Possibly Some of Her Stories

Aunt Irene Wrote Poetry, and a Few Other Family Stories

2010-08-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

On Aug 16, 2010, at 3:04 PM, m got wrote:

Roseanne, does Al ever talk about HIS mother, Aunt Irene? Did she ever have a job outside the home and work? Do you know?

Love, Mart

On Aug 17, 2010, at 10:34 AM, Roseanne Sullivan wrote:

Hi Mart,

Do you know I visited Aunt Irene a number of times? Al does talk about her. I don't know if she ever worked outside the home. She didn't seem to have any intellectual interests.

I remember when I got Mummy and Aunt Irene together after many decades when they hadn't seen each other (I drove Mummy out to their farm). The two of them were like the country mouse (Aunt Irene) and the city mouse. Mummy was typically well dressed and fashion conscious. Aunt Irene's home was spotless, but she didn't seem to care about fashion.

In spite of their differences, they were amazed because after all the years they had not had anything to do with each other, they had some odd things in common. For example, they both smoked Raleighs, not the most popular brand.

On Aug 17, 2010, at 10:39 PM, Roseanne Sullivan wrote:

Hi again, Mart,

I forgot about something important, when I wrote you just now that I didn't think Aunt Irene had any intellectual interests. I remembered after I hit Send that Aunt Irene wrote poetry.

After Aunt Irene's youngest daughter, Janice, found out I studied poetry writing and taught creative writing at the U of Minn, Janice sent me some of Aunt Irene's poetry and asked me to tell her if it was any good. Janice said the poetry was from one of her students who wanted to be a poet. I now am convinced that Janice didn't tell me who really wrote the poetry so I would evaluate it impartially. More about Aunt Irene's poetry later.

Janice was a teacher at the time. Did you know that Janice had a M.A. in Math and taught Math in local schools? Janice later lost her teaching job (I think because she was too rough and harsh with the students, probably understandably because of how she was raised), and she concentrated on her dairy farm for the last 20 or so years of her life. She never married, and she was close to her sister Joyce's three boys, her nephews, Jerry, Jeff, and Keith.

After she stopped teaching, Janice worked part time at the post office to support her farming habit, since the farm was a losing proposition.

From time to time after I finally met Aunt Irene's family in the early 80s, I would get interesting letters from Janice full of colorful details.

For example, Janice's Christmas letters usually included an account of at least one collision during the past year involving one of her vehicles (which was being driven by Janice or one of her young nephews), and the collision was due in part to either a blizzard or a thick fog. The collision was always with either a, an Amish farmer neighbor's horse, b, a deer fleeing in panic out onto the highway during hunting season, or c, a wandering cow.

For about a decade at the end of her life, Janice lived with metastasized breast cancer which had spread to her left arm. She had had a big lump in her breast for years before she took the time off to see a doctor. Amazingly she survived a long time after the radical mastectomy, even though the cancer had already spread. Because the government declared her not to be disabled and denied her Social Security disability benefits, she had to keep working even though her arm was essentially useless. She drove to her job at the PO on the often slippery country roads, (and sometimes slid off into a ditch), sorted mail, drove home, and did her farm work with only one good arm.

The last time I saw Janice, I had brought her out to California for a vacation. It was about a year before she died in 2005 or so. She asked me if she could bring her grown nephew, Jeff, and I said sure. I have pictures of him and of her smiling, toothless but game with her arm hanging limp, in front of the house, in the back yard, and in front of various gorgeous coastal view along the Seventeen Mile Drive on the coast near Carmel where I took them sightseeing.

Janice was one of Al and Fran's two half-sisters, Janice's father, Ralph Priebe, had married Aunt Irene after Irene had been widowed and left with two boys, Francis and Alan. It was a first marriage for him.

Ralph had been born in Chicago and always wanted to farm, although he had never learned the skills. How could he have? His father and mother were in retail. I think they worked at Sears.

When they had saved enough money to escape the city and buy a place, Uncle Ralph and Aunt Irene first moved to a farm in Indiana, which is where Mummy had always told me they lived. Years later after Fran and Al had left home, the rest of the family moved to a farm in Wisconsin. Someone told me there was some sort of dramatic series of events behind the move, but I don't remember the details.

