I’m sixteen years old and I love my mom with an almost scary fierceness. It blooms in me like a mushroom cloud of seething milk right before the boil.
Her opinions seep through me until I am soaked with them. They make me feel full. I take everything she says as the last word on the subject, from the way she cleans raw pork chops by scraping off the bone grit from the saw with a butter knife, to the way she singles out the best romaine at the grocery store, her finger tracing the head with the curliest edge. I try to eat the way she eats: ever so slowly, sucking on a single square of chocolate for a long time as if it were a lozenge. I love how she pushes a grocery cart through the store and then out over the icy parking lot—with urgency and feeling.
I watch her assemble an outfit for a night out, lounging on the silky discard pile on her bed as she tries on each ensemble with this belt, then that one, this necklace, that heel. Her body is exactly like mine, but grown; her kneecaps are smooth and rounded, her ankles small and bony, her wrists too small for most bangles. I stand by as she drapes eye shadow onto her deep-pocketed eyes, the silver dust clinging to the wide awnings of her lids. I love the way my mother smells, how soft her skin feels just above the knuckles.
I am happily, completely, my mom’s spawn. She is my world or, more specifically, my country, and now, in the time of my parents’ divorce, the country is at war. My parents, who fought regularly but never seemed to hate each other, have turned into vicious adversaries. In a panic to assemble some foot soldiers, my mom shares details to get us to join her side—which we do, given that my dad’s influence in our lives measures just a drop compared to the ocean of our mother’s, and that my dad refuses to talk about the divorce with us, never presenting us with his defense. I feel guilt over this years afterward, but we were just kids; it wasn’t a fair contest.
My quiet dad grows even quieter. The invisible force field that has always surrounded him now turns so hard that I can almost see it, and because we’re not sharing a house any longer, I lose even the small bits of affection that I used to glean from just being in his presence. He makes regular, awkward trips to the city to take us to professional sports events or to formal dinners. By this point my mother has taken on a character role, the wronged woman, and she is “spitting mad”—even though we are pretty sure the divorce was her idea. Midway through their three-year court battle, my brothers and I lose interest in her character, and in his character, and for once in our lives feel a unanimous desire to flip the channel and watch a new show.
That the divorce’s eventual outcome takes my mother by surprise is an understatement. The judge does not seem to agree with her request for lifetime maintenance, and it turns out that in addition to raising us and ferrying my brothers to early-morning hockey practices and weekend tournaments, she will also soon have to get a job. When I come home from school, I sometimes find her in bed. It’s so unlike her that I worry. I crawl in next to her and listen to her rail against the evil cards our dad’s lawyer played that week in court.
Finally, one day she gets up early and decides to enroll in a college class to renew her teaching license. This does not mean that her fury has dissipated. It means it has solidified into a mantra.
“Kids! It’s time for a new family motto,” she says, as I riffle through my memory to recall any previous mottos.
“Fuck it!” She was referring to the divorce, to the move, to all our struggles to adjust, to our collective fear of an unfamiliar future. “Fuck! It!” she says, laughing, her new blunt haircut shaking. We look at her in shock, and then at one another with cracked conciliatory smiles, because even though the subversion was hers, she means for us to share it.
Somehow in all the fighting over monetary details, the big question—Why can’t you just get along?—was neither posed nor answered. We never did find out why they split up. Being kids, all we really knew was that we were now living in a new town.
After six months in the office-apartment complex, my mom moved us into a big beige house in a freshly constructed suburban neighborhood so twisting and dizzying that the developers must have been high when they plotted it. Our house was identical to two others in the neighborhood, and more than once I pulled into the wrong driveway. Driving in circles along the endless meandering snake paths of my new streets, I felt out of the bottom reaches of teenage lostness, not yet understanding that the visual sense I was missing in my environment was soul. My mom sought out only the freshest of Sheetrocked starts for all of us, but I couldn’t help but feel the lack of history there: Park Rapids could feel gritty, at times about as glamorous as carpet worn down to the plastic mesh, but it was nonetheless storied. And when we lived there, so were we.
My brother Bob shot up about a foot, grew out his hair in the back, and won a rare freshman spot on the varsity hockey team. A true northerner, he found his footing on the ice. The familiar, funky, dry-aged-beef odor of his and Marc’s hockey equipment thawing out by our fireplace, the fresh layer of animal-boy sweat drying into a shellac on top of the last one, remained the only reassuring indicator of our former home.
