The year Dee went missing, she was a freshman at Mount Mary College, a small all-girls’ liberal arts school run by nuns. She had applied on a whim after receiving a glossy brochure in the mail. Dee was charmed by the quiet, stately campus and the school’s core curriculum, which, she explained one night at dinner, was rooted in humanity’s search for meaning. Pete laughed, teasing Dee that she was sending herself to the nunnery. But when they offered her a partial scholarship and she vowed to pay the rest of her tuition by working part-time at a nearby hair salon, he stopped teasing. Ma enjoyed the idea of Dee studying at an all-girls’ school: She felt Dee had gotten out of control in high school, lamenting her youngest daughter’s love interests, whom Ma described as a slew of degenerates. She thought maybe Dee would be more focused at Mount Mary.
Though I was not under any such illusions, I also supported Dee’s decision, because I had been disappointed in my own school of choice. I was a junior at UWM, on the East Side of Milwaukee, a school that felt large and impersonal, full of brutalist concrete buildings and dimly lit, orange-carpeted libraries. One rampant rumor held that UWM’s libraries were populated by perverts who sat and waited underneath the tables to fondle girls’ feet.
In retrospect, we both ended up at the wrong school. I would have been much better suited to the verdant humanism of Mount Mary, and Dee probably would have enjoyed those aspects of UWM that I abhorred: the larger classes, the boozy house parties, the proximity to Brady Street.
I hadn’t made many friends at UWM in my two years there, in part because I’d taken up a serious relationship when I was still a freshman. Dee was also trying to find her footing that year. Between work and school, she struggled to find a group of close friends like the one she’d leaned on in high school. So we were close then, maybe closer than we’d been since we were girls, I think because we both felt out of place. She spent a lot of nights at my place in Riverwest, and we often spent weekends together back at home. Maybe this lack of belonging had pushed us back toward each other, even while I could see that the contours of our new adult lives didn’t necessarily have room for the same kind of relationship we’d had as girls.
During her second semester at Mount Mary, she began seeing a man whose identity, to this day, remains opaque to me. It’s frightening now to consider how little I knew about this person. These are some of the facts I thought I knew: His name was Frank. He was thirty-five, he was recently divorced, and he was training to become a firefighter. He said he had worked most of his life for his parents, who owned a small cemetery in Menomonee Falls. He seemed to have a lot of money, or enough money to splurge on gifts for Dee, but he didn’t seem upper class. I thought that he was crude and that he was a bigot.
Was that all? Why didn’t I know more? What did I think then? Probably that I had time to get to know him. Probably that eventually I would understand what she liked about him. (It turned out that I had no time at all, and that fact still haunts me.) Or maybe I didn’t get to know Frank because, off the bat, I hadn’t liked him, and so I guessed he was a fad, another phase Dee would leave behind when she felt she’d gotten what she needed. She could be ruthlessly utilitarian.
The way Dee always told it was that she had met Frank at a bar at the beginning of her spring semester. She had liked his confidence but also his composure. She said most men in the bars had a desperate, hungry air about them, like they’d steal you away if they thought they could. She said Frank was different. They’d gone on a few dates: coffee, then a Bucks game and a late dinner at his buddy’s Italian restaurant, where they got the whole candlelit dining room to themselves. Dee felt the whole thing was very adult; she liked that.
When she first told me about him that spring, I said I was happy for her and that I was excited to meet him. She said we’d definitely hang out together, but then she always seemed to find an excuse to put it off. This stung. And honestly, it got to the point where I wondered if she was making him up, and I said so once, while we were out to breakfast together.
“He’s an adult, Pegasus,” she said smartly. I rolled my eyes at her. She was a college freshman—she barely knew what that entailed. “He doesn’t have time to barhop like you and Leif.” This was a deliberate slight against my then-boyfriend, Leif, who admittedly did enjoy barhopping.
“So? Leif’s an adult too,” I told her. Leif was twenty-eight and gainfully employed at Ambrosia, a local chocolate factory. We’d recently moved in together: We paid our rent on time. What could be more adult than that? “He seems to make time for me. And for you.”
