was him being born.” Through the window, the black trees stood stiff and unyielding. Patra was quiet, her hand still on my leg. She was quiet so long, in fact, I thought maybe she had drifted off, but then I felt her shift positions, curl in closer to me so our heads almost touched on the couch cushions. She was whispering. “I’d been resisting Leo’s way of thinking for such a long time. I kept telling Leo, I just don’t have your kind of mind that believes one thing without question. But then Paul was there and everything was fine. Paul was perfect, truly. And I was so happy after that, not fighting Leo anymore. There’s nothing to say about happiness, you know? Nobody believes you when you talk about it.” She was crying a little now, she was asking me: “I’m so happy, right? Don’t we seem happy to you?” “You do,” I assured her. “You are.” I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew I was half-under the blanket and half-under Patra’s legs. I could barely move beneath her soft, warm weight. I could see Patra’s head poking out the other side of the blanket, and I felt a deep body gladness suddenly, as when I used to curl up with Tameka in our one sleeping bag in our shared bed. That old feeling came back to me hard—the way that sleeping bag had been like a second body we’d put on each night, the best body of all, heavier and more substantial than our separate ones. I curled in closer to Patra, let my hip sink between a crack in the couch cushions. I closed my eyes. Perhaps something did tug at the edge of my consciousness then, because I remember reminding myself 179. there was nothing to be worried about—that worrying now was like worrying that the canoe would tip just because you’d imagined it would happen. That was impossible, I told myself. It didn’t work like that. When I awoke next under the blanket on the couch, I was sweating. Leo’s CD was no longer playing, and a breeze was moving through my hair. I pushed a corner of the blanket back and let my damp neck grow chill in the cool air. What time was it? Patra, across the couch, was sleeping soundly. Somehow, I got out from under her legs without disturbing her, and it was only when I was standing up that I realized that the breeze I felt came from an open door. I smelled a bit of woods blow in, the resiny scent of pine needles. The sliding door to the deck was wide open, and a litter of pale leaves lay across the rug. I stepped, shivering, through the threshold and out onto the deck. Night had come at last. The sky: starless, dark, empty. There was someone near the telescope, crouched. “Paul?” He looked up at me, and his face was bright and clear as anything. He looked stronger and healthier than I’d seen in days, the whites of his eyes and the whites of his teeth shining even in the dark. His hair had been worked by a finger into a sharp spoke that stood on the very top of his head. He was smiling. “Oh, brother, another beaver,” he giggled. “Paul—” I felt relief then. I felt relief enough to scold him. “—come on inside.” “Let’s play survival together,” he suggested. “Not now.” 180. “Look! Here comes a bear.” He started running then. He just took off into the woods. For such a little kid, he moved far faster than I thought he could, scrambling over logs and under branches, pushing through pine boughs so they whipped back against my chest. I was running in my socks. Paul was just in his footed pajamas, and yet it was all I could do to keep up with him. Then the last branch fell away and the trees opened up and the shore was in front of us: I saw, to my shock, that a silvery crust of early ice had congealed over the water. Paul looked back at me once, his hair-horn bent double. He yelled, “Oh no, a bear!” The next thing I knew, he was down on his belly, elbowing his way onto that thin sheet of ice, and I realized at last how cold it was, how the smell of snow thinned the air in my nostrils, how my fingertips were already going a little numb. “Paul!” I called out, taking a little step onto the ice, listening to it splinter under my weight, feeling the whole thing giving way. My third step broke through to my ankles, and as I stood there in the bitter water, as I watched Paul drag himself across the ice by the elbows, pulling himself— snake-like—towards the center of the lake, it came to me that this was a dream. Then it was dawn. A grey triangle of sky could be seen through the big window. Fog was rising off the lake, and I could just make out my parents’ cabin through the haze. Gradually, I took in the room around me. Paul’s light was turned off, Leo was snoring somewhere out of sight, and Patra was curled beside me, sleeping. The sliding door was shut up tight. Everything, everything was in its rightful place. I sat up more fully. I watched the white cat pace back and forth, back and forth, in front of the closed door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leo’s manuscript open on the easy chair. Unwilling to go back to sleep, and unwilling to leave the couch, I leaned over and lifted up the top page from 181. the big stack of papers. I was expecting a document about space, something about the misguided search for extraterrestrial life based on our unexamined assumptions. I thought I had a feel for the way Leo would write, and I expected meticulous, convoluted sentences about the space-time continuum and pan-galactic evolution. I expected jargon and equations mixed in with deceptively simple questions, maybe diagrams. Instead, the first page of the manuscript I picked up was written in bland, square language. I read the document twice through, first focusing on the type-written words, and then on Patra’s suggestions for revision, which were scrawled in purple pen at the bottom. Here’s what Leo wrote: Let me start by acknowledging the goodness that is The Church of Christ, Scientist and the inspired teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. I’ve written here of my son I’ve written about my son before, but today I want to give thanks for the omniscient omnipotent grace of God, who shows Himself to the childlike nature in us all. My son, who has recently struggled with the belief of a headache, surprised me one night by asking me to read The Scientific Statement of Being instead of his favorite bedtime story. He is just four years old, but his wisdom has long been a model to me and his mother. I read him the statement we all know so well, “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter…” and after I finished, he asked me, “What is matter?” I was taken aback because he’d never asked this before. As a scientist, I thought of all the definitions my colleagues argue about discuss, but as a Scientist, I was led to tell him, “Your headache and everything else that lies and tries to pretend it is real.” “Out of the mouths of babes” He said to me then, “I’m not matter, I don’t lie.” So I saw that he knew better than even I his own spiritual nature. By the morning after our conversation, my son’s headache was completely gone and he was able to prepare for a weekend trip we’d planned. As Mary Baker 182. Eddy says, “Become conscious for a single moment that life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will utter no complaints.” I’m so continually grateful to this church, which has sustained me and my family with the true teachings of Christ all these years. Here’s what Patra had added at the bottom: Maybe start with a little more description of Paul? Maybe add a little more about what he was struggling with? Re: “Out of the mouths of babes”: Is that how he put it? Didn’t he say, “I don’t matter” instead of “I’m not matter”? Remember how he spooked me with that, and how you corrected him, and it was funny and sweet and everybody laughed? Remember how he was sitting with that old glove of yours pulled up to his elbow and he kept petting your beard as you talked to him? It’s details like those that will move people, I think. Don’t forget to put a few details like that in. Or, remember how he was trying to fit both hands in that glove at once, like a fin? That was funny, too. Remember how when he took his hands out, all those little rocks from the lake came out on your lap? I’m not sure how that fits, but otherwise, of course, this is very beautiful. 183. XIV. I wrote Mr. Grierson a letter once. He was living in Florida when I tracked him down, in a little town outside Tallahassee called Crawfordville, which was named for a doctor who’d lived there long ago. That’s what the internet said. I learned from online reports that Mr. Grierson kept a shop, a place that sold Star Wars lunchboxes and 19 th century rocking chairs and 1950s postcards of orange groves. The postcard oranges were a shiny balloon yellow, not really orange at all. Junk, people called it. The Treasure Chest, the shop was called. Dear Mr. Grierson, I wrote, then stopped, unsure what to say next. I was living in Minneapolis by then. I was eating my dinners with the mechanic and working days as an office temp and, when I couldn’t sleep at night, I read biographies of explorers, the sick drive to Everest where men with frost-bitten fingers dug in ice with spoons. I read these books with a flashlight so as not to awake Ann in her futon bed across the room. I read for hours in a shadowy cave of blankets, leaning against the cold wall, growing impatient with all the hopelessly boyish ploys for survival. When the climbers inevitably started up the mountain in a storm with just a 184. pocketknife and a shovel, I tried writing Mr. Grierson instead. I started the same letter again and again. Dawn greyed and re-greyed the room. Dear Mr. Grierson, I wrote. Dear Adam. To Adam Grierson. To Mr. Adam Grierson. Dear You. You may not remember me (I finally began). I was your student in eighth grade American history in Loose River, Minnesota. I was the one by the window in the lumberjack shirt and the long braid and the hiking boots. You knew me as Mattie. You called me Miss Originality, for the prize I won in History Odyssey. I did wolves, remember? I did my project on wolves. I’m writing now because I’ve been thinking about something that has bothered me for a while. After you left Loose River and after Lily Holburn said the things she did, no one ever spoke one word about what you taught us in class. It was weird to me, like all those days never happened. But I guess you put a lot of energy into your lessons. I remember how you stood up and recited the whole Declaration of Independence by heart, which must have been a lot of work to memorize. I remember how you had us draw maps of the country as if we were Louis and Clark, as if we only knew the shapes of the rivers by riding them. When you took me to History Odyssey, I admit, I thought you were laughing at my wolf idea, but later I thought about how you picked me to do it over everybody else. Maybe you saw me as less trouble for you than some other girl, but it seems to me now that the reasons you picked me matter less than the fact of it. Did you know that when Lily Holburn came back to school the fall after you left, she had a surprise for us? People had been saying for a while she was sick, but no, she was pregnant, which sealed her fate and yours in town, though most people had heard by then that she’d taken back her testimony against you. Can you imagine Lily pregnant? She was very beautiful, actually. She was even more beautiful than she was before. But then she got on a bus one day 185. and went to Saint Paul, where there was a program for girls like her associated with the Lutheran Church. She became a blood lab technician, I heard. The program gave her free career training, baby clothes and stuff, so it’s not hard now to guess why she lied about you. Lots of animals in a trap will play dead. That’s how I think of what she did. She found a sneaky way out of the little life she would have had if they’d made her stay and get married to the guy who knocked her up. Lily wasn’t as dumb as she looked. But probably you knew that already. I thought once about moving to California. That’s where you’re from, right? I wanted to see the Redwoods there. I wanted to feel miniature beside those big trees, to alter for good my sense of the scale of things. I’ve heard people say those trees can do that to you. But Minneapolis was more affordable. The trees here are a lot like the trees in Loose River, actually. I’ve never been to Florida either. I think if I came into your shop I would buy the rocking chair with the high back and the bent oak runners. It looks comfortable in the picture on your website. It doesn’t seem like junk. I’ve read what people say, and maybe they have good reasons to write what they do, but I think you should hear this too: I think you’re innocent. I think you should hear that from someone. I think someone should say that to you, and in case no one has, I’m that someone for you. Sincerely, Mattie Furtson I folded the letter in half. I folded it in half again, then opened it up and reread it. As it got lighter, I saw that my handwriting wasn’t as neat as I’d hoped, the letters running together. But no matter. I wasn’t going to rewrite it. Dawn is a free pass. I’ve always thought that. The hours between four and seven belong to a few fidgety birds and maybe a last bat, charging mosquitoes. In Minneapolis, the traffic from 186. the highway would grow louder and louder, and eventually a slant of light would work its way in through the shade and crawl up my neck. That’s when I put away my books and papers. At seven on the dot, I got out of bed, boiled water on the hotplate, and made instant coffee for me and Ann. I wiggled into my pantyhose in the bathroom. When I stuck out my tongue to brush it, the girl in the mirror was always gagging at me, earnestly. Eyes red. Ann started each morning doing a dead-man’s float on her yoga mat. “Morning, Linda,” she’d say as I got ready for work, looking at me upside down over the wrinkled hump of her forehead. There was something very creaturely about her, seen like that. Her pale eyes looked like two little hungry mouths, her chin a pointy forehead. “Morning,” I’d say. Usually we left it at that, but she must have seen the letter in my hand that day, because she said, hopefully, “Is that to your family?” I knew it bothered Ann—it broke her strict code of Canadian niceness—that I didn’t have holiday plans, that I wouldn’t tell her even the littlest thing about where I’d come from. I hesitated long enough to turn the envelope chestward before saying, “Yep.” I turned away. “Bye.” I whisked up my jacket and hat. Opened the door and rode the elevator down four floors, taking in all the jittery-stuttering sounds of invisible machinery. On the ground floor, there was a clank and a bounce. Why tell Ann that I hadn’t had any contact with my mother for more than nine months? Why tell her that? Outside the apartment, traffic was crawling steadily over icy roads. Exhaust and snow mixed in the air. When I got to it, the corner mailbox was frozen shut so I had to melt it with the heat of my hands. I had, then, a quick image of Florida swamps. As I slid my envelope in I thought of Florida with its jagged palms, and when I looked up again across the icy roads, it was as if all the 187. world was gliding into reach, imperceptibly and at last: everything lazy and frightening with meanings. I waited for my hands to warm in my pockets before setting off into the morning. That morning in the Gardner cabin, seven o’clock came and went without anyone stirring at all. Which was a surprise to me, I guess, but only because I’d always assumed the Gardners were early risers. From my place on the couch beside Patra, I watched the lake silver gradually, and then I watched it snag the first few bits of new sun. I watched a loon surface on the far side and look around. A motorboat sped past grumpily, calving the water, and when another boat followed in its wake, I remember wanting the morning to slow down, slow down. I wanted the morning to just hold still, to take its time in coming. Patra woke up reluctantly. She kept opening her eyes partway and closing them again— as if reassured by my presence, as if my presence gave her permission to return to unconsciousness without guilt. When the early light caught her face, every freckle became vivid and precise, and I watched two of them quiver together over her right eyelid. I saw a slim white scar that I’d never seen before, parting the down on her upper lip. I saw tiny flecks of dandruff riding a few hairs near her scalp. Later, it would be impossible for me to tell anyone of the happiness of those hours, the exquisite sweetness of sitting there with her asleep on the couch, and it was very hard for me to admit even to myself how much of that feeling had to do with Paul and Leo being safely out of the room. A slice of sunlight edged up her blanketed thigh. I remember how her breathing moved the natty yellow cotton up and down, how her eyeballs beneath her freckled lids shifted in her sleep. The palest blue vein could be seen in her neck, but I didn’t touch her. I just sat crossed- 188. legged beside her on the couch, the blanket covering us both, one of her small red knees poking out from a corner. At the time, I did not question why she’d stayed with me in the living room—and not with Leo in their bed or with Paul in his room. I did not wonder about her choice to stay asleep so long, which seemed natural to me at the time, proof everything was all right. That she was still there with me after all those hours, that she was calmly sleeping now, was the only reassurance in the world I needed. Later, of course, I would wonder about it. Later, when I was asked about her actions, I wouldn’t have a very good answer for why she hadn’t gone in to check on Paul during the night. The suggestion at the trial was that she’d remained with me in outright avoidance and denial of facts, that she’d aligned herself with a fifteen-year-old because she wanted to feel less responsible herself. A more generous interpretation was that she identified with me because we were both susceptible in a sense, young girls under the sway of a dogmatic older man. Leo, it was said, had kept Paul away from her on purpose. There’s some truth to both these theories, maybe—I saw evidence for both—but even at the time I understood that they missed something. They left something out. They didn’t account for Patra’s keen awareness of her own power, her disorganized but formidable determination. They didn’t account for what made Patra Patra. Didn’t she always need someone to watch her and approve? And wasn’t I better at that than anyone? 189. When at last she woke up for good, when she sat up on the couch and pulled the blanket over her bent-up knees, she had a closed-lip smile waiting for me, like a reward for my vigil. “So,” she said. “Janet stayed all night.” “Janet?” “Rochester’s name for Jane Eyre. She was a governess, too. Like you.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “You’re both governesses.” She smiled at the word. Then, as if catching herself: “What time is it?” I shrugged. She sat up straighter. “Where’s Leo?” I shrugged again. She turned and shot one wild look down the hall. But instead of standing up, as I thought she would, she closed her eyes and held very still. She looked like she was summoning stillness by sheer strength of will. Then she let out a deep breath through her white teeth, and I could smell it a foot away—the rot and decay, the remains of an undigested meal. She opened her eyes again, squinting a little. “Did you read that?” She was looking at Leo’s manuscript on the chair beside me. I waited a second before answering. “Yeah?” “It’s okay.” She was leaning forward now, getting herself up into a gargoyle-like crouch. She set a damp palm on my elbow. “It’s okay, you know,” she said, breathing it out, and I could see she was talking herself towards something. Her fetid breath and her hand on my arm made something squirrel through my gut. But I leaned in closer to smell her breath again, disgusted with myself—disgusted and interested, both. 190. When she spoke again her voice was lower than usual. “I keep telling myself, worry is the problem. That’s the thing to work on, right?” I hesitated. “I don’t know.” “It’s a problem with my mind.” “Well—” I thought about it. Something snagged. “What do you mean?” “What do I mean?” She looked raked clean, purged for some reason, by the question. She stuck out her tongue—laughing?