Marc, at only ten, was a powder keg, tossing off insults at every provocation, as if he were walking around with tiny sharp rocks in his shoes. Wielding my own wicked tongue and using my language abilities to full press, I appointed myself family judge and chief arbitrator. I spent lots of time telling everyone what they should be feeling so as to cover up the fact that I had no idea what to feel myself. Sometimes my brothers listened to me, and other times they sneered that I was just like Mom, walking around the house with a tissue lodged between coffee cup and saucer as she did, and about as bossy. Mostly, when I wasn’t eating bowls of oily leftovers, I drove around and got lost in suburbia, blaring the alternative radio station at top volume. My adolescent rebellion—“Smells Like Teen Spirit”—had been curtailed out of necessity, but it was still active, like a buried hot spring.
Walking around loose and unknown in my enormous new school, I had my first taste of anonymity. Despite this, I made deep instant friendships with an already established crew of theater goofs, and we spent a lot of time studying for our AP English exams, smoking loosies and drinking strong black coffee in Minneapolis’s late-night coffee shops. My mom insisted that I must be out partying, that there was no way in hell we could be hanging out that long in cafés.
But I was a good girl. And, suddenly, a very hungry one. At home we ate, with more sickly comfort than ever. Feeding hungry, emotional suburban kids—the three of us and, eventually, many of our friends—became my mom’s specialty.
To outsiders, every dinner looked like a holiday. The spinning wheel of my mother’s arsenal, which up to this point had always pulled in a fair number of ethnic outliers like stir-fry, spun tighter and tighter until it began to land each night on one of our richest Midwestern favorites: chicken marsala with mushrooms and spaetzle in brown butter; grilled pork chops served still a little pink in the middle and cloaked with horseradish sour cream; butterscotch bars caving beneath the weight of their thick chocolate tops. She began to make even larger batches in advance prep for the preteen raids on the fridge that so thrilled her. “Marc’s friends came over and ate that entire gallon of chili and all of those apple dumplings!” was a common boast in those days. I can’t remember her ever saying that she herself was hungry, but rather that it was “time to feed these kids.” The woman who made more food than a single family could eat had one wish for it: She wanted it gone.
Her cooking, and our belief in its eminence, was fast becoming the family glue. My abdomen-thorax regions grew permanently round and remained so, in a state of full-on satiation, for the next three or four years. To my mother’s credit, never once did she acknowledge my weight gain, even as my short frame skip-counted from size 4 to 10 and then 12, and not even when I begged her to admit the truth: “Agree with me, I’m getting fat.”
She dismissed this with a wave of her hand—“You’re absolutely not!”—and countered with the only words of eating wisdom I’ve ever needed: “If you feel that way, then cut out desserts, and don’t take seconds.”
She refused to ruin food for me, for which I’m forever grateful.
When it came time for me to apply to college, my main goal was to distance myself as much as possible from the fallout from my detonated family. I found a small liberal arts school in a village in Ohio—as insulated as Park Rapids but even smaller—called Kenyon, whose old stone buildings and ancient literary pedigree seemed like the perfect place to launch a small-town girl’s literary calling. Feeling hopelessly foreign, a Midwestern duck swimming in a pond of East Coast kids, I threw myself into my classes. To offset my social anxiety, I counterintuitively returned to my comfort zone: I got a perm. (I still believed the Midwestern adage that curls make round faces look thinner.) By the time summer break rolled around, I’d come to see my college foray as an indulgent, expensive escape from the family drama, a luxury that I probably didn’t deserve.
Moving back into the house in the cul-de-sac, I saw that they were doing about as well as I was—surviving but not exactly thriving. Marc wore his new angry-teenager costume 24/7; my mom began buying better wine but still in jumbo sizes—cheap magnums instead of boxes; and my brother Bob seemed to be taking the divorce the hardest. He’d been sending me long handwritten letters all year, some of them updates, some of them wildly inventive poems. One night we sat up and talked about them.
I thought his writing could have been really good if it weren’t for his syntax, a curious mixture of biblical and Middle English. While I had lost my Catholicism and my ability to pretend years ago (at around the same time), Bob remained in possession of both his Bible and the full scope of his imagination. In narrative terms, I was reasonable, boring nonfiction; he was fantasy fiction. The secular, liberal English major in me changed his every “morn” to “morning” and “ye” to gender-neutral “they,” and sent them back for revision. And now I was feeling guilty for having so mercilessly edited my brother’s work—little more than diary entries.
“I actually don’t think you need to change anything here,” I said.
