I heard that story, my aunt stepping backward into a flower bed at the news her husband had died at night and alone, over and over as a child. One summer at the lake, my cousin Rene and I acted it out on the dock until my mother, watching from the kitchen, came out and made us stop. That night, we did it again in my room in the dark. When we finally stopped, I lay on the bed with my arms crossing my chest and imagined scene after scene of myself reacting to horrible news. I would be sad, I decided, but mostly I would be brave. I was nine-years-old. My aunt died two years later, and by the time I was married I hadn’t thought about her for a long time. Everyone knew the layoffs at the mine were coming, but no one talked about them out loud. I was in the kitchen hanging the curtains my sister sent from Dallas for the new house. They were little white frilly things and I remember I was thinking that the fabric might be too thin. I heard the front door open and I called “Deb?” because I thought it was my girlfriend coming to help me with a dress I was making. She never knocks. But then I heard the TV come on and I knew it was my husband Mark home in the middle of the morning. I felt my stomach give, but I didn’t turn around. I just went on hanging the curtains and worrying they were too flimsy. I didn’t know I was crying until Mark came in and put his hands on my face and they came away wet. He said my name, “Sandy,” but nothing else, and after a while he went into the garage to work on the car. We went to bed early, but I got up about 3 a.m. and came into the kitchen. I’ve never told anyone this. I got a pair of scissors and took the curtains down. I sat at the kitchen table and cut each curtain into long thin strips and then I rolled each piece into what looked like bandages. I learned how in Blue Birds. I put them into a shoebox and put the box on the top shelf of the china cabinet, where Mark keeps the bank statements. I can’t tell you why I did that. I just knew I didn’t want anything around me that wasn’t strong. Green Beans I know a woman who still hears the 11 p.m. whistle that signaled last shift at the mine, even though it's been over two years now since it’s blown. It’s different for me. When I think about the layoffs, it’s the silence I hear. Mark and I got married just down the block at Faith Lutheran; I was 18 and he was 20 and already working at the mine. After the first layoff in 1982, he stopped talking to me for almost two months. Oh, he’d say, “Good morning,” and “See you later,” but not much more than that. I didn’t know what to do, so I just went on like nothing was wrong and waited for him to get over it. I was beginning to think he never would when I found out I was pregnant. I drove back to the house from the clinic about 10 miles an hour thinking that if ever there was a bad time to start a family, this was it. I yelled at myself all the way down Simpson Ave. and I yelled at Mark down Grant and then I started crying because I wanted a baby so much. He came out to the driveway when I got home and I told him while I was still sitting in the car. I guess I thought one of us might be leaving. But he was happier than I’d ever seen him; it was as if being a father was going to fill the space where his job had been. He decided while we were still in the driveway that the baby was a girl and her name was Molly. I’d be sitting in the living room and he’d come in and carry on these long conversations with our daughter. And he’d tell me about her, like they’d already met and he knew all there was to know. About how she was afraid of cows, but not of spiders, and flatly refused to eat anything but green beans. And he’d do her voice, too. “Hey, Mol,” he’d say, “wanna have a steak for dinner? A steak and Mommy’s lemon pie?” And then in a high little voice, “Green / sat at the kitchen table and cut each curtain into long thin strips and then I rolled each piece into what looked like bandages. beans! Green beans!” I laughed so much sometimes I couldn’t get my breath and I wasn’t scared anymore. We’d get by somehow; it was enough to be with Mark, this Mark who laughed and slept with his hand on my stomach. Seven months later, right after we brought Molly Elizabeth O’Brien home from the hospital, Mark was called back to the mine. Molly started sleeping through the night at nine weeks, but when Mark was on the night shift I usually got up once or twice a night just to check on her. One night a light bulb in the kitchen burned out and I went into the hall closet where Mark keeps his clothes to get another. There was a big box I’d never seen pushed to the back. It was from the grocery warehouse in Virginia but I couldn’t imagine what it was. I pulled it out into the living room—it was so heavy I could barely manage it—and lifted out the first of 48 economy-sized cans