—and I could see it, with its layer of white scum, slide back over her teeth. Between last night and now, there was something looser about her, more disjointed, more tantalizing. She swallowed, grabbing my hand in hers. Her eyes were bouncing from thing to thing. “You’re right, Linda. Of course you’re right. It’s stupid to worry about worry. Look, Drake’s back, and Leo’s here, and you’re here, too. Everything’s good.” “I’m here, too.” “Everything’s fine.” “Everything is,” I nodded. “I know, I know.” “Not even a cloud in the sky. And those are birds are singing, right?” “Chickadees.” “See, you know. I knew you’d know.” And because it seemed so easy to make her happy, now, I added, “And purple martins.” “Purple martins, okay.” “Um, and,” I listened. “Two loons.” Though that was the whine of a motor, possibly. Maybe I was making things up, exaggerating slightly. “Two loons, of course. I should know that. I should know. The thing is, to let myself take things as they really are, like this— 191. In a flash, I saw the white field of ice that was the lake last night. “We just need to know the truth—” But here was the truth: everyone else was still sleeping—everyone but us. I nodded. “Hey, you’re wearing my headband,” she said. Her eyes stopped on my face. “Hmmm,” I acknowledged, relishing the feel of her gaze. The old ache was still there, but it had changed. It had become part of my head—it had both affixed itself to me and disappeared. “Looks good on you,” she said. Then Patra’s phone rang. Star Wars did just two notes before Leo appeared from the back room—instantly, like a grouse that’s been flushed out of the bushes. Patra stood up to pace the rug as she spoke, saying, “Hmmm” and “Thank you, yes.” I stood up, too, holding onto the blanket that was still warm from our bodies. As I did, I kept my eye on Leo in the doorway, but Leo didn’t once look in my direction. He was watching Patra, who was agreeing enthusiastically with the person on the phone, pacing up and down, nodding continuously. “Good, good, good,” she said. She paused in her pacing to take something in. Then, “I’m trying to do that. I’m really, really trying. I am.” She brightened. “But, you know, I’m feeling so much better about things now it’s morning. I really am. It’s a turning point, maybe? And oh! Guess what? I didn’t even tell you the most important part!” She starting up her pacing again, heading towards the table. “He had breakfast! Yes. Pancakes and milk. I know! I know it. We are so grateful.” When she got off the phone, she turned to Leo with a huge, haphazard grin on her face, which gradually closed down as she stood there. One look at Leo, and that smile went out of business. 192. Did they ever, to your knowledge, call a doctor? I was asked. Patra said, “That was the practitioner, Mrs. Julien?” “Yes,” Leo confirmed. Though it had been Patra of course, not him, who spoke to her. “She said we should be grateful?” “We are,” he assured her. There was a new stillness to him this morning, an economy of gesture, as if he’d realized how little movement was required to sustain himself. I watched him assemble some kind of smile to put on his face. There his lips went, pointing up. His wrinkled cargo shorts had nine separate pockets, I counted. Some had zippers and others had straps, some were shaped like triangles and others were pouches. He had pockets enough to forego a backpack or a bag. You just needed those pants. You just had to have faith in those pants. To Patra, he said, “How about some hot cocoa? Can you put the kettle on, Pea?” She shook her head once, and something strange was happening as she walked across the room towards him. All the braided rugs were sliding, smashing up together under her bare feet. She was walking that fast. He stopped her by opening up his arms and giving her a hug. As he held onto her, his voice changed. It grew musical, full of highs and lows. “What are you doing, Patty Pea? Let’s not backtrack now, Patty Cakes. Let’s do what we always do, make the cocoa, clean the litter box, go about the morning. Can you do that for me?” I watched him put his mouth against her ear. Then, over her head and without the singing: “Linda, will you help me with something?” 193. I’d assumed that he’d been ignoring me, so his question took me off-guard. I frowned at him, prepared to shake my head. I stood and shamelessly judged his nine-pocketed pants—which were completely useless, which were pathetic and ridiculous—but when he let go of Patra and turned, I found myself following him out. I was curious, I guess. I couldn’t help it. “Patra,” he said when she started after us. “Some cocoa. Then the litter box, get dressed. Maybe read the lesson? It really is a beautiful day.” In my dream of him, Paul had been so wily and quick. He’d seemed both mischievous and manic, which had amused and irritated me in turns—which, in my dream, had made me furious with him at last. There had been something very devious about the way he’d wiggled across the ice on his belly. So when I followed Leo into his room and saw him sleeping in his bed, I felt some residue of resentment for him, waiting. I took one look at him and felt my sympathy go dry. He was just a kid, after all. He was just a little kid, sleeping. It was gratifying to see him lying flat on his stomach, to see him tucked to his neck in covers, just his golden head poking out. His eyes were closed. It made me glad to feel resentful of him. It was a familiar feeling. “Now, Linda, don’t be afraid,” Leo said from behind, and it wasn’t until then that I was. “Now, Linda. It’s okay.” He seemed to want to pat my shoulder. My first thought was to back away from Leo, who’d closed the door behind us. My second thought was to look for a way out. I wasn’t sure what trap I’d been led into, and I felt my calves tense up, my fingertips prickle. 194. But then I saw that Leo’s face had a lopsided look to it. I saw that he was pushing out one cheek with the tip of his tongue, and I knew (without thinking this through) that this was something he only did when alone. “We’re playing Candy Land,” he told me, almost bashfully, gesturing towards the floor. “What?” But it was clear enough. The pastel board was spread out over the carpet, the path of colored squares snaking across. “Paul’s Blue. I’m Red.” “Okay.” Clearly, though, Paul was asleep. Clearly, Blue was beside the point. “Just move his piece when it’s his turn.” Leo nodded at me, encouragingly. “I’ve got to use the bathroom, quick, and make one little call.” He was painfully apologetic about it. He was twisting a pinch of fabric at his sleeve. He was glancing sidelong at the full plate of pancakes on Paul’s dresser, hastily and without turning his head, as if he didn’t want me to notice it but couldn’t keep from looking himself. He stood there with his tongue poking out his cheek, his eyes bloodshot, his nine pockets all empty—all completely and utterly empty—and for a second he seemed so surprisingly lost, I had the odd impulse to get down on my hands and knees and fill those pockets up. With toys from Paul’s bin, with puzzle pieces and those little green army men, with anything to make all those pockets appear, for the moment, worth having. “Okay,” I said, so he tucked his shirt in his pants in relief. “Don’t be afraid,” I found myself saying, so he tucked in his shirt again and again. He pushed that fabric down deep. He hitched up his shorts and shoved in that shirt. The fabric strained against his shoulders, and he looked like he wanted to tuck in his whole torso and his arms up to his elbows. He was going to tuck his whole self in. 195. To stop him from doing it again, I knelt down on the carpeted floor next to the Candy Land board. “Paul,” I said, to get Leo to leave. “It’s your turn.” Actually, I didn’t know how to play Candy Land. I’d never played games like this when I was a kid, so the rules, the way to move from square to square, eluded me. I didn’t see any dice or one of those arrows you spin. I just stared at the board for a long minute, letting the colors swim. I could sense Paul in his lump of covers on the bed. Then, without thinking, I pulled a card from the stack. I moved Paul’s Blue Gingerbread Man towards the yellow square the card matched. Then Leo’s Red Man. Blue, then Red. With a sinking heart, it came to me that I didn’t need to know how to play: it was obvious. It was a race. Gingerbread Leo plodded past the Crooked Old Peanut Brittle House; Gingerbread Paul took a useless shortcut through the Gumdrop Mountains. After only a couple of turns, I felt the deep drudgery of having played this game too many times before. I moved the pieces steadily along the pastel track. Leo wound through the Lollipop Woods. Paul got stuck on a Licorice Space. Just when Gingerbread Leo was closing in on the Molasses Swamp, just when the winner started to seem inevitable (though still a long way off), I happened to look up. Paul was watching me from his bed. Half his face was smashed up against the pillow, but one eye looked out. Unblinking, blue as anything. I could see the black pupil expanding, sluggishly. I cheated then: I set Gingerbread Paul on the final space. The eye tracked over my shoulder and past my head. I scrambled to my feet. 196. In the hallway, I ran into Leo, whose hands were still dripping from the bathroom. “Umm?” he asked, tucking in his pants, leaving huge wet handprints on his blue cotton shirt. I didn’t know what to say to him. “He won” is what came out, and I felt my voice hack through a crust of panic to say it. “He did!” He looked truly relieved to hear it, glad, as if winning Candy Land was a real achievement, as if watching someone else move your piece around a board counted now as victory. “That’s a lucky break. He’s got to be happy about that. He’s got to be. He’ll be back to his star charts and books in no time. It won’t take much. He’ll be ready for kindergarten in just a few weeks.” “He’s only four!” It felt like a protest to put it like that. Leo took that in, then rejected it. “But he’s got his head on straight. You know him. He’s very, very advanced for his age.” I shook my head. “He’s still so—” defenseless, I meant. “—such a little kid,” I said. I tried to corral some evidence to prove it. “He doesn’t even know how to read” is what I came up with. Something about that, the fact that Paul couldn’t even sound out TRAIN on his very favorite book, made tears spring to my eyes. Leo didn’t seem to see them. He put his wet hands on his hips, settling into the argument. He looked more comfortable, again, back in familiar terrain where he knew he could triumph. “Well now, that’s not strictly true, Linda. You know that. He can read a little. He can read BLUE. And NO.” “He’s memorized those words!” I was veering far past the point. “I’m sure that’s not fair. What do you do when you read? Do you sound it out? What?” 197. I shook my head, bewildered. “Listen, Leo—” “Now, Linda—” He reached out and cupped my hands in his wet palms. He was pressing them now, squeezing my fingers. His voice grew musical, the way it had been with Patra. He’d gotten my hands wet, like his. He insisted, “You’ve been an enormous help. Now I’m just going to pop back in? See what he might be up for next? Excuse me a moment. All right?” I left Leo and went into the main room, where the dishes from breakfast were still on the table. I saw drops of maple syrup had congealed to amber beads on the plates. Pancake crumbs were spread out in wide constellations across the wood table, across the bamboo placemats, across the maple floorboards. Patra, still in her t-shirt, was cleaning out the litter box. She was on her knees in the kitchen. With a blue plastic shovel in one hand and a white garbage bag in the other, she looked an awful lot like a little kid playing in the sand. She glanced up at me when I came around the kitchen island, palming hair from her eyes. There must have been something in my face she didn’t like, because she took one look at me and started scooting back on her knees across the tile. “Patra,” I said, coming forward. She stood up. I saw dozens of grains of kitty litter embedded in her knees, pressed into the red skin in a gray mosaic. I took a step towards her, but she put the island between us. She held onto the white laminate counter. I came around the island towards her, and she circled the same direction, moving away from me. “Patra,” I said again. 198. “It’s okay?” she asked, pleading. As if I could do that for her, as if I could spare her. “I think maybe—” “Maybe?” “—he needs something. Like, from the drugstore?” “Don’t tell Leo,” she said. “Like Tylenol or something?” “Leo says control your thoughts. Think of Paul as a new day.” “I’ll go to the drugstore, okay?” “And who can stop a new day from coming?” “I should go get something, I think. Patra? Patra?” I’d been creeping closer all this time. Now I was just inches from her. There she stood, with her reeking morning breath and kitty-litter knees. I could tell by the look in her eye that that she was riding just the surface of her brain, bobbing on that choppy surface of hope and worry, so on impulse I kissed her on the lips, quick, hating her purely in that instant, wanting to do more than that, to hurt her, to slap her, to get something back. Her lips were cool and flat, unresponsive. They didn’t seem like lips. “Just the Tylenol,” she said, stepping sideways. Not really taking me in—not really a mind at all, just a bobbing boat on a wave. “This is fucked,” I said softly. “What?” she asked. She was too miserable to hurt though. Her t-shirt barely covered her panties. She was, every bit of her, limbs—gangly and thin, almost naked. The scar on her lip seemed to pulse red, then white. I was that close. I was close enough to see that. 199. “Fine, then,” I told her. I worked my socked feet into my boots on the skewed welcome mat. I spun the handle on the front door, opening it up to the harsh bright rectangle of summer. Looked back once at Patra, who was standing in her wrinkled t-shirt by the kitchen counter. She was doing something with her lips, I saw then, twisting them around without sound. Her lips were going slowly, weirdly— like she had a terrible pain in her jaw—and then I was gone. Outside on the driveway it was hot already. I took a few steps into the woods, as if on my way home, and then, abruptly, squatted down and heaved up the mica-flaked stone. Worms waved blindly up. Tiny, translucent beetles moved in stupid circles. Everything was squirming and pulsing piteously, but there were the bills Patra had left, weeks ago. They were sodden and damp, but they were real money. I stuffed them in my pocket and took off at a sprint. 200. XV. For the three years after high school I took classes at Itasca Community College in Grand Rapids. I worked at a pizzaria-bar called The Binge, which had brown vinyl booths and wine- bottle vases plugged with plastic carnations. The requirements for the job were to wear black shorts, even in winter, and to keep the salad bar stocked with chopped lettuce and shaved carrots. During that time I saved up for the down payment on an ‘88 Chevy Corsica, and for four years after I bought that car I lived in Duluth, working retail and doing house cleaning on the side. I lived in the attic room of a minister’s duplex, and during the day I hauled boxes, folded clothes at JC Pennys, washed windows. I’d go down to the shore sometimes on my days off and wait for the lift bridge to go up, for ore ships and sailboats to slink out from the harbor. I didn’t wait on the grassy knoll with tourists, but walked across the bridge and sat in stiff Wisconsin sand. The fourth spring I was there my dad died. After the funeral in Loose River, after I crashed my Corsica in the trees, I sold my car for parts and within a week a half I was working for temp service in the Cities. I got placed in an office where I answered phone calls from the hoarse- 201. voiced men who manned the barges that went down the Mississippi. It was my job to arrange their schedules, give them the anticipated arrival and departure times of their boats, sometimes call their wives and make their excuses. I ate my packed lunch in the coffee break room with the other temps, and at the end of each day, I walked back to the bus stop downtown on salt-strewn streets. Through the scratched bus windows I could see snow falling in fat orbs under lights, all across the river. The mechanic’s apartment was a basement walk-out in once-grand Victorian. Students lived in the turrets. Bare poplar seedlings sprouted in all the gutters. “Hey there,” I’d say to Rom when he opened his rickety back door—still in his mechanic’s clothes, still in his greasy blue coveralls, his brown eyes watery with the cold I let in. I’d hold up a frozen pizza and a six-pack of Buds. “Oh, man,” he’d say. “Oh, really, a Tombstone? You shouldn’t have.” If he was unimpressed it didn’t keep him from drinking his three beers in the thirty minutes it took for the oven to heat up and cook the pizza. I kept him from my beers by whacking his hand every time he reached for one more. “Fair is fair,” I said, so Rom went into the bedroom and brought back a fifth of whiskey. As he swigged from the bottle, he usually whipped up a salad from a head of romaine and a cucumber. He usually made me drink a glass of milk before the pizza came out. He made me eat a few bites of the salad and half an orange, before allowing me one little sip of his ratty booze. “Fair is fair,” he mocked. The pizza cheese burned the roofs of our mouths. When I went for another swig of whisky, he pulled the bottle out of reach. “Eat your salad,” he commanded. 202. That first winter in Minneapolis, Rom was big on vitamins. He thought I ate like shit and had an unresolved past and probably should go to the dentist. He wanted us to eat at his table, so he set out plates and squares of paper towels folded in half. He’d started pressing for a pet, a Labrador retriever, because he thought a dog would lead to a more regular schedule, a shared apartment, more exercise. Weekend trips to the North Shore, a fucking campfire. I don’t know what. When I rolled my eyes at all that, he said, “If you’re not going anywhere, Girl Scout, just shut up. Okay? Just shut up.” “I didn’t say anything,” I protested. “You didn’t have to.” Sometimes, after supper, we put on our mittens and hats and walked to the movie theater a few blocks down towards the Capitol. We spilt the cost for two seats, two Cokes, and a bucket of popcorn. The movies Rom chose were always unrelentingly loud, full of cops shooting over the hoods of cars; still, I found it restful to sit there in the pulsing dark. The louder it was, the sooner I slept, my head against the cushion, my shoes sticking to the floor. I didn’t mind missing the car chases, the explosions. It was reassuring, somehow, to feel that something important just went on happening while I slept, something with guns. Afterwards, Rom would test me to see when I’d fallen asleep. “That guy with the face that turned into a fish?” he’d say, when we were walking out. “Did you see that?” And I’d say, though I usually hadn’t, “He was incredible.” When I’d been in the Cities for about nine months, when the holidays rolled around, I showed up at Rom’s apartment on Christmas Eve carrying a little package I’d wrapped in red 203. reindeer paper and a thin green bow. Rom opened it on his unmade bed, sitting crossed-legged. His feet were bare, yellow-nailed, but he was wearing stiff new jeans and a black button-up shirt, untucked. I watched as he broke the green ribbon with his teeth, as he lifted from the box a dog’s spikey collar and heavy leather lead. It took a moment for him to unwind the leash, and it’s weird how joy goes through a grown man’s face, so that for a second you can see him the way he was as a kid: all smooth-faced and unguarded. Then that look was gone, and he was squinting at me as I wiggled out of my jeans, as I unhooked my bra and got completely naked. I took the leather collar and fastened it around my neck. For an instant he looked so disheartened, so disappointed—like I’d done the one thing that could truly hurt him—but then I sniffed his crotch and handed him the leash, so we had a good time. “Bad girl,” he said. “Down,” he warned, a glint in his eyes. A sadness maybe. “Stay.” His present for me was a Swiss Army knife. “Fool’s protection,” he explained, looking a little nervous, leaning in so I could hear the stud in his tongue click against his teeth. This was after we’d gotten dressed again and were sipping eggnog in his bed straight from the carton. He waited until I said, “Cool. Thank you,” before pointing out all the things the knife could do. Peel an apple, light a match. I didn’t tell him that I had the exact same knife in my purse, though more banged up. I didn’t tell him I already knew which metal slit to pull with my fingernail to get the wire stripper out, or the six-inch blade. It was like so many other things between us, that gift. It was exactly right and totally wrong for me. It was that winter I think, just after the holidays, that I received at last a response to my letter. It was a holiday card with reindeer and HO HO HO’s in black cursive. When I opened it 204. up, out slipped a photograph of a white-haired man with his arm slung around a dog. It was creepy in a way, but also not. It was just a guy in a lawn chair, a guy and his hound—a palm tree shadow floating over his head. “Dear Mattie,” Mr. Grierson wrote. His cursive went loop-loop-loop. “Thank you for your letter a few weeks back,” he loop-said, slanting downwards to the right. He went on: What an unexpected thing, a real old-fashioned letter. I meant to write back right away, and then, after some time passed, it seemed likely I would not write at all. But Christmas is a good excuse, and