“Whatever. The individual words aren’t as important as the meaning of the whole.” He sighed. I was the one in the family known for her achievements, her aptitude, and yet in his eyes I was often so dense. “Look at the last line.”
It said, “So be it.”
So be it? “Is that some kind of answer?” I asked.
“Yeah. When it comes to our family, none of them will ever change. Your problem is you expect too much.”
As a devout child of psychotherapy, I found that hard to accept, but the undeniable truth was that after that he dealt with our parents’ divorce, the move, and his own coming-of-age with the kind of finality and wisdom it would take me many more years to find. Unlike me and, to a certain degree, our brother Marc, Bob had no desire to return to our hometown to dig in our family’s wreckage for fossilized clues. He shut the door to the past and remained close to both of our parents, but never returned to Park Rapids for any length of time; I kept my door open, just a crack, and every time I went back I walked all over my past self, nose to the ground, sniffing for clues.
For my sophomore year, I transferred to Macalester in St. Paul, another liberal arts school—but this one was only twenty minutes away from my brothers, my mother, and her kitchen.
Macalester College pulled in lots of East Coasters from moneyed backgrounds, but I gravitated toward the more informal Midwesterners. I roomed with an enthusiastic social-activist lesbian-theologian from Milwaukee and a wisecracking poet from Minnesota who was deep into Sylvia Plath’s language of melancholy. The poet and I wrote endless pages of confessional poetry and smoked cigarettes until the silver ash mountain in the ashtray overflowed onto the floor. All three of us spent hours playing drinking games with the boys in the basement apartment, who then sculpted a living-room couch from our empty cases of cheap Wisconsin beer. (Huber Bock, to be specific, which in retrospect might have contributed to my thickening torso.)
Everyone in my family, save my mom, thought that my pursuit of an English degree in an expensive liberal arts college was pure extravagance, and told me so. “For that, why don’t you just go to a state school?” asked the ever-practical Grandma Dion. In a way, they weren’t wrong, for I basically spent my college years fine-tuning my god-given aptitude for procrastination.
I’d wait until the eleventh hour to start writing a twenty-five-page term paper, then drive down to my mom’s house and stay up all night long and write the thing in a single sitting, fueled by hefty servings of the food I revered. I came back toting bags of leftovers, which my hungry roommates leapt on.
Installed in my first apartment, I also started to cook on my own. Whenever the pressure of a writing deadline loomed uncomfortably in front of me, I’d dodge it by jumping into my car and driving to one of the nearby Asian markets. I’d happily plunk down forty of my precious work-study dollars at the Thai market to buy everything to make chicken coconut-milk curry and green beans with pork and fish sauce for eight of my closest friends—and another day’s reprieve from writing my paper on Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and the Southern literary consciousness.
I cooked outside of my mother’s arsenal. I did a good rendition of spaghetti carbonara, with an obscene amount of bacon fat and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. I cut carrots and parsnips lengthwise into spears and fried them hard in a sea of butter until the edges browned to copper and the insides gushed when pressed, and then poured the fat, burnished sticks over white rice. If I had a deadline the next day, I could be found at three in the morning crouched in the living room pureeing squash soup in a blender because the socket in the kitchen didn’t work.
But I also regularly overcooked pasta and spent long minutes peeling garlic and mincing it into minuscule cubes, returning to the stove to find my onions frizzled down to a crust. I stopped trying to replicate my mom’s chicken marsala, because the meat never turned out as velvety as hers. When stir-frying in my thrift-store wok, I particularly hated the metallic fumes that rose up when the soy sauce bubbled on the hot metal, burning upon contact. That wasn’t right. How and when are you supposed to add the soy? I fretted more about my steep learning curve with cooking than I did about my classes.
The disasters in the kitchen piled up. As did the dishes, because I so rarely did them.
The summer between my junior and senior years of college was a tremendous bust. Just three weeks after scoring my first job in food service, as a back waiter—beverage pourer, basically—at a high-end Italian spot in Minneapolis, I was fired. Not after breaking my sixth glass, or even after clownishly dropping an entire magnum of champagne on a guy at a very special table of four, but only after I nervously proceeded to pat him down hastily with my side towel—all the way down, into the crevice of his lap, not even thinking about where my towel was headed until I saw his wife’s burning expression. Shaking with mortification, I would never attempt to work front-of-the-house ever again. I left my white button-down shirts in my locker and ran.
Adding to that, my boyfriend of four or five months was breaking up with me. Or, rather, he wasn’t even bothering with that, but just openly starting to date another girl. (“You’re going to Minnehaha Falls with Kristina? Can I come, too?” I’d asked.)
