True North

  In the morning she stopped by for a scant fifteen minutes on her way to school. She wore a pleated skirt and her legs were very cold to the touch compared to her vulva which seemed like a miniature electric heater only soft. I shuddered when her icy hand touched my penis so she substituted her mouth. She said, “It was my first time doing this last night and here I’m already doing it in the morning,” then laughed. Afterward she wondered how I could miss school so much and I said that they scolded me but that I always got all A’s so they didn’t push it. I was a junior while Polly was a senior. Her principal told her she was a sure thing for a tuition scholarship at Michigan State down in East Lansing and that she was sure she could earn her own room and board. As usual the struggles of real people embarrassed me. When she left I returned temporarily to a maudlin state. What the fuck was I doing toying with this lovely young woman but then I decided I would marry her in a minute. This posed a specific problem as I had already decided that I never wanted to father children. I was convinced that I should do my part to stop my family’s genes from spreading in the world. I was supposedly smart according to the tests but then, strangely enough, my father had graduated magna cum laude from Yale and my mother had done very well too all of which proved that intelligence could be a suspicious factor. When my father pointed out his diploma on his den wall to visitors I always wanted to offer that “this man would be better off if he was dumber, the world would be a better place,” and so on.

  7

  My parents returned in early April from their separate locations both looking tanned and comparatively fit but then a tan can cover a multitude of sins. Mother had been in Bermuda, and father in Palm Beach and Key West. He had actually gone fishing and had many photos of sailfish, tarpon, and bonefish to prove it. Always the young detective I noted certain consistent elbows, knees, thighs, backs, bathing-suit-clad butts but never the face in the photo. I couldn’t fault him on his taste but only hoped she was vaguely adult though I knew the age of consent varied from state to state with Mississippi at the lowest at fourteen.

  Cynthia wept that Mrs. Plunkett was gone but then recovered in a few days. When not in school that winter and spring I spent most of my spare time at the library though my mission had become a little stale in the welter of historical fact and county and regional maps. Twice a week after their arrival my parents drove down to Escanaba for reasons of privacy and visited a marriage counselor. I allowed myself a shred of hope. After all one can’t help but love one’s parents even though this love seems to emerge mostly from the closeness and dependency of early childhood. Cynthia had taken to spending time with Donald’s aunt back in the woods over south of Au Train. Cynthia told me that she liked to help this woman, a full-blood Chippewa, but with two young grandchildren whose mother had died from alcoholism. Cynthia wasn’t allowed in Clarence’s house because he was fearful over his job. One late night Cynthia told me that Father had tried to “tinker” with her a couple times when he was very drunk. I said I had guessed that the summer before when I saw her whack him with a garden stake. She was amused when she thought about that particular scene. Occasionally I am appalled by her toughness. I can’t quite believe it. When I asked Fred about it he admitted he had also been puzzled and asked a psychiatrist about Cynthia. The psychiatrist said though it was impossible to accurately make a long-range diagnosis that perhaps one out of ten thousand young women were that resiliently strong. He had never run into one in his practice for obvious reasons but had seen the condition referred to in professional literature. Fred added that there is really no pathology to study in the strong and mentally healthy.

  We were corresponding again after our spat of last August. Fred held out the prospect of my helping him teach disadvantaged kids how to read and write, a government project inelegantly called “Catch Up.” With my gimpy ankle there was no chance I could return to the serene life of a manual laborer. Glenn had anyway reached a dead end having lost his driver’s license on two drunk-driving charges only three weeks apart. The social services people decided to dry him out under lock and key. It had been over two years since Glenn had visited our house. He said he didn’t like the way my parents looked at him though they were polite. I decided not to correct him. In truth people like Glenn simply didn’t viably exist as humans to my parents. We had a falling out on the first day of trout season in late April, normally the happiest of times. It was a cold rainy day and I could spend only ten minutes at a time wading in the river without my ankle becoming unbearable. Glenn called me a “pussy” in a genuinely hostile way. I chided him for having a pint of schnapps in his creel because if he got caught he was back in what he called the “zoo” under lock and key. “Fuck you rich kid,” he yelled glugging at his schnapps. He drank the whole pint within an hour, then fell face forward into the Middle Branch of the Escanaba. I went over my waders saving his sorry ass. He fell asleep in the truck when I drove him home. He was shivering violently in his sleep and when we reached his place he fought me off when I tried to help him into the house bloodying my lip. Glenn was my only close friend. Everyone else was an acquaintance. When he was about ten his mother had taken off with a transferred enlisted man from Sawyer Air Base. Herbert with Glenn along had chased them all the way out to a Strategic Air Command base in North Dakota but she wouldn’t come back.

