My sexless garb hardly made a case for the romance of dressing the rural part, but I failed to see it, for back then I rarely looked in our single foggy antique mirror. As if proof of the fact that illumination was not a given in those days, I have loads of memories but very little photographic evidence of this time. It comes as no big surprise that the girl who didn’t carry a flashlight also didn’t take any pictures. I have a mere handful, and whenever I look at them, it’s a stare-down. To the girl standing next to the enormous log on the Hanna Ore forest road I want to say: Get yourself a real haircut! Good Lord, at least a decent bra! You look like a schlumpf!—the sloppy state of dress my grandma Dion had cautioned me against. But the look in the girl’s eyes goads the camera to a challenge, staring my future self down with a distressing amount of haughtiness, clearly high on newfound self-sufficiency.
Suddenly, the rain started to pound down and people streamed into the screen house, crowding in on me and Cheryl. A bunch of people were still outside, some huddled under the umbrella over the table, some dancing out in the rain. Everyone was excited because the rain was filling up their rain barrels. Aaron and I joined them, because we possessed rain barrels, too, but were delighted with the irony of not needing them today or the next day. With the hand-pumped well, we finally had a backup water source. Truly, when it rains, it pours.
16
CHEF SALAD, NO EGGS
Another winter spent down in Minneapolis, another summer up north at the house in Two Inlets—our third. The sun had been hitting my face in our loft bedroom for hours already. The birds had been awake forever and were already on to lunch.
Thud…thud, thud.
I registered the sound before I saw the clock: 9:00. I was really late for work.
But what the hell was that? Was someone at our door?
It could be. Around Two Inlets, and especially before we had a phone, visitors would just show up unannounced at ungodly early hours. Our neighbors got a kick out of our throwback lifestyle and loved to pop in on us in our little cabin out in the woods—like people used to in the old days.
I looked out the kitchen window and didn’t see anyone in front of the door. A closer look revealed that a massive snapping turtle had crawled up out of the creek and ass-planted itself in my flower bed next to the door and was now whapping its prehistoric tail against the wood. With eyes like shiny coffee beans, he glared menacingly at me. His knobby, vicious head was not tucked inside his shell; it was definitely out.
“Don’t open the door, he could bite your arm off,” Aaron shouted down from the loft. “We’re going to have to get a stick, or an oar, for him to clamp onto so we can lead him away.”
Whoom, whoom. The thumping was like a vise tightening on my cranium. Wickedly hungover, glowing from the inside out, I was thankful to have an excuse—even an absurd one—for being late for work. I called Jorg, my boss at the Schwarzwald Inn on Main Street in Park Rapids, mumbling about a snapping turtle at my door and not being able to leave my house.
“What?” he shouted, as if he couldn’t hear me. “What? What turtle? What the hell are you talking about?”
Finally I started whining. “Jorg, I can’t come to work today. I’m sick. I am so hungover. I’m sorry, I just can’t function.”
He paused for a second and then yelled into the phone slowly and distinctly: “WE ARE ALL HUNGOVER HERE! GET YOUR ASS TO WORK!” He hung up.
The previous summer I had worked a couple of days a week at the Schwarzwald Inn, the German-American diner on Main Street, mostly just showing up to make some pies and prep some carrots and onions for the soups. Jorg paid me five dollars an hour, hardly worth the price of the gas to get there. When I walked into the restaurant this summer, now on the short-cooking schedule for three-day weeks, I saw an unfamiliar head of spiked platinum-blond hair on the line. When she came around the corner, she was flustered, her words coming out in spits and stops.
“Hey, I am Tonya!” she said, pronouncing it Tone-ya. “From Mallorca.” We pumped hands. Fashionably lanky, she had what some locals would call an out-of-town figure.
“And that is Klaus,” she said, tipping her head to the hot line. Her boyfriend Klaus, tall and dark with curls that licked the collar of his chef shirt, had grown up in Germany with Jorg, and he and Tonya had met while both were cooking in her native Spain. Why they decided to work that summer in Park Rapids I never did understand. Tonya and I struggled to talk, but we shared the international languages of cooking and fashion. I introduced her to all my favorite permanent garage sales in town, where she found tons of perfectly outrageous vintage outfits for her drag-queen friends back home. Straight from Dolores Nepsund’s garage to a nightclub in the Balearic Islands—it was a clothes pipeline that I treasured, and figured had to be a first.
“Amy,” I told her, “from Park Rapids.”
“Estoy crudo,” she said, sticking out her tongue to loll at one side of her mouth. “Cru-do.”
Crudo. I didn’t know a lick of Spanish. She made a quick sketch in her kitchen notebook and then I guessed it: “Hungover! You’re hungover!”
“Yes! Yes!” she replied, hopping and doing a tiny clap, totally delighted.
I guessed she had heard about the turtle.
“Amy!” Jorg bellowed. We quickly scattered—her to the back prep, me to the grill. We could hear the little bell on the front door dinging away. We served nearly a thousand hungry tourists on busy weekends, most of them queuing up for Schwarzwald’s famous smorgasbord and the rest ordering hot short-order plates. I tied on a white apron and threw a sausage patty for myself on the grill. Troy read out a table: “Two stuffed hash browns, a pork chop breakfast, and a kid pancake.” Troy, a chesty guy with permanently wet-looking curls, was surprisingly graceful. He spun around to the grill. “And a solo schnitzel.”
Jorg smiled theatrically at me and said, “Oh, look who showed up for the battle!,” which was how he referred to the Sunday brunch service. And then he snarled, “I want you to show up on time! And I want you fed!”
“Okay, okay,” I said. Maybe it was time to reel things in a bit.
He glanced out the peephole kitchen window to see who had ordered the schnitzel. It was a big guy, patiently waiting with his legs planted wide at 10 and 2. Jorg dipped into the reachin cooler, grabbed a second piece of tenderized, paprika-dusted pork, and threw it into my working breading bowl, which was circled with planetary rings of dried-on egg wash. “Better do two.” Damned if they were truly ravenous, but the skinny ladies only got one. At the Schwarzwald we cooked not only to order but also to size.
—
When Jorg bought the restaurant that his parents had established, he inherited Arlys. And, unfortunately, she did not do hash browns.