Civil Twilight

Loblolly I spent the 4th of July at the shore that year,...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:09:00 -0500

Loblolly

I spent the 4th of July at the shore that year, waiting to find out if I was going to die young.

On the Tuesday before, I’d had my ultrasound. It was not until I was lying there with cold jelly on my stomach and my own grainy kidneys floating on the monitor that it had occurred to me to be scared.

The technician moved the wand over me, pausing from time to time. After a few minutes he stopped and put the wand back. He cleaned off my stomach with a towel. He told me we were finished.

“Your nephrologist, Dr. Blomstedt, right?” I nodded. “He’ll call you in a week with the results,” he said. “It takes just a little longer with the holiday.”

“Thanks,” I said, and got dressed in the dark.

Outside the hospital, walking back to my car alone I couldn’t breathe. In a week I’d know if what killed my aunt, my uncle, my grandfather — what was killing my Dad even then — was in my body too.

□

Bob was always good to me, and he knew I needed distraction. So he drove us to Rockport.

I hated driving when he could be doing it instead. He was wonderful at it, but he was never better than on a trip to Rockport, stepping into the easy rhythm of those roads.

He’d been driving and walking and riding in that rhythm since he was a boy, and I loved to watch him find the turns a second before they appeared. He’d pilot the car as if in his sleep, finding his way through the shoals of the place, leaving a broad wake of air behind us as he drove. I felt safe in the slipstream of him: flying down the path he made for me.

He’d take Tregony Bow to the water, along the rock beaches to Penzance Way, down the red asphalt to the curve of road along Loblolly Cove and onto the dirt access road that brought us to the parking lot.

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Loblolly Cove was a small, nondescript bay ringed with a stone beach. A road curved just beyond the rocks, cutting it off from a marsh and the distant summer cottages up Penzance Way. The family used it like a backyard. In the summers Big Bob and his second wife Sue would park the Volvo and unpack a thermos of martinis, bags of carrot sticks and popcorn, beach chairs and their dogs, and walk all the way out to the shore. They’d sit in the twilight and look at their sailboat.

Big Bob had been anchoring his sailboats there for years, and he owned one then. But it seemed the family had rented or owned a sailboat when Bob’s mother had been alive as well.

When Bob’s mother died, he was 12. She’d had cancer for a long time, since he was 6, and she went peaceful and slow, dying in the bed she’d shared with Big Bob. The last time Bob spoke to her, he was on his way out to the movies with a friend. He kissed her goodbye, and she said “I’m of a more puritan soul.”

In later years he came to realize that she’d meant to comment on his leaving at what she thought was a late hour. But the phrase was the only saying of hers that he quoted in the four years we’d dated.

After she died they scattered her ashes in the Cove.

Once someone had left a pair of her old sneakers on the shore there and the waves had begun to wash them out. “Your mother wants her shoes back,” Bob’s dad had told him.

□

That holiday when we drove to Rockport we were only stopping at the Cove to look around. We parked the truck in the town residents’ lot, even without a summer sticker, and stood there smelling the air. It was overcast, cool and humid, like the sea was crawling up over the boulders on the peninsula. All around the dirt parking lot beach roses had made a hedge.

We walked out to the place where the hedge gave way to a view of the Cove, looked over at the water for a minute and then walked back. Crossing through the parking lot, we doubled back to the east side of the point, and climbed the big grey boulders towards the open sea. The view lacked all the sheltered comforts of the Cove, but Bob knew it was my favorite part, and so he lead me over the rocks.

We’d driven there weekend after weekend over the years, usually at night to keep our terrible old cars from overheating. Some days Bob made me practice the route, and since he’d taught me to drive, I’d let him murmur, “It isn’t good if you feel like you’re hurtling,” softly under his breath as I made all his old turns too fast.

Ending up in that lot, we’d drag sleeping bags and flashlights out of the trunk and find that flat boulder with a view of the lighthouse, eat cold green apples in the dark, and fall asleep until the chilly dew came at dawn.

But, that holiday, we sat on the rocks for a moment, quiet but not restful, and tried to edge around the silence that had fallen between us since the ultrasound. Giving in to it, we fled the rocks and drove through the bright day to the summer place.

□

Bob’s family had never been wealthy. They were a troupe of frugal Yankees who saved their pennies to buy things that made them inadvertently look rich. To list the assets that Big Bob and Sue commanded – the ski cabin in Vermont, part share in the summer place in Rockport, the boat, the house in Amherst – you’d never picture the people they were.

They were unpretentious, believing fundamentally in thrift and patience. Bob’s dad seemed to cut his own hair, and he’d proudly announce that his latest wardrobe acquisition had come from the town dump. You could see the rough edges and the home-spun, can-do quality in everything they had.

The place in Rockport was a series of uninsulated cabins that had been built by hand as family members grew up and had families of their own that needed accommodation. There was a dirt road, there were outdoor showers and a windmill for power. And, though you could walk to the beach, the property sat on the wrong side of the main road, hunched in the scrub woods like a hermit.