As you know, Fran and Al had the last name of Nadosy from their father Oliver. After Irene married Ralph, Ralph adopted Al and Fran. As a result, Al and Fran and Irene's three other children that she had by Ralph (Charlie, Joyce and Janice) were named Priebe.

I remember Ralph with revulsion as the least likeable man I ever met. I cannot even stand his name. Unlike other vicious people I've met, his meanness was in no way compensated for by any attractiveness, charm, intelligence, creativity, or good taste. His natural children were attached to him and they saw things from his point of view. On the other hand, his step-sons Fran and Al recount horror stories about how Ralph would beat them literally bloody when they didn't do mundane things to Ralph's liking.

Fran told me that one night he and Al didn't clean the dishes per Ralph's orders while Ralph and Irene went out for the evening. When they came home, Ralph raged up the stairs to the boys' bedroom. He chased Fran and Al out of bed and down the stairs beating them about their heads with a board until blood was pouring out of Fran's head. Even so, Ralph made them go back into the kitchen, take all the dishes out of the cupboards, scrub the dishes and the cupboards spotless, then dry and put the dishes back before they were allowed to go back to bed. I don't know what Irene was doing while all this was going on.

As soon as they could when they got older, Al and Fran got their names changed back to Nadosy and broke off communication with Ralph. When they had to see him to see their mother, they didn't speak to him and he didn't speak to them.

During the years I lived in Minneapolis and attended the university, I had no idea that Aunt Irene lived only 350 miles away from me in the eastern part of Wisconsin. Maybe I never realized her family had moved to WIsconsin because Mummy didn't think to tell me.

And I had no real idea about the true nature of terrible Uncle Ralph, except I had heard years ago from Mummy that when Irene and Mummy's middle sister, Alice, had come to stay along with her children after trouble with her own abusive husband, Ralph had thrown them all out in a fit of rage in the middle of the night, upset because he had to spend money to feed them all.

I got to know Aunt Irene's family only because one day around 1981 Al phoned me out of the blue when I was finishing my college degree at the U of Minn. Al had read a short story of mine that had won a contest in the Minnesota Daily, and he remembered that his mother had told him that he had a cousin going to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Al introduced himself to me and told me that his wife Dorothy Gross was teaching music at the U of Minn. Since Al is from the Hungarian side of the family, and Dorothy is Hungarian too, I invited them over for Hungarian food. That evening I joked that Al could have a scam going: call up strange women and finagle a free meal with them by claiming they are cousins.

That's the first time I had ever met anyone from Mummy's side of the family, except for that one brief visit you remember from Grandpa Kaposi when we were very small and living with Aunt Peggy and Uncle Ray while Mummy was in the hospital. Grandpa Kaposi was very short, maybe 5' 2" but Aunt Peggy, who often bragged about catching a tall man when she married 6' 1" Uncle Ray, told me Grandpa Kaposi was very handsome.

I remember before he got on the train to go back to California where he lived, Grandpa Kaposi gave $5 to Aunt Peggy for each of us. We never saw a penny of it after that. I was little but I had a lot of nerve, and I even asked her what happened to the money. I don't remember the answer she gave but it was on the level of how the money was used to take care of us, it wasn't for us personally.

Through Al I met the rest of his family in about 1982.

The first time I saw Janice she made an indelible impression. The occasion was the first time I drove out to meet the family in Wisconsin . We were about to have dinner at Aunt Irene and Uncle Ralph's farm house. Janice stomped in from the barn with her father in dirty boots and dungarees splashed with barn waste, in a gruff but not unkindly voice she introduced her large black dog called Demon to me, and then she unceremoniously plopped herself down to eat. She was loud and a little plump and was missing a lot of teeth.

Aunt Irene did all the cooking and housework. Ralph and his kids did the farm work. Everyone apparently looked down on "women's work."

Al's other half-sister Joyce was thin, kind of built like you and around your height, but not at all glamorous or stylish, unlike you. Joyce and all of Joyce's three boys, Jerry, Jeff, and Keith also had missing and visibly decayed teeth.