it was a nice surprise to hear from you, I guess because I didn’t expect to get a letter like that. Hearing from an old teacher, I worry, can only be a disappointment. I remember running into one of my professors a few years back, and we just stood around with nothing to say, so I guessed that he didn’t remember me the way he said he did and was just being nice. I vowed right there and then never to pretend to know an old student. What I’m saying is, please don’t take it personally that my whole time in Minnesota is pretty much a blur to me now. I just don’t have many memories of that year, plus I’m not as young as I was, as I’m sure you know. Even so it’s nice to know that someone got something out of my lessons. I did work hard, and it’s good to feel that maybe all work that counted somehow. I’m running out of room on this card! Florida’s nowhere I’d recommend. It’s like being squashed slowly by invisible hands. Ha, ha, ha. It’s hot is what I’m saying. The days go by pretty fast, and lately I just want a shopping-list approach to things, that’s about all I feel capable of at this point. Here’s what I want, just sitting down at the end of the day and seeing that I can check off the items. I think I’m not in the least what you say I am, though your letter was kind. I’ve 205. learned a little about these things in my time, that is, the kinds of people who take the trouble to write me. I’ve found that some people who’ve done something bad will just go ahead and condemn everyone else around them to avoid feeling shitty themselves. As if that even works. Other types of people, and I’m not saying you’re this, necessarily, but I’m just putting it out there, will defend people like me on principle because when their turns come around, they want that so badly for themselves. I’m just saying. California’s awesome, though. Go, if you can. Peace, God bless, and happy new year! Adam Grierson On New Year’s day that year I got up early and walked down the winding path that followed the Minnehaha Creek to Lake Harriet. That morning the sun never really rose. It was dark, and then it was just a little less so. Snow had fallen overnight, but it seemed to have blown straight off the icy roads and back where it came from in the sky. When I got to the lake, I saw some hopeful fisherman was pulling a red plastic sled of supplies across the bare ice. All the usual joggers and cross-country skiers had stayed home. They were sleeping in, I guess, or doing their resolutions on notecards, drinking their bright orange mimosas, getting laid. It was just me and Sled-man out in the world. His body made an acute angle with the ice—he was leaning that hard as he pulled. I could see the long blue streaks his sled had made, from one end of the lake to the other. When the wind started picking up, I hurried through the trees to keep warm, peed in a brittle porta-potty without fully sitting down. Came out and left the lake behind, not looking back. On Upton Avenue I stopped for a cup of coffee to warm my bare hands at a bakery that sold so many kinds of bread the loaves covered one whole wall. I stared at the bread for a while, 206. then went out without buying any and found this bar I’d come to like, where the stools were painted to look like human legs. I let myself get drunk. I let myself slouch, like the Sled-man, at a very acute angle over the counter. Eventually I glanced at my watch and realized I needed to find a bus so I could meet Ann at our laundromat—Ann who wanted to wash all our towels and rugs and curtains for the New Year. “Fresh start,” she’d said. For two hours, until my buzz wore off and our quarters drained, we folded and stacked linens and drapes. By the time we started back it was almost dark. Ann said she wanted to see the rich- people’s luminaries along the river, so we walked with our baskets down less familiar streets, through an alley and down a winding line of shops. Between a closed camera store and a bank, we passed a crow pecking at a frozen crust in front of a lonely lit shop. The shop had Science and Health marked in blue chalk in the window, and inside a single white-haired lady sat applying chapstick with her pinkie finger. The sidewalk crow towed his frozen crust up onto a telephone wire, and as it did, Ann paused, lingered by the glass. She had gone to camp with some Christian Scientists, years back, which made her think she was some kind of authority—and she stopped for a second, reading silently through the window. “I thought they’d closed most of these reading rooms down. There’s, like, hardly any churches left.” Then she shook her head, shifting the weight of her basket from one hip to the other. “I mean, the thing I never understood, the thing that didn’t make any sense, is how you can have a religion that offers absolutely no explanation of the origin of evil.” I kept walking. It was another dreary snowless night. Almost no one was out—we could have walked straight down the middle of the street. Where were those luminaries? I remember wondering, my 207. arms aching under the weight of all those lemony-smelling drapes. Had we gone too far? Had we missed them? But no. Within a few blocks we caught sight of the first of several long lines of brown paper bags lit up, all flickering orangely with candles. “Ah!” Ann cried, stopping short. Hipping her basket so she could touch my arm. “Look-it that! Look.” At some point that year—maybe that night, maybe a few weeks after—I ended up telling Ann about Loose River. I told her about the competing nativity scenes at Christmas, the Lutherans’ husky Jesus and the Catholics’ ice one. I told her about the gym roof that collapsed in eighth grade and about Mr. Adler, who loved Rasputin more than anything, even America. I may have even told Ann about Mr. Grierson, eventually, about beautiful Lily—Lily who left us eventually—but I never told her a thing about Patra and Paul, and I never told her what I really thought about Christian Science, which is that from what I know, from what little I know, it offers one of the best accounts of the origin of human evil. This is how it starts, Ann. I think, now: that’s the story I’m trying to tell here. When he ran, Paul ran with great moon-landing steps. He always looked as if he were concentrating very hard, saying to himself run run, and each time the word went through his head he’d take a slightly more determined leap into the air. When I told him to run faster, he’d just run higher, and his pace would slow way down. He’d do all this useless work, kicking one leg straight out, pumping his fists. It was the road runner in slow motion. 208. It was great to watch, and I was only a little cruel about provoking him. “Run!” I’d say, and he’d slow down to a near-crawl, almost stopping between each stride. “Faster!” I’d say. His lips would pinch shut. He’d shunt one arm forward and one arm back. He was a kid who’d learned to run from watching dwarves in their mine, from TV, from cartoons. “Race you to the house!” I said once, and, as if he’d figured it out—that day, at last—he stayed put. He just stayed sitting on the dock, so I took a few exaggerated steps to encourage him. “I’m going to beat you!” I said, offering up that irresistible threat, doing a thump-thump- thump with my boots on the dock. No dice. When I looked back again, he’d slunk to a lying position, belly down, his arms curled up under him on the boards. “What’s up?” I said. I closed in on him, casually prodded him with the toe of my boot. “This here bear has gone into hibernation, looks like.” After a moment: “I’m bored.” “The bear is bored?” I asked, mock-incredulous. “And—” He turned his neck so his face smashed into the boards, the skin of his lip pushing out in a loop. “My head—” Something about the way he said that made me crouch down and look at him more closely. Then I pulled him up to sitting position. I lavished on him all that was left in my little reserve. “Then you don’t know about the wolf.” “I don’t want to pretend.” “This one’s real,” I promised. 209. This was late May, maybe. I remember the cottonwoods were dropping their cotton and seeds in great fluffy drifts that accumulated—the way snow once did—along the dirt driveway. I coaxed him into the garage with a few pretzels and buckled him in the bike while he ate them, slouched, helmeted, serenely disenchanted, looking big-headed and Buddha-like in his red plastic seat. I pulled the bike out onto the driveway and swung it a little menacingly when I climbed on. “Here we go!” I yelled, hoping to throw him off-balance, hoping to thrill him into acting more like a kid. It was a long ride to the Forest Center, and the whole way there I told him wolf facts, wolf statistics, wolf stories. I intended to impress him with the taxidermy bitch in the lobby: I intended to point out the yellowed canines under her blue-hooded lip, the cherry-red drips of blood painted on her coral claws. I remembered the first time I’d seen that wolf as a kid, how the feeling went beyond love, how it made me hungry, hungry, hungry. But Paul had no interest in the wolf at all. He looked at it for a few seconds, shrugged. After eleven miles on the bike, all he had to say was, “That’s not real.” What he liked best at the Center were puzzles. He found one on a shelf in the corner that exactly matched one he had at home. It was some bucolic winter woodland scene: a snowy owl perched fatly on a black branch, eyes lidless and round as two black pots opened. Paul knew how to put this puzzle together by heart, so instead of looking at the wolf or stuffed foxes, instead of fingering the rubber scat or dipping his little hand into one of the wooden boxes and guessing its contents, he sat crossed-legged on the floor in the corner, piecing together the same puzzle he’d done a hundred times at home. He sat, alone, putting that puzzle together and taking it apart. I wandered around the Center to kill time, read about the tea you could make from pine needles, watched goldfish float in Peg’s aquarium. Eventually, nothing left to do, I went over and crouched down next to Paul, who was holding a swiss-cheese slice of the owl’s face in one hand. 210. At first it infuriated me: how he didn’t look up when I approached. How he didn’t acknowledge me at all, or wonder what I was doing. He just scootched over automatically, let his body flow into mine, worked his way—bit by bit—onto my lap. He never stopped studying the puzzle. He just settled his body against mine, arranging leg over leg, so I had to sit down fully on the floor. He assumed I was available and interested—he always just assumed. He bent double at the waist to reach the puzzle from the perch he’d taken up on my lap, and outside, outside the window and down the road, whole mountains of cottonwood fluff drifted past. At first I was irritated, and then I was less so. I felt his breath through his nylon jacket and against my ribs. I felt the heat of his body through my jeans. He moved his fingers very knowingly from piece to piece, leaning his head back into me occasionally, to assess, and when he’d finished, he broke the puzzle up to do it again. “Nope,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure I meant it. By then, the room was going golden in the setting sun. Outside, the cottonwood fluff was rolling over. It was something I thought I should say, though: “It’s time. Time to go.” That’s when he yawned, his skull stoppering up the breath in my clavicle, and there was something about that that made me regret suggesting that we leave—something about the simple gift of his body, its closeness and its heat—that made me want to stay a little longer. Then we were at the door—me zipping his jacket up, Peg handing him three Gummy Bears—and I asked him, proddingly, for Peg, “Did you have a nice time?” He nodded in a way that moved his whole body up and down. “That was a great puzzle,” he said. 211. XVI. Patra grew up in a subdivision outside Cincinnati. According to her testimony, she was the youngest of five children by almost a decade, raised in a household of adults. Her father was an engineer, and her mother, who had stayed at home with all her siblings, had gone back to school by the time Patra was born and was getting a PhD in urban sociology. She had taken little Patra to the classes she TAed, and to her field research in the city, and to her defense, and by the time Patra was in high school, her mother was tenured faculty and her father had died of colon cancer and her siblings had teenaged children of their own. Patra finished high school a year early and left for the University of Michigan, where she met Leo Gardner her junior year. The week she graduated they were married. He bought a turn-of-the-century colonial for them outside Ann Arbor, with a vegetable garden and cats. A swing set, a gazebo. After Paul was born, Patra took him to infant music classes, then gymnastics for toddlers. She started him in preschool when he was three, the best one in town. She’d driven him to his Montessori classes every day—Patra confirmed this on the stand—even though she didn’t like to 212. drive, and even though she would have preferred keeping him home with her a little longer. Patra also confirmed, when the DA pressed her, that when Paul’s teacher had expressed concern one day in February about his health, she’d taken him secretly to see her mother’s friend, who was a pediatric endocrinologist. Afterwards, as she waited for blood test results, Paul had seemed better, then worse again, so she blamed herself—and her decision to see the doctor—for his relapse. It was apparently around this time that she agreed to Leo’s plan, or maybe even initiated it herself, to spend some time at their newly-built summer cabin in March. “To give us some mental space,” she said. “To have a change of scenery.” I also learned during the trial that while I’d been in Loose River that day searching for Tylenol, while I was on my way to and back from town, Leo had decided that it would be best to get “a change of scenery” again. He’d worked an unconscious Paul into a pair of pants, wedged his feet in shoes, and filled his backpack with puzzles and trains, handiwipes and animal crackers, a coloring book of birds he’d bought in Duluth. He’d combed down Paul’s hair, and when I returned with the bottle of pills in the afternoon, there they were on their way out the door through the kitchen. First came Patra, who walked right past me—her face white and taut—then Leo. Then Paul in Leo’s arms, Leo side-stepping around the kitchen island like he was carrying a big bundle of wood, or a miniature bride. Leo’s red eyes took me in, then moved on to other obstacles in his path. The table, the front door. “Thanks, Linda,” he said, when I moved a chair out of the way for him. Paul’s one white arm dangled behind him like a rope. Did they tell you where they were going? I was asked. They didn’t say anything. 213. Did they tell you they would drive two and a half hours, and make two stops at private residences, in both Brainerd and St. Cloud— They didn’t say— —neither of them medical professionals, before the victim experienced acute pulmonary crisis at approximately 7:30 that night? Leo just told me to lock up behind me. The last I saw of Patra, she was standing in the driveway, bent over double, the heel of her hand in her mouth like a hunk of bread. She had on unbuttoned jeans and slouchy moccasins, and when she stood up, her whole face was slick. Her eyes were unfocused, her mouth open wider than it needed to be for breathing. She closed the car door without a word. I stayed standing in the doorway for a long time after they left. I still had the bottle of pills in my hand, and after a moment, I went over and set it down on the counter. I hadn’t taken off my boots when I’d come inside earlier, I realized, and I could see tiny half-moons of dirt in a track across the floor. Back on the mat, I unbuckled my boots, got a broom to sweep up the dirt and crouched in my socks, sweeping into the dustpan down the hall. Outside Paul’s bedroom there was fishy-sweet scent like perch gone bad. I stood for a moment holding my breath. Then I went in and lifted Paul’s full plate of pancakes from the dresser, gripped his full glass of milk—which looked viscous in my hand—and carried both back to the kitchen. I went out to the deck and poached some pinecones and strips of bark from Europa’s walls, cradled them in my arms. Arranged them just as they’d been outside right there on Paul’s rug, in a half-circle around the dresser. The room smelled a little better then, like sap. I 214. heaved open the window for good measure. I folded up the Candy Land board, returned it to its box. I turned on Paul’s caboose nightlight, though it wasn’t really dark, though the late afternoon sun had hit an angle that allowed it to work its way down through the trees and shove a trapezoid of light across the floor. I sat down on his little-kid bed, lay back. Willed my skin not to crawl when I felt the dampness of his sheet. I focused on the trapezoid as it bent in half, made a stage, then seeped up the wall. My feet in their socks dangled off the far edge of the bed. You thought they’d come back? The room darkened. I could hear the clock ticking, a gutter creaking, refrigerator humming. A loon called out twice, like it was slicing at the evening, cutting all excess away. This is this, it said. That is that. A breeze shook the blinds. I didn’t notice when the trapezoid of light disappeared. I didn’t notice it was nearly dark until I heard the gravelly sound of a throat clearing in the doorway. I sat up. In the red glow of Paul’s nightlight I saw a man’s silhouette. My first thought was that it was Leo, come back. I thought it was Leo, and a feeling of dread or relief—or both— went through me. It wasn’t Leo, though. It was my dad. “Mom sent me,” he said. “I knocked?” He must have come through the unlocked door, come hunting through the empty house while I’d been sleeping. Had I been sleeping? He looked at me sitting in Paul’s bed, sitting guiltily mussed, like some teenaged Goldilocks in droopy socks and a sweaty t-shirt. “Madeline?” he asked. I saw the room the way it must have looked to him. Red nightlight in the corner, pinecones circling the dresser, bunnies and bears aligned against the wall—and me, all by myself 215. in bed, as if I’d made an elaborate fort in the woods, or something, as if I’d made everything up and he’d walked in on me playing dolls or pretend. For a second I felt like the littlest of little kids. I scooted to the edge of the bed, hooked my heels on the baseboard. “Wouldn’t of come in,” he apologized. “But, I saw your boots by the door—” He had on a shirt I’d worn myself, a soft gray flannel that was tight across his chest, but which had hung from my shoulders when I’d worn it to school last spring. His gray hair showed in tuffs beneath his Twins cap. He was blinking his eyes to adjust them. “Everything okay?” Maybe I was wrong to think that there was only one answer to that question that would keep me from walking straight over and setting my face against his chest. “Yep.” “Your friend’s family? They—?” I could see how much it cost him to say even that much. Hadn’t he always made it seem a great kindness—the greatest kindness of all—not to ask too many questions? Wasn’t that something I’d always known? Hadn’t he taught me that much? “They just left. I’m on my way home now.” If that was overtly false, he didn’t challenge me. “Okay,” was all he said, setting his big palm over his mouth again and rubbing out whatever remains of an expression might have been there. Then he turned and headed out, me behind him. He passed on a decade after that. Two strokes in his last months made his face look softer, fatter. He became almost a fat man in the end, overnight it seemed, though he must have been gaining weight for years, slowly—as he walked less and drove his ATV more, as he 216. stopped canoeing any further than to the other side of the lake. I came home once in that last year to help my mom winterize the place, and I saw that someone had hung a bird feeder from one of the front pines. It spun from a piece of frayed twine, and all day long Dad watched birds come and go. He sat in a chair most days near the end, eyeing the birds or sleeping. I remember sitting with him one violet evening as the sun went down, watching winter birds congregate in the snow outside, and at some point I lifted my hand and said, “Look, a nuthatch.” I knew immediately I was wrong—the house finch hopped to a branch and shat. I knew he knew as well, and even so, he nodded. That’s the kind of person my dad was. Here’s what my mom was like. That same winter, as I stood on a stool taping plastic over the windows, as the birds fought for seed outside—and my Dad slept in his chair—she went on and on about my father as a young man. “He would have followed me anywhere,” she said, not really bothering to whisper it. “He didn’t know if he wanted to start school or go to work for his daddy or go fishing. He just didn’t know. He was turning circles, going nowhere! I knew what he should do.” She rested her elbows on some interrupted