I loved that place, his family and the people he grew up with as if I’d inherited them too, as if I could step into their lives like I’d been born with the right to them.

My family couldn’t have been more different, and my birthright had more to do with squalid hipster apartments and hash parties than summer houses at the ocean.

In Bob’s world, the kids were all clean, with straight teeth, large vocabularies, and good manners. In his world friendships ran long and deep and safe. For fun they climbed hills with their guitars at night and sang folk songs without irony or beer.

My summers with them were a blur of cozy innocence, even when we were in college.

We put on plays in church gardens. We boiled corn and went skinny-dipping. We drank boxed white wine at someone’s parents’ house. There was minor and innocent sexual intrigue, strip poker; once or twice we smoked pot.

But we all lost our virginities tenderly and with people we liked. We ate dinner with each other’s families and visited each other’s campuses.

Except that no one came to my house and no one mentioned that I spent a lot of time at hospitals and funerals. I kept close to them all, with the idea that maybe no one would notice and I could slip into their lives by simply following behind the steady pull of them.

□

Bob’s family was all in Rockport for the holiday, bunking in cabins, walking to the beach. In the morning there was a parade through town dominated by fire trucks and kids in costume. Big wheels and red wagons rolled by and people grabbed for candy thrown from the decorated parade cars.

At night we had dinner together in the largest cottage, at a long table in the center of the living room with the big fieldstone fireplace and the home-made plexiglass wall rolled back to leave us open to the wet coastal breeze.

They cooked lobsters. Mine was pregnant.

As I took apart the claws, Sue asked about my test.

Looking down at my plate I said I’d know soon, the doctor said it might not show anything - polycystic kidney disease was a long haul killer, and the evidence of it might not show up for years. Most of my family was dead in their early forties. I was 22. No one knew how long it might be before I lived with dialysis, transplant, aneurysm. Or, I could find out that the cysts were already strong and multiplying, ready to catch me early like they had my aunt.

I tried a half-hearted phrase about the thing, about the way the illness worked what it had done to us, all we’d lost. I couldn’t keep it up. That story seemed wrong in that room, seemed off.

I’d been to Loblolly Cove enough, telling things. Sue knew that part. And somehow, I thought I could dodge it f I didn’t say anything. I’d sail right past my whole family even, and settle down in the shadow of that fireplace, with the salt air on my skin. The quiet would save me.

I pretended not to feel the knot of fear behind my sternum. Two days left till I heard.

□

After dinner Bob and I got into the truck and went to town. We parked on a narrow street that backed up from the harbor. The tourist shops and little diners were closed for the night and the place was warm with silky ocean air.

People crowded the street in small groups and we joined them, walking to the town beach. We rounded the corner and from behind the side of a hotel you could see the light of the three-story bonfire.

Each year on the 4th, the town built a pile of scrap lumber, railroad ties, and building parts, topped it with an outhouse and set it on fire on the sand.

In the harbor people anchored their boats to watch it burn, they set off illegal fireworks they’d bought over the state line in New Hampshire. Their blooms hung reflected in the water. Everyone watched for the moment when the outhouse would fall from the top of the fire, and the suspense kept us waiting, held together.

Bob and I found a place to sit on the long rock jetty. I looked at his face in the light. The cherubic boyishness he’d always had was starting to fade. His sweet eyes had a compelling hurt behind them sometimes, one that you couldn’t avoid if you knew him long.

No one in my life knew better what kidney disease would mean for me. And no one else had made it so clear that they’d stay for whatever was coming.

But, that moment was a slipstream; I was in the wake of something larger moving. It was the comforting pull of a known road, maybe, a rhythm I’d ridden since I was a child. I’d always thought that I could pull away, towards Bob’s life, the future clean and shiny. There would be boat sneakers, thermoses of martinis, and summer evenings waiting to see phosphorescence in the wake of a craft I wasn’t sailing.

But, in that moment, the lumber slowly burning away on the beach, I knew for the first time that there was a larger gravity exerting its force on me again. The pull of my own family, the messy complex possibilities for loss, was the thing I felt just then.

And this time it was clear: no matter what the answer about my future, that pull finally had me. I was the object in motion. It was my slipstream Bob rode. I couldn’t hold him to it; he’d be behind that wake and out to sea, while I pushed on alone.

Kids leapt past us on the jetty, sparklers lighting up their faces. In the glow I saw a boy that could have been the pink-cheeked twin of Bob at six. And in that moment I thought “I’m of a more puritan soul.” I knew I’d have to leave him to his life – the summers, the cabins, the family, and whatever troubles were coming his way. I knew my own, and somehow I knew they’d never fit him.

“Look,” he said, “the outhouse is going.”

And, with a shatter of sparks, it hit the beach

Brass TaxI didn’t see that the hot pot cord was tangled in the...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:29:00 -0400

Brass Tax

I didn’t see that the hot pot cord was tangled in the pillows. It was easy to miss the white cord caught up in the white fabric, in there like a cruel surprise.

I wasn’t thinking about the just-boiled water in the pot, the chaotic molecules I was about to sit down underneath.