She shrugged because she knew I was right. Leif often cooked simple dinners for me and Dee. He’d been to Sunday dinner at Ma’s, where we’d watch the Packers game together. Sometimes Leif even watched long, boring Brewers games with Pete while they both crushed cans of Schlitz. “Yeah,” Dee said. She studied her eggs. “I’ll ask.”
I didn’t know at the time if he was refusing to meet me, or if she was reluctant to introduce us for some reason, but either way, something felt off. I tried to explain this to her, but she got defensive. “I said I’ll ask, dammit.”
When I did finally meet him, I could see why Dee might have wanted to keep us apart. He proposed we meet for custard, which I thought was kind of creepy, because it seemed like the type of outing an uncle or a brother would suggest. But I loved custard, and I loved Dee, and so I tried to push the thought away. But then he chose some Podunk custard stand in West Allis that I’d never heard of, which also annoyed me because everyone knows Kopp’s is the best.
Frank hugged me when we met. I didn’t like the feeling of his body against mine. I kept my arms awkwardly by my sides. When he pulled away, I felt like he was looking through my clothes. Some men seem to be able to do that—to make you feel totally naked. How did he make Dee feel?
“Finally!” he said. He clapped me on the back and grinned. He had dark, wavy hair that stayed glued in place even when he moved, on account of copious product. He smelled like cedar chips. He wore a gold chain that seemed too tight for his neck and a large gaudy graduation ring. He made a big show of paying for our custards, which came out to a whopping eight dollars. He seemed able to keep a part of his body touching Dee’s at all times. He didn’t look like her boyfriend, he looked like her boss. I made a note to tell her that later. We sat outside on the damp cement benches, even though it was chilly, and ate our custard in relative silence. I shivered and tried to hide it.
“Dee tells me you’re a writer,” Frank said. I nodded. “Have you published anything?” I shook my head. I tried to eat my custard faster, but my head ached already with cold. My mind was numb. I wished I were drinking. I knew he was trying. I locked eyes with Dee, and I could tell she was begging me to try too. Plus, while I’d heckled her for weeks about meeting him, I couldn’t think of a word to say to the guy. I knew I’d hear about that later.
“How is firefighting school?” I said. I didn’t know what it was called, but once I’d said that, I felt it was wrong. My cheeks went hot even though my brain still felt cold and slow. I pictured the vast glaciers that once crawled over North America. I felt much younger than I had in a long time.
He laughed. “It’s hard, honey,” he said. “It’s really hard.”
I refused to say anything after that. I threw the rest of my custard away too.
Damn, did I hear it after. Dee said I’d been rude, which stung, because it wasn’t true, and also because he was the one who’d been rude. She said I’d acted like a half-wit, which also stung, and made me self-conscious. I told her I didn’t like him, and she said I didn’t even try to get to know him. I wanted to tell her the things I had intuited about him, but I was scared she would stop talking to me. I was scared she would hate me. I thought she’d figure it all out soon enough. It was obvious to me that he wasn’t the right person for her, but if she wanted to enjoy the gifts he bought her and the adult trappings of their fling a little longer, maybe that was fine. That was my position on him at the time. But things only got worse from there, and I felt less and less certain that keeping my mouth shut was the right thing to do. And now I can’t believe I ever felt that way.
Leif and I met at a house party my sophomore year of college. He was a real wallflower type at big parties—nursing room-temperature beers or a finger of whiskey near the turntable, or spending long minutes examining the bookcases and leafing through chapbooks. But in smaller groups, or one-on-one, he was charming, boisterous, quick to joke. Later, this made me suspicious that the wallflower behavior was an act meant to cultivate a sense of mystery, but at the time it impressed me—I’d never seen someone so content to be alone at a party. Wasn’t mingling the whole point? Plus, we shared a sense of humor, which was rare in my world. I’d never met anyone except my sister who laughed at the same things I did.
I could tell Leif had been eyeing me from the moment I got there, but he waited until much later in the night to approach me. “You look like a poet,” he said to me. He offered his hand. “Leif.”