Having never been so thoroughly dumped before, I was clearly confused, and dramatically heartbroken, for about a week. My pain was more theatrical than real.
The heat didn’t lessen from day to night that summer. Compared to northern lake country, city nights feel strangely indistinguishable from the days. Up north, after the sun dives behind the trees, the wind and the temperature both drop and the waves on the lake flatten to reflective glass. I missed the lake. I missed nights spent sitting on the dock, talking with my friends in low voices because we knew that the water before us would amplify our every sound wave. I missed the Park Rapids sign that announced our population: 2,961. I missed our double-wide Main Street; I missed the sight of the dumb potato plant belching fryer steam, my friends, and even my dad’s dorky announcements of love. I just wanted to drive north and go jump in a lake. It was all I could think of to do.
Mom’s lake cabin had been the first pawn to go in the game that was the divorce—first point, Dad—so I couldn’t go there. Our house in town, where my dad still lived, looked exactly as it had after my mom’s final garage sale. At the end of that day her face had taken on a weird clownlike glee as she watched the effects of their years together march out the door in the hands of new owners. As the house emptied and she began to feel the reality of her fresh start, she grew bolder, ordering my brothers to run back into the house and grab paintings, doodads, all of her seasonal fake-flower arrangements, whatever, and slap a dollar tab of tape on each one of them. My brothers, bouncing to the beat of the adrenaline in this, sprinted in and cheerfully obliged. By the time it was over, she’d sold most of the house’s decorative aspects. She’d basically sucked the woman out of it, leaving him with—not kidding—light squares on the walls where the photos had been and bare mattresses in the rooms, which he’d truly had no idea how to cover. When we came to visit him, you could almost hear him thinking: Where does she keep the part that goes under the sheets, the pad thingy? I was welcome to stay in his forlorn, air-conditioned house in town, but it would be no jump in the lake.
Two weeks in advance of a high school friend’s wedding, I called up my friend Sarah Spangler to ask for an extended visit. Sarah was in the wedding, too, and if I could think of a house that better fit my nostalgic ideal of life in Park Rapids, hers was it. Built at the turn of the twentieth century, the Spangler place was so close to Fish Hook Lake it nearly squatted on its shores. More bookish and environmental and Scandinavian-outdoorsy than my parents, hers filled their house with plants, piles of New Yorker magazines, and a constant soundtrack of classical music. Also unlike my house, theirs lacked a glorious supply of leftovers, and her dad’s environmentalism extended to the furnace, causing Sarah and me to walk around on Saturdays after sleepovers in afghan capes. But still, their house felt like a lakeside refuge. I’d stayed there for a week while we were moving, and maybe they’d let me bunk there again.
I called their house three, four times but couldn’t reach Sarah, who was working two jobs. Each time my call was answered by her older brother, Aaron, and each time our conversation lasted an abnormally long time, especially as I couldn’t recall a single verbal exchange between the two of us. He was four years older; if he knew me at all, it was as one of the cheerleaders he’d cautioned his sister not to hang out with in high school.
Now he was back in town himself. He caught me up on all its changes in the past four years while we’d both been away, both of us digging our hometown with a strange expatriate enthusiasm. Over the phone line I fell hard for Aaron’s conversational prowess. In his orbit the most mundane details, such as the renovation of the town’s Dairy Queen, felt worthy of discussion.
“We got a second traffic light,” he said.
“Over by the Holiday stationstore?”
“No, for some reason they put it by the Pamida.”
This is so weird, I thought. But oddly comfortable.
The fourth time I called, he asked, “Can I ask—why do you keep calling?” I explained my plight, that I wanted to come home but didn’t have any place to stay. “Oh, just come up,” he said.
“Really? You don’t think Sarah would mind? Or your mom?”
“Nah, it’s fine.” In those days teenage friends of the Spangler kids—Matt, Aaron, and Sarah—would often show up at the sliding glass door, knock, and walk right into their ’70s-era gold-and-orange kitchen. That summer I was one of them.
If there was someone I had assumed would never, ever come back to live in Park Rapids, it would have been Aaron. Easily voted “most likely to get out of town” in his senior year, he was one of a handful of local kids who had been turned on to punk music. He lent Sarah mixed tapes of pounding music we’d never heard before: Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Motörhead. He fronted his own band. He studied both the hardcore ethic and its aesthetic—the casual, open-flung shirts, the ratty, gnarled flop of long hair, the loose Converse Chucks—and practiced them devoutly. He didn’t jibe at all with the sonic and cultural testosterone of the Top Gun 1980s, or the conservative town for that matter, and so he sought out his own symbols, a lot earlier than most of us did.
