“Look at the freedom you have!” She said this when she was the most exasperated with me, throwing open her arms. As if all her rags and rocks and jars of sand were a form of rarest treasure. As if she had saved up her whole life to acquire this hoard of scraps.
Sometimes, to please her, I wore her dragon tail out to train the dogs. The summer I was twelve I was transitioning them from sled to search and rescue. They each had a different reward: a broken paddle, a rubber hose, a tennis ball I’d found at the high school courts. I’d unchain one dog at a time, tell him to stay and duck behind a tree trunk. But that was too easy. Each one found me every time. So one summer afternoon, after trying all the familiar places, I dashed behind the house and scaled the back of the shed, dragging my dragon’s tail over broken shingles. Then I gave the signal to look, a high-pitched whistle, and watched Abe go for all the old pines, sniff upwind and down, run in frantic circles around the cabin. Abe wasn’t an old dog then, but after twenty minutes, he was panting hard and flinging saliva in wide arcs across the yard. A half hour passed, forty-five minutes. The other dogs heaved on their chains, joining his distress. From above, I watched Abe’s ribs swell and contract; I watched him try the same spots over and over again; I watched him stumble, once, in exhaustion.
I sat still on the roof of the shed. As an experiment, I put my own mouth on the scummy rubber fuzz of the tennis ball in my hand. The moment before I gagged, before I choked and spit it out, a queer euphoria lifted me up, as if by wings.
“Really, ask me anything,” I said, pulling the extra tarot cards into a stack on the mechanic’s carpet in St. Paul. His name was Rom. He had bright blue eyes, big muscly arms, a paunch. The stud in his tongue flashed at me when he yawned, so I poked him in the chest. “Ask me, how often do wolves eat? And I’ll tell you, every four or five days. They straight-out starve. Then they gorge like—”
“I know this one! Teenage girls.”
“They’re never going to eat again. Now ask me, what do they eat? Ask it.”
He shook his head but played along. “What do they eat?”
“White-tailed deer. Also worms and blueberries.”
“Keep it coming, Girl Scout. Keep stuffing it all back down in the unconscious.”
“And dogs! There was this little town in Alaska, Middleofnowheresville—”
“Isn’t that where you’re from?” He raised his eyebrows.
“And they came at night and got someone’s Lab. Just chomp. Then the next night, it was a couple of huskies, who never even made a sound. The final blow was someone’s pretty coonhound, one of those long-snouted things, a winner of dog shows. She was eaten right off her chain, just her collar left behind and, you know, her jawbone and tail.”
“Jawbone and Tail. An album title.”
“Wolves eat most of the bones, usually. That’s a Girl Scout tip.”
“So what happened in Nowheresville?” He was leaning in closer to me now, was murmuring into my neck. “Who saved the rest of the dogs?”
“No!” I pushed him back. “Who saved the wolves? They were all shot.”
The fall I started middle school, my mom stopped calling me CEO and started calling me the Teenager. This was because I was always stealing magazines from the secretary’s office at school, reading People or Us or Glamour. I read about procedures for blow-drying your hair so it looked like a tornado had come to town, and I studied tips for slicking down bangs so they looked wet. I never had any interest in trying these looks. What I liked seeing was something so mysterious broken down into steps, pieced together in charts and tables. Or, if there weren’t any new magazines in the office, I got books from the library on ice age paleontology and the history of electricity. I coveted diagrams of hairstyles or skeletons, ink drawings of angles and equations I didn’t understand. My mother didn’t see me reading these things because I wasn’t doing anything she found interesting. Instead she’d be setting out jars for jam—or copying a quote on a pink index card—and when she’d glance up, she’d look right through me. I didn’t watch TV until I lived in Minneapolis with Ann, but when I did I recognized the feeling: to look at somebody who can’t look back.
Occasionally, she’d see me reading and peer at the book over my shoulder. “Is that for homework?” she’d ask, shaking her head in amazement. I knew she wanted me to do well in school, but she wanted me to succeed the way she had—by disdaining the whole process. It bothered her to think I was trying. “Oh, you’re becoming such a little professor, aren’t you? We should get you one of those gowns.” She was glancing down at a drawing of a velociraptor in my book, its bones labeled with arrows. She seemed one part surprised, maybe even pleased, but two parts disparaging and contemptuous.
“Don’t give me that look!” she’d laugh.