No wonder: one time I stayed at Joyce and her husband Ernie's house, about a mile from Aunt Irene's farm, and just about all the food Joyce fed her family was sugar-laden prepared foods. Pop tarts for breakfast in the freezer. Another freezer was stocked only with ice cream treats. Large bottles of pop were lined up in a long row. The only thing I remember her actually cooking was Hamburger Helper and a super sweet pineapple upside down cake.

Joyce and Ernie's home was right next to their cow barn, and the whole house reeked of cow urine inside.

And the boys were mean. I saw them kick and taunt Ralph's mother who was living with Irene and Ralph when the grandmother tottered out of her room to go to the bathroom. And I saw them torturing baby mice in the hay loft. Aunt Irene acted abusively to her mother-in-law too. But that's another story.

Joyce lived on her dead brother Charlie's place a few miles away from the two family farms that were close together.

Did you ever hear the story of how Al's half-brother Charlie died? Ralph had the habit of cutting the third grounding prong off 3 prong plugs for convenience, ignoring the safety ramifications. Charlie apparently took after his father amd did the same. The day before Charlie's divorce from a woman the family didn't like was final, Ralph found Charlie electrocuted in Charlie's barn in a puddle of water with a plugged-in electric drill beside him.

A conspiracy theory held firmly by all was that the wife's brothers had killed Charlie so the wife would be able to inherit the dairy farm. If Charlie had died one more day later, the divorce would have gone through, and they thought that Charlie had left would have stayed in the Priebe family. Maybe she would have gotten half of everything in the divorce settlement, but not all? To everyone's chagrin, the wife got all the cows and the farm. I seem to recall that the Priebes bought the cows and the farm back from her.

During the evening when I was staying at cousin Joyce's home, my kids were avidly watching TV, which we didn't have at home. I was uncomfortable, sick of the urine smell, and bored. Joyce came in and brusquely told me that her father was helping a cow give birth in the barn. My starry-eyed idealism about going back to the real life of the farm took me over. I had to see the birth, share in the cycle of nature. I hurried out to the barn.

Ralph did not acknowledge my greeting when I came in, and I proceeded to tell him I wanted to see the calf born. He didn't acknowledge that either. Ralph was standing in a big stall with the cow. Joyce's family was running the milking machines in the long room full of cows next door. The milk was flowing from the milking machines into hoses that fed into a big stainless steel holding vat.

I was shocked that Ralph had a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. I briefly recalled a Flannery O'Connor story in which a batch of milk got sent back from the dairy because the hired help had been smoking in the barn, and the smoke had ruined the milk. Could it be that no one was testing the milk for off flavors and odors any more? That thought soon passed, replaced with more unpleasant affronts to my starry eyed idealism.

Next I saw that Ralph wound some chains around the hind legs of the calf, which were by then protruding from the birth canal. The chains were connected to some sort of an electronic winch. I was simply amazed when Ralph turned a switch and started winching the calf out of its mother. So much for natural birth.

In a brief amount of time, the calf was standing wobbly next to its mother, covered with a gooey Vaseline-like substance. What happened next was an even worse violation of my dewy eyed expectations. The mother got in only a few licks of her tongue to clean her newborn calf before Ralph returned from where he had been coiling up the chains. Ralph picked up the calf by its middle. He carried it out of the stall, and into an adjacent area that had much smaller stall, where he left the newborn calf by itself about thirty feet from its mother. They could see each other but never touch each other again.

What's the meaning of this? I wondered.

Are you preparing this calf for veal? Yes. You don't even let it drink its mother's milk? No. I think he extracted all the new milk from the mother with a milking machine to sell. They would feed the veal calf when they get around to it with skim milk. From a bucket. Keeping it closely stalled is part of the veal making process, because the close enclosure keeps the calf from developing much muscle and makes the meat tender.

I went back into Joyce's house. I longed for the calf to have the comfort of its mother and the mother to have the comfort of her calf. Joyce's family was all still out in the barn milking. Unlike the farmers I met out when we lived in the country in Minnesota, these farmers bred of city stock did not have a routine. They got up whenever they wanted, and they milked any old time, when they got around to it.