project on the kitchen table, books open on top of other open books. She was more restless that winter than usual. She stood up for more coffee but her mug was still full. “He needed direction,” she said, sitting down, rimming her mug with a finger. “You wouldn’t know it from the way he was later, but he was just one of those guitar- strumming kids at the time. Back then, all he could do was plane a board and catch a fish. That’s it. He picked up everything else later.” It was 1982 when they set out, she told me, nobody’s idea of a revolutionary time. Because my mother was older than the rest of the group, because they were good with talk and 217. she was good with plans, she’d been the one who arranged the timing of the departure, who’d assigned jobs to the others, who’d convinced my dad to lift a few axes and rifles from a bait-and- tackle shop. Understand? she asked me. I didn’t answer. I’d heard most of these stories before. I’d heard her describe that first winter in the cabin on several occasions when I was young: all the scrappy little crises, the one fish they had to eat, the two new babies that came before spring, the ex-nutritionist’s kid who’d set one of the babies on fire by accident one night and the frantic drive to the hospital in a storm, the broke-down van on the road, the baby who was fine after all, and the kid-turned-teenager who wouldn’t speak again after that. I’d heard my mother go over most of these stories many times over the years, in fact, but never quite like this, never with this same mix of bitterness and nostalgia. Always, before, she’d emphasized how young they’d all been then, how ignorant and misguided. But she wasn’t young, she told me now. She was thirty, long past her high school and college years. She said, everything she did, she did when she should have known better. “Listen,” she told me. And she went through it all again from the very beginning. The van stolen from her parents’ garage in the middle of the night, the perilous winter drive to her uncle’s abandoned fishing cabin, the big new bunkhouse they’d built the first spring, the relief of summer, and summer again, the carefully-drafted commune charter, which had been copied over in calligraphy on parchment and hung over the door—but which had been burned when it all broke up six years in. “It was pretty bad at the end, sure. Everybody fighting everyone else, everyone jealous and getting confused about the kids. What to do with you guys. But not all the parts were bad, not most of the time. We had good ideas, good plans. We wanted kinship, not obligations—” she paused. “We believed there should be more than the nuclear family. We really thought we could see something better—” 218. She glanced over at my sleeping dad, his cheek smashed against his shoulder. She went on, “We really thought we could do more with the world—” I looked down at her from my stool and waited. “—but then everyone took off, and we started over with just you.” 219. XVII. P.S. The sequoias are more impressive than the other redwoods, in case you ever get out to California. There’s a difference just so you know. The coastal redwoods grow (obviously) on the coast and the sequoias are in the mountains. You can drive straight through a sequoia, right? That’s one of the things people do. Plus the sequoias are older. I thought you’d appreciate knowing the difference. I used to go camping in the Sierra Nevada with my dad, and we’d eat canned soup and sleep in this tiny two-man tent he had from the army. It was great. Those trees really do seem permanent, they’re so big. We stayed for weeks, never washed our hair, drank Tang. The woods look like The Time of Dinosaurs or something. Of course, things always seem more impressive when you’re a little kid. That’s one of the reasons I don’t really want to go back. I mean, who wants to ruin one of the things you like thinking about most? Who gives that up on purpose? Thank goodness for the back of the card but now I’m really out of room. Bye again. 220. XVIII. The summer passed quickly after the Gardners left. Or, not quickly but in fragments. It was one of the hottest summers in a while. It was so hot some nights in July that I soaked my t- shirt in lake water just before going to sleep. I wrung it out in the woods and wore it dripping through the dark house and up my ladder. Mornings, the sun brought steam off the lake and it was too humid in the afternoons to do anything at all. I remember waiting out the worst hours in some flickering patch of shade beneath pines, brushing away flies with a fir branch and searching for ticks on the dogs—all four—who lay collapsed around me in the dust. Working my fingers through Abe’s thick, half-Husky fur, I could feel each of his ribs in turn, convulsing as he panted. I could feel the way the bones separated and contracted again, making room for more oxygen. I could feel him scootching away, patiently, from the unfamiliar heaviness of my hand. I remember bouncing one humid evening on the back of my Dad’s ATV to the police station in Whitehead, where they gave me a Coke poured so fast into a Styrofoam cup that it burbled over onto my lap. This was a few days after an officer showed up at the bottom of the 221. sumac trail and chatted with my dad over the hood of his white car. At the police station, they handed me a roll of brown paper towels to wipe the spilled Coke. They offered to get me another can, but I shook my head and sucked in the froth from my cup. They turned on a fan that blew warm air into my face, and as it dried out my nose and eyes, I remember wondering if this was where Lily had come. If this was where she’d sat last spring and had a Coke and said her piece against Mr. Grierson. I never knew for sure. I spent hours in that one little room that summer, in a green plastic lawn chair, answering questions from different people in uniforms and suits. I no longer remember who asked what, or when, or in what order. I know I drank lots of warm Coke. I chewed lots of lips off smallish Styrofoam cups meant for coffee. I sprinkled the chewed white bits across the table, like clumpy snow, and eventually, I learned to ask for the one cushioned folding chair they had, which was kept behind the front desk. By August I’d been prepped by a lady with a pouty face—the DA? the DA’s assistant?—to cross my legs at the ankle and fold my hands and, if I remembered, to say “ma’am” to the judge and “sir” to the defense lawyer. “Don’t let him scare you, now,” she told me. “Don’t bite your nails like that, don’t look down, don’t let it get to you. Think of yourself as floating? Like a fish? You like to fish, don’t you? But not a dead fish, I don’t mean float like that, I mean swimming or something? In the water? Get that image in your mind, remember you’re not the one on trial.” I wasn’t scared, though. I didn’t need to think of myself as some walleye drifting along in a current somewhere, just waiting for my hook. I was yearning for it. 222. August came. The days grew hazier, ash-scented. Forest fires were going strong a few lakes north of us, and the air tasted of it, though the worst of the blaze was a more than a hundred miles away. “Safe by the skin of our teeth,” people were saying. By then, by late August, all the deciduous trees—all the aspens and oaks—had gone crinkly and blond in the hot weather. The pink geraniums in the window boxes of the Whitehead courthouse lay slung over, and the grass along the front walk was brown in strips. Brown, except for a square of emerald sod laid down against the marble steps, like a tiny pricey carpet. For months the heat had been oppressive, but now that summer was ending, now that September was on the horizon and the first geese were in flight, everyone was going on about how perfect the season had been, how lucky we’d been all along, how blessed to live in the north, in the woods, which was God’s own country. “What a doozey of a day!” I heard, as my mom and I filed up the marble stairs to the courthouse. “What a perfect ten!” was the reply—though it was ninety degrees already. Inside, I had to listen to that same conversation about the weather again and again. I watched the DA’s assistant flick a finger in a glass of water and dampen her lips as she spoke to a man who was painstakingly rolling up one of his sleeves, inch-by-inch-by-inch. I watched them eyeing me in my thrift-store dress—assessing me, and at the same time pretending they weren’t. When they saw me glaring back, they squinted their eyes into smiles, looked down at their watches, crossed their legs. Beside me, my mom sat too close on the gallery bench, sweating and fanning herself. At some point, she put her hand on my arm. “Oh my, oh my,” she said, so I followed her gaze. Leo and Patra came in, single file. Patra’s hair had grown out, I saw, as they walked past. It no longer frizzed up around her ears, but hung wet with product over her sweatered shoulders. 223. She was wearing a baby blue cardigan, and already, even before she got on the stand, navy crescents of sweat bloomed under each armpit. She had a very smooth, very immobile face. She looked like a painting of Patra: framed composure. She looked like she’d hired a sitter to take over—during the painter’s long hours of labor—so the final product was both herself and someone else. I expected her to look over at me and give me a sign. A wave across the stuffy court room, a hello or a nod. Or, if she couldn’t manage that, I thought I could understand: I’d take just a glance in my direction, any indication at all that she saw me. But it was strange how every time I looked at her, her eyes went somewhere else. She was whispering something in Leo’s ear, taking a tiny sip of water from a tall glass. She was scratching a blue vein on her wrist. She was smoothing down her hair and perching on the edge of her chair. One knee jiggled under her black silk skirt, but her face was as calm as I’d ever seen it. On the stand, she kept her eyes down most of the time, her hands folded on her skirted lap. When her lawyer asked about her childhood she answered in paragraphs. Back straight. She responded to the district attorney’s questions when he stood up with such precision, such mildness, that she might have been discussing weather, too, but with a touch more regret than everyone else in the room, perhaps even condescension. That’s what the DA wanted the jury to resent her for most, I understood, her blitheness and her youth, her professor husband. He implied that these things made Patra that worst combination of snobbish and debased. “Speak up!” the DA said once, when Patra folded up a tissue to blow her nose, and Patra replied—with what might have been fear, but also might have been contempt—“I did not say anything.” It went on like that. The DA asking her to clarify or speak up, and Patra repeating herself in a small, breathy voice. She never once said my name, or Paul’s. She said, “the babysitter.” She 224. said, “My son, whom I love.” As she murmured her mild answers, I thought I could imagine the school teacher Patra might have been, the editor in her checking every word with her neat red pen. I could hear the grammar in her sentences. I could hear all her minute corrections. My son who ,whom I love so much, told me he was feeling better. I was We were relieved overjoyed. We couldn’t could not have been happier. She sat up straighter and straighter as she spoke, and her neck seemed longer. The blue fabric under her arms was black before long. “I’m trying to understand, Mrs. Gardner. I am.” The DA put his hand to his chest so that his tie squished up a little under chin. “You’re saying you didn’t see that something was wrong? Or that you did, and failed to seek treatment? It can only be one or the other. Please help us understand.” I watched Patra swallow. “He was being— Treated.” “Yes, fine, your husband explained yesterday. We’re all for prayer. We’re not here to put anyone’s religion on trial, but I need you to clarify something for us. The morning you were in Duluth, that is, the morning of June 20 th , didn’t you tell Dr. Gardner you were taking Paul to the market for, what was it, picnic supplies? When in fact you placed a call to the pediatrician you’d contacted months before, Dr.—” The quickest of glances at Leo. “No one was there.” “But you thought something was wrong? You understood at that point something was wrong.” Swallow, the whole mechanism of her throat moving. “There was never a— Diagnosis.” “Why was that?” “People go to doctors all the time.” For the first time all day I could hear the pleading in her voice. I could hear how much she wanted to convince him of this, or at least make him be 225. nicer to her. She put her red hands on the railing in front of her. “Don’t people go to doctors all the time? And they don’t always get better?” “Excuse me, Mrs. Gardner, you’re changing the subject. Please don’t make me have to remind you, again, to answer the question that’s been asked. We’ve already heard that insulin and fluids could have saved him up until perhaps an hour before he suffered cardiac arrest. An hour. The treatment is minimal and simple—” “I’m his mother—” Patra interrupted. “You were his mother,” the DA interrupted back. Something rushed into her face, then flowed out again like water. All the muscles in her face clenched, let go. After that she waited patiently for the next question, back straight, eyes flat as two tiny blue screens. She repeated the same things she’d said before, he was fine, he was resting in bed, and when the DA dismissed her at last, frustrated, she moved across the courtroom with her TV eyes, holding a full bottle of water upside down in both hands like a throttle. That whole morning I kept waiting for her to look up at me so I could reassure her somehow. All I needed was the littlest sign from her, and I would have laid it all on Leo when my time came around. There he sat, back to me, with a Bible on his lap and his glass of still water. Nodding ever so slightly at Patra. He shifted in his seat when she sat down, recrossed his legs so his knee nudged up into hers. Even from behind, I could see his beard had been trimmed so close it was just a half-mask of grey. I watched, but he didn’t poke out his cheek with his tongue. He didn’t look upset. He didn’t look at all worried. 226. “It’s going to be okay,” he’d said to me that last day, just after he’d loaded Paul in the car. I’d been standing stupidly on their front stair. Patra had already gotten in their car, and Leo was about to climb in, too, when he saw me wavering in their open doorway. He’d paused, then. Walked back across the driveway. “It’s going to be okay,” he’d said, hands coming at me through the air. He’d reached out and hugged me—me—saying, “You can’t be anything but Good. Got that, Linda? You shouldn’t feel bad about any of this.” I would have accused him of bullying, of making us all do his bidding, but Patra never gave me any sign. So in the break before I was to take the stand, I went outside and smoked three cigarettes as fast as I could. I sat on the parking lot curb, and when the cigarettes were gone, I put my arms on my knees and my head on my arms. Closed my eyes. My heart felt like a black train chugging uphill through my body. I let the heat of the sun rise up from the concrete to cook my skin, and when I opened my eyes, the dazzling white of the day emptied me out. A chainsaw buzzed in the distance. I heard branches somewhere splintering down. Then—in a gust of hot wind—Patra came out. She pushed open the courthouse door and stood for a moment, taking in deep breaths. The wind blew her hair around, so she looked a little more herself. A little less combed. She uncapped her water bottle and sucked—sucked so hard the plastic suctioned in, and when she pulled her mouth away, it popped. I guess she didn’t see me crouched on the curb between cars, because when she lifted the water bottle to her mouth again, tilting her head back, she walked a few steps closer. Walking and drinking at once. She came close enough for me to catch a whiff of her coconut shampoo. Close enough, almost, for me to reach out and touch her black nyloned leg. 227. I could have left it like that, just her leg close me—which felt like the sign I’d been hoping for. Just her leg and a large drip of water falling from her mouth and greying the concrete. Her plastic bottle popped as she pulled her mouth from it. Thirty-seven, Twenty-six, fifteen, I thought, watching another drip come down. Twenty-six, fifteen, four. I stood up the second before she turned. Here’s what her face did then. A mutant half-smile formed on her lips, habitual friendliness mixed with undeniable loathing. “I have nothing to say to you. Please.” She turned away. “Patra.” “What?” She turned back, and her question seemed in earnest. “What?” “I—” “Listen—” A muscle in her neck was fluttering. “I hate him,” I blurted. “Leo.” I hate him for you, I meant. “Leo?” She seemed confused. Another gust of wind had tossed her hair into her eyes, and she pushed it back. As she did, as she palmed her hairline with her hands, I saw her freckles were disappearing in the red of her skin. Something new was turning in her eyes. “Leo?” she asked again, her voice dripping, soaked to the bone. “Paul was just—” I whispered, more hesitant now. “It wasn’t your fault.” “What are you saying to me?” She took a step forward. 228. I put my hand on her arm to calm her, and she started back as if stricken. She gave a peculiar shiver, and I saw then that I was just a part of the evil that took him, the one arrived just in time for, and presided over, his disappearance. That’s all I was to her now. She bit out at me. “You’re the one who thought of him that way. You’re the one who looked at him and saw a—” she sobbed “—sick little boy—” “No—” “I know you did! And that’s all you could see. Isn’t it? Isn’t it!” “I should have gone earlier,” I admitted—it was the only time I ever said it. “I should have gotten help for us.” Us. We needed it. “How could he get better with you thinking like that?” she spat. “How could he? I’ve thought about this. I’ve gone over it and over it. Leo said, control your thoughts, but it was your mind—” she said it like she could barely get the words out. “Your mind. That was too small. To see beyond itself.” She drew a ragged breath. “Yours. You saw him. As sick.” They’d made me wear my hair differently that day, combed and parted on one side, clipped with a single barrette. It kept getting in my face, so I had to hold it gathered in one fist, my bent arm across my chest. They insisted I wear a long, loose dress with a green salady floral pattern. I could feel my sweaty thighs slip against each other beneath the fabric. I could feel my cotton underwear droop down from my butt. Damp. My own smell was mothballs, cigarettes, and laundry detergent. I felt hideous, ridiculous. The Local Teenager, I was called by the defense attorney and the Star Gazette. Babysitter, Patra said on the stand. 229. So when she said what she did in the parking lot, I just hunkered down, like a vole in winter, and refused to say anything. She didn’t need or want a response. She screwed the lid back on her water bottle, spilling some, then turned around. After she left, I stayed in the parking lot until a bailiff or someone (my mom?) came out to get me. I stood in the sun, which made my skin itch, which made my face feel like something rigid and thick stretched over my eyes, making it hard to see. I stood and listened to that chainsaw bringing down someone’s bad tree, first the swishy leafy parts, then the clattering branch-work. Then the trunk in a thump. Nobody believes you when you talk about happiness, Patra told me once. For months, I’d watched her blow into Paul’s soup and kiss his perfect half-moon eyebrows. I’d watched her rush out in the rain before dinner, gather up books Paul had left by the lake, come back in dripping and elated. Run around the house rubbing her hands, trying to warm up again. Sing to him. Sing to us. I’d watched her slide in her socks from one side of the kitchen to the other, from counter to island, filling plates, stirring pots, pushing the frizz of her hair from her face with her palms. And all that time, Paul had been fine. He was fine: he was better than that even. Hadn’t Patra given him granola bars broken into bits to look like kibble, so he could eat like cats? Hadn’t she warmed his apple juice in the microwave, once, because he said it was too cold, it hurt his teeth? He was so entirely and evidently cherished: that’s the truth. I could have said all that when I had my chance. I wanted to—I planned on it—but didn’t. Here’s what I said on the stand when I was asked what Patra did for her son: nothing. She did nothing. 