But, when I leaned back on those pillows the cord shortened and suddenly the pot toppled from over my head, pouring scalding water straight into my lap.

The impact left a track of hot wet fabric from my neck to my hip, and underneath that fabric, pain.

I remember looking at Bob as my skin started to burn. This moment was why I loved him.

In his mind, he lived close to this kind of crisis all the time. After he’d finished his EMT training he took to wearing rubber gloves in a little pouch on his belt, to protect himself from HIV in case he ever came upon a bleeding person who needed help.

Early in that first year of school in Seattle, months before I’d find out I had kidney disease, months before I’d leave him, we’d borrowed a car from a friend and taken a ride out to Discovery Park on the city’s western edge. We were tired of living in dorm rooms and needed air.

Crossing a bridge by the Ballard Locks we’d seen a man crash his car into the guard rails on the side of the road. Before the car had skidded to a halt Bob was pulling over into the breakdown lane.

He was the first person at the smoking car, opening the door to reveal a man lying over the steering wheel, blood pouring down his face. The man was delirious, and kept repeating, “My bag, my bag, don’t touch it, call the police.” On the passenger seat was an open brief case and inside that a velvet bag, out of which spilled diamonds. Bob held the man’s head until the ambulance arrived and I watched the bag.

But during my own accident all I could watch was him. Looking at his eyes as the water scalded my skin I remember thinking that I’d be fine, that the hurt I was feeling was somehow inevitable, a test of what we’d practiced together for years.

I remembered what Bob had told me after one of his classes years earlier: scald burns can keep burning as long as there is fabric to hold the water against the skin.

As I stripped off my bra and my jeans, he held my eyes right back, as if he could will me to remember his training. This was no one else’s wreck, it was ours.

Finally naked, I ran down the dorm corridor, found the communal bathroom and a shower stall, pulled back a plastic shower curtain and turned on the water. The world shrank down to the sight of my own hands, the sound of my breath. I was alone in the big echoing room.

□

The EMT had a mustache. That was all I could look at. I watched it move over his mouth and tried to climb the huge wall of the pain to be closer to what he was saying. He said, “I’m going to give you morphine. Is that OK?”

I nodded. I thought I understood. Something he was going to do now was going to help. Reaching in through the shower he found the arm with no damage and located a vein. The drug was warm going in. He looked at the syringe while he worked.

After he took out the needle, he turned to find Bob standing in the doorway. He walked back to his medical case, put away his gear then stood and went to Bob. Putting a hand on his shoulder, he took the towel Bob was holding and walked back to me. He held the towel up as a screen, not touching me but still getting wet from the shower, and kept talking.

I couldn’t follow a word he said. I could feel the cold water on my skin still, the slap of pain that came with it. I wanted to touch things, the tile of the shower stall and the wet terry cloth that the EMT held between us.

Past the EMT’s arm, I could see another man with the same uniform out in the hallway. I remember wondering why he was there. We only needed the three of us, I thought. Any more people and I’d have too much noise around me. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on climbing the wall.

The other EMT moved past Bob and pushed a wheelchair into the room. How’d they get that up the stairs, I thought. The men nodded to each other, passing between them a look of such competence and tenderness that I almost couldn’t watch. They’re feeling bad about me, I thought.

“OK, we’re going to move you now,” said the EMT with the mustache.

They walked me out of the stall, patted my skin dry with a cloth and wrapped me in a light white sheet. They helped me sit, they dried my hair. While they worked I looked at my lap and hummed a little pain song under my breath.

And then, in an instant, it cleared. The warmth of the morphine circled around under my skin, leeching its way up to the throbbing flesh and stretching it out until it was simply gone, like the dot that used to disappear from old school TV screens after you shut them off.

Now things began to fill up the space where the pain had been. Aluminum seeped in from the corners of my sight until everything was aluminum. The room was made of aluminum. So was the EMT, so was my skin and the shower curtain. And, miraculously the aluminum was the same color as whatever it took over, so that everything looked the same. But I knew it wasn’t. I could taste it.

I looked up from my lap and met the eyes of the EMT with the mustache. “Better?” he asked.

I nodded.

“OK,” he said, “let’s get you down those stairs.”

□

Nurses tended to the wounds, cutting away blistered flesh and gave me more morphine which, this time, made me throw up.

They treated most of the burn with thin panels of frozen pig skin. The skin would adhere to the raw wound like plaster or a bandage; it would set to the wound. The pig skin would then behave just like a natural scab, something burns don’t make. As it healed, the pig skin would peel back to show the healed flesh and you could cut it away, around and around the edges.

In the packages the prepared skin still had brown freckles dotting it, showing the markings of the animal that gave it up. Any skin that was flat could take it. But where the skin curved they iced me with Silvadene cream and wrapped me in gauze.

My breast was bound to my chest, the fingers in my burned right hand a mitt that I couldn’t move. I didn’t know it yet, but one week later, brain fuzzy with Vicodin, I would pull off the ruined skin of my breast until the scab of my nipple came loose to reveal a pale half-moon underneath. I would make sure to keep that moment from Bob.