I gave up. My participation in reality was over for the time being. In the kitchen, I grabbed a Nutty Buddy ice cream cone and joined my kids watching Fantasy Island in the living room until it was time for bed.

We left in the morning and joined Fran and his wife and two kids, Jody and Terry for breakfast at the farm where they lived 20 miles away, away from Ralph and away from his gruff, belittling siblings. Jody was at that time a beautiful red headed early teenager, still playing with a huge collection of Barbies. It was interesting to see her dressed in work clothes and helping her dad feed the pigs. Clodean and Fran were very hospitable and Clodean served a hearty breakfast. Terry sat at the breakfast table with us while we ate pork sausage. He apparently was trying to get a reaction out of us by snapping some metal snips over and over and telling us he would be using them in a few minutes to castrate the piglets out in the barn.

What with the castration snips at breakfast and the calf winching and the granny abuse and the mouse torture over the past few days, I felt a bit like I had fallen into a Wisconsin version of the Deliverance movie, and I was relieved to get the kids back in the car and to get on the road back to Minneapolis.

Now let's return to the story of Aunt Irene's poetry, which Janice had sent me soon after my first visit was over. After I had read the poetry (which wasn't notable), I had told Janice that if her student really wanted to be a poet, she should study the history of poetry and the various styles. She should work not on expressing herself, but she should prepare herself to write professionally by mastery of the craft of poetry. Janice never spoke of it again. I think they wanted me to tell her only that the poetry was great. Anything less denied their dewy eyed expectations.

Years later after I moved out here to California, I heard that Jan read one of Aunt Irene's poems at Aunt Irene's funeral. I had tried to go back for that funeral, but my car broke down on my way to the San Francisco airport for the flight out.

That breakdown was probably providential. Things get very intense at family reunions that happen around funerals and marriages and the like. All the old disappointments and resentments come up, not to mention paranoias. This happens even in families that aren't as messed up as ours.

Poor Al has always been in the out group. Aunt Irene was skilled at making sure she was in the inner circle, and Fran is like her in that way.

Practically speaking, the only way to make an inner circle is to exclude somebody. And I suspect it is always more satisfying to exclude someone who is aching to be accepted, like Al. So Al gets pushed to the outside most of the time. I can relate. Mummy was not as deft at such things as Aunt Irene. Neither am I.

Here is another little story that I think illustrates some of the differences between how Mummy and Aunt Irene approached life. After Mummy's and Aunt Irene's mother, our Grandma Yolanda Kaposi died, Grandpa Kaposi had put his three little daughters, Irene, Alice, and Mummy (Martha) into an orphanage because he couldn't take care of them. After he remarried, Grandpa's new wife Magda at first didn't want Grandpa to bring his daughters home from the orphanage. Aunt Irene made it clear she would do anything Magda wanted because Irene wanted to be able to go home. Mummy instead pinned her hopes on being adopted. (She told me that.) I feel that I absorbed maybe by osmosis Mummy's dream, and looking back on my life I find that I subconsciouly thought I find my "true people" who would appreciate me some day. Aunt Irene just decided to work with the family she had in a practical manner. Good for her.

Here is one example of Al getting hurt by being excluded. It happened after Fran's daughter Jody grew up, went to the Minneapolis Art Institute, and met John Peerenboom in around 1993 or so, Al, Dorothy, and separately Sunshine, and I went to northern Wisconsin to attend Jody and John's wedding. We all attended the wedding and the reception, but we were left out of the other events associated with the wedding when the reception was over. I thought that since I had flown all the way from California and since Al was Jody's uncle, we shouldn't have been left alone in a motel in a small town with nothing to do while another part of the family was invited to the groom's parents' house to view the opening of the presents. Our not being included seemed to be especially inappropriate because they did invite a well-dressed Chicago woman named Cathy who was there with a boyfriend, even though she was not even a real relative, and the boyfriend wasn't related at all.

Did you ever hear about how this smart looking Cathy got to be a double-Nadosy? While I was at the wedding, I heard this story about her and her relationship with Al and Fran's Uncle Ed Nadosy.

It seems that Al and Fran had a fair amount of contact with their late father Oliver's brother, Ed. Their Uncle Ed used to go on cruises a lot. And at least once Fran and his wife Clodean went on a cruise paid for by Ed. I never met him myself.

