“It’s a good thing,” I added. “This girl — she could never be a good mother. And the lady who’s hiring me? She’s kind of neat. She’s nice and pretty and she owns a fancy restaurant in town.”
“That’s why she needs you,” said my mother, concerned. “She’s too busy for a child.”
I was about to try to defend Sarah when my father asked with unfeigned interest, “What restaurant?”
“Le Petit Moulin,” I said.
My mother turned and made a knowing face. “A fineschmecker running a place for other fineschmeckers.”
My father smiled broadly. “Oh, I remember her. Very nice woman.” My mother turned her back to us, flipping the flapjacks and throwing the latkes into hot oil, refusing to let go of her skepticism regarding the whole matter. My father continued. “She would come and check out those potatoes as if they were diamonds. But she would sometimes take the ones with a bit of rot in them anyway, knowing that once the rot part was cut out the rest of the potato would be sweeter than most. Smart lady.”
“Why can’t she have her own children?” asked my mother, continuing in her doubt.
“Mom, I don’t know. I can’t ask. I hardly know her.”
“What about her husband?”
“What about her husband?”
“Who is he?”
It was a little surprising even to me that I knew so little about him. “I think he’s probably a professor of some sort, but I’m not sure.”
“Hmph,” said my mother. “Academics.” Now she was muttering. “They all shoot from the hip. And the hip is always in the chair.”
“What did you say?” asked my father.
“Nothing,” said my mother. “Keeping a safe distance never keeps one from having an opinion, is all. Having no dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats.” Then she added, “Pull your seat up to the table. The food is ready.”
My father had more of a sense of humor than my mother. “Just because I’m hard of hearing,” he said to her now, smiling, “doesn’t mean you’re not mumbling!” Yet it was his sense of adventure she had had to sign on for long ago, good-naturedly, and in reluctant love, and he had taken her on something of a journey, out here to the country, to this farm. But she had been game. At least at first.
“Oh, well, someday maybe I’ll open a restaurant,” she said now, sighing brightly, which seemed about as happy as she got — a sigh with some light in it. She then added a remark that typified the sort that filled me with loathing for her. “You know, with the new year approaching, I’ve come to realize I’ve done nothing these past decades but devote my energies to the interests of others. So, soon? I’m going to start focusing on myself.”
“Well, before you get started, darling,” said my father, “could you please pass the syrup?”
Once when I was a kid my father planted ten acres of corn and rye and then midsummer plowed just the rye, making a graphic ribbon effect through the rolling fields. “This would be best seen by air,” said my dad. The whole reason he had become a farmer is that he thought it would be fun. And so he hired a guy from Minneapolis to take an aerial photo of it, and we stuck it up on the fridge with little spud magnets. It looked beautiful — the gold of the mown rye striping the green corn and both undulating through like a performing pair of lovebird dolphins. This, I pretended, was a picture of my parents’ marriage. My mother had thought she was marrying a college president’s son but got a hobby farmer instead, yet she’d followed him. She stayed with him wherever the hell it was they were going. She was like a stickleback fish caught inland as the glacier retreated and the rivers — the only access to the sea — disappeared. She would have to make do, in this landlocked lake of love. I knew, as she had mentioned it, that she’d thought there’d be money — he’d grown up in a house with columns — but she hadn’t realized there was none: the house was owned by the college. Even when she and my father came to Dellacrosse and bought our old brick house, with its falling-apart shed and barn but its flowerbeds gorgeous with pansies and impatiens, she didn’t understand that those particular flowers were annuals, and so she waited for them to return the next year, feeling dashed and betrayed when they didn’t. Another mirage! But eventually she learned to plant her own. And for a while she was a pro. Until she got too tired. That was when she installed mirrors in the flowerbeds, slowly learning the art of mirage herself.
After our late breakfast the winds picked up, and soon there was a thunderstorm, the sky yellowish and the clouds filled with the crunch and rip of lightning. The leafless trees looked frail and surprised. The sudden downpour eliminated practically all the snow on the ground, and because the drainage on the county roads was so poor, they filled like canals with water, just sitting there glistening, ready to turn to ice when the temperature dipped later in the afternoon. Which it did.
Our actual Christmas ceremonies for the day, outside of breakfast, had been so painfully casual — no hamentashen, no pfeffernüsse, no kringle from Racine — that I wondered why we had bothered. Perhaps my mother, the keeper of ritual, had lost interest in this ostensibly Christian custom now that we had grown, and my father didn’t really know how to take over. Where was the turkey, its yankable heart in a baggie jammed up its butt? On the other hand, my mother had given me a carefully wrapped present of a pearl necklace and watched, teary-eyed, as I opened it. “Every woman should have a pearl necklace,” she said. “When I was your age I got one.” From my father, I knew. And now, with no man in my life, even though I was only twenty, she would be the one to bestow this artifact of womanhood, this rite of passage, this gyno-noose, upon me. That I might in fact never have an occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of Republican doing so probably never occurred to her. I think she saw it as a kind of ticket off the farm and out into the world, wherever that was.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and kissed her cheek, which was simultaneously powdery and damp. I thrust the velveteen box of pearls high, as if making a toast. “Here’s to Jesus,” I said.
My mom looked at me from a great and concerned distance. Their present to Robert was a handheld instant star and constellation identifier.
Another flurry of thunderclouds passed by overhead and hail came pounding down on our roof, and down the chimney, crackling in the fireplace as if to mock the sound of fire and then bouncing out from the hearth onto the wood floor. It was as if I had unstrung my mother’s pearls and just flung them around.
Afterward we sat around and watched TV. Only once do I remember our going to church on Christmas — the Norwegian Lutheran church in town. My father had cast his WASP eye around at the stained-glass windows and their bright, jellied scenes and designs, and then murmured, perhaps recalling his churchier past or struggling against some ancestral Puritan pride, “I think that’s an original Koshkonong window. Or, wait a minute, let me see, maybe it’s not—” and my mother had whispered in a fond hiss, “Let’s face it, Bo: You know nothing about the goyim.”
“There’s lots of strange weather all around the country,” my dad said now, sitting down to join us.
“What do you mean?” I asked, a little frightened. Like a child, I still trusted him to know all.
“Well, there are a lot of storms in odd places and high winds”—he slowed down to subdue his own dark report—“and eerie calms …”
“Eerie calms?” I asked.
“There’s a pregnant pause outside Kenosha that’s scaring the pants off ’em.”