of green beans. That w&s how I found out Mark knew another layoff was coming. I sat for a long time holding the can before I pushed the box back to the closet. I never told Mark I knew. Box of Cookies Sometimes when Mark hasa temporary job to do early in the morning, like hauling wood or shoveling snow for the city, and the baby’s still asleep, I make breakfast just for myself and watch Phil Donahue on a Duluth station. It’s what my Mom calls an indulgence, like eating a whole box of cookies back in the days when we had money to buy store cookies. I sit on the couch with a bowl of cereal and I watch people talking about stuff that’s maybe a million light years from my life. It’s all this serious stuff—sex and politics and nuclear war—but I enjoy listening because I’m usually so tied up wondering what we’re going to eat those last three days before I can go to the food shelf again or where we’re going to find the money to buy Mark new boots for the winter. So there they are on TV and there I am on the couch and sometimes I just laugh. But other times I think about everything I have to do—and what I have to do it with— and oh boy, I’d rather have a box of cookies than a sense of humor. High School Last week Joe Staley and I spent Tuesday at the central labor pool in Hibbing waiting for our names to be called for day jobs like cleaning theaters and picking apples. When the woman behind the desk said, “O’Brien, Mark O’Brien,” it sounded much too loud and I ducked my head like I’d been caught doing something dirty in the back of a school bus. I wanted to just go on sitting there but finally I stood up, and Joe and I got three days' work digging a well and putting up a fence for some people, who bought a summer place on the lake. It was about 7 p.m. Friday when we finished and we stopped at Swenson’s for a drink. Joe because he was thirsty and me because I knew Sandy would be holding what she calls the “dinner show” for me and that means tuna and noodles. Joe and I graduated a year apart, but we worked the same job at the mine and we got our layoff notices the same day. He’s never been a big talker, but for some reason, after a day of digging a hole and filling it back up again, he started in about high school and how he wished someone had told him what it would be like to be looking for a job with a high school diploma, a varsity letter in track and a layoff notice as your entire resume. One thing about the last two years is that I’ve heard about a million jokes that aren’t funny, and all of them seem to be on guys like us. It’s true. Neither Joe or I are qualified to do anything but what we were doing when we lost our jobs. We drank about two beers thinking about that and then we both started trying to remember what we actually did learn in high school. We decided that between us, we'd gotten 24 years of schooling and a fifth-grade education. What does anybody learn in high school? I’ve been out four years now and about all I remember actually thinking about was how to get some sleep in Mr. Nyberg’s third-period history class without getting caught or whether my luck was ever going to change with one of the majorettes at an away game. I can tell you I slept more in class than I ever did on the game bus, but I can’t tell you a single thing about American history except the three principle causes of the Civil War. And I only remember those because Connie Farmer helped me study for that test and she was a girl who demanded a certain amount of concentration. So I did my time in school, like I was waiting in a bus station, and when I graduated it was finally time to get on the bus—to go into the mines with my father and my brothers after summer was over. I remember that, all right, my first day on the job. My mother ironed my blue jeans and made me wear a new plaid shirt, and I felt like a kid following the big boys down the street. Except this time I was glad summer was over, because it meant I was grown up. I know that sounds silly, but I'd been waiting for that job a long time, listening to my brothers talk about what they did every day, wondering what the jokes One thing about the last two years is that I’ve heard about a million jokes that aren’t funny, and all of them seem to be on guys like us. about Sobrovich the foreman really meant, wishing my father would talk to me the way he talked to Danny about the mine. It felt so right; Jesus, I was even proud of how much I hurt those first few months, getting used to bending over and straightening up maybe a million times a day. So what I wonder now is, could I have made it turn out different? If I’d paid attention, sat straighter, joined the Math Club, retaken the SAT’s, would I have a college degree and a job that didn’t come and go a hell of a lot faster than the tuna casserole waiting at home? Sometimes—okay, times when