“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Almost in tandem we ran from the house. For always there was the half-pleasurable touch of child-panic—
Wait!—wait for me.
A BRIGHT WARM DAY in mid-June in Huron County, Michigan: school had been out just one week.
An incandescent light shimmered from the sky that was bleached of color, reflecting the rough water of Lake Huron five miles to the north, and not visible from the Salt Hill Road.
In a blur of pale lilac—linen slacks, matching jacket—our mother slid into the driver’s seat of the Chevy station wagon. Her glossy dark hair was plaited into a single thick braid that fell between her shoulder blades. Her eyes, that tended to water in bright air, were shielded behind sunglasses, and her mouth, described by our father (embarrassingly) as eminently kissable, was a dark plum color.
Beside our mother was our little sister Melissa pert and darkly pretty. So small, and so unobtrusive, you might almost miss that she was there.
But always, Melissa was.
We did not like to consider—(Darren and Naomi did not like to consider)—how frequently Melissa sat in front with our mother or, less frequently, our father. Overnight it had happened, seemingly irrevocably, that as soon as Melissa was old enough not to be strapped into the demeaning child-seat in the rear, she sat in the passenger’s seat beside the driver.
We did not complain, we took not the slightest notice.
But having so often to be together in the backseat of a vehicle, the two of us older siblings, thrown into each other’s company and forced to stare steely-eyed out the side windows pointedly ignoring each other—that wasn’t so great.
Now, we were (almost) late. Hurriedly Mom backed the Chevy station wagon down the rutted and puddled driveway at an angle, cursing beneath her breath—“Damn!”
Our (rented) house three miles west of the small town of St. Croix, Michigan, was a clapboard house dingy-white as a gull’s soiled feathers. It was a forgettable house, a house you could not “see” if you were not standing before it; not a house to nourish memories though it was, or would become, a house to nourish regret like the toadstools that emerged out of wet soil around its base.
Seven miles in the opposite direction from St. Croix (population 11,400) was the smaller town of Bad Axe (population 3,040). Our mother had said, when we’d moved to rural Huron County from Saginaw, at least we’re not living in a place called Bad Axe. No one would believe me!
The clapboard farmhouse had been built atop an uneven knoll, an upstairs lump of land like a thumb. In the stone foundation was a faint numeral—1939.
The unpaved driveway veered and careened downhill to Salt Hill Road where the aluminum mailbox stood atilt and scarified from numerous collisions.
There had been another house in St. Croix which our parents had rented, or had intended to rent, several months before. This was a ranch-style house on a residential street (only just three blocks from St. Croix Elementary, which Melissa would attend) into which we’d been partly moved when something had gone wrong, a misunderstanding about the terms of the lease, or a disagreement between the landlord and my father, or a “dispute”—and the boxes we’d unpacked had had to be hastily and humbly repacked, and the rental trailer reloaded, so that within a single harried day we moved another time, to the very farmhouse on Salt Hill Road which my parents had seen, and had rejected, my mother with particular vigor, weeks before.
It was a vague promise of our father’s that we would find another, more suitable house in St. Croix soon.
To spare us the rural school buses, which had not been very pleasant for any of us, in the first week or so of school, our mother usually drove us to and from school.
(Our parents had asked us not to speak of the school buses. Not to complain. Bullying, harassment, sexual threats—“rough behavior”—we would be spared the rural-America school bus experience but were not to think that we were in any way superior to the boys who were the sons of our Huron County neighbors.)
(For our parents were adamant, idealistic, [usually] unyielding liberals. They did not believe in anything other than public schooling and hoped to convince each other that their children’s sojourn in the Huron County public school system would not sabotage our educations or our opportunity to attend first-rank universities.)
In the station wagon Darren was restless, fretting.
“Mom, did you call Dad? Does he know we’re coming to meet him first?”—Darren couldn’t resist asking.
“Darren, no. I have to drop the car off at the garage to get it inspected. You know that.”
“But—”
“We’ll get to the Center before your father leaves. Please don’t catastrophize!”