Spring usually comes very late to the northern plains. The rule of thumb is that cannot put out tomato plants safely before Memorial Day, because even up until that late date there is still real danger of a hard frost.
When the temperature falls below the freezing point, which happens usually at night, and it doesn’t warm up above freezing in the morning, that’s a hard frost. Many plants can survive when the temperature goes below freezing at night as long as they thaw the next morning, but few can endure a hard frost. A hard frost, like hard feelings, kills. One kills plants, the other other less-tangible things, like tenderness, compassion, relationships, people . . .
On April 16, 1987, Margaret walked into her living room and picked up the phone on the third ring. It was a sweltering hot afternoon in the 90s, much too hot for the week before Easter. A heat wave in April was so rare that when in later years she would think back on what had happened, what was about to happen during that week and during the following weeks and months, she would start to doubt the accuracy of her memories. To begin with, it couldn’t have been that hot, she would think.
During the five years she had lived in the Fargo area, April had always been cold, at best in the mid-40s. At worst, below zero. Way below. Sometimes as low as 13 below. But not that year.
When she walked from the kitchen at the back of duplex apartment to pick up the phone that day, Margaret was forty-two, feeling wilted, hot and tired.
She had spent the night before trying to beat the heat. After not being able to sleep in her own bed in what used to be the dining room, she had put a sheet on the floor in her daughter’s bedroom underneath the open window, and she had lain there in her nightgown hoping to catch any breeze that might be generated outside. Her daughter was handling the heat better than she did, sound asleep in her bed a few feet away.
There were no breezes to be had. Margaret sleepily pinned her longings for relief on the outflow of the air conditioner in the dining room window of the duplex next door. As she shifted and dozed on the hard floor, she kept waking up to the air conditioner’s rattle. It doesn't really make a breeze, Margaret realized on one level, all it was doing was putting out hot air exhausted from the neighbor's apartment. She had lingered there hoping anyway on the floor, too tired to move. Margaret couldn’t afford to buy a fan.
She had just gotten a contract as a technical writer at a supercomputer company a few days earlier. Things were starting to fall into place for her financially. But money was still tight, and she had just bought her first new car. It wasn’t much. But after a string of used cars that broke down all the time, that new car, however modest, was a big improvement.
The alternator had gone out on her last car on the way to her last technical writing job one morning. Somehow she got the car going after work long enough to drive the car into a Chevy dealer’s lot on the way home. The car barely made it through the gate in the chain link fence before it came to a dead stop in the parking lot. She went into the showroom, traded the old car in, and she bought a Chevette on the spot, because it was the cheapest version of the cheapest car she could find. The model she got was called a Scout, and it was so stripped down it didn’t have a glove compartment door. The salesman told her when she got more money she could get a door from a junk yard and have it spray painted to match and installed. Something to look forward to . . .
Since the car she drove in on was no longer mobile, and the dealer had to do something to the new car that meant she couldn’t drive it home that day, the car salesman had offered her a ride home.
While he drove, the salesman told her about himself. He told her that he was in his second marriage. He had a teenage son from his first marriage and his new wife had a teenage daughter. The girl and the boy kept each other company while the car salesman and his bride went out to dinner together after work every night. He thought it was cute that the young ones seemed to be bonding with each other. Margaret thought gloomily that what he was describing as a rosy picture from his point of view was pretty close to child neglect. No parents in the home until late in the evening. No family dinner. No supervision. Let the kids eat microwaved food they take out of the freezer. With the two teenagers thrown together like that, trouble was probably brewing. She thanked him profusely for going out of his way when he left her off in front of the house. She told herself she didn’t understand people like that, marriages like that.
The house she lived in with her two children, Rainbow, 12, and Justice 15, was an old wooden duplex with one apartment on each of two floors. Her landlord, a man in his late thirties, lived upstairs. The house was in a blue collar neighborhood a few miles northeast of downtown Minneapolis. Because the small homes in the area had originally been build for Polish families who worked for the railroad, the area was sometimes called Nordeast. The residents didn’t mind hearing the name used, and they used the name themselves.
Before she had started getting technical writing jobs the previous year, Margaret had been at the University of Minnesota for most of the previous nine years, (except for two years that she took off to spend more time with her children). She was there first as an undergraduate and then as a candidate for an M.A., and finally for a year taking classes towards a Ph.D.
During her undergraduate days, she had been living, just barely getting the family by, on welfare. She had left her husband after years of looking for a way out when she found out that welfare offered training program that would pay for child care and would give her a monthly check while she finished the college degree she had interrupted when she first met him. While they were still together, she had started taking classes part time, making the 25 mile commute to the state college at Moorhead from their house on a farmstead 5 miles outside of a town called Barnesville.
When she had left John, she had to stop going to college part time. Going full time was the only way to get the money for child care. You couldn't qualify if you were taking less than 14 credits. She got a Pell Grant that covered the tuition and opart of her books and supplies.
She had no qualms about applying for welfare. She thought of it as a necessary way to survive long enough to finish her college education. She felt she had to do it, because John couldn't afford enough to support the family in separate homes, and because she saw her college degree as her only way out. Out of what? Out of being with someone who hadn't fulfilled her dreams. Out of the anonymity of living in a nuclear family on the fringes of a farming community that didn't know what to make of two atheist former hippies who had lived in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco and had children named Justice and Rainbow.