But just then, I let the nurses be in charge of my skin, and when they were done, it was late at night and they took me up to a room. Bob left me in the dark, the curtain drawn between my bed and the next, the window beyond that.

The woman in the other bed screamed all night. In the morning, I woke to find her watching Erkel on the television we shared.

She talked to me through the noise of the TV. She’d been at a gas station, filling her tank. She’d spilled a little gas on her pants. As she got in to the car, her passenger’s lit cigarette had fallen from his hands. Her clothes had ignited instantly and she’d run from the car, across the blacktop in panic before someone tackled her with a blanket and tried to get her to roll. All she could think was that the pumps would explode.

□

That morning, I told the doctors that I wanted to leave. As I had my dressings changed, I memorized how it was done, failing to rest, rushing the whole thing.

I called my parents and lied to them. They were in Massachusetts, I was in Seattle. We were broke enough from school. We didn’t need the expense of a flight. “I’m fine,” I said, “Bob’s here, the burns aren’t that bad. I’m going home today. Please don’t fly out.”

But it was more than the money. I’d been in hospitals with my family for much of my life, and my accident didn’t seem to rate as an emergency. Also, it wasn’t safe to be needy around them, so I simply wasn’t. From the strange territory of the hospital bed, I lied to them, and I looked at Bob while I did it.

It was just going to be us.

Split Time: The Inland Ocean Five days into our trip,...

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 00:32:57 -0400

Split Time: The Inland Ocean

Five days into our trip, after we’d left Seattle in my old Saab, after the motel clerk in Boise had told us she couldn’t imagine living where we did because of all the niggers, after we’d stopped in the Idaho mountains and wandered into an old mission with horsehair plaster walls and the feeling of genocide, we arrived at the Badlands.

We’d been driving all night, making time from Yellowstone to the Black Hills. The heat wave kept us holed up inside my car all through the dry plains, and the West scrolled past the windows.

We wanted to watch the sunrise from inside the national park, so I drove faster down the access road than I should have. The park rangers were still in bed, and in the cool slim air of six o’clock I slid the car past the entrance booth without paying a dime or getting a map. A mile or so in, Heather noticed a slash cut into the flat expanse of the prairie surrounding us and the dainty parted “V” of a canyon in the distance. I pulled the car to the side of the road, coming to rest for the first time in five hours.

There’s a Polaroid that Heather took of me right then, as I changed my sweaty shirt next to the car. My hair is so short that I look like a sunburned boy, at least from the back. We stood by the car and waited for the sun, and when it broke the horizon, we walked to the place where the land dropped away.

Beneath us there were acres of round and loping buttes, shaved to curvy brilliance by centuries of rain and wind. Each was wrapped with alternating bands of yellow, tan, brown, red and a color like nectarine skin. The sunrise caught their stripes and the whole valley flared with impossible light.

Then and there you could walk off the edge of the world. For different reasons, we both thought that was a very good idea.

□

Heather didn’t drive stick. She couldn’t tell east from west. She’d never read a map. Once, while we were sitting at a truck stop, she saw a moonrise and thought it was the sun going down.

On our way across the country, we shared the gas and the tent and the food bills. I played squeaky-clean Girl Scout to Heather’s cigarette-smoking cool. I put up the tent in the dark and worked the stove, navigated and drove. Heather read me Paul Bowles and pulled fresh mix tapes out of her bag to keep us going.

Heather had me listen to Vic Chesnutt and Liz Phair. And while I was driving, or eating lunch, Heather would sometimes ask me to imitate her favorite songs. “Do Flower,” she’d say. And I’d sing Liz Phair’s dirty lyrics with her phrasing and pitch and all the words intact, a parlor trick that Heather never tired of.

But everything I was doing felt like that trick. I wasn’t sure what was me, and what was just someone else’s idea. I’d come unmoored, a new life stretching before me like some huge sea; and my little boat was so small.

Leaving college, driving back home, single and buzzing with music and the total unknown, sometimes I would slip deep into my own mind and disappear. Like a falling into a trance, I’d be reading on the dirty bedspread of some motel we’d found, and close my eyes. Then I’d vanish into a comforting oblivion.

Not sleep, not meditation, it was like an emotional narcolepsy, an involuntary peace. It felt so different from my usual surefooted forward motion; strange and giddy, like getting high, and I had no idea what to do with it. In fact, it terrified me.

Surety had been my currency for so long. I’d been that girl at the front of the class, getting all the answers right. The kind of girl that soldiers through anything. And while you might admire such a girl from afar, lord knows you don’t want to be her friend. Why would you? Where is the pleasure in a girl like that, except maybe in finding the crack in her somewhere?

Those slips were the first crack I had found in myself. And as those cracks opened wider over the week we were on the road, they made room for new thoughts. Standing at the edge of that canyon on that first morning in the Badlands I thought, why not jump? And in the next second a sparky horror rushed through me, a shame at letting my standards slip that shook me up.

