I remember the resulting trip to West Acres Mall feeling buoyant because we bought freely, but also heavier. Our usual order at the Country Kitchen—cups of thirteen-bean soup and a bran muffin, split—tasted denser, lined with doom.
One night soon after, my mom made boiled pork and sauerkraut for dinner, an assemblage that really deserved a better name. Even though she talked the talk about French food, her best dishes pulled from her mother’s German side. Scented with garlic, thyme, bay, and allspice, her pork roast—a muscular picnic cut—simmered in tangy sauerkraut juices for four to five hours until it was as tender as tuna. It had the power to stir you deep down, in the way that only long-cooked pork can. I halved the baseball-size potato dumpling that had been poached in the pork broth, smeared butter on its firm ragged interior, and nibbled on the fluffy cloud edges. It was my favorite meal. I had three helpings.
My brothers and I did the dishes as always, and then our parents called a family meeting.
Matter-of-factly, my mom told us that she and our dad were separating. Dad was moving to the lake cabin, we were going to stay at the house in town—“for now,” she said ominously—and their divorce was likely. Large tears rolled out of my brother Bob’s round brown eyes. My youngest brother Marc’s face, a transparent superconductor of his every passing thought, projected shock and confusion. My dad didn’t look up. I was grateful that he didn’t make eye contact because I knew that my eyes would reveal that I already knew.
Suddenly the phone rang in my room, my own private line. I was a teenager—it rang all the time. In a move that I have regretted ever since, I walked away from the table and down the hall to answer it.
Even worse, I still went to play rehearsal that night. During the break, Cara asked me if I wanted to split a package of Gardetto’s pretzel mix from the vending machine, as was our nightly habit. I held my taut belly and told her I’d had three helpings at dinner that night and was way too full.
She said, “Again? Why’d you eat too much for dinner again?”
I didn’t really know the answer to that. I was eating to fill a new and foreign space.
—
Our dad moved out to the cabin that winter, and eight months later, we’d move away, too. My mom had chosen our escape route, one that felt sufficiently dramatic enough to match the high tenor of her big life-changing decision, and planned a move to a suburb of the Twin Cities, a place we’d visited a mere double handful of times.
That August before my junior year of high school, we moved into a sprawling apartment complex that probably housed the same population as the town we’d just left. It contained all the coziness of an office complex. I’d had my driver’s license for precisely two weeks, had only driven dirt country roads and around the ten-block radius of Park Rapids, and had yet to master what for me was the hardest part—steering—when I launched myself as a hidden hazard onto the interchanges and merge lanes of the Minneapolis–St. Paul freeway system.
My Park Rapids friends and I burned up the USPS with dramatic, overly descriptive letters. Cara wrote that she often saw my dad driving around town with our dog, Buffy, in his lap. It’s so cute, she said, but also kind of sad. The dog’s paws were up on the wheel, as if she were steering.
I figured Buffy was better at it than I was.
I have just a vague recollection of going back to visit my dad at the house in town. The rooms were clean but painfully bereft of my mother’s housekeeping. Plastic bags of dry-cleaning from Modern Cleaners hung on his doorframes, indicating that my dad now ferried all his clothes to the dry cleaners, including all of the dress shirts my mom had previously spent hours ironing. He sat in front of the TV in the evenings with the curtains wide open, so that anyone driving past on Eighth Street could see him. And he ate out a lot, alternating nights among the four restaurants in town. The one thing he made at home was popcorn, which I knew because I saw the smaller of my mom’s two dedicated popcorn pots on his stove, both of which my mother credited with making her popcorn so irresistible. Golden and heavy, the exterior of the pot was covered with a flaky layer of oily black crud and so caked with it on the bottom that when you shook the pot against the metal burner, sparks flew. The inside of its lid was stained with brown oil residue, as sticky as pine pitch, and impossible to scrub off.
It was amazing how that smaller one, hardly more than six inches in diameter, could produce the enormous bowl of popcorn that it did; it was the clown car of pots—just when you thought everything was tipped out of that thing, the popcorn kept on coming.
Back when we used to sit at that counter, popcorn had always been the savory dessert after our lavish meal, but here in Dad’s empty house, it might have comprised dinner itself. Were the two precious popcorn pots laid out in the divorce degree, as in: I take the kids, you keep the dog; I get the speedboat, you get the house; I’ll take the big Club Aluminum pot, you keep the small? The minute I saw the small popcorn pot on Dad’s stove, the permanence of my family’s division descended on me all at once.
A few years later, while rooting around the cupboards at my mom’s place for stray stuff to fill my college apartment kitchen, I would snag the other one.
10
OLD FIVE-AND-DIMERS
I’m sixteen years old and I love my mom with an almost scary fierceness. It blooms in me like a mushroom cloud of seething milk right before the boil.
Her opinions seep through me until I am soaked with them. They make me feel full. I take everything she says as the last word on the subject, from the way she cleans raw pork chops by scraping off the bone grit from the saw with a butter knife, to the way she singles out the best romaine at the grocery store, her finger tracing the head with the curliest edge. I try to eat the way she eats: ever so slowly, sucking on a single square of chocolate for a long time as if it were a lozenge. I love how she pushes a grocery cart through the store and then out over the icy parking lot—with urgency and feeling.