230. XIX. I remember there was this big faded mural in the courthouse hallway. It showed an Indian with a white guy in a canoe, both in chocolaty furs, both pointing into the woods at a bear on the shore. There were green trees and white fluffy clouds—everything nice and peaceful. You know, everybody getting along. But as I was leaving the courthouse that day with my mom, as we were walking out, I noticed the perspective on the mural in the hallway was a little off. The white guy was actually pointing at the bear’s butt, and the Indian had a pointing arm but not another one, and the bear appeared to be levitating slightly. His paws were not quite on the ground, and he looked unsurprised that he was floating off into the trees like that, bored and resigned to it, maybe, and also sort of terrifying. “Are you coming?” my mother asked from the doorway. Somehow I got outside and back down the marble steps. Somehow I got myself and my skirt back in the truck my mom had borrowed, and we were on the road again. The pickup was on loan from some church acquaintance of my mother’s, someone who’d read about the trial and 231. wanted to show the difference between true God-fearing people and false ones. It had Mr. Yuck stickers in a complex mosaic on the dashboard, a dentist-office smell from the air freshener that spun from the rearview mirror. My mother could only get her window crank to work by leaning into it with her whole body, and even then she could just get the glass down a crack. When we got going faster, the top layer of her hair was sucked right out. She focused exclusively on shifting gears in the busy streets near downtown. She had just gotten her license renewed in July, and she was a conscientious stopper at all the signs, a silent and concentrated merger onto the highway. But then, when we hit the easy flat of Route 10, when the traffic evaporated from the road and woods returned, she starting easing her way slowly from subject to subject. The heat. The judge’s drawl. The yellow toilet in the Ladies’ Room. Mrs. Gardner’s sweater. She didn’t know why anyone would wear a sweater in August. It bothered her for some reason. She kept glancing over at me as she spoke, fishing for a few strands of her hair and pulling them back in through the window. “I mean, who would wake up and think, hey, it’s ninety degrees, I should go get my cardigan?” She looked over at me across the cab, where I was sort of slumped against the far door. “Earth to Madeline,” she said. Earth to me. Earth to me, I thought. I was watching the way shadows and sun were curtaining the black road in front of us, the way their movement seemed to make the pavement undulate as we drove over it. I was wondering if the highway tar on the shoulder was actually melting or just seeming to melt, if the little rodents and insects scrambling across would get stuck in the mess, if it was a dangerous place for them to be. I was mentally warning them all away, the toads and the grasshoppers, and even as I was doing that, even as I was creating a force field on both sides of the highway with 232. my mind, I could sense the appeal in my mother’s glance, the way it was almost physically painful for her to have to endure my silence now. “Hel-lo?” she said after a moment, pretending to knock the air between us with her free hand. “Is The Teenager sleeping?” I set my head against the window. “I’m just saying it was an impractical thing to wear. It was impractical, wasn’t it?” She was kneading the steering wheel with her big red hands. She was looking at me long enough for the truck to swerve, slightly, into the oncoming lane. “Just say, yes, okay?” She got the truck back on course. She slowed down, or maybe the engine missed. “Just say, yes, that sweater was a strange thing to wear. You can add fucking—you’re a teenager, so I don’t care. Say it was a fucking ridiculous thing to wear, and then you can say that her explanation, her defense or whatever that was, was pretty much a load of bull too.” I could hear the gumming of her hands against the plastic of the wheel. Then she added, getting worried, “You know it’s a load of bull, right?” When I was eleven or twelve, I found this unexpected thing in the back of the shed. It was a wooden cradle wrapped up in a clear plastic tarp, which I pulled open when I was looking for something else. The thing was hand-painted with white daisies and blue lilacs, long-finned fish swimming through it all like golden grinning devils. It was filled to the brim with rotting firewood, mouse droppings, unfurling weevils. I remember covering it back up with the tarp, finding a stack of asphalt shingles to lay over it. I shooed the dogs outside and went back to my day, but later, when I was guiding the canoe through shallows or pulling some teeny thorns from Abe’s paw pad—or working out a tedious math problem—an image of that cradle would 233. occasionally come back to me. I’d see that grimy rim painted fresh with lilacs and fish, the maple runners creaking back and forth, some bald little thing wedged inside, wiggling. I’d see a face hovering over it. Going, you know, “Shh, shhh.” The thing is, I have no memory at all of my mother before the commune broke up. In my mind it was always just Tameka and a constantly shifting amalgamate of teenagers and adults— legs in jeans, legs in skirts—and I admit I wanted to bring her into focus, see her rocking a little baby I could imagine as me. But my mom never said much about my baby-self. She didn’t have any pictures, of course, and she once said with a snort that my first word was “Wah.” She wouldn’t even tell me what she’d chosen when the commune did the vote for my name. “Madeleine’s all your dad,” she insisted, but I knew from stories how everybody wrote down the names they wanted and put them in a hat. For a while I thought about that a lot, the names she might have liked, such as Winter or Juniper or Ark. I thought about those baby-days and maybe- names (Canidae, I thought with longing, when I was doing my wolf project in eighth grade), until it dawned on me at some point that maybe my mother wouldn’t say, not because she’d wanted something else, but because she’d suggested nothing at all. And then I began to wonder, who besides my dad wanted Madeline? Who else voted for that? I’m not saying I ever consciously wished that there’d been someone else. And I’m not saying that this thinking happened all at once, because it didn’t. It came over me gradually, almost unremarkably, in a way that seemed to move on a separate plane from all the other events in my life. I can’t attach it to anything that happened, to a year in a school or a particular thing my mother did or didn’t do, but once the thought was there it didn’t go away. “The CEO’s doing her accounts!” she’d say, for instance, and my scalp would tighten like a cap over my ears. Or she’d dangle some decorative lure she was making in front of my nose while I was connecting 234. dots in my workbook, and I’d have to lay my pencil down. I’d have to release that pencil, set it down like it was a match in a newly lit fire. Look up at her. “Hush!” she’d say to herself then, seeing the dark expression on my face, but not the plea, never the bald desire to be treated more gently. She’d whisper, “The Professor’s at work! Shhh! Everyone be quiet.” Or she’d knock the air between us with the hand she wasn’t using for driving. She’d knock on the air and keep her eye on the highway. “Earth to Mad-e-line. Did you hear what I said—” And before I knew what I was doing that day in the truck, before I could stop myself, I was croaking out, “Did I do okay?” “You mean—?” I waited, felt the truck’s engine shoving us down the road. Missing, shoving again. She thought about it for a while before saying, “What happened probably would have happened whatever you’d done. If that’s what you mean.” I returned my head to the window ledge, watched clouds swell over other clouds that might have been smoke. She tried again. “I’m not the judge of this one.” You only say that because I’m not your kid, I remember thinking, rolling my forehead grease against the window, making it look like some wide, unidentifiable insect had flown against the glass. It’s hard now to know how much of what I did and wanted in those years came from some version of that thought. What’s the difference between what you want to believe and what you do? That’s what I should have asked Patra, that’s the question I wanted answered, but it didn’t occur to me—or not 235. in that way—until after we’d talked that day in the courthouse parking lot, until I was riding with my mother in the hot, rumbling truck and she was parking between two vans behind Our Lady. While my mom wrote a thank-you note to tuck under the truck visor, I got down on my haunches in the gravel parking lot, my salad skirt poofing up around me, and started sifting through the little stones. Then my mom came up, said “Okay,” and we started back. As we walked along the highway shoulder, I uncurled my fingers and let the stones fall out. She didn’t try to talk to me now. She let me dawdle and get far behind, dropping rocks as I went. She glanced back once at the turnoff to the lake, but by the time I reached the sumac trail, by the time our cabin chimney was visible again over treetops, she was out of sight. She was just a rustling of the sumac branches, leaves moving in a pulse as she passed underneath. Or what’s the difference between what you think and what you end up doing? That’s what I should have asked Mr. Grierson in my letter—Mr. Grierson, who, even after Lily took back her accusation, was convicted and sentenced to seven years based on his courtroom confession. I read through his statements in the months after his sentence, which he served first in the Lino Lakes Penitentiary, then in a Berkley jailhouse. The Gardners, who were convicted of involuntary manslaughter, got community service and fines. I didn’t follow them after the trial ended. After I said my piece in court, I went home with my mom in that borrowed truck, ate three peanut butter sandwiches in a row, went fishing for carp. Went fishing, got drunk for the first time, forgot. Their cabin sat empty across the lake for months and I never went back, and I didn’t stop to watch when the new owners set up their grill and their badminton set the next summer. But I tracked Mr. Grierson around the country when he got out of jail, followed his little red flag from state to state, from Florida to Montana and back again. I watched him go back 236. into prison for possession of child porn, get out on parole, set up his shop in the marshes. By the time I wrote him my letter, by the time I was living in Minneapolis with Ann, I’d read his official statement about Lily several times. “I thought about it, I thought about it, I thought about it,” he’d said. “I wanted to, and when she said that I had, I was like, yes. When all that stuff was found in my apartment, I pretended I’d never seen it before. I did lie about that. But when that girl Lily said what she said, I was like, alright. Okay. Now my real life begins.” 237. XX. The view from my desk at the barge company in Minneapolis was a weathered concrete parking structure. All day long I could see people puppeting out of their car windows, punching their tickets, waiting for the yellow arm to kick up. If I scooted my chair back from my desk and swiveled around one hundred and eighty degrees, I also could see a wedge of Mississippi between the parking structure and a bank of willows. Egrets, brown foam, white buoys. After the first year there, I had my own cubicle and my own computer, so I could do what I wanted most of the time and nobody bothered me. I could watch the egrets pluck fish from the river and ferries of tourists heading towards Saint Paul. Or, if I chose, I could look up things online while I did up schedules on spreadsheets, the death toll on Everest and recent sales at the Treasure Chest. Though I was just a temp there, I was at ManiCo Barge long enough to get a shelf for my lunch and a hook for my jacket in the break room. I was there long enough to be the go-to person when it came to dealing with the distressed wives of barge workers. To everyone’s surprise, I was good at calming them down when they called. I’d say things like: Don’t worry, your husband will be 238. home again soon. I’d promise: He’ll get to shore in Oquawka and call tonight. I said this even when I knew he wouldn’t get to shore for another day, and when he did he’d probably hit the bar before calling anyone. Still, the wives knew me by name and asked for me every time. I knew the names of all their kids, the names of their dogs, the names of their babysitters. I was used to them calling at the end of the day, so I when my phone rang a little after four one afternoon—one early spring afternoon my second year there—I thought at first it was just another worried wife. Right away I could hear the irritation in the woman’s voice, the way her vowels were squished up around her attempt to sound friendly. “I’m so sorry to bother you at work,” she said, primly. “I’m not sure I’m calling the right place.” So then I was pretty sure it was not a wife but a regular wrong number. I was about to hang up on her. I was about to hang up and straighten my pantyhose and get my last cup of coffee, when I heard whoever it was on the phone draw in a sharp breath. “I’m very sorry to bother you,” the woman said again, adding, “Please don’t hang up.” So even before she said she was from Loose River, even before she explained who she was, I recognized something about the way she spoke, about the way she apologized as a way to express her disapproval. That was a Loose River thing to do. When I didn’t say anything and I didn’t hang up either, the woman went on. She said she’d gotten my number by calling where I used to work in Duluth. She said she’d gotten the name of my old landlord, and he told her the name of the barge company where he thought I’d gone to work, and then she’d found that number in the Yellow Pages. I’d been pretty hard to track down, she said. She hadn’t wanted to meddle this way, she went on, but she wasn’t sure how else to go about this. “I’m calling on behalf of your mom,” she said. Then paused. “She’s stopped coming to church? She hasn’t been to church for a few months? So I went out to visit her.” 239. I waited. “The place is getting— A bit rundown?” I cleared my throat. “The cabin?” “Actually, the cabin roof was taken off in a storm last year. Or that’s what she said.” “The roof came off?” “Um. I think she wintered in the shed. She’s moved the gas stove out there.” “To the shed? It’s not insulated.” “She’s tried insulating the walls with leaves and mud. Newspapers.” I couldn’t imagine it and then I could. “Okay.” “She lost part of a finger chopping wood. I don’t think she can see too good anymore.” “Who is this again?” I asked, feeling—not sick—but a slow pounding in my head. “Liz Lundgren. I go to Our Lady with your mom.” “Ms. Lundgren.” I stood up. I started pacing the length of the phone cord, chewing my lip, looking over the cubicle wall and out the window, where the brown water of the Mississippi was sliming steadily by on its way to Florida. That’s when something loosened in my mind, drifted out. “Life science,” I said. There was a pause. “Yes, a million years ago. Yes.” Liz Lundgren bit down on something in her mouth and I could hear relief flooding her voice when she spoke again. “I filled in before I retired. At the high school, yes. That’s me. Listen, Linda. I’m not trying to meddle, I don’t want to cause trouble, but I think I could arrange a call. I mean, I think she’d like me to arrange a call.” Heaven and hell are just ways of thinking. There is no death beyond the belief in death. 240. There is just the next phase, for Christian Scientists, which as far as I can tell is the same as this one, only maybe you see it differently. This much I got from the church service I went to one Wednesday night that spring. I went not long after Ms. Lundgren’s call, one evening after a happy hour that involved two vodka tonics and a couple of scummy warm beers. I paced the sidewalk outside the big church doors for a few minutes—pretty drunk, pretending I was going somewhere else—before I finally pushed the doors open and went on in. I walked as straight as possible to the nearest pew, sat down like I was in school again, looked around without moving my head. Whatever I’d been expecting to find inside, whatever I’d been avoiding for a dozen years, it wasn’t what I saw that night. There were maybe eight people in the cream-colored sanctuary, which smelled like Pine-Sol, and whose white carpet between the pews was raked in deep vacuum lines. Everything had been painted white and cream, white and beige, white and pink—the plaster walls and wooden pews and simple lectern in front. The sermon that night, or whatever it was, was called Ancient and Modern Necromancy, alias, Mesmerism and Hypnotism, Denounced. A smooth-faced elderly man hunched over the lectern, reading from the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s book. Occasionally, he stopped to take sips of water from a slim glass that caught a panel of light and jittered it all around the room. I must have dozed off. I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew someone two pews in front of me was speaking into a cordless mike. She was an old lady with silver bun, and she held that big mike in her tiny hand like she was eating an ice cream cone. Mumming it with her lips, fuzzing the room with static. She explained that she had been healed of a toothache by being nicer to a neighbor, who grated on her. She said her toothache had been a false belief in Mortal Mind, which had tricked her into feeling pain. But Mary Baker Eddy had taught us to Love Thy Neighbor, so she’d left a pot of marigolds on her neighbor’s driveway and the toothache 241. disappeared. Her bun, I saw, had silver whorls over a pretzel of jet black coils that were closer to the nape of her neck. A teenage kid went next. He wore polished leather shoes and a crisp white shirt rolled up to the elbows. He reminded me of the forensics boys from high school, at first, only he had powerful tendons in his forearms and faint stubble, like someone who worked outside. He knew exactly how far to hold the microphone from his lips. When he paused, he smoothed down a wrinkle in his pants very close to his crotch. He told a long, winding story about a test in school he hadn’t been able to study for, an AP exam, and then, thanking Our Beloved Founder, Mary Baker Eddy, he explained how he’d aced it anyhow. After that it was quiet for a long time. The pews creaked like branches and my head started to ache. The night birds began trilling outside and I longed to slouch down in my seat, lay my head against the cool wood of the pew. But I didn’t. I made myself sit up straighter, pay attention. The last person to stand up and take the microphone was another old woman. She said she’d been healed of the belief that her husband had died when she read this week’s lesson. As she spoke she was smiling brightly, drooling slightly, touching her hair. She said she had given in to the false assumption that her husband was matter, but she flushed his ashes down the toilet when it came to her at last that we are all All Mind, Harold too. There was no death for any of us, ever. I remember exactly how she put the next part, because my palms started to sweat. “Harold’s fine, Harold’s fine always. It’s not what you do but what you think that matters. Mary Baker Eddy tells us heaven and hell are ways of thinking. We just need to know the truth of that. There’s no death beyond the belief in death, and there’s no going anywhere—not in Reality. There’s just changing how you see things.” 242. This was probably around the end of March. I remember that a glint of green had started showing on the willows by the river. As the days passed, I watched piles of snow slink back from the parking structure outside my window at the barge company and robins arrive to wrench worms from new grass. I watched the daffodils come up in nodding yellow clumps around the concrete parking barriers by our building. Not long after that the leaves on the trees burst out—a wallop of bright green everywhere you looked—and I went to the credit union after work to see how much money I had. Afterwards, I went to the hardware store to buy a screw for the doorknob Ann had been complaining about for months. While I was fixing that, since I was already on my hands and knees in the bathroom, I decided to fix the leak in the bathtub faucet. I pinched a crimped nest of hair from the drain with my two fingers and put a new roll of toilet paper in the dispenser and gathered up all the towels to wash at the laundromat. I left the towels in the dryer until they were so hot they burned my arms when I hugged them out. I folded them into warm, leaning towers and carried them home with my chin resting on top. On my last day in town I went to Rom’s apartment at dawn. Wind was battering the loose shingles on the old Victorian turrets. I used his key to get in, left all my stuff by the door in a heap, and crept into his bed with my shoes on, and my jacket. He didn’t wake up as he pulled me to him, as he sunk his face into my hair. “Goodbye,” I said. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted to walk around on my hands and knees one more time, collared. But he barely stirred. He nestled his cock between my legs and fell into a deeper sleep. His clock on its shelf shone its red numbers at me. Morning came in a single grey bar through a slat in the shades. I started to get hot in his arms in my jacket, sweaty. After a while I looked at the clock again and realized that if I didn’t hurry I was going to miss my bus. I was 243. going to miss my transfer to the Greyhound station downtown, and my ride up to Whitehead, where my mother would be waiting for me with Ms. Lundgren at the Burger King near the bus terminal. She hadn’t sounded surprised to hear from me when I finally called. It had been two years since I’d spoken to her last, since my dad died, and all she said, after a few stiff hellos, was, “It’s looking like it’s about time to sell some of the land.” As the sun came through the high window in Rom’s basement apartment, I wiggled my way out of his sleeping arms. I pulled out from under his grasp and that’s when he woke up, at last—when he felt me leaving. “What’re you doing here?” “I’m not here.” “Who’s this in my bed, then, Girl Scout?” “Some fantasy of yours.” “Fuck you.” I could feel his mouth smiling into my scalp. “Okay,” I whispered, pulling away. “Try.” As I was sliding out from his arms he pulled me back. He squeezed me tighter. I could feel my own ribs in his arms, even through my canvas jacket—the bones pushing back against his weight. I liked that. I liked how the more I fought, the more tightly he held on. I squirmed free of his grasp, half-sitting up. I twisted around but before I could swing my legs to the floor, he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back down. I wanted more. I wanted more. He started to pull open the buttons on my coat, and on impulse, I bent my leg and kneed him in the chest, hard, so he started coughing. Sitting back on his haunches in his boxers, confused. I felt the chill of that moment hit my skin like a splash of water. Grey light caught the pores on his face, so it looked rough as sandpaper. 244. “What’s going on?” he asked, now fully awake. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His thin white shoulders looked rectangular against the wall. He’d taken the stud from his tongue so his words had no click to them. They sounded softer than usual, simpler, wetter. “Nothing.” That’s when he saw my big backpack at the door. “What is this? Where’re you going?” “I came to say goodbye.” “Goodbye?” He blinked at me. “You’re going back to Buttfucksville. Right now.” I pushed off the bed, straightened my jacket. I went to the door where my backpack was waiting, and as I hoisted it up, I turned back to look at him, huddled in bed across the room. He had one hand on his left eye, pirate-style. “You’re going to a place where the wolves eat the fucking dogs?” I shook my head. “That was Alaska. An anecdote.” “It’s been what, like, almost two years?” “I talked to my mom. It’s planned.” “We’ve been happy, right? What is it you think you did that you can’t be happy?” “Happy, happy, happy,” I said. “Happy,” he flipped the word over, made it innocent again. “Don’t be a baby,” I sneered. He must have seen something ugly in my face because he found his shirt and plunged his head inside. His head was a white cotton mask inside his shirt, blank indentations for mouth and eyes. After that he was zipping up his pants and getting his cellphone from the dresser, and I 245. found I could speak to him as myself again, more deliberately. “Don’t be childish about it. I came to say goodbye, okay? I came to say thank you and goodbye.” “I’m being childish? Listen, listen.” He took a few steps forward, his t-shirt catching on the hill of his belly. “Do you remember when you told me about that little kid?” “That little kid?” The thought of Paul went like a breeze right through me. I put up a hand to stop him from going on. “I didn’t tell you about any kid.” “I mean you, Girl Scout. The easiest prey in the world. House of old hippies, girl left behind.” “That’s not what I said. That’s not what it was like.” “The Fool.” “No.” “Walking off a cliff every time you take a step. Poor little girl, with, like, no shoes and an empty belly. Who was taking care of you?” “That’s not how it was. I was fine. I was fine.” “What kid did you mean?” I sucked in a breath. “Nobody. He died.” “Who did?” “Nobody. He’s fine.” “What the—” I was thrusting something out at him. Rom stepped back. In my hand was the knife he’d given me for Christmas, shiny and red, all the blades tucked in—but maybe he didn’t see that. Maybe the memory of me kneeing him in the chest was too recent. He laced his fingers over the top of his head, baring the scraggly hair 246. under his arms through the gaping sleeves of his t-shirt. Finally, he let his arms fall to his sides. “Whatever. Keep it.” He shook out a breath. He slid his hands into his pockets. “Keep it, Fool Scout.” I found myself thinking of that church lady as I waited to board the bus. There is no death but the belief in death. Heaven and hell are just ways of thinking. I lingered till the last minute in the waiting area with a blind homeless man on his cardboard island—reluctant to get on, reluctant to climb the steep stairs onto the coach. It’s not what you do but what you think that matters. I didn’t want to board, but once I was on the bus I saw the windows were unexpectedly tall and wide, tinted against the bright morning sun. And I had my own seat, and the coach slid effortlessly through city traffic. It glided around the clover leaf and onto the highway, passing even the semis going downhill. As the bus angled north, as we left the city behind, I watched the leaves on the trees through the window go from deep green to pale mint to gone. I watched snow appear on the roadsides again, and somewhere along the way—despite myself—I started to feel a sleepy, sweet, intoxicating calm. Perhaps it had to do with the speed and height of the bus, the feeling of floating over the highway and going fast enough to kill somebody. Speed is one kind of magic. I’ve always felt that. But the wash of calm also had to do with seeing all the lakes frozen over again, I think, and the patches of bluish snow on the ground, and the black fields gone white and empty. After a couple of hours, I could even see fishing houses rising up from the lakes in compact, exact little cities. I could see crows circling the air above looking for scraps. It came to me somewhere near Brainerd how strange it must have been to see winter like this for the first time in middle age. As we slowed for some kids crossing the road at a light, 247. teenagers in huge puffy coats, it occurred to me how odd it must have been to arrive from California this time of year, and how it must have seemed so forgiving at first, everybody walking around slowly in boots, all the girls in heavy wool sweaters. Everything up till then just wouldn’t count. All those pictures wouldn’t count. It’s not what you think but what you do that matters. I waited for Whitehead to appear over the next ridge, and the next, and then it occurred to me—it came to me all at once—that those pictures had been left like a wrapped package under the sink for someone to find. To find and find out. It started to snow a little. Before we reached Whitehead, snow started to fall and cover up the road. It happened so fast it was startling. Blacktop, yellow lines, median—all gone within minutes. I felt the disconnected parts of my brain snap bit by bit into place as fresh wet flakes flashed down outside. As the bus jackknifed on the slippery road and everybody gasped. As the wheels found traction again and we barreled on. 248. XXI. No, I didn’t think to call 911. I admitted this on the stand. It did not occur to me use the cellphone, or to go to my parents’ house, or to take the bike into town. I didn’t think about how it would have been faster to flag someone down on the road or to go to the information booth at the National Forest Campground. I said: I didn’t really have a plan. I said: I don’t really know what I was thinking. When Patra asked me to go get the Tylenol that morning, I testified, I just put on my boots and headed for the door. What I didn’t say was that when I looked back at her from the doorway, Patra had been moving her mouth at me. It had been strange to see, like she was yelling without sound. Like her whole face was contorting around each word. Going THANKYOU. Going HELPUS. HELPUSPLEASE. Did she think I would understand? I remember closing the door very gently, listening for the latch. Did she think I would do for her what she couldn’t do herself? Having come this far, having accumulated everything that mattered to her at all through a series of little, irrevocable choices? I remember squinting out into the hot morning, letting go of the knob. I 249. remember lifting the rock in the woods, finding the money in its damp roll, taking off at a sprint. High summer sun hit from directly above. No breeze. No birds or clouds. Two tall walls of green rose up on either side of the highway. I don’t remember getting tired, but I do remember my chest starting to burn, and just as it did, a helicopter swooped overhead. It was one of those Forest Service copters, fitted with tanks and buckets, painted bright red. It churned up the top branches of the trees, and I stopped for a moment in the middle of the highway to look up at it. Was there a fire? I remember wondering. But only briefly, because the roar of the copter skimmed away all thoughts. Its wind whipped the loose hair over my head and rippled like a spook through my t-shirt. By the time it was gone, I was walking along. My heart was still thudding, but all the urgency and dash had drained from my limbs. I felt light as air, as if the copter had hefted up some great weight on ropes. I felt chilled. In the bigger lakes, always, there comes a point when you’re crossing when you can’t see where you came from and you can’t see where you’re going. That’s how I felt, as my t-shirt settled back over my sweaty skin. Cut loose from shore. Let me be clear about something. The woods of my childhood is the not the same woods I look at now. When I was little, another name for Still Lake was Swamp Lake, because in dry years cattails ate up the shore and lily pads were so thick they looked like solid ground; in wet years, the lake rose to my parents’ shed and rotted out all the floorboards. Now, the Association of Homeowners has widened the channel between Still and Mill Lake, ensuring unvarying water levels year-in, year-out. There are twelve summer homes around the perimeter—not log cabins 250. so much as mini-chalets—with skylights and multiple decks and moored pontoon boats on beaches. In summer, it’s a suburb. Most of the lakeshore aspens have been cut down for sunbathers and flowerbeds. The water is crowded with little kids horsing around, with teenagers in black inner tubes bouncing behind bowriders, with dads in pontoon boats skulking the side ponds, hoping for some hoary walleye. Often, when I go and sit with my mother outside the rehabbed cabin, I try to remember how the woods looked to me when I was younger. I know better than to be wistful. It was never magical to me: I was never so young, nor so proprietary, as to see it like that. Year by year, the woods just kept unfurling and blooming and drying up, and its constant flux implied meanings half-revealed, half-withheld—mysteries, yes, but mysteries made rote by change itself, the woods covering and recovering its tracks. When I was eight or nine, I used to go down to the shore and fill coffee cans with toads the size of dimes. I called these Zoos. My mother wanted me to pray before sleep, and so I said the same prayer every night: Dear God, please help Mom, Dad, Tameka, Abe, Doctor, Jasper, Quiet, and all the Animals in all the Zoos to be not too bored and not too lonely. Not too, was my mantra. I wanted very badly to keep the toads. I liked their many faces—their highly structural eyes, especially—but I worried about what I was keeping them from. After a few nights of swelling guilt, I usually emptied out the coffee cans in a buckthorn bush, and as the toads popped away on their tiny, tiny legs, I felt the power of the woods very keenly. I felt the way it chastised and corrected me, the way it always seemed to say: See? Here’s what I passed that day on my way into town. First, the familiar spray-painted sign propped up on the roadside, the one that promised Liquor and Gas. For years Katarina the 251. Communist ran that old place, selling bait and beer on discount, vodka and gasoline for a premium. She had a windowless shop no bigger than a truck trailer, and inside she had a black- and-white TV that she never turned off. Katarina was fifty my whole life, a second-generation Czech from Iowa with the highly structural eyes of one of my toads. She sold my dad’s blow- down wood in twined bundles and my mother’s handmade lures reconfigured as earrings. As I got older, it dawned on me that Katarina took pity on us. Once, she gave me a pair of Adidas sneakers that had belonged to her niece, saying, “Goddammit, Linda” when I wouldn’t take them at first. Saying, “A high schooler does not wear hiking boots to school, period. Okay? Okay?” I knew she kept a couple of dusty boxes of band-aides on her shelf, perhaps a bottle or two of Tylenol as well, but I skipped Liquor and Gas that hot Monday morning, dreading Katarina’s bustle and chewed nails, her greasy pity, which somehow infected me with her bad looks, which always made me feel as fetid and sweaty as she was. Next was the stop sign, which locals only sporadically obeyed, followed by the three bars and three churches. There were Mike’s, The Hare and the Fox, and Bar. On the other side of the street were Saint John the Baptist, Our Lady of Prudence, and Unified Spirit. Because my mom went to all three churches for different services, she wasn’t allowed to be a member at any of them, though they made use of her do-gooder energy to propel each of their various charities. On Monday morning, all six buildings were closed—the bars on one side, and the churches on the other. But you could see detritus leftover from weekend festivities. There were empties overturned on the grass next to Our Lady’s wooden crucifix, and Sunday bulletins blown into a paper mesh against Mike’s chain-link fence. Come All Ye Faithful, they said, again and again. Then came the Ice Rink, with its shell-like hulk, with its aluminum siding and flat asphalt roof. It was the biggest building in town by far. Weekdays in the summer, it was packed with 252. figure skaters and hockey players competing for ice time. When I passed by the rink, I saw that the Zamboni had chased them all outdoors. They hobbled around the parking lot in their skate guards, the boys hoping to be the target of the girls’ vitriol, the girls, in turn, hoping to be the target of chucked ice shavings. Then came the downtown shops, with their old-timey facades in crumbling brick, with their storefronts built during the time of the quarries. The barbershop, the bank, the hardware store. Old people were already ordering their lunches from the diner, their bowls of cream of mushroom soup and coleslaw salads. Through the storefront window, I saw them hunched over tables, suffering through sips from spoons. On the other side of Main was the burnt-down mill, now so overgrown with summer trees and weeds you could hardly see it. Further down Main, closer to the Interstate, was the strip mall Pine Alley. After that Whitehead was twenty miles down the road. In another 120 miles, Duluth. Then the lift bridge, the anchored Tall Ships, Lake Superior itself. I thought of it briefly, as I walked past the Pine Alley shops, as I fingered the four dirty tens in my pocket. It was almost longing I felt: Superior, with its 31,000 square miles of water and its 36 degree temperatures year-round—with its sunken Edmund Fitzgerald and its piles of spilled taconite and unrecovered bodies all preserved face-down in silt in orange lifejackets. There was a Pamida in the strip mall. I pushed the door and went on in. The air conditioning sent a fast shudder up and down my skin. All the items on the shelves—all the bottles of cough syrup and jars of baby food—were cold to the touch. I must have been extremely sweaty when I came in the door, because after a minute or two my fingers were a splotchy white, and I had to wiggle them to draw blood back. In the back of the store, I saw a sunburnt dad in flip flops and bathing trunks trying to pry the handle of a broom from a 253. toddler’s mouth. He didn’t look like a local or a fisherman. He was something else, something more like Leo though less intense, a big dopey grin on his face even when his face was at rest. He thought my wiggling fingers meant I was waving. He nodded at me, holding the baby’s hand up in the air as if it were a prop. “Do you need something in particular?” the cashier asked. I looked up, and saw it was Sarah the Ice Skater—wearing a green smock, nibbling a red straw from the Dairy Queen next door. I was too surprised to respond. Wasn’t it summer? Didn’t that mean Sarah had all day every day to work on her triples? Wasn’t the Olympics just a year away? Then I remembered how Sarah’s double axel had dried up last spring during Upper Great Lakes. Every time she went up in the air, people said, she had the determined terror of a suicide. She’d looked like she was throwing herself off a ledge. “You need something special?” she asked, approaching me, teething her straw. The baby in the back of the store was going GA, GA, GA. “No.” I read the bottle labels, feeling the distance between us close. There was a medication called Human Health that claimed to close your pores. There was a multi-vitamin called IGGY that you squeezed into your nose with an eyedropper. Aspirin, I read, was for thinning the blood—as well as for preventing fever, stroke, pregnancy loss, pain, and possibly (promising studies showed) cancer. Sarah asked: “Is it your time of the month?” “No.” “You hung over?” 254. “No.” She watched me read the back of a clattery bottle of multivitamins. “You anemic?” She sucked again from her Burger King Straw, never taking her eyes from me. “Are you, like, malnourished or something?” “I’ve got a headache. A—” I searched for the word. “A migraine.” “Did you fall?” She lowered her voice. “Did somebody hit you?” “And, I think, a fever?” She took a step back. “A fever? You better call Doctor Lord.” “You mean Lorn?” “There’s a D on the end of it, I’m pretty sure.” I was about to take issue with this point when the baby in the back of the store let out a wail. Something about that sound made me step forward and touch Sarah’s wrist, briefly. “It might be a high fever. Is there something here for very high fevers?” Though I’d barely touched her, I swear I could see Sarah’s arm twitch. She narrowed her dark eyes. “Oh, God. You’re contagious-sick, aren’t you? I’ve got a late-night shift! I’ve got to stay up and work. Stay back, don’t get too close. Seriously.” I took a step forward. “I’m not that sick.” She shuffled away gracefully on her skating feet, and stood with her back against a wall of tampons. “Don’t come near me, then, okay? Okay? Just take what you need and put it on the counter.” At a loss, I grabbed a bottle of baby aspirin for 3.99 and put it in my basket. Then, on impulse, I added two pixie sticks, a bag of Tropical Skittles, and an Atomic Fireball. I set everything on the counter by the cash register, and Sarah motioned to me to back up while she 255. came around, found a pair of green gardening gloves with the price tag still on, wedged her hand in one, and used that to ring everything up. It came to $8.39, and when I set one of my soiled tens on the counter—smeared with dirt and moss, folded at the corners—Sarah closed her eyes as if her worst fears were confirmed, as if visible disease clung to that bill in the form of actual mud, and she told me to just take what I needed, she’d pay, whatever. Just go. As I left, I saw the toddler in the back of the store had put a padded bra over his mouth like a bandit. He waved at me. Once I was out on the street again, the real heat of the day slammed into me. I ambled up towards the high school, sucking a Maui Punch Pixie Stick, and down past the diner, popping Tropical Skittles in my mouth. I went past City Hall twice, three times, thinking somebody might stop and ask me why I was loitering on the steps. I sat for a minute on the curb where I saw an old lighter in the gutter, like it just wanted my fingers on it, and I lit the second Pixie Stick on fire. It burned slowly, smoking and dripping red goo on the sidewalk. When nobody stopped me for arson or loitering, I stamped out the Pixie Stick and went to the hardware store. It occurred to me that I might see my dad there. He sometimes went in for nails and fishing line, but Mr. Ling, the owner, was alone, dozing with a Gophers cap over his eyes. I went into the grocery store. It was empty except for Mr. Korhonen, who was reading the paper on the counter and didn’t look up. Strangely, the door didn’t make a sound when I entered or left—each time it caught a pocket of air and never