  By mid-May and near the end of school, my junior year, my mind began to fail me. I had ten spiral notebooks full of material on my project without touching the carton Sprague had sent me. Mrs. Schmidt had me read The Stranger by Albert Camus and I’m not sure it helped what with my propensity to fall into characters until I was close to suffocation. I had loathed Catcher in the Rye thinking the hero to be a wimp though, of course, it was the insufferable resemblance of my character to his however slight.

  An uncommon early wave of heat came in May and I further delaminated. For instance, after my mumbled prayers at night I’d turn my bed light off and on a hundred times to make sure everything in the room was in its proper place. I think that’s why I did it. The degree to which I had failed in my secondary project of not thinking about myself stunned me. I gibbered in a letter to Fred who was alarmed enough to write back immediately to say that I should stop everything except rowing the boat which I hadn’t done yet this spring. He said that there was no political solution for the disease of greed in my family, past and present. I sounded like a young version of Karl Marx wired on lysergic acid. I could tell he wasn’t really joking. How could I at age seventeen expect to figure out the nature of greed when the world’s great philosophers hadn’t been decisive on the matter? Maybe I should buy a recording of “Pomp and Circumstance” and play it around the clock. When you’re aiming at the big thing you have to take care of the little things. In short, Fred wasn’t gentle.

  Even my parents untypically noticed my slump and insisted on seeking professional help though what they meant were the magic pills they used. Fred had said that people of inherited wealth largely had nothing to do while all the others mostly didn’t like what they were doing to make a living. Life had clearly become an impasse.

  I noticed with mild sadistic pleasure that my father was having financial problems. The den door was always closed and you could hear his shouts of “buy” or “sell” while he talked on the phone. Meanwhile my mother had commissioned a private detective to follow Cynthia after school and confronted her at dinner over the fact that she was still seeing the forbidden Donald. Cynthia said, “You could have saved money by asking me.” My father who was fueled by his martinis tried to lighten the atmosphere by saying that since Donald was half-Finn and half-Indian he could be called a “Findian.” Nobody laughed but him. I looked down at my whitefish that had been baked into white cardboard. Along with Cynthia I had been losing too much weight since the departure of Mrs. Plunkett. I had also given up fishing and drinking. It was mid-May and I hadn’t caught a single rainbow or brown trout, and my experience with Glenn two weeks before had made drinking unattractive.

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sp; I was oddly charmed by my parents’ silly efforts in my behalf. To my surprise Jesse picked me up after school on Friday saying he needed to talk to me. Jesse always minded his own business on personal matters and I could see my father’s assignment was difficult for him. He began by saying that mine was the time of life that I should also be dancing, having a few beers, and chasing young women. I was studying too much and it was “hurting” my head and my unfortunate experience with Laurie shouldn’t be allowed to poison women for me. Why did I like only “old time” music and never go dancing? I tried to explain that I didn’t like rock and roll though I didn’t go into my private theory that both modern music and television were the “soma” Aldous Huxley spoke of in his novel Brave New World, My schoolmates listened to thousands of hours of rock and roll and it had obviously scrambled their brains. Jesse said that when we got home he would loan me some records from Veracruz and perhaps I would like them. I had heard his music faintly from the windows of his apartment over the garage during warm weather. Jesse was so discreet that it was never loud enough to truly hear it and you felt only the slightest throb of the marimbas.

  We had a nice dinner at the Mather Inn during which he told me I also must have my ankle operated on because I couldn’t limp through my life like an old man. I said maybe later in the summer because when school got out I was heading down to Ohio to teach poor kids how to read and write with Fred. “Teaching poor kids will make you feel worse,” he said then got up to use the lobby telephone.

  After dinner we drove around the block twice in the twilight passing an attractive but rather bulky girl who was leaning against a lightpole reading a magazine. “Do you like her?” Jesse asked. “She’s a present from me to you.” I thanked him and said I had a girlfriend over in Iron Mountain. “A girl way over in Iron Mountain can only be in your head,” he shrugged.

  When we got home there was a note from Clarence saying he would pick me up for fishing at six A.M. I played some of Jesse’s Veracruz music and again I admit it made me feel better. I called Polly to see if I could drive over to see her and got a knife in the stomach. Her little sister had found some of my letters and showed them to her father who was still convalescing and would be forever. She couldn’t see me “up here” under any condition but she was starting at Michigan State early this summer to make sure she had a job in the kitchen of a dormitory. I could see her in East Lansing in June. That was that.

  Perhaps Clarence was less wise than Jesse. It’s hard to tell because he wasn’t verbal and in our culture if you’re smart you better say something smart or at least catchy. I had wanted to go down and fish the confluence of the Middle Branch of the Escanaba and the main river but Clarence had only a few hours because my mother liked our yard to look like a golf green and he had to mow before she threw a baby shower for a friend’s daughter.

  We were an hour out on the Deadstream with me rowing before Clarence said anything at all.

  “I heard you was down in the dumps.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I figured. I bet you can fish your way out of it. Or row. A body gets restless if it doesn’t get tired.”

  Absurd as that sounds it’s true. After a couple of hours Clarence had to get back for mowing but I returned, made a sandwich, and rowed until midafternoon. When I got home I called Laurie and asked her to go to a movie and she said “why not?” I hadn’t seen much of her since Cynthia was spending so much time with Donald. We went to an early movie, the seven to nine, and saw Picnic which she liked and I didn’t but I avoided saying so.

  After the movie there was a warm rain but barely more than a sprinkle. We went out to Presque Isle and walked up the west side keeping an eye on the yellow glow of the setting sun behind the darker clouds of an approaching storm. She had broken up with her halfback boyfriend Brent who was unhappy about her abstinence. “I hope you didn’t call for that,” she said. I said only that I had seen her hitting tennis balls with her coach and I was lonely to talk to her. “I can beat him this year,” she said proudly. I had a lump in my throat and apologized for what had happened the summer before. “You didn’t do it by yourself,” she said shyly. “I just thought boys carried rubbers.” I joked that I did now but hadn’t used one yet. She nudged me toward a thicket. “It’s too wet for my skirt. You get on the ground.” I did and we necked for a while and then naturally I tried to put the condom on backward and it popped into the grass so she helped. The light was still yellowish and it had begun to rain in force and then it got darker. I brushed a mosquito off her bare hip and she said “thanks.” Afterwards when she was lying on top of me despite the hard rain she said, “It’s strange how much fun it is when you do it because you really want to.” Now there was thunder and I had my mouth open to catch rain because my mouth was dry from exertion. I was idiotically trying to figure out if I had done the right thing. I had my hands on her crouched knees and suddenly thought, this is her knee not my knee, and I am not the center of the universe. She is she and I am I. It sounds just on the edge of stupid but it wasn’t to me, as if I had previously thought myself the hub of an old-fashioned wheel and all others were spokes emanating from my core. Lying there looking up at an occasional flash of lightning my mind spun with the consequences of these thoughts. I slipped my hands around Laurie’s rain-wet butt as if it was a marvel which it was. She had a tiny penlight and inspected the condom for flaws, giggling as she did so. We made love again. Back in the dome light of the pickup she was a radiant waif. We were as wet as if we had been swimming in our clothes.

  When I got home my father was watching the Stanley Cup hockey playoffs. He was a little drunk but affable. When I was younger we would watch the Detroit Lions or the Green Bay Packers play football but neither of us was much interested so we stopped. In the eastern U.P. men follow the Lions but to the west where the U.P. is contiguous to Wisconsin they are Packer fans. My father thought of football as a military metaphor, a kind of fake war. I sat down on a couch and drank a beer. He looked at my clothes dripping on the floor as if waiting for an explanation but I offered none. He said it was sad to hear that my friend Glenn was having problems. He sounded sincere and without the usual ironic backspin and I replied that Glenn was a kamikaze drinker. Of course having spent a couple of years in the South Pacific during World War II “kamikaze” had a special meaning to him. He turned to me gravely and said, “It can be a terrible disease. I started loving alcohol when I was fourteen. My brother Richard could take it or leave it.” His hands waved at some invisible point in the air. For a unique moment I felt compassionate. “I hope it’s not a problem for you,” he said. He was staring at me and I said I didn’t think so. I averted my eyes to a locked book cabinet of my mother’s first editions of Robert Frost, as if anyone in Marquette would steal them. I thought of Frost as tedious but my mother had seen him perform several times when she was in college and loved his work. She was disappointed when Frost consented to read at the Kennedy inaugural. “I heard Robert Frost was mean when he was drunk,” I offered. My father took this comment quite seriously and said, “Then he could be mean when he wasn’t drunk. I still regret the dog.” He was referring to an incident when I was in second grade. My father had a nasty bulldog at the time because of his sentimental attachment to Yale. The dog severely bit the hand of a little girl classmate of mine and her father, a county road worker, came over and shot the dog on our lawn. My father got the man fired and they moved away from Marquette. I knew that he had paid to get the girl’s hand fixed but so what? At that moment I wanted him to regret an incident with Clarence but there was a question of whether he remembered it. Once a few years back when he was red-eyed and drinking in the morning he was yelling at Clarence out in the flower garden. Clarence was kneeling over a bed of flowers and my father tried to kick him but Clarence caught his shoe and upended him. I saw it from the bedroom window. I was uncomfortably pleased.