Aunt Irene and Al both told me at different times that Irene had married Ralph partly because she had to move in with her husband's brother Ed after Ollie had died, and Ed had made it hard on her in some unspecified way. Irene didn't have anywhere else to go with her two little boys, so marrying Ralph was a way out of Ed's.

Uncle Ed later obtained a lot of money from suing someone for an injury. He then married a divorced woman who had a daughter. When Ed's wife later died, he continued to take cruises all over the world with his late wife's daughter, Cathy, who was his step-daughter.

Ed used to boss Al around, and he would tell Al that Al had to do whatever he (Ed) wanted or Ed would not leave him anything. Al would fume but comply because he was really dying to get an inheritance from Ed.

Finally as it turned out, when Ed died---to Al's shock Ed didn't leave Al or Fran anything. An even bigger shock was that it came out that Ed had married his step-daughter Cathy and had left her everything he had.

All of a sudden, everybody found out that Ed and Cathy had been following the family for years. Fran assumed a noble indifference to being shut out from the inheritance, and Fran and his wife also extended a gracious tolerance to Cathy, ignoring or forgiving that she had been part of what seems to me to have been a cruel deception.

So then about a year after Ed died, when Jody got married, Cathy the step-daughter/widow was treated like the guest of honor at the wedding along with her current boyfriend, a younger Greek restaurant owner from Chicago. From Jody, I got the sense that Fran and Clodean's family thought Al was stupid for being upset. But I think it's true that Ed played with Al, and that it was natural for Al to hope that his uncle would leave him some money, especially since Ed used to dangle the prospect like a carrot in front of a rabbit.

This reads like a plot from As the World Turns to me.

A partial happy ending: Two of Joyce's sons, Jerry and Keith, joined the armed forces, and the government dentists fixed their teeth. Jerry married a loving intelligent young woman, Gretchen, who is one of my Facebook friends, and I communicate with her frequently. He has done well for himself, he is a Major in the National Guard and teaches at a college in Minnesota. They have three kids.

Here is another story from Jody's wedding, this one's on Al. I felt badly when I heard that Joyce and Ernie, Janice, Jerry, Jeff, and Keith, were going to drive 10 or 12 hours from their farms in south east Wisconsin to where the wedding was being held and then drive back when the reception was over.

I told Al to tell anyone from the family that wanted to that they could stay in our motel room. Stupid me. I assumed that since we were all relatives, we could sleep in the same room innocently enough. I don't know if Al was drunk or crazy (I tend towards the crazy explanation) but listen to this. Towards the end of the reception, Al told me that Joyce, Ernie, and Janice had to drive back to milk the cows. Then Al revealed he was vexed because he had spent so much energy that whole evening negotiating which of Joyce's boys were going to sleep with me and Sunshine. He apparently thought I was offering s*x. I was flabbergasted!

Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men?

One beautiful part of the experience surrounding Jody's wedding happened on the drive to the wedding from Minneapolis, where I'd picked up a rental car and Sunshine after I got off the plane from San Jose. After about an hour on the road, Sunshine and I had gasped at the sight of a gorgeous display of Northern Lights that began to shower down. I pulled the car into the nearest farmer's long driveway. We got out and we stood on the gravel drive and clung to each other ecstatically and screamed with excitement and joy while the red aurora borealis lights poured down around us from every side, surrounding us like a dome. That trip was the first time I had been reunited with Sunshine after she had run away, so it felt especially precious to share that experience with her.

Another good part happened after Sunshine and I returned to Minneapolis after the wedding. We met up with Liberty and his girlfriend Elizabeth and went to the Walker Art Center. Even though it was only early November, a big storm had hit on Halloween, and the city was still blanketed with 16 inches of new wet soft snow.

It was dark out. During this mini reunion between me and my two children plus one, we all got into a friendly snowball fight, climbing around one of the big sculptures outside the museum, scooping up and flinging big wet hunks of the snow at each other. As is often the case when Liberty and Sunshine are together, things took a semi-hysterical turn, and Elizabeth instantly tuned in at their exact wavelength.