I hold on to a vivid memory from childhood that contains the both of us, an illicit meet between the rebel and the cheerleader if you will, although he still refuses to confirm it.
I was in the ninth grade, co-captain of the boys’ basketball cheerleading squad, sitting for my biannual perm at the Family Hair Affair—a tradition that began for me in kindergarten and mercifully ended my senior year of high school (save that single backslide during college). The stench of the solution was a perfect blend of rot and ammonia and it needled at my eyes. Aaron sat in a chair behind me, in my mirror’s purview. The salon’s owner, Mavis Davis (her glorious married name), and her constant cohort, a six-foot ice blonde with a Brigitte Nielsen crop, stood over Aaron. These ladies loved—they absolutely lived, as my mother would say—to cut it short. Mavis roughly lifted up hunks of Aaron’s heavy dark hair and loudly discussed how they might remove the enormous rat’s nest that was knotted at the back of his neck. Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong and they were holding up his hair and talking about how they could remove the image of a spider that had been shaved into his head beneath his long flop of top hair. It’s all a little hazy now, and Aaron swears that he never set foot in the Hair Affair after middle school, but I know without a doubt that I sat in that white vinyl beauty-salon chair suffocating in a stinging cloud of perm-fumes and spied on my future punk husband while he was in consultation with Mavis Davis.
After college Aaron went to art school and exited with the intention of being a full-time artist. (“That’s different,” the hometown murmurs.) A few of his sculptures sat in the Spangler yard: One was a small wooden chair surrounded on three sides by wooden-framed windows. I tried out the chair when I first got there. The old wavy glass threw the woods into a squirmy, surreal abstraction, instantly defamiliarizing the landscape. On their porch hung another of his pieces, a large relief carved out of wood, with a glossy blue river flowing through a rough, tar-covered townscape. It was not-pretty in a foreign, intriguing way.
He’d been living in Minneapolis for years, and yet here he was back in town, by day working at a local sawmill, by evening building a house out on his parents’ land by Two Inlets and reposing nightly on the Spangler back porch playing country songs on his guitar. Sarah and I joined him after dinner, curled up in sweatshirts against the cool summer night, drinking spiced tea. Eventually Sarah, a morning person, went to bed, giving us two night owls the tree perch to ourselves.
“So what’s your house like?” I asked.
“It’s just one room, and tall. Kind of like a warehouse live-work space, but in the woods. Full of scavenged wood and windows I’ve been collecting. I’m still putting up the logs on the inside, straight-cut slabs I bring home from the sawmill.” He smiled. “I don’t really know how to build a house, you know. I’m just making it up as I go.”
It seemed a little doubtful to me that he’d actually moved back to Park Rapids to make art like a hermit, and I told him so.
“It’s Two Inlets! Not the Park Rapids we grew up in.” He crossed his legs into a triangle and lit the ivory bowl of his pipe. “George, the sawyer at the mill, has so much vernacular knowledge. He’s cutting logs on this old saw from 1910 and he judges how to cut a log by how it sounds on the first cut. I’m learning so much basic stuff there, things I feel like I should already know.”
He pulled up his guitar from his feet and all of a sudden tipped his head back and started singing. No tentative porch sing was this. It was more like a solo in a musical, a song woven right into the conversational fabric. I was a little taken aback, not yet accustomed to the way Aaron naturally just breaks into song.
“Last winter I bought a tractor-powered saw-mill…I wanted to make my living cutting boards to sell…but she don’t want to live in the town I grewed up in…so I’ll just take my tractor back…to the auction barn…”
“ ‘Grewed up’! Who sings this song?”
“It’s mine. Old country songs have bad grammar.” He kept the rhythm on his guitar and popped right back in.
“We fellll in love, I bought her a ring, but she found out…that all I had to offer her…was this piece of ground. She says we woooon’t be married now…”
“Shallow lady!” I interrupted.
“I have nothing to call my ooooown…and I…just lost…my tractor to…the auc-tion barn…”
“Oh no, not the girl and the tractor!”
“Listen to the song, you’re like a heckler in a bar,” he said.
“All alone, allllll alone…living on…my daddy’s land…”
And then he tipped his head back so far his eyes shut, and he fell into a soft yodel that grew louder, longer, and ever more woeful.
