In the early years, Mom left the cabin untouched, and she and her sisters and mother spent many a weekend there installed around the kitchen table, drinking gin and tonics and playing cards. As if to enforce the casual vibe of the lake, the women all put their pajamas on right after dinner—groaning as they shucked off their clothes that they just couldn’t wait to get out of their bras. (Their equivalent of letting down their hair.) The men must have been around, but I just don’t remember them.
Like all prerenovated cabins, the grubby original turned out to be more fun than the redone. Small and dark and postered with relics from someone else’s dreams, old cabins come equipped with a freeing fortlike glee. Without the cultural tradition of these shacks, the upper-Midwestern character would be wildly different. It’s all the thrill of camping, but with ice cubes.
In the name of improvement, my mom chucked the dusty deer head, added on a couple of bedrooms, and put down practical gray berber carpeting throughout. She kept the fieldstone fireplace, though, because it was stacked by hand by someone else years ago. On cold evenings, not unheard of even at the height of a Minnesota summer, we made what we called pudgie pies right in the open hearth, layering white bread and ham and cheese into the pie iron, then carefully cracking an egg in the middle before locking the two sides together and holding the iron in the fire to cook it all into a buttery, turtle-shaped pie; it was kind of like a French charlotte with American breakfast filling. For this totally blind cooking process, the pudgie-pie cook had to rely on her instincts. I liked my bread almost burned and my yolk soft, so I bravely held my iron down in the orange-and-silver coals and pulled it out only when tiny droplets of butter and melted-cheese liquid dripped from the iron.
On sweltering nights, which the dramatic northern summer could just as easily produce, we sat in front of the fan with our feet in buckets of cold water and watched movies. My mom made us big bowls of heavily buttered popcorn and then stood in the kitchen frying up half-slices of bacon, which she passed around on paper-towel-lined plates. She bought it from the family meat market in Pierz, never in less than five-pound bundles, and it flowed throughout my childhood like water. “Another pound, kids?” she’d ask, until it was gone. As she fried and flipped, the dog sat at militaristic attention at her feet.
When my dad came home, his face was often shadowy with his work, the numbers, spreadsheets, and complicated personal interactions still churning in his head. His was a difficult job, a shuffling pattern play each month, and we were unreservedly proud of him. Unlike us, he was not “off” for the summer. He changed into his only pair of shorts and tan walking shoes, still wearing black dress socks up to his knees, tilted the fan toward his recliner, and sat down with his paper. Because his mind functioned best with all points firing, he found it relaxing to stretch himself out in his recliner in a numbing blitz of simultaneous media—watching TV, reading the newspaper, and listening to the baseball game on the lo-fi AM radio all at once.
My mom’s opinion of my father was in free-fall that summer, so she asked me to serve him his libations—now ice water instead of his previous Chivas Regal, following the premature heart attack he’d had the previous fall at the young age of forty-one. He was the kind of guy who quit things cold turkey. She peeled and sliced thick wedges of raw kohlrabi and handed me the bowl with a shaker of salt. “Give this to your father.” His predilection for the raw, wet salted chunks was an indicator of his family’s German roots, and the only food craving I remember him having. Once, I caught him munching on a salted wedge of what looked like a potato and asked him, “Why are you eating raw potato?” He replied flatly, as if the answer were obvious: “Because your mother ran out of kohlrabi.” Dad accepted even the shiftiest of substitutions: When a restaurant failed to stock ginger ale, he routinely told the waitress to give him a glass filled one-third with Coke and two-thirds with Seven-Up. It tasted nothing like ginger ale, and when I told him this he said, “At least the color is right.” My taste buds were more demanding, like my mom’s; his were clearly more zen.
At the cabin, as the raucous outside leaked dangerously into his precious interior downtime, my parents’ after-hours fights gathered steam. As the heat wave continued, one day we were surprised, but not really, when he didn’t drive out to the lake after work but instead stayed alone at the house in town. It was quiet, air-chilled to his liking, and the dog, who loved nothing better than to sit on his La-Z-Boy-propped legs, went with him.
In October, we moved back in with Dad at the house in town, which I hoped would set everything straight. Football had started for the boys and I was in the school play.
My mom and I fell into the habit of sitting up after dinner to snack on her sinful buttered popcorn and page through mail-order catalogs, me drinking water, her drinking red wine. With her own future swirling uncertainly, she took to talking a lot about the family’s past and then vaguely about my future, insisting that I could do anything I wanted to do. The narrative my mom spun for me involved college and then moving away to get some kind of job in the desk-and-cubicle world before eventually settling down with a nice—preferably rich—man and having children. I pictured the first part, living in a city, working in an office, wearing a low-cut pinstriped business suit straight out of the pages of Victoria’s Secret, this catalog being my only window into the cosmopolitan world. I didn’t know what I’d be doing exactly, but I thought it might involve signing contracts and having heated, triumphant meetings.