Heather would have understood if I tried to explain what was happening to me. She’d told me she thought about suicide all the time. But until we’d left Seattle, knowing this made me look at her like a strange fish in an aquarium. My father’s family had a history of dying young, and the notion that someone would crave death like we craved life was bizarre to me. What would it be like to want to kill yourself? What would it be like to have gills?

□

When the sunrise was over, the daylight muted out the canyon’s colors and the heat began to build again. By then, neither of us could look at it anymore, and we drove off to find a place to sleep.

Sage Creek campground sat in a bowl of light, floating on the prairie’s inland ocean. It was an empty place, no trees and none of the classic buttes or colors of the showy part of the park. Here you were totally exposed, surrounded by low hills, some scrub pine bushes, and tall grass that had gone pale in the heat.

Beyond the camp you could see a low wash bordered on all sides by cottonwood trees. There were no shelters, but there were tan painted picnic tables with fixed metal awnings that curved over them to protect you from the constant sun. From the side their shapes looked like covered wagons. They were arranged in an arbitrary circle in the center of a shallow valley, so it had the appearance of a pioneer stopover.

It felt lonely, alien and barren. There was a quiet that pulsed with something. I could feel the hum and push of the Badlands over the curve of the horizon. But, looking out at the grass, I felt a safe distance from their huge charisma.

We still had ten days before we had to be anywhere else. We’d agreed that we’d stay for a while at any place that felt right.

We stayed in Sage Creek for a week.

□

That first day, it was so hot that I lay down in the shadow of the tent and slept. Heather took a book and fell asleep under it, lying in the shade on her bench.

An hour later, the shade left us, and we woke up in full sun. Crickets arrived to cover the ground and us and every inch of my car. And then the wind started to shift. It blew away the tent and sent us both running over the cricket-strewn grass to get it back, the bugs jumping away from our feet in waves that made a sound like the surf.

That night, after the wind finally died down and the crickets inexplicably disappeared, Heather cleaned up from dinner in the dark. I took a blanket from the back of my car and lay it on the ground in from of the tent. The wind had swept away the clouds, and the open space made the sky press down on my chest like a vise.

After we went to sleep, the wind came back. It blew down the sides of the tent and pressed the nylon into my mouth. The tent walls bent back like sails, and for a second I thought we were in a storm on the sea.

□

Sage Creek felt too complicated to leave, and so Heather and I never went back to hike the Badlands. Going back so close to the edge of the world for something as simple as sightseeing seemed both too tempting and too literal. The campsite and the prairie turned out to be enough.

It was as if you could spend years right there and never understand the place fully, never understand why it held your focus so completely. You could pass a whole day just looking at the light. It moved all day long. It changed with every cloud. The sun edged across the big sky and with each degree it rose or fell, it took on a shift. The color of the land and grass and air would change too. You couldn’t look away.

“It looks like Africa,” Heather said. And while neither of us had seen Africa outside of the movies, I knew what she meant. It was so different than our idea of the country, but also so different than our idea of a pleasing landscape, that we had to imagine it as something very far away.

I sat at the campsite most of the time. I drew circles in the dirt with a stick. I watched the light march along and imagined African animals, prairie schooners, mastodons crossing my field of vision. I thought that I could see ghosts, or see God, or feel the history of the place seeping up out of the dry ground. The slip came back again and again.

□

I didn’t expect the pull the prairie had on me. I was raised in the thick of the Yankee forest. And, while my mother loved to lie before the ocean’s dip and flash, my father worshipped trees. Years later, when I tried to tell him what the plains were like, he told me, “I’d miss the woods too much to fall in love with a place like that.”

Before I wandered into South Dakota I would have thought the same thing of myself. I’d expect to miss variety, the privacy and shelter of the canopy above your head.

But the canopy of the sky and the utter emptiness made a different kind of privacy; a deeper kind, a solitude that let you go as far inside as you could. I’d operated as long as I could remember under the notion that looking inside oneself was not only unnecessary, it was dangerous. My parents may have been back-to-the-land hippies, but they were rationalists, and the closest that they ever got to opening some door of perception was my Mom’s one bad trip on LSD.

While I was a child they didn’t dabble in Buddhism, they never visited the local ashram. My father’s spiritual practice involved making furniture and listening to jazz; that was all. He raised me with the Shaker mantra, hands to work and hearts to God. Be useful, he said. Go make something if you want to pray.

And so I was useful. I worked, I studied. I weathered life with a fervor for accomplishment, even in the face of death. If death comes, I was taught, talk him into going away. And if that fails, make something beautiful before he takes you, something he can’t touch.

Now my subconscious, or maybe my God, was dragging that notion out of me. In slip after slip throughout this road trip I was visiting someplace else inside myself, that deep place I hadn’t given any weight to.

I was being shanghaied into contemplation, and as I sat in that desert, the place where people go to meditate after all, I felt those previously singular moments merge into one long heartbeat of slippage. As the days went by, I had a hard time pulling free long enough to drive to town for food.

