It was strange to think of this woman Sarah knowing my father.
“Did you ever travel into town with them?” she asked.
I fidgeted a bit. Having to draw on my past like this was not what I had expected, and summoning it, making it come to me, was like coaxing a reluctant thing. “Not very often. I think once or twice my brother and I went with them and we just ran around the place annoying people. Another time I remember sitting under my parents’ rickety sales table reading a book. There might have been another time when I just stayed in the truck.” Or maybe that was Milwaukee. I couldn’t recall.
“Are they still farming? I just don’t see him at the morning market anymore.”
“Oh, not too much,” I said. “They sold off a lot of the farm to some Amish people and now they’re quasi retired.” I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. “I am quasi ready to go,” I would announce. Or, “I’m feeling a bit quasi today.” Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.
“Or quasi something,” I added. What my father really was was not quasi retired but quasi drunk. He was not old, but he acted old — nutty old. To amuse himself he often took to driving his combine down the county roads to deliberately slow up traffic. “I had them backed up seventeen deep,” he once boasted to my mom.
“Seventeen’s a mob,” said my mother. “You’d better be careful.”
“How old’s your dad now?” asked Sarah Brink.
“Forty-five.”
“Forty-five! Why, I’m forty-five. That means I’m old enough to be your …” She took a breath, still processing her own amazement.
“To be my dad?” I said.
A joke. I did not mean for this to imply some lack of femininity on her part. If it wasn’t a successful joke, then it was instead a compliment, for I didn’t want, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me — to have! to know! to wear! — her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.
Sarah Brink laughed, a quasi laugh, a socially constructed laugh — a collection of predetermined notes, like the chimes of a doorbell.
“So here’s the job description,” she said when the laugh was through.
Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialogue balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive. I tried to remember everything Sarah Brink had said to me. It was a mile home to my apartment, so I replayed long snippets of her voice, though the cold air was the sort that bullied a walker into mental muteness. This is an incredibly important position for us, even if we are hiring at the last minute. If we hire you, we would like you to be there with us for everything, from the very first day. We would like you to feel like part of our family, since of course you will be part of it. I tried to think of who Sarah Brink reminded me of, though I was sure it wasn’t anyone I’d actually met. Probably she reminded me of a character from a television show I’d watched years before. But not the star. Definitely not the star. More like the star’s neatnik roommate or the star’s kooky cousin from Cleveland. I knew, even once she had a baby, she would never be able to shake the Auntie Mame quality from her mothering. There were worse things, I supposed.
In the sky the light was thin and draining. Dusk was beginning already, although it was only three in the afternoon. The sun set earliest in these days before Christmas—“the shortest days of the year,” which only meant the darkest — and it made for a lonely walk home. My apartment was in one of those old frame houses close to campus, in the student ghetto that abutted the university stadium. It was a corner house, and the first-floor apartment I shared with Murph was to the south, on the left as one walked up the stairs to the porch. Murph’s real name, Elizabeth Murphy Krueger, adorned our mailbox along with mine on an index card in sparkly green glue. Across the street the gray concrete stadium wall rose three times higher than any building around, and it overshadowed the neighborhood in a bleak and brutal way. In spring and fall convening marching bands, with their vibrating tubas and snares, routinely rattled our windowpanes. Sun reached our rooms only when directly overhead — in May at noon — or on a winter morning when reflected from some fluke drifts of a snowstorm, or in the afternoon when the angle of its setting caused it to flare briefly through the back windows of the kitchen. When a generous patch of sun appeared on the floor, it was a pleasure just to stand in it. (Was I too old or too young to be getting my pleasure there? I was not the right age, surely.) After a rainstorm, or during a winter thaw, one could walk by the stadium and hear the rush of water running inside from the top seats, dropping down row by row to the bottom, a perfectly graduated waterfall, although, captured and magnified within the concrete construction of the stadium, the sound sometimes rose to a roaring whoosh. Often people stopped along the sidewalks to point at the exterior stadium wall and say, “Isn’t the stadium empty? What is that sound?”
“It’s the revolution,” Murph liked to say. To her, stadiums were where insurgents were shot, and this caused her to have mixed feelings about living so close, to say nothing of her feelings about the home football games, when curb space was scarce and the parked cars of out-of-towners jammed our streets, their cheers from the stands like a screaming wind through town, the red of their thousands of sweatshirts like an invasion of bright bugs. On Sunday mornings, the day after the games, the sidewalk would be littered with cardboard signs that read I NEED TICKETS.
Murph was now only technically my roommate, since she mostly lived a mile away in a subletted condo with her new boyfriend, a sixth-year senior. I had a tendency to forget about this — looking forward to telling her something, wondering what we might cook up for supper, expecting to see her there, brooding, with her sweater thrown over her shoulders and her sleeves wound round her neck, a look that was elegant on her but on me would have made me appear insane. And then I would come home to realize, once more, that it was just me there. She would leave the telltale jetsam and flotsam, hastily changed clothes, carelessly written notes. Hey, Tass, I drank the last of the milk — sorry. So I was left with the ambivalence of having to pay with aloneness for an apartment I could not alone afford. It was not miserable — often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I’d felt the same sinking feeling when she was.
The porous dry rot of our front steps still held weight — six slim tenants, single file — but every time I climbed them I worried it could be my last: surely the next time my foot would go through and I would have to be pried from the splintery wreckage by a rescue squad phoned by the watchful Kay upstairs. Our landlord, Mr. Wettersten, was classically absentee, though he believed in good boilers and, when school was in session, did not stint with heat, perhaps fearing the lawsuits of parents. You could shower several times a day, or at the last minute: your hair would dry in a snap over the radiators. Sometimes my apartment would so overheat that my fingernails would dry up and crack and break off in my gloves, chips of them stuck in the woolen fingertips. Now, as I unlocked the door and pushed in, the pipes were clanking and letting loose with their small internal explosions; no pipe had ever yet burst, though if the boiler kicked on at night, the quaking could pull you alarmedly from sleep. It was, at times, like living in a factory. Kay, who lived in the largest flat, was middle-aged and the only tenant not a student; she was always in some skirmish with the landlord about the building. “He has no idea what he’s up against, letting this building go the way he has,” Kay said to me once. “When something’s off here I have nothing else to think about. I mean, I have no other life. I can make this my life. He doesn’t appreciate what he’s up against. He’s up against someone with no life.” So we all let Kay manage the troubles of the house. She had been there for more than a decade. Murph sometimes referred to the tenants of the house as the Clutter Family, by which I assumed — I hoped, I prayed — she meant all their clutter.