I cooked outside of my mother’s arsenal. I did a good rendition of spaghetti carbonara, with an obscene amount of bacon fat and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. I cut carrots and parsnips lengthwise into spears and fried them hard in a sea of butter until the edges browned to copper and the insides gushed when pressed, and then poured the fat, burnished sticks over white rice. If I had a deadline the next day, I could be found at three in the morning crouched in the living room pureeing squash soup in a blender because the socket in the kitchen didn’t work.
But I also regularly overcooked pasta and spent long minutes peeling garlic and mincing it into minuscule cubes, returning to the stove to find my onions frizzled down to a crust. I stopped trying to replicate my mom’s chicken marsala, because the meat never turned out as velvety as hers. When stir-frying in my thrift-store wok, I particularly hated the metallic fumes that rose up when the soy sauce bubbled on the hot metal, burning upon contact. That wasn’t right. How and when are you supposed to add the soy? I fretted more about my steep learning curve with cooking than I did about my classes.
The disasters in the kitchen piled up. As did the dishes, because I so rarely did them.
—
The summer between my junior and senior years of college was a tremendous bust. Just three weeks after scoring my first job in food service, as a back waiter—beverage pourer, basically—at a high-end Italian spot in Minneapolis, I was fired. Not after breaking my sixth glass, or even after clownishly dropping an entire magnum of champagne on a guy at a very special table of four, but only after I nervously proceeded to pat him down hastily with my side towel—all the way down, into the crevice of his lap, not even thinking about where my towel was headed until I saw his wife’s burning expression. Shaking with mortification, I would never attempt to work front-of-the-house ever again. I left my white button-down shirts in my locker and ran.
Adding to that, my boyfriend of four or five months was breaking up with me. Or, rather, he wasn’t even bothering with that, but just openly starting to date another girl. (“You’re going to Minnehaha Falls with Kristina? Can I come, too?” I’d asked.)
Having never been so thoroughly dumped before, I was clearly confused, and dramatically heartbroken, for about a week. My pain was more theatrical than real.
The heat didn’t lessen from day to night that summer. Compared to northern lake country, city nights feel strangely indistinguishable from the days. Up north, after the sun dives behind the trees, the wind and the temperature both drop and the waves on the lake flatten to reflective glass. I missed the lake. I missed nights spent sitting on the dock, talking with my friends in low voices because we knew that the water before us would amplify our every sound wave. I missed the Park Rapids sign that announced our population: 2,961. I missed our double-wide Main Street; I missed the sight of the dumb potato plant belching fryer steam, my friends, and even my dad’s dorky announcements of love. I just wanted to drive north and go jump in a lake. It was all I could think of to do.
Mom’s lake cabin had been the first pawn to go in the game that was the divorce—first point, Dad—so I couldn’t go there. Our house in town, where my dad still lived, looked exactly as it had after my mom’s final garage sale. At the end of that day her face had taken on a weird clownlike glee as she watched the effects of their years together march out the door in the hands of new owners. As the house emptied and she began to feel the reality of her fresh start, she grew bolder, ordering my brothers to run back into the house and grab paintings, doodads, all of her seasonal fake-flower arrangements, whatever, and slap a dollar tab of tape on each one of them. My brothers, bouncing to the beat of the adrenaline in this, sprinted in and cheerfully obliged. By the time it was over, she’d sold most of the house’s decorative aspects. She’d basically sucked the woman out of it, leaving him with—not kidding—light squares on the walls where the photos had been and bare mattresses in the rooms, which he’d truly had no idea how to cover. When we came to visit him, you could almost hear him thinking: Where does she keep the part that goes under the sheets, the pad thingy? I was welcome to stay in his forlorn, air-conditioned house in town, but it would be no jump in the lake.
Two weeks in advance of a high school friend’s wedding, I called up my friend Sarah Spangler to ask for an extended visit. Sarah was in the wedding, too, and if I could think of a house that better fit my nostalgic ideal of life in Park Rapids, hers was it. Built at the turn of the twentieth century, the Spangler place was so close to Fish Hook Lake it nearly squatted on its shores. More bookish and environmental and Scandinavian-outdoorsy than my parents, hers filled their house with plants, piles of New Yorker magazines, and a constant soundtrack of classical music. Also unlike my house, theirs lacked a glorious supply of leftovers, and her dad’s environmentalism extended to the furnace, causing Sarah and me to walk around on Saturdays after sleepovers in afghan capes. But still, their house felt like a lakeside refuge. I’d stayed there for a week while we were moving, and maybe they’d let me bunk there again.
I called their house three, four times but couldn’t reach Sarah, who was working two jobs. Each time my call was answered by her older brother, Aaron, and each time our conversation lasted an abnormally long time, especially as I couldn’t recall a single verbal exchange between the two of us. He was four years older; if he knew me at all, it was as one of the cheerleaders he’d cautioned his sister not to hang out with in high school.
Now he was back in town himself. He caught me up on all its changes in the past four years while we’d both been away, both of us digging our hometown with a strange expatriate enthusiasm. Over the phone line I fell hard for Aaron’s conversational prowess. In his orbit the most mundane details, such as the renovation of the town’s Dairy Queen, felt worthy of discussion.
“We got a second traffic light,” he said.
“Over by the Holiday stationstore?”
“No, for some reason they put it by the Pamida.”
This is so weird, I thought. But oddly comfortable.
The fourth time I called, he asked, “Can I ask—why do you keep calling?” I explained my plight, that I wanted to come home but didn’t have any place to stay. “Oh, just come up,” he said.
“Really? You don’t think Sarah would mind? Or your mom?”