We were all having great fun in this cool descent into childish delights, silently self-congratulatory about our artistically creative non-conformity, ignoring any and all shadowy undertones, not the least of which was the separation that was about to begin again tomorrow, when I needed to get on the plane to return to my job in Silicon Valley and my empty home.

On that November night, everything was brightened with light from the combination of the street lights, the moon, and the snow. The deep shadows sharpened the edges of everything. All around us was that pleasing expanse of public space that s bounded by the Walker and the adjoining Guthrie Theatre, by the open spaces and hard edged shapes in the Sculpture Garden, by the whimsical bridge that arches across the street, by the Gothic Episcopal Cathedral which led its witnessing dignity to the scene from the other side of that street, and by the tall black silhouettes of the pines and the Basilica of St. Mary that fringe the facing park. In this borrowed expanse of public space that served as our temporary playground, everything around my nuclear family was for that time in sharp contrast, familiar, clean, well-ordered, beautifully proportioned, and comforting.

Back to the present years and our family, I think we all behaved ourselves well for Uncle Ray's and Aunt Peggy's funerals. Thank God for that.

Love,

Roseanne

Below: Jeff, Janice, and Liberty in the back yard.

Finding George Revisited

2009-02-19T23:17:00.000-08:00

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.
2358 words

Day 5, Post 3 (Word Count: 2358

2004-11-05T21:55:00.000-08:00

Spring usually comes very late to the northern plains. The rule of thumb is you 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.

If you live someplace else than the north middle part of the United States, you might not know what a hard frost is. When the temperature falls below the freezing point, which happens usually at night, and it doesn’t warm up in the morning, that’s a hard frost. Many plants can stand it when the temperature goes below freezing at night and thaws the next morning, but few can endure when the temperature continues to stay that cold. A hard frost, like hard feelings, kills. One kills plants, the other kills all kinds of other less-tangible things, like tenderness, compassion, relationships . . .

On April 16, 1987, Margaret walked into her living room in the duplex she rented in Northeast Minneapolis and picked up the phone on the third ring. It was a sweltering hot afternoon, 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 own memories. To begin with, couldn’t have been that hot, she would think.

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 the house 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. She had lain on a sheet on the floor in her nightgown in her daughter’s bedroom underneath the open window, trying 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 from the heat 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 didn’t really make a breeze, Margaret realized on one level. Even though it was hot air exhausted from the neighbor's apartment, she had lingered there hoping anyway. 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. 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 jump 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 alcoholic landlord, a younger man in his late 30s 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 Minneapolis. The residents didn’t mind hearing the name used, and 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 MA, and finally for a year taking classes towards a PhD program.

During her undergraduate days, she had been living, just barely getting by, on welfare. She had left her husband after years of resentment and looking for a way out when she found out that welfare had a 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 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 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.

John was living with a good for nothing 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 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 them, 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.

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 her 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 shoes) were too small for his body. He carried a brown paper bag tucked between his arm and his body. Probably’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 with them, and then 350 miles back south, alone.

They talked.

Herman and Millie were polite, as usual. Hospitable to a fault.

That evening they went to see the roommate. They stood around on the grass in back of the 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.
2358 words

Outline

2004-10-31T21:32:00.000-08:00

Since this is a lot bigger than anything I've tried to write before, I'm going to try something new: making a list of scenes. . . .

Not all the scenes will be in the story. Others may be added. I heard that having a list like this can help you keep going if you are stuck. I'm thinking it will work like this: I can't get any further in one scene; looking at the list will give me another scene to start work on. And it will help me not to forget important parts of the story.
The phone call.
Drive to Fargo.
Meeting with in-laws.
Visit with roommate.
The last night before he disappeared.
Stop at the farm house on the way back to Minneapolis.
Talk with daughter.
Talk with son.
Phone call from roommate.
Drive to Fargo.
In-laws. Ted's prediction.
Funeral director.
Forensic science?
Call to Rotary member.
Call to Japan, host father.
Call to son.
Drive to Fargo: Sister Helen Mary, cabbage and colostomy, tornado, prayers and the rain stops
Memorial service
Drive to the grave
Shingles
Mother in law's funeral