quite closed. I poked my head into diner, but Santa Anna, my old boss, was on vacation. She’d gone to the Laurel and Hardy Festival in 256. Vancouver and gotten her sister to fill in. “She’ll be back in a week or so,” the sister said, pushing long bangs from her eyes and pouring coffee for an old lady doing a crossword puzzle. Down the road, I saw that the door to Unified Spirit was now open, and I went on in, thinking I might see my mom at one of her many meetings. At the very least, I thought I might see Pastor Benson tending his rabbits in one the cages in his office or the secretary folding Sunday bulletins in the multipurpose room in the back. But no one seemed to be there at all. The wooden pews in the sanctuary were set up in such a way that they blocked any reasonable route to the altar. I wound this way and that, I moved through those pews like a maze, and in grim triumph, arrived at the altar sucking on my atomic fireball. My mouth burned, and at the same time, felt finely and delicately needled through with shards of sugar. By then, more than twenty four hours had passed since we’d left Duluth. By then, I later learned, Paul had an hour before he slipped into a coma, about three hours before cardiac arrest. Dear God, I thought, upon arrival at the cross, though I knew it was a rinky-dink faith I possessed, of less use even than superstition. Dear God, I thought, please help Mom, Dad, Abe, Jasper, Doctor, Quiet, and Paul to be not too bored and not too lonely. Not too. It was the only prayer I knew. As the heat from the atomic fireball filled my mouth—seeming to swell and lap at my tongue, seeming to enlarge the space inside me that could be burned—I thought of Patra, deliberately then, letting my mind return to her bit by bit. I thought of Patra with all that pancake in her mouth. I thought about Patra going to the hospital to give birth to Paul, of her hand tapping out the beat of her heart on my thigh, and when I thought of all that, I almost believed that by buying the aspirin and making no fuss, I had done something to please her. My eyes watered 257. from the heat in my mouth. Relief came over me just that quick. I’d done exactly what Patra had said, and no more, so it felt almost heroic then, valiant in its way, how little I’d accomplished. I went up to the offering box on the altar and left the grubby tens with their folded black corners. At the last minute, I took off Patra’s headband and left that as well, as a second thought, knowing that the ache had settled in too deeply to dissipate any time soon. Then I wound my way through the pews and started back. Here’s how I remember the woods of my childhood. Every tree, even the pines planted in strict rows by the Forest Service years ago, seemed truly different: one with sap seeping out in blisters in the heat, another with a branch knocked down, leaving a gnome-like face in the wood. I took pleasure in these differences. I found them absorbing and distracting, a kind of nursery for non-thinking, for just seeing and walking along. I liked running my eyes over details, over twigs and pine needles, over road kill with intestines like spilled baggage on the concrete. There were things I knew about the woods, but always, too, there were things I was sure I’d never seen before in my life. A crow fighting with a snapping turtle over a beer bottle, for instance. Or a box elder bug, appearing from out of nowhere on my thumb, carrying a maple key up my arm like a prize. Or this. Halfway back to the Gardner cabin, a car passed me by. Then a hundred yards ahead, it stopped and began backing up. By that time, the sun was much lower in the sky. A woman in a white sun visor was driving, craning her neck around, but it was the man in the passenger seat who rolled his window down and spoke to me. In the back of the car, I could see two little kids, a boy and a girl, staring out. 258. “Hey,” the man said. “Everything okay?” Their license plate said Illinois. Land of Lincoln. I kept going. The car, a station wagon with a canoe lashed to the roof, slowly followed along as I walked. Like one of those dogs you can’t get rid of. The man had furry eyebrows. “We’re not trying to be creepy,” he said. “And you’re right to be wary, of course. But I think—” The car drove over a fallen branch, which cracked very slowly and loudly. The man went on. “I can’t help but think you look like you could use a ride somewhere? Do you need a ride somewhere? The map says it’s just woods for fifty miles in this direction. Just lakes and woods.” He held the map out the window to show me. As if I didn’t know this already, as if this was news to me. But he was watching my face very closely. “Okay,” I said finally. Late afternoon was settling in around us, the bottle of aspirin was still in my hand. I felt calm, delivered. “It’s not far,” I promised. In the back seat, the little kids in their shorts and t-shirts helped me buckle up my seat belt. I had to direct the car. I had to say, “slow down” at the turn-off to Still Lake and then point the way in the shadows towards the narrow road that led to the Gardner cabin. The visored woman was a good driver, I could tell, and she took it easy on the gravel roads. The woods passed by, slowly but surely, the branches a blue-green slurry through the windows. I wondered how long I could keep the woman driving—she was very trusting, I could tell. I had the feeling 259. that I could point down any backwoods road, any rutted path, no matter how remote, and she’d go just where I said. When I found myself enjoying this thought, it felt like a betrayal of something (I wasn’t sure what), so I urged the careful woman driver forward. I tried to warn her of bumps on the road, of future dangers. “Sometimes it’s hard to see deer. You gotta watch out if you’re driving at dusk, keep that in mind for later. There’s no streetlights or anything.” The woman gave me a little smile in the rearview mirror. Like: I know. The man was into small talk, but not like Leo, who liked facts, or like my dad who only did baseball, weather, and fish. He asked me where I was going, and I said, “Home”—which I guess to him sounded about right, because he left it at that and started telling me about their campsite up near Turquoise Lake. “Ever been there?” I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “A thousand times.” “Any tips?” I thought about it. “There’s a bald eagle’s nest near the north shore.” One of the little kids, the girl, said with all earnestness, “Cool.” She had out a notebook, and she wrote it down. Eagels Nest. At the top of that page it said, Plans, and next to that was a second list for Memories. Here’s what she’d written down under that: Dead deer on the road. Girl who looks like a boy. Doesn’t know how to use a seet belt. “S. E. A. T,” I told her. She made the correction, scrubbing at her paper with the eraser. The father up front said, “We’d love to see a bald eagle.” The mother said, “We’ve seen black eagles, but not bald. That would be cool.” I almost told them then: There’s something wrong with Paul. 260. I almost said it. I think I need some help. But I didn’t because I knew that they would help, and I didn’t want Patra squinting at them through the front door in her t-shirt, her panties exposed, or Leo shooing this other father away with a sweaty handshake. I didn’t want to see Patra shushed by Leo, sent back inside, or Leo tucking in his pants and blinking his bloodshot eyes as he explained the way back to the highway. And I knew that if I somehow got this visored woman inside, if I somehow got her past Leo and into Paul’s room, it would mean the end of Janet and Europa for good, the end of everything worthwhile. So I had the woman take the slow way around the lake, going down the one-lane logging road that was almost never used, that was overgrown with buckthorn and young poplar. I had her take the boat access road to the shore and double back. As she drove, I could see the woman watching me very closely in the rearview mirror. She was driving and watching both, but I broke her gaze and looked down at my lap. Beside me, the boy put his fingers out and touched Paul’s aspirin bottle. “What’s that you got in your hand?” “I got a headache,” I said. Though I no longer did. It was gone. We were going so slowly, and the woods was so shaded and dark, it seemed the trees, and not the car, were moving. They were just sliding past the windows, mechanically, and it was the car that seemed fragile and hesitant. Then the Gardner cabin appeared. Car in the driveway, front shades closed, white cat peeping out one window. 261. “Oh!” the woman driver exclaimed, surprised. Plainly relieved to have reached a real destination. She rolled down her window to get a better look. “What a nice little house. Just tucked away here!” I could see the little girl writing it down. Cottage. She wrote it down carefully: Cottage. Deep in the woods. At some point—perhaps not long after that—the woods started to seem different to me for good. Let me be clear. This feeling started long before Still Lake was sold off to developers from the Cities. It started long before the channel had been widened between our lake and the next, before the aspens had been cut down and the lakeshore divided into lots and all the new houses built. Those were just the most obvious changes. What I’m talking about is something else. I just remember watching the wind scuttling through a branch one day near the beginning of tenth grade, and thinking I could see the earth’s orbit setting up a chain reaction of weather that made the blowing branch inevitable. I looked up at the foliage and saw electrons from a not-so- distant (and not-so spectacular) star turning carbon dioxide into a yellow-green leaf. Abe died later that fall, and as I dug a hole for him beneath the buckthorn, I started to think about what would happen if we never found humans or humanoids or intelligence or cells or life of any sort anywhere else in the universe. I started to think maybe all those astronomers were wrongheaded in their quest, that the difference between life and nonlife was minimal at best, probably beside the point. We’d gotten it backwards. We’d pointed our telescopes into space in hopes of seeing ourselves, and seen so many clumps of chemicals reflected back. There was no helping the boredom, I thought. After Abe died, after Leo and Patra left. There was no changing the loneliness. 262. XXII. The first day of tenth grade, I got up earlier than I needed to. As my parents slept in the tiny room behind the kitchen, I got dressed—jeans, green wool sweater, boots—and turned on the gas stove next to the sink. At first, the blue light of the gas was all I could see by, but as the water began to thrum in the pot, a bit of gray September day showed itself through the one window. Pines shivered in the wind off the water. I filtered coffee through a wet cloth, poured the oily black brew into my dad’s thermos. Nestled the thermos in my backpack. The dogs whined as I passed them on the way to the road, pulling on their stakes, dropping dew from their chains in long lines across the yard. They’d become used to me again over the summer. They’d come to expect more than a pat or two, though I didn’t have time for that now. I poured their kibble sloppily, shoved their four bowls against the side of the shed. They were always hungrier than they were affectionate, anyhow. They didn’t look up again once they got their breakfast. The highway was empty, still. Early fall mist clung to the trees on the edges, muffling sounds, making the five-mile walk into town a long slide from one four-foot patch of concrete to 263. the next. I swung my arms against the chill. I got my heart going, and once I did I couldn’t slow it down again. When I got to Main, I took a sharp right behind Katarina’s gas station. It didn’t look like she’d opened the place up yet. The plexiglass window that on the side of the shop was still dark. Out back, she had the hides of two bucks strung up on poles, which would have interested me usually, but I was in a hurry and didn’t stop. I followed the wet woods path past the old timber mill, whose charred black boards rose higher than the pines and got lost in the fog overhead. I went around to the bank of Gone Lake, where I knew Katarina kept a battered aluminum canoe, unused for years. After a few minutes of fruitless searching, I found the canoe sunk in broken cattails and mud a little ways down from the creek mouth. Wading into the mud, I turned the thing over— first draining the water—and cleaned the mucky seats with the sleeve of my sweater. The sun was burning the fog from the lake now. The surface rippled with minnows below and water striders above. I dipped the paddles in the cold creek water to rinse them clean, then propped them up against the beached canoe. All ready to go. All ready for Lily. Back in town, back at the baseball field behind the school, I sat down on the batters’ bench and waited. I knew Lily’s dad dropped her off not far from here. If she was coming to school, if she was coming at all, I meant to head her off on the way to the door. I had something to give her, and I wanted to give it to her in the canoe. My idea was to tell her I’d gotten a letter in the mail from Mr. Grierson, and if she didn’t believe that, I’d explain how close we were, Mr. Grierson and I—closer than it seemed—because of History Odyssey. I’d written the letter myself the night before. I’d snuck a beer from the shed and a good ink pen from my mom’s craft supplies. Sitting crossed-legged in my loft after my parents went to sleep, I’d written the letter 264. the way I thought a person in prison would, the way a person with a longing and a grudge all wrapped up together would do it. I had this letter for her, sealed. I wanted to take her somewhere where she couldn’t get away while I watched her read it. The canoe in Gone Lake would be best, but if that made Lily suspicious then it could be the woods behind the gas station where Katarina kept her buck skins and bloody axes in pails. Or I would do it here at school, if she wouldn’t go with me to the lake, here in the frost-crusted grass with the hockey players watching. They could watch if they wanted. In the end I didn’t care. Somewhere between home and the baseball field I’d gotten angry. Somewhere between August and September I’d grown a pins-and-needles feeling on my neck and scalp, a tightness in my chest that almost never went away. I couldn’t bear to walk down Main Street anymore, even to get tackle at the hardware store, because that’s where the bank was with my babysitting money inside. I couldn’t go by the elementary school or to the Forest Service Nature Center, which used to be my favorite place in the world. I couldn’t go anywhere or be anyone. I was trembling as I waited in the baseball field. I was hoping Lily would arrive before the last bell rang. I saw her dad’s pickup drive up a few minutes after the last busses took off. He did a little half turn against the curb, so a mess of two-by-fours and an empty dog kennel slid around in the bed. I stood up. Seeing that pickup arrive when I wasn’t sure she’d come at all—seeing Lily open the passenger door—made everything else that I would do to her seem inevitable. Now things would just run their course. Now, one way or another, she would see this was not playing, what she’d said, that you couldn’t just do whatever you wanted to someone and get away with it. When she climbed out of the cab, her hair was wet. It swung in clumped ropes on either side of her head, and she was strangely unsteady. She had to hold the pickup door with two 265. hands as she got out, and for a second I thought, oh no, she’s drunk, but then I saw she had a belly so big that her red hoodie didn’t quite cover it. So big, I could almost see the baby inside her when the sun hit her skin, the outline of a terrible tiny person there, I swear— —but no, it was just her veins, a branchwork of purple lines that were covered again when she pulled down her shirt. I didn’t step forward and say her name. I didn’t approach because of that belly of hers, and because I saw—as she waddled towards me—she was wearing the black suede boots I’d left at her house four months ago. She was wearing my boots, which shone a dark plum color in the sun. I just nodded at her as she passed, as she glanced once in my direction and then on to the next thing. The door. The crowd of hockey players in their white caps on the curb, who’d caught sight of her, now, and were staring outright. School. Tenth grade. “Dear Lily,” I’ve been wanting to write you a note for a very long time. I’m having Mattie give you this letter because everybody will be watching you for correspondence from me, and nobody will be watching her. What I need to tell you is I can’t stop thinking about what you said last spring. I think about your fantasy of Gone Lake all the time, every day, every minute. I think about it so much that it’s all very clear to me now, like something that actually happened. Like something we really did. Did you intend that? I think maybe you did. I think about the feeling of your lips on my skin in that boat. I think about the feeling of my dick in the back of your throat, you sucking me down, and then your sweet look of surprise when I finish. Can you imagine how deep it went, how good it was, how long I lasted, how I drew it out for you at just the right moment—did you feel all that, Lily, you fucking pervert?” 266. Even now—in the murky moments just before sleep—I sometimes think about what it would have been like to have taken Lily out on Gone Lake that day in the canoe. In my mind, I go through the ritual preparations methodically, staving off all feeling of any sort, heating a kettle on the stove, filling a thermos with coffee in the early morning and tucking it in my backpack, ambushing Lily when her dad dropped her off in the school yard. Saying to her, “Let’s cut class, this once.” Saying, “Let’s have a smoke, catch a few crappie, okay?” She’s reluctant, in my dream of her, but then, magically, we’re out on the boat, out in the bright center of Gone Lake. The waves are shushing the boat around, and it’s early fall, just after dawn, and Lily’s wet hair has frozen stiff. Her teeth are chattering and her lips are white, and she’s wearing just one of her sheer sweaters, no jacket or gloves. I see the cold curl her thin shoulders in. But I cannot feel it myself. No cold, no wind. I feel nothing. When she turns around to flick out her cigarette, the one I lit for her, I lunge and take her paddle from her. She gives me a confused look, so I tell her, quietly, “You knew what was going to come next.” Then I creep from the back of the canoe towards her. I feel the boat like my whole body going under me, the thing rocking back and forth, shuddering and tipping us both off balance. I say to her when I get close, warningly, menacingly perhaps, but also with tender commiseration: “Just a kiss.” It feels almost like a benediction, giving her this. The violence in me is almost overwhelming. “That’s what you wanted, right? Just a kiss.” And then there’s this. Even now, when those words move through my mind, like a curse or a wish, I become Lily. It happens just like that. I have to go through all the preparations for it to work: I have to heat the coffee, fill the thermos, wipe down the wet canoe seats with my sleeve. I have to paddle through the rolling water for a long time, and do it silently, and let Lily 267. just ride in the front. I have to be patient. I have to do all the steps. But by the time the shore is just a huge ring of horizon around us, by the time I’ve taken her paddle, and seen the look of recognition in her face, I find I’m the one stranded in the boat, I’m the one shivering with cold, I feel everything and I’m the one wanted more than anyone else. 268. NOTES In Chapter I, Madeline quotes in her presentation from Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez (New York: Scribner, 1978). p. 33. AKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincere gratitude to Aimee Bender, who read this novel with such insight and thoughtfulness in its very earliest of drafts. I also thank T. C. Boyle and the students in his workshop at the University of Southern California, who long ago read what became the first chapter of this novel. Thank you, too, to Southwest Review, which published that first chapter in 2013 and honored it with the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction. A special thanks to the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for recognizing the value of supporting feminist projects. I also want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Bill Handley and Natania Meeker for reading this project and agreeing to a summer defense. Thanks to the University of Southern California for financial support and for providing such a wonderful community of thinkers and writers. And finally, my deepest thanks to Nick Admussen, who believed in the value of this project from the beginning and encouraged me all along the way.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