I’d come out of it from time to time to find I’d been staring at the horizon. I’d wonder where Heather had gone. Somehow, while I’d been drifting, she’d walked across the prairie to the eastern edge of the campground. I’d see the swing of her brown bob turning the corner and disappearing down the bluff that led to the dry creek bed. I’d be gripped with several feelings at once. I’d wonder if she’d told me she was going, and I just hadn’t noticed. And in the next moment I’d wonder if I should follow her. I wanted to overcompensate again and tear off across the grass to go make small talk while we hiked together.

But I couldn’t do even that. I was utterly self-absorbed, as if I was falling in love. At first I thought that I was falling in love with the place itself. But it was really a version of myself that I was falling for. And the version of me that I loved, the one I found there, was the version of me that knew nothing, that was unmoored.

The silence and the space that opened up inside me seemed like all the stillness I feared in death. And in the face of it, there was something unseemly about putting my hands to work as usual. Better to just sit instead.

□

Heather, for her part, smoked and read and walked.

While we were at Sage Creek she kept asking me to sing Vic Chesnutt’s Dodge “…Well it’s time for me to/get the fuck out of Dodge…,” I’d mimic. And a smile would come over Heather’s face. She was getting the fuck out of Dodge. Our journey would put her 3,000 miles away from home.

She’d lived on the West Coast most of her life. She’d been adopted into a Mormon family in Portland where things had been tough –- not much money, nothing was simple. But I got the idea that the worst part was how little she fit in with them.

Heather loved quiet and music and film. She loved sitting in bars and reading a book. She had a curiosity that enabled her to put herself through school and be the only one in her family to pursue any kind of education. I could tell that it was a compulsion that had made her different at home and made it impossible to go back.

And yet the compulsion was so private and genuine that she hadn’t finished all her graduation coursework by the time we left Seattle. As if, her curiosity satisfied, she could put aside external accomplishment and move on.

She wanted to move east, to go to film school someday, to leave her painter ex-boyfriend behind and start clean somewhere where she couldn’t duck into her favorite bar to do her homework.

But it was clear that she took everything with her: her effortless hipness, her lack of awareness of her beauty and smarts, and her lonely intelligent ambition. I watched her in awe most of the time, and with her I fell silent a lot. As if in speaking I’d blurt out my admiration for her quiet complex lostness, the way she wore uncertainty like a gorgeous dress.

I needed to be near the way she often dropped her grip on life. As foreign as it was to me, it seemed a graceful gesture that I couldn’t really survive without perfecting myself.

I tried to stay close to her at Sage Creek, but it didn’t work. What happened to us there was linked somehow, but it was also so private and so different we couldn’t compare notes on what was happening. While we were there we avoided naming it at all costs.

□

The last night that we camped there, we drove to Wall for supplies. Coming back to Sage Creek, the sun turned the grasslands to a gold-green sea, the little hills rippling in shadow and color.

As we crested a ridge we saw a herd of bison spread out over the prairie. There were so many of them that without thinking I stopped the car in the middle of the road and we both got out and watched them pass. The herd moved like an idea, like a wave. Big as they were, they had the infinite quiet of the empty sky, and the things that had happened in the place where they lived.

At Sage Creek we were forty miles from the Pine Ridge Reservation. We were forty-five miles from Wounded Knee. Between two and ten thousand bison had been killed every day during the peak of hunting in the 19th century. And yet, here was a herd, in a protected park. Here were bison cows and calves and long sweeps of grass with no fences. After everything, here was life.

Heather lit a cigarette and we sat on the hood of the car until the last animal slipped over the far ridge and was gone.

□

After dinner, after we’d finished the last mini bottles of Sutter Home, Heather and I lay on the blanket looking up. Clouds swept across the night sky and I could tell that there were banks of them coming. I watched as they slowly covered the stars and brought the wind to a standstill. Heather kept her eyes closed to it, breathing so quietly that she might have been asleep.

The place was shutting down around me; taking back the spell it had had me in all week.

Just beyond the access road, past Wall and back on the highway, was the route we’d take away from here. We’d drive east to Chicago, then south to North Carolina. We’d split up, we’d find jobs and think about what to do next.

But for that night, we were still there. The wine, and the bison, and the disappearing stars were all there too, around the edges.

“Are you awake,” I asked?

“Yeah.”

We waited a little while before speaking again. The last star blinked and was gone; the night was still and hot.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t know how to leave here. This is the first place I’ve ever been where I haven’t wanted to kill myself.”

We sat like that for a long time, each of us lost in half of the same idea, until the opaque sky drove us into our tent to sleep.

In the morning we drove east anyway.

Thaw Story That January, 22 inches of snow fell on Chicago. ...

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 18:16:00 -0400

Thaw Story

That January, 22 inches of snow fell on Chicago. I was living over Tuman’s Alcohol Abuse Center, which, you might have guessed, was a bar. Next door was a Ukranian funeral home. The man upstairs beat his wife.

My friend Mia walked the three miles from her apartment to my place wearing a Snocat snowsuit she’d found in a thrift store.

I have the picture of her. Her hood is up, framing her face, and behind her the old tin wall of my apartment – covered in layers and layers of paint – is shining in the flashbulb.

We sat up all night drinking tea, playing sleepover. My mother used to call it Giggle Whisper Whistle Hour.

