But that was in another time and another place, and I cannot afford to think about it now. Instead, I make my mouth smile, and reach past Tom to hold out a hand to my Teddy. But my little son only smiles, a smile that is at once secretive and begging. He slides into the other end of the circular booth, forcing everyone to scoot over and sending Steffie up against me on the other side. Grandpa has missed none of this. “He’s Grandpa’s big boy today, Mommy. He’s gonna sit over here with me.”
Grandpa’s eyes are black, like little bits of anthracite coal set into his pale, soggy face. He was a big man once, had stood tall and had tanned, weathered skin. Maybe then the lines around his eyes had been laugh lines. Now he looks bleached, like something found under a pile of old trash, a soup label with the colors gone all wrong, the green beans turned blue, a farmer turned entrepreneur, a corned and blistered foot crammed into a pointed Florsheim shoe. I could have pitied him if he hadn’t been so hateful. Our eyes don’t meet, I don’t let him have the victory. I squeeze Tom’s hand and look into his eyes instead.
“Did you find the part?” Mother Maurie demands.
Tom nods. “Junkyard had it.” He turns to me. “You eat already?”
“Yeah, but if you …”
“How much was it?” Mother Maurie cuts in irritably. This is business, and Tom has no sense, mixing it up with a conversation with his little wife. Mother Maurie has shifted gears, is no longer the chic shopper but is now the shrewd businesswoman, versed in every facet of the family’s farm equipment dealership.
“Seventeen-fifty. New one is twenty-two, but if old man Cooper wants his tractor back in the fields by Tuesday, he’s gonna have to be happy with secondhand parts.” Tom goes back to scanning the menu hungrily, fielding Mother Maurie’s agitated questions easily.
She is upset with the parts supplier and doesn’t care who knows it. Wants everyone to know it, as a matter of fact. If they think they can get away with treating Potter’s Equipment this way, they are in for a surprise, she’ll go right to the factory for parts after this, just cut them out entirely, and let them eat that. Why, she must order two or three thousand dollars’ worth of parts a year from them, and for them to let us down like this just isn’t good business, as they’ll soon find out. Her own ruthlessness is giving her great satisfaction. She speaks clearly and almost loudly, so that other people at other tables hear and know just how hard-nosed a little businesswoman she is. She is proud of her savvy, and so is Grandpa Potter, for he nods sagely as she carries on.
Tom’s fingers close over mine and hold me fast. The others at the table are talking, and he is replying to them, but his fingers against mine are a different conversation, and a different man is speaking to me from the one who they know. I listen to him alone, letting the other voices fade into a background hum like summer bees. I know I do not belong in their world. What matters to me is that somehow, Tom’s world and mine have intersected, and that in that brief crossing, we can be together.
Fairbanks
Winter 1963
My family is a family of poachers. Very few people know this outside of the immediate family, and almost no one else would believe you if you told them, for we seem very ordinary people. My mother works making floral arrangements in a flower shop. It is a part-time job, and she is always home before we are. She believes children need a mother to come home to. My father works for Golden Valley Electric Association. He works in the coal-fed GVEA generator building that is right across the playground from my school. Sometimes, when I miss the bus, I walk across the street and sit amid the darkness and noise of the big generators until he is ready to take me home. I think of the electrical power plant as a great cave full of large machinery exuding a constant deafening level of sound. There are ladders, and gauges to check, and it is always warm there, in contrast to the immense cold outside.
People call my father the plant engineer. I find this tremendously confusing. For one thing, my mother works with plants, not my father. For another, although there is a train that goes right past the back of the GVEA plant and leaves mountains of coal there like gigantic mounds of droppings, to my knowledge my father never runs the train engine. But this is not the sort of thing I am adept at explaining to adults, so when they say he is the plant engineer, it is easier to let them persist in their ignorance.
The GVEA building is grey with black windows and tall black smokestacks that speckle the snow outside our school with black soot almost as soon as it falls. The snow outside the school never tastes good, and I never eat it, no matter how thirsty I get.
The name of my school is Immaculate Conception School, and I go there with my two younger brothers and my little sister. My two older sisters go to Monroe High School, which is joined to ICS by a lobby, like Siamese twins joined at the hip. Both schools feature Jesuit priests in black cassocks with the unnerving habit of sometimes turning up in plaid flannel shirts and black pants, looking almost like anybody else. There are also nuns in white wimples and long, whispering black skirts interrupted only by the chattering of the rosary beads that hang at their hips like holy six-guns. The nuns are more honest, and never dress as anything other than nuns.
That is me, out on the playground, and I am easy to spot because I wear a battered play parka of lined corduroy, and my legs are bare. It is twenty below zero, but it is still required that we spend the morning recess outside. Little girls are likewise required to wear dresses or skirts to school. No one but me seems to find a contradiction there. We are supposed to play games, I suppose, frolicking about in fifty-two degrees of freezing while remaining girlishly modest. The boys play games, running and falling on the snow, tackling one another, yelling with smoking breaths. I stand and watch them, unable to comprehend their pointless energy. The other girls stand in clusters and talk. Most of them wear nylon ski jackets in bright blues and reds, and their waterbird legs are encased in bright tights that match their pleated skirts. I hate tights. They are always puddling down into little circles of fabric around my ankles, and then I have to pull them up by grabbing the waistband through my dress and trying to heave them up. It is impossible to do this in a ladylike manner. It is easier to go bare-legged and endure the cold than to endure the superior looks of little girls whose tights never puddle around their ankles, the shocked scowls of the playground nun as I try to wrestle my tights back up into place. I’d rather have chilblains and frostbite.
Making me go to school in winter is one of the cruder things my parents do to me. Although all my brothers and sisters attend school also, I always take it as a personal torment my parents insist on inflicting on me. I do not complain much about it. I am even good at school, very good, if academics are what you consider important. I am academically vindictive, ruining class curves with my hundred per cents, doing fifteen book reports instead of the required five, but it is never enough to counteract tights that go with your dress and match the ribbons in your hair. Vaguely I know that I do not know how to compete. I always put my energies into the wrong arenas.
But it is more than that. School is not my turf. I resent wasting the brief daylight of the winter days trapped in a classroom instead of running through the white and silver of a Fairbanks winter landscape. Yet even that isn’t it. I believe there is something unnatural about school, something damaging. To take a young creature and force it into an enclosed space with thirty others like it, all of the same age … would you do this to a puppy or a young chimp? You know what happens when you do it with chickens or rats. The same thing happens when you do it with children, only the damage is less visible. If I were a chick, pecked until my entrails hung from my rectum, someone would have taken pity on me. But I am a child and children are expected to endure the tortures of the damned stoically. I believe, perhaps self-pityingly, that it is worse for me than it is for other children. The ones who play in playgrounds, who visit one another’s houses, collect toys, and have sleep-over parties, never perceive how peculiar an institution school is. But I am a healthy young animal, taken from my hunting, from my running and growing, and thrust into an exhibit more inhumane than any concrete-and-steel zoo pen. From the moment I step