“Yodeleyheeee-hooo…yodeleyheeeee-hoooooo…yodeleyheeeeeeeee…yodeleyheeeee—EHEEEE-hoooo…”
His voice filled the entire porch, all the way to the corners. It was a vulnerable howl, and I wanted to cry. How could she turn her back on the romance of the guy and his tractor-powered sawmill?
When I slipped into bed beside Sarah that night in her old bedroom, she rolled over and sleepily groaned, “Oh boy, were you up all this time talking to my brother?”
Around the time I arrived at the Spangler house, a stray dog started showing up. This surprised no one because odd dogs often came for the summer to join the pack of them that ran the beach, tore around in the woods, and rolled in the dead fish on the shore; they’d gotten three of their dogs that way. I nicknamed this one Schnoz for his outsize lab nose and quipped that directions to their place must be written on the hobo dogs’ bathroom wall. During the day I read books by the shore, my hands buried in Schnoz’s woolly head.
When it came time for me and Sarah to go to our friend’s wedding, Aaron decided to crash it, and he arrived in style. When he stepped out of his low, old-man Buick in cowboy boots and a tight parchment-colored vintage three-piece suit, his shadowy blue eyes found mine and the round gears of his jaw shifted under his suntanned skin. I had never before been so curious about a person.
Within weeks, he was back down in Minneapolis. He and his friend Rob were planning to pilot Rob’s houseboat all the way down the Mississippi, from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Rob’s boat on the river looked more like a little log cabin with a woodstove in the center than a river rider. As at Aaron’s house, its walls were nearly choked with paintings and found objects, and the two of them spent their free time tweaking the interior for their trip. In the meantime, Aaron picked up day work with a stone mason and dated me. After going to art openings and museums and rock shows and his favorite diners, we’d sit on the steps outside my college apartment and talk for hours. One night, after he left, my roommate, the theologian, said, “Holy shit, when the two of you get together you take on this really strong accent.”
The cadence of the talk I grew up with, which I didn’t realize had faded, was coming back.
Aaron and Rob had spent all their time perfecting their houseboat abode and none working on the engine, so when it failed to start up, their Mississippi trip was called off. I was secretly glad. Aaron was staying most nights at my place, anyway. He had been sleeping on a pallet of blankets in his cement-floored warehouse studio space, so giving him a proper bed felt like the most practical thing to do.
The first night we spent together we stayed up in bed until the wee hours, watching the light of dawn creep up the window shades as I lay there in his arms, trading memories of Park Rapids school lunch. We recalled the windowless dungeon that was the middle school’s basement cafeteria and the route there that took us through the dark boiler room, pitted with surprise puddles of water that soaked our white Keds. We joked about the way the gruff lunch ladies, in their housedresses and hairnets, clocked out perfect balls of mashed potatoes onto our plates, the synthetic potato-bud mash as smooth as nylons. These shared fruit-cocktail and hamburger-gravy memories were amusing to him, but the fact that we had grown up eating the same crappy lunches absolutely slayed me. I howled and curled into a fetal position, doubled up with recognition.
In the mornings, we listened to the radio in my bedroom—K1400 AM, an oldies station for seniors that played “The Music of Your Life.” I started wearing a robe. In the mornings, we’d get up, eat basted eggs, and then I’d send him off to work with a tub of bean soup stuffed with three kinds of smoked meat from the family meat market: country sausage, bacon, and the pink bits whittled from a long-simmered hock. He’d look at it with a smile—“This should get me through!”—accustomed as he was to lean turkey sandwiches with sprouts. This gave me a charge, as I was already hanging part of my self-esteem on my cooking, well on my way to becoming a feeder.
I felt timeless with him and blurted this out one day, immediately wishing I could take it back. Shit, I thought. I don’t even know what that means. Mercifully, Aaron understood. He said he felt the same.
That Christmas, when I was back in Park Rapids to see my dad, Aaron introduced me to his house. Located four hours from Minneapolis, twenty-five minutes from our hometown, five minutes from the nearest gas station, and a mile down a snaking dirt path, Aaron’s house was so lodged in the woods that it felt like we were traveling back in time.
It was so rough and so wild, even the road was homemade. To make it, Aaron had followed the faint stamped-down line of a deer trail all the way through the eighty-acre piece. After cutting the trees with a chain saw, the small brush with a gas-powered brush cutter, and the high grass with a machete, he was able to heave and bounce down the road in his four-wheel-drive Ford.
But now, when we came to the driveway, he stopped. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Snow’s too deep. We have to walk in.”
“Too deep for the four-wheel-drive?”
