Drinking a cold, sweet Pepsi in a coffee shop across from the bus station in Duluth, I scanned the want ads. A taconite-mining company based in a small town was looking for a cleaning-and-maintenance trainee in their shop; it was one of the few entry-level positions in that kind of operation. On the opposite page from the job ads were “housing to share” listings.
The three-bedroom house I moved into was already occupied by two women in their mid-twenties. Erin and Cheryl Anne were a nurse and a medical receptionist, respectively, and close friends. They’d lived in the rented house for over a year, losing their previous roommate to “marriage and real life,” Cheryl Anne said. They were cordial and pleasant to me, and I to them, from the start.
That’s where we got stuck, at cordiality. The passage of time and the fact that I paid a third of the rent did nothing to lessen the feeling that I’d moved into their long-established home. Sometimes, when the TV’s blue light flickered over the living room, I joined them, but we rarely spoke. I never turned on the TV set on the occasions that I was home alone. So, at the end of my first days on the job, hot Indian-summer days of late September, I’d walk down to the small and thinly stocked city library, to check out paperback thrillers.
When I think about those days, that’s what I remember, the simplicity of it. Shopping for food not in the grocery store but in the drugstore, where the center aisle was full of cheap nonperishables: soft French bread so full of preservatives that it lasted for weeks, strawberry jam, 99-cent spaghetti and macaroni that stuck together no matter how carefully it was prepared. Evenings on the porch, drinking store-brand cola with ice cubes that tasted like the freezer, the last of the day’s light dwindling in the west.
“What are you doing up there, Sadie?” my father asked, over the long-distance wires. “Your aunt is gone, you’ve got no family there anymore.”
“I have friends here,” I said. “I have a job.”
The job part was true, of course, but I had nothing that rose beyond friendly acquaintanceships so far.
“I just don’t understand it. You up and quit school for no reason that I can see, go live in a little town that isn’t even where you grew up,” he said. “You’re not even taking night classes, are you?”
“No,” I said.
“Why would you want to live up there, in the middle of nowhere?”
“It was good enough-” I started to say, then caught myself.
“Good enough for me to send you there when you were 13?” he said, finishing my thought. “Is that what this is all about? You’re angry?”
“No,” I said, “no, I’m not. Look…” I twisted the phone cord around my thumb. “I’m just trying to have a life. To make a life, that’s all.”
In the silence that followed I could almost hear him think that it wasn’t much of a life, an industrial job and a rented room, but he couldn’t say any more. I was 19, an adult.
“What about Christmas?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you like to come home then?”
New Mexico at Christmastime. Light glowing from the farolitos- sand-weighted brown paper bags with candles in them- and the sopaipillas and rich mole sauce of a traditional Noche Buena feast on Christmas Eve…
“Is Buddy coming home at Christmas, too?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father said. “He’s got a week of leave.”
I put another twist in the phone cord. “I can’t come,” I said.
“Why not? Surely you’re not working?”
“The mine runs 365 days a year,” I said. “It costs too much for them to shut the equipment down and then start it back up. And I was the most recent person hired. It’s too early for me to ask for Christmas off.”
I wanted him to believe it, but he wasn’t stupid. “I haven’t had you and your brother under the same roof for years,” my father said. “Why is that, Sadie?” The bafflement in his voice seemed, for all the world, to be genuine.
My thumb was turning red from having the phone cord wrapped so tightly around it. You know why. I tried to tell you, and you wouldn’t listen.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t come.”
January came, and with it the coldest weather of all. Night came so early that I walked home from work in darkness, and it was too cold and icy to go out after dinner. My chief entertainment became the paperback novels I checked out, several weeks’ worth at a time, from the library on Saturday afternoon.
I should have realized something was wrong with my life when I strayed into the wrong section of the library, found a paperback of Othello, and immediately wanted to check it out.
After leaving school, I’d believed I’d never torture myself with anything an English teacher would approve of ever again. But then, standing amid the faint attic scent and educational posters of the public library, I felt a thrill of pleasure and nostalgia, remembering Othello as being the only Shakespeare I’d really liked. Something about the world Othello, Iago, and Cassio lived in, that world of martial duty and sometimes perverted honor, had spoken to me. At home on those coldest of nights, I read and reread Othello. The library had to send two overdue notices before I returned it.
If this were a movie, Othello would have changed my life. I would have moved on to other Shakespeare plays, loved them too, and finally enrolled in community college. But it didn’t work out that way. After Othello, I went back to the pulp novels I’d preferred before.
And then, in the spring, I found something else I liked to do.
In the maintenance shop, I worked with an Armenian-American girl, thick-waisted, dark-haired, pleasant-looking, easy to talk to. Her name was Silva, and she seemed to live for one thing: the dance at the VFW hall every Saturday night.
“You should come,” Silva said more than once, but I’d been noncommittal. Dances at the VFW hall sounded too much like bingo or pie suppers at a church to me, but one March night, I decided there was no harm in checking it out.
At nine-thirty, the scene at the VFW hall was surprisingly animated; people spilled out onto the steps along with light and music from inside. The high spirits of the crowd surprised me, but it didn’t take long to learn the secret.
Technically, these dances were dry, meaning no alcohol was served. But, as is painfully typical of small-town life, the majority of the young people inside the hall were in some stage of intoxication. Bottles were passed around in the shadows of the parking lot, and if you weren’t lucky enough to know someone who’d brought a bottle, there was Brent, a local entrepreneur who parked his Buick LeSabre near the VFW hall and sold liquor from the trunk. Ill at ease, and feeling like an outsider, I quickly sought him out.
Alcohol hadn’t been a part of my life since a few girls’ nights out at UNLV. The single shot of whiskey hit me hard. Pleasurably hard. Not long after, a young man I didn’t know asked me to dance, and I said yes. Silva, flushed with exertion and pleasure, brushed by and winked at me. I felt the world beginning to drift away, just a little. I liked it. Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized how depriving and monastic an existence I’d created for myself. It was like a burden that I was only now letting slip from my shoulders.