I’ve had two beers with Joe Staley— I think, yeah, if I just hadn’t been so stupid, it would all be different. There was a whole world out there and all I could think about was doing what everyone I knew was already doing. I put more imagination now into thinking up stories to tell Molly before she goes to sleep at night that I ever did into choosing my “lifetime” career. That’s the one that lasted two years. But then I think, Jesus, what guy would have been worried that it wouldn’t last when it had just begun? Bicnic It’s so hard to separate it out, to tell what’s happening between Mark and me because he isn’t working and what’s just normal give and take between two people in a marriage. Lately I keep remembering this cartoon I saw once, where there were two little balloons over this woman’s head. One read, “What I said,” and the other, “What he heard.” I feel like that woman; everything I say these days seems to mean something else. Like last Sunday after church, when Mark and I took Molly up to the point for what she calls a “bicnic.” She does that all the time now, switching b’s for p’s. For a while, I tried to get her to say it right but I’ve given up for now, especially since Mark’s started calling it a bicnic, too. I tell him he’s just encouraging her, but he says he’s not going to worry about it until she’s a freshman at Benn State majoring in piology. We were unpacking the sandwiches and Mark and Molly were arguing about whether to go play on the swings at the “bark” after we ate. I listened to them for a while and then I said to Mark, “Keep it up, I’ve always wanted two kids.” I meant it as a joke, since it’s hard to tell sometimes who’s my oldest, Mark or Molly. But it came out all wrong, like I was accusing him, reminding him we’ll only ever have the one child because we can’t afford another baby. He was holding Molly’s hand when I said it, and he squeezed so hard she pulled away from him and started to cry. He put an arm out for her then and said her name, but she was just out of his reach. Lons Way Bown There was a girl who moved to Silver Bay in eighth grade, Christy Kuch, and she used to tell us all about her dreams. We’d be dressing for volleyball or standing in line in the lunch room and she’d be talking about dreaming she was married to Elton John or being caught without any clothes on in the middle of the stadium at half-time on Thanksgiving Day. Pretty soon everyone but me was competing to see who could have the weirdest dreams. I just said I couldn’t remember mine, because I didn’t want to talk about waking up once or twice a week, convinced I was falling a long way down. That feeling scared me worse than anything and for a while I went to sleep every night with my arms above my head so I could grab the bed posts if I had to. I hadn’t thought about Christy Kuch in years —her family moved again that summer, to Des Moines, I think—but I remembered her this morning. Mark’s in Babbit until the weekend because he and Joe Staley got jobs helping to reroof the high school. Molly was still asleep in her room but I knew she’d be up in a minute so I should go get breakfast started. I got up and opened the door to our bedroom, but it wasn’t our hall. I mean, it was me standing there, but nothing else was the same. This hall had dark blue carpet and Molly’s baby pictures were gone from the walls. I was scared for a minute—if I wasn’t in our house anymore, where was Molly?—but then I realized this was a dream and she must still be asleep in her room. And then I started laughing because Mark and I have been arguing for weeks about whether I need to get away for a while, maybe take Molly to my sister’s in Dallas, and rest before it’s winter again. “Now this,” I said to myself, “is a cheap vacation.” I was saying it in the dream, but it was like I knew what it meant when I was awake. So it was really like being two people, Sandy in the dream and Sandy awake, knowing it was a dream. And then I thought, “Listen to this one, Christy Kuch,” and I started laughing again. I decided as long as I was wherever this was I should at least see the house, so I went down the hall into the living room. I kept thinking I’d recognize the furniture or something, that I must have made the house up in my imagination from a picture in a magazine. But nothing was familiar —everything was new for one thing, nothing fram a garage sale anywhere — until I walked into this big kitchen. Mark and Molly were at the table eating breakfast, and it was my table, the butcher’s block I picked out in the catalogue. I remember thinking Mark must have just showered and given Molly her bath because their hair was curling at the ends the way it does when it’s damp. They looked so much Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1988 33
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz