Читать книгу Temperance Creek - Pamela Royes - Страница 13

Daughter of the Plains

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

—GRAHAM GREENE

My parents gave me and my two brothers a rich and respectable Presbyterian upbringing fifty miles south of the Canadian border in Grand Forks, North Dakota, population thirty thousand. The Red River Valley’s high prairie sprawled to the horizon in all directions, stark, fertile, and one of the flattest landscapes in the world.

Neatly laid out corner to corner and following the strict lines of the township-and-range system, it was a place where Methodists didn’t mix with Catholics (even after Kennedy was elected president), and the barley crop didn’t mingle with the corn. The wooded sloughs and muddy, winding Red River offered the only deviation from unrelenting quadrants of big and little plots.

My ancestors, part of the 750,000 Norwegians who immigrated to America in the late nineteenth century, settled here. They staked claims, stripped the sod, and scraped a living from the broad sweep of virgin soil that had drawn them clear across a continent in the hopes that this New World, in time, would provide for them.

My father, a third-generation descendant, was groomed for higher education and a future that didn’t include farming. As a Georgetown University–educated lawyer who ended up running a Cadillac dealership and later a real estate business with his father, he wore dark suits with silk ties, white shirts so brilliant they took your breath away, pants with knife-edge creases, and hand-buffed black shoes. He was careful with his money and subscribed to the Wall Street Journal but never invested a dime. He left for work the same time every morning (after chastely kissing “Mother”) and returned the same time each evening (when he kissed her again).

Prematurely gray, my dad smelled of spearmint and exuded dependability, like the evening news with Walter Cronkite. He had a great tenor voice, a barbershop voice. He sang “Moon River” along with Andy Williams and listened to Perry Como and Bing Crosby but not Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin, whom he considered lacking in moral restraint. He hummed, was an elegant dancer and a compulsive tickler. Saturday afternoons we shared a whole banana split at the Dairy Queen, two spoons. He called me “Droopy Drawers,” took me fishing in Minnesota, and taught me to hold a golf putter. As an avid sports fan, he exclaimed, “cripes all Friday” or “for crying out loud” when the football referee decided against his team. He had a short fuse and disliked unmade beds and getting lost. Honest to a fault, his face appeared whenever I was tempted to stretch the truth. I never saw him cry but once, at Grandpa’s funeral.

In his need to protect us, to provide for us, there was a feeling of urgency. He seemed desperate for us to decide our course. As if he’d already lost us to the uncertainty of the future.

“What will you study in college, Pammy?” Dad asked. I’d just finished my nightly childhood ritual of rummaging through his pockets for spare change and was lying on the living room rug, counting it. “Nursing, typing, maybe teaching?”

“No. I’m going to be a park ranger.”

“Hmmm. Where did you come up with that idea?”

From the glossy pictures and maps of the world included in the monthly National Geographic magazines and our hardcover copy of America’s National Parks, I’d plotted my future as a Canadian park ranger. It was Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park, fifty miles due north (where my family spent one idyllic summer vacation and I’d worn both the horses and the wranglers to a nubbin), that filled my head. If all else failed, if they forced me to teach or type, I would run away to Canada, steal a horse, and disappear into the woods.

“Dad, were there any other babies born the same day as me?”

“Of course.”

“Well, are you sure you took the right one home?”

“Come over here so I can tickle you.”

My mother, vivacious and resourceful, was the daughter of Idaho dry-land potato farmers, French and Cherokee on her father’s side, English on her mother’s. She rarely talked about her past, ashamed of her rural beginnings, handmade dresses, and the two-room shack shared with four siblings. Her mother and father divorced when she was eighteen. After high school graduation and without the financial resources to attend college, she moved to Monterey, California, and found work as a secretary in a war-supply office. It was there that she met Sergeant Bruce Severson, ten years her senior.

She loved red. She wore lipstick red as a cock’s comb, red as a wound. She wrapped our house in red. Red wallpaper, red tulips, petunias, and geraniums, and against my youthful protests she clothed me in red dresses, red sweaters, red jackets and scarves.

She drew terrific alligators.

From her dresser drawer she produced satin boxes of jewelry for my amusement. Flashing rings and sparkling ropes of pearls, bright beads, gold bracelets, and silver pendants on silver chains. A charm bracelet with clever silver charms including pendants inscribed with the names of her children and their dates of birth, a bicycle whose handlebars turned and wheels spun, a Mexican in a serape, and a covered wagon around which I invented countless stories.

She took night classes through the university and ran a Brownie troop. She sewed curtains and bedspreads, braided rugs, knitted sweaters, embroidered pillows, planted lavish flower beds, danced, and entertained. She never just sat. She turned a basement room into a studio and refinished furniture, painting portraits, pictures, and the walls of our home once a year whether they needed it or not. She created community murals and painted the downtown’s plate glass windows at Christmas and taught me to love literature and the arts, taking me to The Tempest at age eight and later to the Black Masada in London at age nineteen. She cooked elaborate meals from scratch, and I cut my culinary teeth on cocktail parties and hors d’oeuvres. As a child I rode the caboose of her ambitions from one civic meeting to the next, clutching my pad of paper and box of crayons.

The bathroom door is open a crack, and I’m sitting on the edge of the tub, watching Mom’s mirrored reflection. Dark-eyed and petite, she leans toward the mirror, chin jutted forward, eyebrows arching. Wearing a bathrobe belted at the waist, she brushes on blue eye shadow, applies liner, and when lifting her elbow to sweep the mascara wand up and away, her robe gapes slightly open. I straighten, transfixed. Between the folds I glimpse her white brassiere, the curve of her breast. When she begins to remove the pink curlers, I blurt, “I want to be just like you.” She laughs, turning to look at me.

“Why did you say that?”

“You’re beautiful, Mom.” And staring at our reflections, I know a sudden clutch of fear. The impossibility. To be like her.

Following her into the bedroom, I sprawl on the massive bed to furtively pick scabs as she shrugs into a girdle taken from the dresser, shifting from foot to foot to pull it up, like a contortionist. When the girdle’s above the belly button, she shifts hand positions to pull it down around the thighs, and there is a loud snap as she pulls her fingers free. From toes to mid-thigh, she bends to roll a silky nylon up each leg, clipping them front and back with metal fasteners, then disappears briefly into the closet and materializes dressed in a swirling, sleeveless blue-green dress. Like the colors of earth when seen from space.

She lights on the edge of the bed. “Help me with the zipper, will you?”

From a high shelf she retrieves an elegant mink stole, symbolic of her economic standing in our class-driven Midwestern community. A position, I would come to understand, she never for one moment took for granted.

Wedging her feet into spike-heeled, pointy-toed, blue satin evening shoes, she moans and, with a fluttering motion of her hands, shoos me from the room and closes the door.

I don’t want them going out another night this week, don’t want to be left in the care of my brother Mark who would sooner eat brussels sprouts than endure a long evening babysitting his sister.

In the study, Dad stands jiggling the change in his pocket while watching a golf match. When Mom enters the room, he checks his wristwatch. She leans over me with a kiss that smells of Seagram’s and Chanel. When they leave, I watch through the window as the Oldsmobile belches exhaust from the open garage door into the evening air. I hang over the back of the couch, waving wildly as the car backs down the driveway onto the street.

In an era of abundance and opportunity, little was expected of children in my economic bracket. We went to school. We took lessons. We joined clubs. Brownies, Scouts, 4-H. I joined these clubs and attended the meetings hopeful that something would happen. We might go hiking. Someone might light a campfire. But nothing like that ever happened.

Until we were teenagers, our parents didn’t want us to work. It made them look impoverished. Because I was an impatient, energetic child, I remember feeling much of childhood was dedicated to watching the hands on the clock. Waiting for Mom to come home from the Elks, the country club, bridge club, the YWCA. Waiting for the recess buzzer, for someone to pick me up, for Christmas, for summer vacation to start, for the next Marvel comic book, the ice-cream man, the bookmobile, the toaster to pop. Waiting to turn ten.

I was in constant motion. Movement was hope. So I ran. Crossing shaded yards and quiet streets, intoxicated by speed and dreams of flying. I ran, lifting my feet, praying for the ground to fall away, certain—if I could work up enough speed—my faith would carry me wherever I wanted to go.

Anything was possible as I skulked through the alleys setting cardboard-box rabbit traps and searching for discarded treasure, bouncing balls against and over the house, drawing chalk houses and digging backyard holes to reach China, uncertain what I would say when I broke through. There was my purple Schwinn stallion named Dynamite, the public swimming pool, and lime slushes with my best friend Rio at the Dairy Queen. There were jump ropes and jacks, roller skates, King of the Mountain, and breaking my wrist when launched as the human cannonball in a neighborhood circus production (for which I wore a cast most of the third grade, and learned cursive with my left hand). There was ice-skating, tobogganing at Lincoln Park, and hockey played with brooms and cans of tuna. It froze and thawed and in spring, I sent twigs down the rivulets that ran beside the curbs, and on summer evenings we chased the industrial mosquito fogger through the alleys.

We played, blissfully aware no one would be looking for us until dinnertime.

Every adult I knew, with the exception of my mom and dad, my grandpa Severson, and a few aunts and uncles were addressed as Mr. or Mrs.

Grandpa Severson, a widower, lived downtown in a fourth-floor apartment of the Dakota Motel. He wore dark suits with white shirts and monogrammed cuff links and had thick white hair. When he laughed he threw his head back and made a high, whinnying sound. Every other Sunday we rode the elevator up after church, and he would pour me a 7 Up while the adults drank Bloody Marys. I sat on his lap and he smelled of starched cotton and peppermint candy. Carefully, he would get down the fragile glass figurines from the mahogany shelf above the nubby brown couch and let me play with them, and because he trusted me, I never broke one. On alternate Sundays, he took a taxi to our house in the suburbs and ate Sunday dinner with my family.

Great-Aunt Regina lived alone and managed the family farm outside Kloten, North Dakota, in the white and spacious farmhouse built by my sturdy Norwegian ancestors. In summer my brothers and I went to visit. Sometimes I was allowed to bring a friend. We ran wild through the fertile brackish sloughs, the windbreaks, and the fields, capturing dragonflies with our bare hands and tallying the scores. Although the big draft teams were long gone, the barn musty and deserted, it echoed still with life, and we scattered table scraps for the chickens and stalked the feral barn cats.

Sometimes, when I came by myself, I helped Aunt Regina roll out thin sheets of lefse, the Scandinavian flatbread, and ate them rolled with butter and sugar. We took lunch to the field hands in a pail covered with a white dish towel, and afterward the men picked their teeth with stalks of grain. On hot afternoons we read together on the screened porch. We cut zinnias, gladiolas, and daisies for the table. Five times a day she fed me and five times a day she said grace, and gave thanks. There was breakfast, forenoon coffee, dinner, afternoon coffee, and supper. She never took off her apron except for church, where she played the organ every Sunday, and afterward I helped her and the Lutheran ladies serve lunch. At night, she loosened her hair, waist-length, white, and wavy, and as she brushed it, she counted aloud to a hundred. And I helped.

More vivid than any memory is Aunt Regina letting me stand on the running board while she bounced her black 1940 Ford sedan through fields of blue flax. And time as I knew it in other places, governed by clocks and schedules, was nonexistent.

I lived in two worlds: the world of my circumstances and the one of my imagining.