I couldn’t believe I wasn’t wearing decent winter boots. City living had made me soft, my footwear unfit for anything but a shoveled sidewalk. I felt hopelessly un-local. The snow swooped across the driveway in an even wave, broken only by the fine string of oval hoof holes left by deer delicately plucking their way across the road. We were doing the same, but indelicately, me tromping in rapidly soaking leather boots, Aaron in proper winter mucks.
“It’s just another half mile,” he said. Halfway there, the cold wind invaded my lungs and I realized I was having an asthma attack.
After stopping three times along the way, we arrived at the end of the road. There, on a hill above a wide, frozen waterway, stood his house. It looked old, like it had been there a long time. He explained how he’d built it, over the course of two years, without any electric power. He’d dug the foundation with a shovel and then started raising the sides: four large log poles on each side, spaced eight feet apart. It was basically a pole shed. He planned the ceiling to be fourteen feet high, so that it would feel lofty inside, even though the footprint was only twenty-four by fourteen feet.
The padlock on the front door was unhitched. Aaron turned the latch and pushed open the nine-foot-tall door, a giant’s entrance into a tiny house. We walked in and were met with the spicy aroma of fresh wood. It was like walking into the inside of a barrel and smelled exactly like the woolen work shirts he wore to the sawmill.
To the left there was a shipman’s alcove kitchen, its shelves holding a few colorful spice jars, boxes of tea, and metal canisters of sugar, flour, and cornmeal. Taking up most of the kitchen was a huge vintage white stove with four wide burners and a lake of shiny white enamel between them, with two identical oval rust holes burned out on each side. A large speckled black kettle sat squarely on one of the burners and on the other, a wire cone-shaped contraption.
“What is that?” I asked.
“That’s my toaster.”
I’d seen this artifact, along with the water kettle, in antiques stores before, but never in action. Here, they made sense. The ceiling in the kitchen was a network of rough beams he’d cut with a hand saw, with open joints and wedges shimmed in the corners to make them as level as he could. Freshly constructed in 1995, the place looked like it could have been built in 1895.
To the right of the entrance, a homemade wooden ladder descended into the room. It led up to a small bedroom, anchored with a rusty metal bed (“pulled from my grandpa’s chicken barn,” Aaron boasted) covered with a patchwork quilt. Beneath the loft sat a vanity, with a shadowy mirror and a chipped enameled washbasin on top. I guessed that that was the bathroom.
Aaron built a fire in the woodstove in the center of the house and dropped a pile of snowy logs at my feet, on which I propped my boots to let them melt off. Outside, the sun was dropping. He lit an oil lamp, tinting everything orange. I shivered, not with cold but with the engrossing weirdness of the place. If I hadn’t known him and his family all my life I’d have thought I’d just entered a madman’s lair.
I looked up. The flat ceiling, fourteen feet up, was covered with overlapping pieces of rusty sheet metal (“the backside of old trailer house siding,” he said). The blotches of maroon, orange, black, and pink swirled into a surreal pattern like the one that forms on the back of your eyelids when you squint in the dark. The house was sided with rough board-and-batten, but the interior was made of shiny logs, which he explained were the extra slabs that he’d taken home from the mill, stripped of excess bark with an axe, varnished thickly, and nailed onto the walls to create a faux-log-cabin effect. Though he’d fully intended to put down a wood floor over the wide plank subfloor, he fell in love with the dirty patina the floor had taken on during the time he’d been working on it with his muddy work boots, and instead decided just to preserve its finish with four layers of heavy varnish. In the flickering firelight from the oil lamp, the dark pine boards shone like lacquered dry coffee in a forgotten cup.
Nearly every inch of space on the walls was filled with stuff: paintings, photos, iron tools, lake buoys, record covers, deer hides. Crude handmade wooden weapons hung ominously amid the sculptures and paintings. The tables held a granny’s menagerie of tchotchkes—trinkets, figurines, little glass boxes with taconite pellets, quirky old coasters, brooches, geodes, music boxes with yellowed gloves draped over them—a nice collection of everything you might have felt like buying in an antiques store but put back at the last minute. Each treasured knickknack held its own orderly slot. Everything wore a lacy shawl of dust.
The nearest electricity box was more than three miles away. He poured me a glass of water from the jug he’d brought in and explained that there was no running water, either, because the pump he’d attempted to pound in the kitchen had come up dry. And no phone. He laid the eggs and the bacon, the loaf of bread and the coffee on the kitchen butcher block. We were marooned, with just these resources. And yet it was the coziest place I’d ever been, like the fantasy house that children dream about as they sit in their forts, wishing them to come to life. Most adults forget about those places as they grow older, but not him.