A bag of shocking pink: occult imagery in contemporary American fiction by women

PDF

The cyborg in the basement: hauntedness and narrative transmography

PDF

How reading works: intimacy in the author, reader, text relationship

PDF

Earth, sky, and morning light: naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories

PDF

The moral basement: investigations into ethics and irony in contemporary fiction

PDF

The connoisseur of pain: a novel; and, A new and sharper vision: sensuous aesthetics as theological immersion in Terrence Malick's The tree of life, Thomas Kinkade's landscapes, and Ron Hansen's ...

PDF

The paradox of Jewish identity in the age of assimilation: Irène Némirovsky, her life and works

PDF

The monstrous city: urban sprawl, Los Angeles, and the literature of the fantastic

PDF

Authority and the failed justification of evil in Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian, or The evening redness in the West

PDF

“Where beasts' spirits wail”: the Great War and animal rights

PDF

Neighbor plots: the ethics of strangeness in the modern Gothic

PDF

In defense of “prose”; and, Concrete flag

PDF

Plotting the geographic imaginary: nostalgic impulse in the California novel and So L.A.

PDF

Becoming multiple: cyborg aesthetics and the inversion of horror

PDF

Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

PDF

Between literary training and literary service: school writing instruction in the Russian Empire, 1780-1860

PDF

The Futurists: speculative fiction for the network society

PDF

Reclaiming the book-object: appropriated texts in 21st century poetry

PDF

Mercy and metaphor: the empathy era and its discontents

PDF

Savagely spiritual: illness and the imagination in the fiction of Jean Stafford

Asset Metadata

Creator Fridlund, Emily Jane (author)

Core Title The usual things in unusual places: plotting simultaneity in narratives by women

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 09/09/2019

Defense Date 07/01/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag feminist theory,Fiction,narrative theory,OAI-PMH Harvest,simultaneity,women's writing

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bender, Aimee (committee chair), Handley, William R. (committee member), Meeker, Natania (committee member)

Creator Email fridlund@usc.edu,fridlune@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-471511

Unique identifier UC11286982

Identifier etd-FridlundEm-2898.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-471511 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-FridlundEm-2898.pdf

Dmrecord 471511

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Fridlund, Emily Jane

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA