We’re headed to Bush Lake in “prestigious west Bloomington,” as real-estate ads on the radio are suddenly calling the new neighborhoods beyond Normandale Boulevard. “Prestigious west Bloomington,” Dad repeats, wondering aloud what wonders life must hold for the aristocrats out there, nine minutes from our home in benighted central Bloomington. Forever after, when he hears the word “prestigious,” he snorts and pronounces it with the same affected accent as the guy in the Grey Poupon commercial.
Already some of our neighbors are moving out to prestigious west Bloomington, including Mom and Dad’s good friends the Cannadys and the Engelharts. Mr. Cannady has a cool job selling Cooper hockey equipment and Gladding sleds to sporting goods stores. He also sells C. Itoh bikes from Japan. My baseball glove is a Cooper model that Dad got from Mr. Cannady, who in 1973 also began to carry Nike shoes, which consisted principally of the red-swooshed Cortezes. The Cannady kids didn’t want to wear them, preferring (like all the other kids in South Brook) the Adidas Roms, whose three stripes were the same green color of the sports teams at Lincoln High School. But Mr. Cannady was unmoved. He wouldn’t buy his children Adidas. And so they wore the Cortezes, and within a couple of years, the rest of us did too. Most of America does. I’ve heard it said that Mr. Cannady gets a commission on all the Nikes sold in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North and South Dakota, and Nebraska. And so they are moving off Xerxes Circle and on to prestigious west Bloomington.
But Mom and Dad have doubled down on South Brook, adding a screened-in porch to the back of the house and expanding the family room at the front of the house. From the outside, you can almost see the mint-green aluminum siding straining to contain us, as if the buckling metal might burst all at once like a bag of Jiffy Pop.
“Jiffy Pop is a magic treat. As fun to make as it is to eat.”
And anyway, our fortunes are rising. Mickey Mining has been good to Dad. He and Mom are playing tennis at the Normandale Racquet Club, supplementing Dad’s other exercise routine of buying and ignoring primitive fitness contraptions: a single wheel with two handles for rolling on the floor, a spring with two handles on it for stretching across his chest, a spring-loaded pliers for strengthening his grip and maintaining supremacy when delivering the Knuckle Floater. It is a mark of the 3M Company’s largesse that the annual picnic at the company-owned Tartan Park in Saint Paul has bottomless Coleman coolers filled with cans of Brimfull pop and soft ice cream sandwiches, and the children are encouraged after the sack-racing tournament—the parents appear to bet on their children as if it were a cockfight—to gorge on orange soda and Bomb Pops.
In Bush Lake, we swim all day, breaking only to shiver over a soggy sandwich on the beach, where I lie flat in the sand to warm myself, so that I resemble a breaded veal cutlet when I return to the water.
Life is a series of blistering sunburns, the skin bubbling up like the tar bubbles in the streets of South Brook. “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.” At home, before dinner, at the end of a perfect day, I lie on my bedspread and peel a patch of skin from my shoulder, hold it up to the light, and admire its translucence. In school, I’ll spread a thin layer of Elmer’s glue on my palm and let it dry. Peel it off and the strip lighting of the classroom shines through. But tonight this is my real skin, tanned to a Reese’s brown. I ball it up like a booger and throw it somewhere near the Schlitz-can wastebasket.
We have central air now, but it’s only turned on when the heat becomes unbearable. It’s something we have but don’t use, like the furniture in the formal living room, or nuclear weapons.
Dad has something else he doesn’t use. As The Boys come thundering down to breakfast one morning, Jim’s portrait is knocked off the staircase wall. The glass front breaks and the photo falls out of the frame. But there’s another portrait behind it, used as backing paper—a sketch of Jim as a little boy. It’s unmistakably him, beautifully rendered in pencil, and when Dad sees his own artistry—he has clearly forgotten ever having drawn this—he laughs in mild embarrassment.
I ask him to draw something, but he demurs. And yet he brings home graph paper and number-two pencils from the inexhaustible supply cabinet at Mickey Mining, and encourages me to draw whatever comes to mind. What comes to mind are hockey goalies. Page after page of goalie masks, goalie sticks, and waffle boards. I render the netminders of the National Hockey League as quasi-religious figures, in the style of my Book of Saints. I know the goalies better than the saints: Gump Worsley, Cesare Maniago, Gilles Gilbert, Tony Esposito, Bernie Parent, Rogie Vachon—the names alone captivate. And the goalie masks mean I never have to draw a face.
The hotter it gets in the house, the more expansive my ice-hockey drawings become, incorporating Zambonis, fogged breath, steaming Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, like the kind dispensed from the vending machine at BIG—where the cup falls upright, if you’re lucky, followed by a fire hose of hot cocoa.
At night I bring my drawings to Dad, ensconced in his Archie Bunker chair. He pores over them with serious interest—like Mr. Brady hunched over blueprints. “Wunderbar,” he says, flexing his businessman’s Berlitz. “Bellissimo.” And then, when I don’t respond, “Nice job.” The family-room windows are cranked open. Crickets and the whir of the neighbors’ AC condenser. Moths and fireflies bumping against the screen. Mosquito buzz, dog bark, John Chancellor talking about Watergate.
Back upstairs an electric fan cools my lobsterized body. Colored pencils scratch out goalies on graph paper. Separated from me by a foot of blue-carpeted DMZ is Tom’s bed, where he too lies in front of the fan, waiting for its merciful oscillation. Together we look like “we fell into the sun,” to quote Paul McCartney, on the radio, in Mr. Wagner’s sputtering love bug, through all these sounds of the summer of 1974.
On late summer afternoons, in the interval between cleaning and cooking dinner, Mom does the crossword in ink, bending the puzzle to her will. If the clue to nine across is “Color of the sky,” and she’s already inked in “bl_h,” she’ll go with “blah” rather than do the remedial work required to make the sky “blue.” “Well, the sky is kind of blah today,” Mom might say, not incorrectly, unconcerned that all the other answers will play off these letters. The a and h in “blah” mean “cot” is “cat” and “mate” is “math.” The completed puzzle is a neat grid of non sequiturs. But it all fits, the way my favorite palindromes—“Some men interpret nine memos”—are clever and tidy without making any sense.
The orderliness is what matters to Mom. A place for everything and everything in its place. It bothers only me that an “army bed” is not a “cat,” that a “London pal” is not a “math,” and I set about correcting Mom’s crosswords when I find them on the table next to her chair, until one day she just asks me for my help.