Mia had grown up in Philadelphia and the stories about her childhood made me so sad. At three she’d often been left home alone by her parents for hours during the day – the apartment key around her neck in case of emergency.

Now, looking out the window from my little kitchen she told me that she’d played a game with her sister when she was young. Snow would cover Philly and they would wait inside their rowhouse for the plow. Then, once the streets were cleared, they’d open up the second-story windows and jump into the plow piles from the ledge.

The snow was deep enough to catch them, flecked with ice and road salt and dirt. But looking up through it, the light was the surprise, an underwater-ness and glow that you’d surface out of with only the greatest effort. And the first breath would catch you off-guard.

□

I’d been living in that apartment for years by then, having moved in during the monster heat wave. Seven hundred people died while I painted the kitchen a yellow that turned out badly, and had to start again.

My boyfriend, Lawrence, and I had found the place on his birthday. It was three bedrooms for $550 a month. It was fussy and Victorian when we shared it, full of dust and primary colors and the sound of Chicago Avenue with the #66 bus keeping time.

Three months after we moved in, Tuman’s became a nighttime bar, not just a hangout for the early-shift guys from the local electrician’s union. Holly played the jukebox loud when the old men left for home at 6:00. We left the stereo on in our living room to try to mask the noise. But from the alleyway we heard the bar’s bathroom door opening and closing, letting Tom Waits and Iggy Pop yell up at us in bursts.

If we hadn’t lived there, we could have been clear-eyed about it. It was a great bar, after all. It might have been a favorite, the glass and tin ceiling, the painting of the naked lady over the booze, the oak bar and carved barback. Hell, the name alone would have charmed us. We would have drunk $2 Guinness and watched bike messengers flirt with art girls like everyone else.

As it was, we played prissy pioneers. We’d march into the bar at midnight in our pajamas and beg Holly to turn it down. We’d explain about our early-morning jobs, and Holly would look right at us as she turned the volume up. We never drank there.

Once Lawrence left, I gave up fighting the bar. There were junkies in my hallway and the smell of smoke in the rooms nearest the stairs. I woke up at 5:00 every morning to the noise of Carlos emptying the bottles into the dumpster. I painted the apartment all over again, everything cool and bright, light as air and twice as lonely.

Then Heather started drinking there. Some nights she and Patrick would call before they left for the bar. I’d meet them, sneaking downstairs, in through the back door without a coat. I’d sit next to them while Holly served me free Jack & Cokes out of kindness to the vanquished, and I bummed Heather’s cigarettes. As the night wore on, Heather would explain again why I needed to get laid – one-night stands were the key to life, she said, and I’d never had one. We’d pick out men as we sat there, playing a game of it while Patrick argued politics on Heather’s other side, screaming by the end of the night, quoting Fall lyrics, buying us shots.

Even a year after Lawrence left, celibate as hell, I couldn’t bear to bring the men who flirted with me up through the back stairs. I held on to the perch above it and waited to stop missing my ex. My skin was a hard frost, not a touchable inch left. The way the ground is in, say, November. Where the first three inches of soil will bruise you if you hit the ground, and the grass has a crunch. Under that is something else, but you can hardly remember what it was for. Growth, or something, digging in, mud pies, pits.

□

The morning after the blizzard, Mia and I made eggs. Andy walked over from his apartment a few blocks away and we ate together in the snow-day feel of that morning. The two of them were flirting with flirting with each other and they’d created a little group that was serving as the camouflage for it all.

None of us had seen each other since the holiday. We’d flown home only a day or two before the blizzard. We found ourselves back in our apartments with Chicago announcing its usual start of hibernation.

As we cleaned up from breakfast we could see that under my windows Carlos was shoveling a thin, reedy path along the building, just wide enough for one foot in front of another. The piles he made seemed almost tall enough for Mia’s leap of faith.

Behind me in the kitchen, Mia in her peripatetic way was starting a round of phone calls, forming a network across the city as if we were all connected by string and tin cans from tree house to tree house above the snow.

By the time she suited up in her Snocat and poor Andy, the Georgia boy experiencing his first Chicago winter, put on his hat with ear flaps, there was a plan to meet again at night and toast our resilience at getting out of our houses.

Mia had picked the Rainbo. It was an older bar north of my apartment. It hunkered low behind a tall six-flat on the corner of Division and Damen. When I’d moved to the city, Wicker Park was already cleaning up at a furious clip. Nelson Algren would hardly have recognized the place.

The Rainbo sat in the middle of the battle, indie kids and gentrifiers meeting in the red leather booths like Sharks and Jets, playing out the real estate drama on a smaller scale. But the night of the blizzard it was nearly empty, and the quiet that erased the tensions of the neighborhood extended in from the snow-covered streets.

It had taken me twice the usual time to make the trek from my place. I walked up Hoyne to play my private route-planning game. I try to find a way that combines the best views, the most efficiency, and the most nostalgia. It’s like the car game where you re-create the alphabet from license plates and highway signs. There’s always a lyrical path to anywhere, you just have to find it.