I took his hand and rubbed my thumb up and down the thick ligaments attaching his wrist to his fingers. His hands were cool and in need of lotion. I imagined myself rubbing cold cream into his skin. He smelled oddly of cocoa and Lysol. My mouth went a little dry. “Peg,” I said. “Why do you say that?”
“The way you’re noticing everything.”
“Why are you noticing what I’m noticing?” I asked. He had a messy mat of auburn hair that I wanted to put my fingers in, and his eyes reminded me of a set of green marbles spilled across a wood floor. They stayed moving.
He shrugged. “It’s the most interesting thing happening at this party.”
“Who’s your favorite poet?” I asked him.
He raised his eyebrows. “Bob Dylan,” he said. I laughed because I thought it was a joke. Leif frowned.
“So you mean Rimbaud?” I asked.
“I believe the term is intertexuality.” He made air quotes around the word.
“I think actually it’s just plagiarism.” I made air quotes back at him.
He laughed. “What about you, then?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Kurt Cobain?” We both laughed.
“No, really,” he said. “Come on.”
“Lorine Niedecker,” I said without hesitation because it was the first name that popped into my head and because I’d read these lines about her earlier in the day: Niedecker lived in southern Wisconsin for the rest of her life. She scrubbed hospital floors, read proof for a local magazine, and worked other menial jobs to support herself and her writing. She endured near-poverty . . .
“Grandfather / advised me: / learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery,” Leif recited. Very quickly I learned this about Leif: Lines of poetry stuck to his brain the way gum, once hardened, will stick to the underside of chairs. I tried not to look impressed. He knew.
Thirty minutes after we’d met, he tried to kiss me on the mouth, and I backed myself against the wall.
“Too soon?” His eyes were dopey with beer.
“Much,” I said.
He held his hands up by his face like he’d been ordered to do so. “You got it, baby,” he said.
I was under the spell of an intoxicating sense of invincibility, which is to say I was twenty. Leif and I dated for about a year and then we moved in together, a secret to which only Dee was privy. Leif was twenty-eight, which was much too old for my mother’s and Pete’s tastes. I suspected Pete was particularly worked up about it because Leif was only a year older than he was. Why can’t you date someone your own age? Pete had whined when he found out about Leif. Because men my age are animals, I’d told him smartly. Over a series of laborious Sunday dinners, Leif gradually charmed my mom and brother (or so I’d thought), but I knew they’d never come around to us living together in Riverwest. So, after we moved in together that spring, I told them I was living with two friends from school in a flat on the East Side.
When I look back now, I see how it was over almost before it began, but at the time I felt the whole hot promise of a life with him. I still remember our belongings on the sidewalk outside that apartment building. There was trash everywhere. Springtime turns the city of Milwaukee briefly into a landfill; the snowmelt from the most stubborn snowbanks reveals heaps of trash: cigarette butts, dog shit, shredded newspapers and magazines, vomit, crushed cans, and plastic bags whipped into stringy ropes. Each year, after resident weatherman John Malan has determined the city won’t be visited by any more snowstorms, they send inmates out to collect all the winter trash in white plastic bags. Afterward they cart the trash away to the landfills west of the city, and they bring out pressurized hoses and spray down the sidewalks and the streets with water pumped fresh out of Lake Michigan. I love the smell of cold water on concrete. That’s spring to me, not tulips or daffodils or rain, but Lake Michigan’s cold bathwater washed over the whole city.
There were still blackened snowbanks in front of the building in Riverwest when we unloaded our furniture. We were young enough then to be thrilled by things like a kitchen table belonging only to us. Our first night we spent there, Leif made steak and we drank red wine out of the bottle and ate on the living room floor, which was filthy, and then we fucked on the floor. We were covered in dust. At the end of the night, the soles of our bare feet were black. It’s hard to believe now. Showering without a shower curtain, air-drying our damp bodies in that dirty apartment, Leif shaking sheets out for us to sleep on top of the mattress on the floor, the way he held me that first night to make sure I knew it was safe in there. He checked and rechecked the locks.
