I defended Mr. Adler. “It wasn’t the Soviet Union we were talking about. It was czars.”
“Oh, Mattie.” No one ever called me that. It was like being tapped on the shoulder from behind. My name was Madeline, but at school I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak. I pulled my hands into balls in my sleeves. Mr. Grierson went on. “No one cared about the czars before Stalin and the bomb. They were puppets on a faraway stage, utterly insignificant. Then all the Mr. Adlers went to college in 1961 and there was general nostalgia for the old Russian toys, the inbred princesses from another century. Their ineffectuality made them interesting. You understand?” He smiled then, closing his eyes a little. His front teeth were white, his canines yellow. “But you’re thirteen.”
“Fourteen.”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry if this has started off badly. We’ll get on better footing soon.”
The next week he asked me to drop by his classroom after school. This time, he’d taken the stud out of his ear and set it on his desk. Very tenderly, with his forefinger and thumb, he was probing the flesh around his earlobe.
“Mattie,” he said, straightening up.
He had me sit in a blue plastic chair beside his desk. He set a stack of glossy brochures in my lap, made a tepee of his fingers. “Do me a favor? But don’t blame me for having to ask. That’s my job.” He squirmed.
That’s when he asked me to be the school’s representative in History Odyssey.
“This will be great,” he said, unconvincingly. “What you do is make a poster. Then you give a speech about Vietnam War registers, border crossings to Canada, etcetera. Or maybe you do the desecration of the Ojibwa peoples? Or those back-to-the-land folks that settled up here. Something local, something ethically ambiguous. Something with constitutional implications.”
“I want to do wolves,” I told him.
“What, a history of wolves?” He was puzzled. Then he shook his head and grinned. “Right. You’re a fourteen-year-old girl.” The skin bunched up around his eyes. “You all have a thing for horses and wolves. I love that. I love that. That’s so weird. What is that about?”
Because my parents didn’t own a car, this is how I got home when I missed the bus. I walked three miles down the plowed edge of Route 10 and then turned right on Still Lake Road. In another mile the road forked. The left side traced the lake northward and the right side turned into an unplowed hill. That’s where I stopped, stuffed my jeans into my socks, and readjusted the cuffs on my woolen mittens. In winter, the trees against the orange sky looked like veins. The sky between the branches looked like sunburn. It was twenty minutes through snow and sumac before the dogs heard me and started braying against their chains.
By the time I got home, it was dark. When I opened the door, I saw my mom bent over the sink, arms elbow-deep in inky water. Long straight hair curtained her face and neck, which tended to give her a cagey look. But her voice was all midwestern vowels, all wide-open Kansas. “Is there a prayer for clogged drains?” she asked without turning around.
I set my mittens on the woodstove, where they would stiffen and no longer fit my hands just right in the morning. I left my jacket on, though. It was cold inside.
My mom, her own jacket damp with sink water, sat down heavily at the table. But she kept her greasy hands in the air like they were something precious—something wiggling and still alive—that she’d snatched from a pond. Something she might feed us on, a pretty little pair of perch. “We need Drano. Crap.” She looked up into the air, then very slowly wiped her palms on her canvas pockets. “Please help. God of infinite pity for the pathetic farce that is human living.”
She was only half kidding. I knew that. I knew from stories how my parents had ridden in a stolen van to Loose River in the early eighties, how my father had stockpiled rifles and pot, and how, when the commune fell apart, my mother had traded whatever hippie fanaticism she had left for Christianity. For as long as I could remember she went to church three times a week—Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday—because she held out hope that penance worked, that some of the past could be reversed, slowly and over years.
My mother believed in God, but grudgingly, like a grounded daughter.
“Do you think you could take one of the dogs with you and go back?”
“Back into town?” I was still shivering. The thought made me furious for a second, wiped clean of everything. I couldn’t feel my fingers.
“Or not.” She swung her long hair back and swiped her nose with her wrist. “No, not. It’s probably below zero out there. I’m sorry. I’ll go get another bucket.” She didn’t move from her chair, though. She was waiting for something. “I’m sorry I asked. You can’t be mad at me for asking.” She clasped her greasy hands together. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
For each sorry, her voice rose a half step.
I waited a second before I spoke. “It’s okay,” I said.