And once, coming closer, getting curious, “Did your dad do that to you? Is that the kind of thing they do to you?”
I had two chores to do with my dad: chop wood and clean fish. By the time I was ten, I could chop whole logs on my own, so my dad gave up that chore for me to do alone. But we did the fish together until I was in high school, working quietly over a pair of buckets in the shed. We used bleached fillet knives that we scraped against the whetstone before starting—and that was the best part, always, the gravelly, ringing drag of steel over rock. The sound made the hairs on my arms prickle up, my teeth ache pleasurably. Then there was just the sluice and slop of skins coming off. There were our two fist-size puffs of breath punching the air side by side, my father’s and mine. Ha. Ha.
The fish and wood only took a few hours, so I used to make up extra chores for myself. When I was in fourth grade I started writing down the good deals at Mr. Korhonen’s on toothpaste and toilet paper so we wouldn’t run out, and I passed these lists to my mom before she went into town. I took over care of the dogs the winter I was eleven; I began feeding the stove in the mornings because I woke so early for the dogs. Later, just before I started middle school, I saw it as my responsibility to sit with my dad on Sunday afternoons and listen to ball games and A Prairie Home Companion. My dad told me once that he’d had a class with Garrison Keillor in college, and for years I imagined Garrison as one of the relatives I’d never met. I thought of him as my dad’s gregarious older brother, and my dad as the shy younger one, who could handle himself better against loneliness and disaster.
I didn’t have any regular chores to do for my mom. She couldn’t bear to have me around when she washed clothes or cooked dinner. She said I was too slow, too judgmental. She said I watched too closely for mistakes. “You act like I’m being wasteful when I take off the littlest bit of potato with the peel.”
My mother was inattentively industrious, full of ideas. She had all kinds of do-gooder projects strewn on the table and chairs, stations of interrupted activity. Quilting scraps for inmates, letters to protest chemical spills, Bible quotes she copied onto index cards, thrift store mystery novels, a years-long scheme that involved reading Russian fairy tales from a book she never returned to the library. Her long hair always fingered the air as she moved across the cabin. It clung with static electricity to everything she touched—pot handles, broom handles, my face when she bent over me.
“Are you still oiling the same old reel?” she’d demand. “How is that possible?”
Her hair snapped when she moved away.
It bothered her that I wouldn’t play her games, that I refused to read out loud or dress up as a dragon in the rags she wound around my body and called a tail. “Roar!” she used to say, coaxing, pulling my hair. She crossed her eyes, tried to provoke me. She stuck out her tongue, and I could see a white film like a layer of moss over the pink.
Then I would think: We need toothpaste.
I would add it mentally to my list: toothpaste, mouthwash, floss.
“When I was your age, I wrote a novel,” my mother told me. “I put on Macbeth in my parents’ backyard with a cast of twenty characters! It was a funny version, actually.” She scrunched up her face and spoke with an exaggerated British accent: “Out, out damned Scot!” She waited for me to laugh but I wasn’t sure what part was funny. “Here,” she said then, sighing, and handed me a wand she’d made from a birch branch rolled in glue and glitter. She wanted very badly for me to cavort and pretend, to prove I was unharmed, happy. During those years she went to church on Saturdays as well as Sundays, to the Catholic and Lutheran services as well as the interfaith one, to cover all her bases. She never asked me to go along. She said she was a Religion Mutt. She couldn’t decide what mattered most: good works or God’s grace. She couldn’t settle the sacrament of blood: man’s flesh or empty metaphor. “Both sort of suck,” she said, when discouraged. What she did know, and believed with all her heart, was that it was some combination of private school and television that had corrupted her mind and cheapened her natural talents.