Riverwest was, and remains, one of the few somewhat mixed neighborhoods in Milwaukee, a city that is intractably segregated. And Riverwest was, and still is, often described as dangerous. As far as I could tell, though, the reputation was unearned and due mostly to the fact that the neighborhood’s western border was Holton Street. This street, to many Milwaukeeans, represented a kind of tenuous border between the wealthier, mostly white East Side and the poorer, mostly Black communities on the North Side of the city. Riverwest was like a long, funky, porous borderland between these two parts of the city. So, of course, Leif loved it there. He said it was like living in a liminal zone: a place with its own rules and its own separate zones of possibility. I teased him that he was only glad it was safe for him to smoke weed on the streets there, although I knew that wasn’t what he meant.
Frankly, I often felt more afraid on campus than I ever did in Riverwest. Once during my first semester as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, I left the library after dark and walked across campus to my dorm. I had gotten in the habit of spending long afternoons that blurred into late nights reading, or doing homework, or writing in the library. I avoided my dorm room, which wasn’t conducive to studying and which also smelled permanently dank, like the primate house at the county zoo. I would stay at the library until I couldn’t stand the hunger anymore, and then I might walk to Oakland Gyros and flirt with the boys behind the counter who sometimes gave me extra fries for free. On this particular night, a Friday, I was trying to avoid being witness to the excessive alcohol consumption I knew was taking place in my dorm room, but as usual, by nine-thirty, my stomach was growling and my focus was shot.
The fall chill had just sunk its teeth into the city, so that already layers upon layers of clothing were necessary in order to be outside. I’d forgotten a hat, so I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head and went out to brave some kind of disgusting sleeting rain.
I hadn’t decided what to eat or where when I saw a group of boys, already absolutely loaded, headed in my direction. I thought maybe I could cross the street to avoid passing them, but cars whizzed by in both directions. I stuffed my hands into my sweatshirt pocket and focused on the cement. Probably harmless, I thought. Probably you will be fine. They were loud, though, and judging by the way they were walking and monopolizing the sidewalk, the case of PBR they’d just drunk had them all feeling like kings. I inched to the edge of the sidewalk. When they got close, one of them, whose face I never saw, bumped into my shoulder with his whole body, even though I was taking pains to be as far away from them as possible. I stumbled off the sidewalk and into the wet grass. Rain and mud leaked through my canvas sneakers and soaked my socks. The boys laughed. They passed, and when I thought that was the worst of it, and I was already letting out a breath, the same boy turned around and said loudly to my back, “Your hood won’t keep you from getting raped, you know.”
I didn’t make any sudden movements. I walked like I hadn’t heard a thing. They kept walking too. I made myself keep moving. Down the block, I spotted a pay phone, and I called Peter. He picked me up ten minutes later and drove me to Ma’s. During those ten minutes, I tried to make myself very small. I pretended I was invisible. I didn’t say anything in the car, and Pete didn’t ask. I studied his movements: the assuredness with which he drove, which was the same way I remembered my father driving when I was a girl. Was Pete capable of this kind of behavior? It seemed impossible. Pete squeezed my knee. I jerked away from his hand. He tried not to notice.
“Ma and Dee will be thrilled to have you home,” he said.
I said nothing.
At home, Ma fed me a reheated slice of Cornish pie, a meat pie in a buttery crust that I slathered in ketchup and practically inhaled. Then Dee and I curled up on the couch together with her head on my legs and my hands in her hair and we watched Full House until we fell asleep.
Later, when I told Leif about this incident, he was shocked: He said what to you? I was often confused when men were outraged by these stories; I assumed so many of them had witnessed or participated in some degree of it at one time or another. Maybe the outrage was a performance for my benefit? Or maybe fewer of them participated than I suspected? Or maybe these stories manufactured, in their minds, some scale of heinousness that easily reassured them that their own transgressions were comparatively minor. Was it in this way that the men I knew often didn’t see themselves as the problem? Sometimes I worried that telling these stories would only assure them of their superiority rather than forcing them into reflection: Jesus, well, at least I’ve never done that.