Hoyne was the street of my first love affair with the city. My first Thanksgiving in Chicago Lawrence and I – when we were still drowning in newness and sex – walked Hoyne from Chicago Avenue to North Avenue, a route that took us past little brick cottages and two flats and farther north past the rotted old mansions of Wicker Park. The houses were Halloween-ish, book-ended with leafless sycamores and lilac bushes. Renovations were just around the corner that would take away all the seedy romance they had then. They’d waited for so long. We looked at them in their last moments of quiet.

I chose my blizzard route to remember and forget that November. I couldn’t look up much as I walked - to keep my balance I watched my feet and played the memory of that walk with Lawrence in my mind.

What I missed was the feeling of it, not the weather or the easy walk or the sexy, untouched piles of brick. I missed how live everything felt to me then, how lit. Being in love like that, anything I touched felt warm – iron gates, branches, lamp post. But actually it was me that was warm, for the first time since I was diagnosed at 22 with the same kidney disease that was killing my Dad.

And even though it had only felt like that a little while before the work had set in and we’d been broke and living over a loud bar, it hadn’t mattered. It gave me back my life for the first time, the love I had for him. And even though I have felt that since, the first time the thaw comes is the big surprise isn’t it? And how do you get over that?

Maybe you don’t, in fact. Maybe you instead resign yourself to cold settling over your body, you decide that that’s the way you’re supposed to feel.

I suppose I had decided that, resigned myself to the loud neighbors, my father’s illness and my own, the chaos and the cold, to the sense of there never being heat again.

But the walk through the snow reminded me that there had been another way.

□

There is no photo-booth strip from that night. I don’t remember much from the bar. The quiet light of the place, flowers sitting in a vase by the ladies’ room door.

What I remember is leaving. I found my things, put them on, and left the bar with Doug. He was an old friend of Andy’s, someone I’d met at some party or other. As we stood facing each other on the sidewalk he looked at me once, quizzically, and asked me if I’d like tea.

I said yes before I knew what it meant. It was the chance to be invited in somewhere, to come into an open space instead of opening mine. The moment I’d said it, Doug turned on his heel and walked east to his place, and I followed with an edge of panic – grasping the offer in my dense way, finally.

I’d never been someone who understood the exchange of invitations that lead to sex in the adult world. Sex for me was stuck in some strange, child-of-hippies place. It flowed naturally from skinny dipping or camping. It was not offered up on street corners or in bars, and if it was, it certainly wasn’t offered up to me.

As I walked behind Doug, I did a little math in my head. I found him attractive. He was a photographer, and I’d seen his work. He was well-read, with good taste in music, design, and friends, but I found it nearly impossible to maintain a conversation with him. There was a vagueness to our talk that threw off my chirpy earnestness every time.

And yet I was following him home, I had an invitation that implied some interest on his part, something I couldn’t really fathom.

□

We took off our coats in the living room and I sat in his kitchen while he worked at the stove. Along the top of his white cabinets he’d arranged a collection of green vases and bowls. I kept looking at them, thinking about the time he’d taken to lay them out, the visual punch of them.

We talked over cups of tea. From time to time I’d get up from the kitchen table and pace the room with the warm cup in my hands. I felt suddenly nervous in his space, the green bowls looking down at me. I looked around and wanted no part of it, really, but it occurred to me that I wanted to be kissed.

It was just the little crack in the ice, the reedy path home, the first try. And since it seemed so suddenly necessary I began to worry that it wouldn’t come. Do men really make tea in their handsome kitchens on romantic snowy nights for girls they mean to seduce? Or do they just seduce them with no questions or pauses or beverages at all?

And then my tea was gone – first one cup and then a refill and no third was offered.

I walked back into the living room with its brown walls and comfortable chairs and he followed me. I asked a few awkward questions about his paintings, which he answered. We both looked at my coat on the couch, and I put it on. I walked to the door and he followed.

And then he reached down and pulled up my chin and kissed me.

I understood what Mia was describing when she told me about leaping into snow. As if it were my own sense memory, the kiss brought it back to me. The snow was dirty. It scraped your face with bits of rock. The fight up out of the drift was like digging out of a grave. And though it was inelegant and rough, it was the prize of your own freedom that made it sing.

I took the kiss and, warmed, I headed out the door.

□

I walked back west, past the lights and cars on Damen. I kept up until I reached Hoyne again. A few blocks south I came to Lawrence’s old block. There was the nondescript brick three-flat where he’d shared an apartment, the place he’d lived in when we met. The window to his old bedroom looked out on the street. I walked to it now and stood for a moment with my back to the building. I kept looking at the view I’d always seen from his bedroom window, thinking of our night walk through Wicker Park.

The cottage across the street had been framed perfectly in his window then, the leaves that usually blocked it knocked down by cold rain. And now the cottage sat framed by the snow lining its roof. Its chimney was puffing out wood smoke, the tree in front of me waiting for spring.

A thaw would come, it seemed to me. The city, the cottage, the tree, the street, and I would all remember life again. The reach for light and air would leave us finally blinking on the sidewalk in the sun.