We slept there that night, crawling the ladder to the loft bedroom. I pulled out the lace-up petticoat top I’d bought in a vintage store, which suddenly felt a little too historically accurate. My fantasy is out of the bag now, I thought, as I fastened the long line of pearly buttons and crawled into bed. Aaron piled the heavy quilts on high. When we turned off the oil lamp for the night the mice began to play a game of pinball in the rafters, and immediately Aaron corrected his mistake.
“I always play night music to drown out the mice,” he said as he went downstairs to put a Fritz Kreisler violin tape into the boom box. The high notes of the violin kicked in, swirling into the dark like a voice. We lay there, taking turns rolling over toward the window to look out at the soft drifts of moonlit snow.
Aaron said, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been afraid of the dark. I used to think it was a monster”—he held his arms up—“chasing me.”
“You’re not afraid now, are you?” I asked, a little scared myself.
“I’m starting to get over it,” he said. “It’s better with someone else out here.”
The next day when we were ready to go, we let the fire die down, shut the door, turned the latch, and hung the open padlock on it. As we walked back to the road in yesterday’s trampled footprints, I turned around. The loft window formed one eye and the window in the door another, making a crooked, lovable face. It was hard to believe we were going to leave the house out there all alone. It was already a character.
And although Aaron hates it when I say this—because it’s so sugary—when I looked back at the house, I thought its board-and-batten siding made it look just like the one on Little House on the Prairie, ladder to the sleeping loft and all.
A few months later, the long, record-breaking cold winter of 1997 came to a close. To celebrate the temperature’s rise to zero, we drove around with the car windows down. The sun was shining, and in an instant we were old-timers, happy, and constantly together.
I was graduating that spring but hadn’t yet formulated a plan. Many of my friends were moving to New York, and others were headed on to more school. I figured I’d work a year in Minneapolis, then probably go to grad school myself to become a professor. The English department felt more like home to me than any other place. I knew Aaron intended to keep making art and that he’d want to move back into his empty house in the woods that summer, but he was keeping his specific plans for the future close to his chest.
Then one day, as I was sitting on my bed reading The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein—a famously unreadable book, but one that effectively drills the dream of the pioneers into your head over the course of two thousand pages of repetitive nonsense—and Aaron was sitting in the wooden chair next to me, embroidering a tiny baby-quilt art piece with the logo for the fictional Two Inlets Knife and Gun Club, his absurdist ode to the rack-and-gun culture of our home, I started to cry, my tears projectile.
Aaron kneeled by my side, imploring me to tell him what was wrong. What was it that he had done?
“Nuh-thing!” I wailed. I didn’t know. Or I couldn’t say. I couldn’t see. I finally coughed it out, the words that hadn’t yet gone through the pipes of my brain but had been keeping me from breathing deeply.
“I wanna go up there!”
“You want to go up where?”
“I wanna move up to the house with you!”
“My house? In Two Inlets?” He was honestly shocked.
“Yes!” I shouted, wiping my face. I glared at him through puffy eyes. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
“I—I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d want to live up there.”
He looked at me, slumped on the bed, fully depleted and about as unvarnished as I’d ever been with him or anyone else. “All the guys up there told me that I’d never get a woman to live at my place,” he joked.
“Some guy says women can’t live in the woods and you believe them?”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t think it was really your thing. Honestly, I thought I’d have to build a rambler at the front of the road to get you to move there with me. The road is so long and terrible.”
“It’s terrible,” I agreed. “But I don’t care. I want to go up there.”
“You really want to live up there, sweetie?”
“Yes,” I exhaled. “I do.”
For some reason, going back felt like the very definition of moving forward.
I had said it: I wanted to go home. It was hard for me to admit, but moving away from my hometown two years short of my high school graduation had somehow messed with the flow of my natural exodus. The city, where I’d found the culture, the books, and the people I’d been looking for, wasn’t enough. I didn’t even like that damned town, and never thought I’d want to go back and live in it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d left something behind there that I needed to retrieve. Aaron, a post-high-school flight risk like myself, felt a similarly inexplicable urge to go back to the town to which he’d never expected to return. He didn’t put a name to it, and neither did I, but I could feel the energy of what pulled him.
Somehow in fusing our two minus-forces we had made a strong magnetic positive. The charge between the poles of our two homes—rural and urban—remained strong and tight with tension, setting our insane future migratory life together in motion.