And so she had found her way out, way out, on her own with a 2 year old and a 4 year old, poor both in money and time.
She thought of her decision to use welfare that way as a sign of her intelligence. She was always dismayed when she realized from time to time from some unguarded expression or bad choice of words that some people, probably most, viewed anyone, her, living on welfare as lower class. In this as in other things she didn’t want to accept, Margaret realized about herself that she would be surprised to find out the same thing about people or about herself when she had had the same insight over and over again.
The caller on the other end was her former father-in-law, Herman, calling from Fargo. In a measured way, he told her the news that her ex-husband, John, had disappeared.
Herman’s voice did not show the emotion she knew he must be feeling. It was a trait she’d come to understand about her husband’s relatives, that they were trained from infancy to control their emotions. She knew he must be in a lot of pain.
For a few years, John had living with a good for nothing overweight roommate named Charlie in one of two first floor apartments in an old wood frame two story house in Fargo that was broken up into four apartments. Charlie had called Herman three days earlier and told him that John had disappeared. Charlie had asked Herman if he knew where John was.
Margaret and Herman talked about why John might have disappeared, where he might have gone. They all knew he was in trouble with the IRS. John hadn’t paid taxes for years. There’s a lot he had stopped doing since Margaret and the kids had moved out. Herman said, “Maybe he’s gone to Canada. Trying to avoid being put in jail.” Charlie had said that as far as he could tell, John hadn’t left a note.
Margaret and John had married and had their son, Justice, in San Francisco. Without consulting her, John had decided to buy his parent’s greeting card distributing business and that they were going to move to Fargo. Margaret had thought that John was going to finish his own college degree, and that they would live on the land, someplace cool she thought. They had looked at land in Oregon. But after the baby had come, John’s unilateral plan had brought them to Fargo.
They lived in their in-law’s guest bedroom, and Herman trained John in the greeting card business. At first he had seemed to have turned into a clone of his father. He shaved his beard, leaving mutton chop whiskers. He cut his hair. He started dressing like his father, in J. C. Penny’s permapress shirts, wearing clip on ties, shoes of man-made materials, polyester pants. He’d bought his parent’s Rambler Americana station wagon for driving the cards around the three state area, distributing them to little drug stores. He had worked less and less on the business as time went by. He had fallen behind on the payments to his parents, money they could have used during their retirement. Margaret wondered to Herman if there was any significance to the fact that he disappeared on April 13th, two days before tax deadline.
She told Herman that John had asked their daughter Rainbow for permission to commit suicide while she had been visiting him over Thanksgiving. She said that John told Rainbow he was convinced he would be going to jail, he owed so much money to the IRS. He had read how men were raped in jail. He was doubly afraid because he had painful hemorrhoids. He had asked his little daughter to promise to make sure to send him a certain brand of medicated wipes if he ever was jailed.
The whole story had come out when her 10 year old daughter stepped off the Greyhound from Fargo after a week with her father. From that moment on, Margaret could never do anything right as far as her daughter was concerned. They had been very close. Margaret told people that what had passed between Rainbow and her father must have been so painful that she had to turn her anger somewhere, and it had come out against her mother.
After she hung up the phone, Margaret told Rainbow that her father was missing, repeating pretty much the words her ex father-in-law had said to her. Rainbow didn’t show much emotion.
They packed a few things in a suitcase, put it in the trunk of the Chevette. Margaret packed some snacks. And they left for Fargo.
On the way out through the front hall, they ran into the landlord of the duplex, who lived upstairs. He was in his early thirties, thick waisted, tall bearded, of Swedish descent. Ingvar Petersen. As usual, he was wearing a pair of small suede shoes. Margaret always thought his feet (or maybe it was his too-tight shoes) were too small for his body. He carried a brown paper bag tucked between his arm and his body. Probably he’s got the quart of whiskey he drinks every day, Margaret thought.
They had driven the 350 miles to Fargo on the big Interstate 94 scores of times. Margaret always said that she didn’t quite understand how she got the job, but for most of the past ten years whenever the children were legally supposed to go to visit their father, she would drive 350 miles up north to drop them off, and then 350 miles back south, alone. When the visitation was over, she would drive back up alone and pick them u p, and bring them back tot the Twicn Cities again.
They talked.
Herman and Millie were polite, as usual. Hospitable to a fault.
That evening they went to see the roommate. He didn't invite them inside. They stood around on the grass in back of the old Fargo wood-framed house, while Kurt told them what John had done the night he disappeared.
Margaret cried and cried and cried. Nobody else seemed to have any tears. On Easter Sunday, she went to Mass at the Fargo cathedral. After Communion, she sat in the pew crying. I wish he was all right. I wish he was all right. The thought came to her, “He is all right.” A brief vision, if it was one, flashed in her mind’s eye. John was suffering. Bravely. Not crying. Numbly. Grimly. He was aware of her thoughts of him.
After Herman and Millie took them all out to breakfast, Rainbow and Margaret started for home.
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