The bathroom floor was cold, its gray-and-white Depression-era tile hurting Kristen’s feet. The stark white sink, its pipes in full view, had a separate faucet for hot and cold. She chose cold, rinsed the sleep out of her eyes and dried her face with a white towel, scratchy and sweet-smelling from yesterday’s clothesline. The tub stood ready, waiting for her to fill it. She could throw on some clothes, get a cab to the airport and be back in California by nightfall, but first she would have to break it to Aunt Marie.
Who had let her sleep in the first place.
Kristen hung up the towel and walked down the hall to the kitchen, where Felix the Clock beat his metronome tail and laughed silently. How soundly she had slept, setting a new record: sixteen hours.
She pulled out a chair, its metal legs scraping on the linoleum, and sat down at the chipped grey laminate table. Aunt Marie had left a note, a scrap of paper propped against the salt shaker. “Cereal above sink,” it read. “Dinner at noon.” Everything Kristen needed to feel at home again.
She pushed back, staring at the note. Maybe she should fire up the laptop, try to bootleg an Internet connection and get some work done. Do a little networking. Polish the old résumé.
As if anyone wanted to see it now, in the depths of the Great Recession.
In the living room, the front left window still stuck, and the floorboards in the hall still creaked in exactly the same place they had when, as a child, she tried to watch TV instead of going to bed. The house seemed tiny now, almost more like a cottage, with two small bedrooms, a bath with a tub but no shower, and a root cellar.
She ran her fingertips over a painted white wall, the plaster finish cool to the touch. One hundred years ago, her great-grandfather packed dirt into the gap between the interior and exterior walls. The primitive construction made for good insulation through winters severe enough to make him pine for Siberia, and how many summer tornadoes had beat the crap out of this poor structure? Yet in the start of the twenty-first century it stood, humble but defiant.
Old homes – older than this one – lined the block. Instead of knocking them down and starting over, owners remodeled a bit on the inside, or kicked a wall out into the yard if they needed space. North Dakotans had a reputation for using and reusing objects longer than anyone else in the country. A leaky hose became a garden drip line, an old tire a planter, a glass insulator a doorstop. How well she remembered her parents admonishing her for tossing out a pair of ripped sneakers. “They can use that at the poorhouse,” her mother would have explained while fishing the shoes out of the trash can.
Sitting on the back steps munching corn flakes, Kristen watched a jet cut across the sky. This sad lethargy, the culmination of her career at Global, weighed her down like an x-ray blanket. Normally she would leap into action, ever the ballsy career woman assailing the next corporate peak, solving problems, taking steps.
Instead, she contemplated the garden at her feet, a study in Midwestern Zen. Long wooden planks, their edges rounded from weather and footfall, served as paths between rows. A wider set of boards, lying two by two, formed a walkway from the porch to the alley. Forty years ago, Kristen and her friends raced up and down the planks, playing hide-and-seek behind the tomato plants. They picked peas and ate them right off the vines, gagged on tart chokecherries and spit watermelon seeds at one another.
Her mother taught her how deep to bury seedlings, how much water they needed, and how to thin the growing plants so that the strongest thrived. Every inch of the back yard was planted in rows of vegetables and herbs. By the end of the summer their neighbors avoided eye contact so as not to receive yet another box of zucchini. Before she finished sixth grade Kristen knew how to can vegetables and preserves.
The warming earth, well rested from a winter under snow and ice, pushed up bachelor buttons and morning glories. The tomato plants were covered with yellow flowers, and the squash and cucumbers already threatened to take over. The yard ended at a wire fence on the other side of which ran a lane, now blacktopped.
A lawn mower started up a few backyards distant, recalling memories of playing outside in the summer, charging barefoot across a wet lawn and through the cold water arching from the chattering Rainbird sprinkler. When she was older, she spent most of every day hanging out at the community pool with her girlfriends, flirting with boys and showing off the cute new swimsuits she made herself.
She finished her cereal, rinsed the bowl and wandered around the house. Aunt Marie’s selection of reading material, neatly displayed on the coffee table, ranged from TV Guide to a magazine of crossword puzzles. Kristen tried the TV but found only game shows and the crop report. The house closed in, its hands around her ribcage.
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She left the back door unlocked and went through the hand-made wire and wood gate into the alley. At the end of the street she turned right and found the old path that ran next to the railroad. As a child, Kristen rode her bike along this path, she and her little buddies darting like mosquitoes around the ruts and rocks and broken bottles left by hoboes. Yelling though the underpass, their voices echoing powerfully, the girls zipped up to Villard Street, intent on the five and dime with its rows of nickel candy. If they were short of coinage, they’d peer through the back door of the café until Aunt Marie shoed them away with bribes of freshly-baked donuts.
Following her memory, Kristen hiked eight blocks eastward through neighborhoods that seemed to have shrunk in the past thirty years, desiccating in the dry North Dakota air. Clapboard homes stood alongside small ranches, some dilapidated, others fiercely meticulous. The century-old sidewalk was cracked and buckled, turning back into aggregate in places. Except for an old woman sitting on her porch, the streets were deserted, the residents working or passing the morning in old folks’ homes, visiting the near dead.
She found the old community park, abandoned in favor of the new recreation center. A chain link fence surrounded the swimming pool, now drained and peeling. The playground equipment stood rusting, the monkey bars a mottled red-brown. Swing sets lacked swings, weeds overran the sand boxes, and brush invaded the cracked pavement of the tetherball court. When she climbed on the merry-go-round and pushed, it screeched in complaint but turned, rough and slow at first and then faster, as if remembering how. Once she had it going she lay on her back, hands under her head, feet braced against a crossbar. The clouds whirled overhead.
Fifty yards to the south, the river flowed silently past, the wind rattling the cat tails. Kristen took a deep breath of the new-oxygen smell, like putting her nose in a freshly-opened bag of potting soil. She and her friends had played in and around the Heart, graduating from making mud pies to sneaking smokes and kisses in the tall grasses along the banks. After school they skulked along the river, scuffing their Catholic saddle shoes in the dirt, their uniforms riddled with foxtails.
She rode the merry-go-round on her back, at home with the silence. This abandoned lot had started as prairie, turned into a park, and soon contractors would scrape it off to build a new condominium or strip mall. Nothing stayed the same. She knew that and prepared for it, but lately being prepared didn’t seem to help. You could do your best at a job for years and still find yourself on the street for no other reason than some CEO had bought himself an island and ruined the company. It appeared that the younger generation would never be able to afford their own homes or find secure work, and the Internet was turning into a place where husbands could fall in love with sexy avatars from a virtual world.
At least, hers could.
As the years passed she noticed his growing indifference and her own, but shoved it out of her mind in favor of her busy career, always the default setting. Her job served up another project to work on, another employee to counsel, or a critical position to fill in one of her hospitals. If she had to work late yet again, she assumed he could feed himself. She had learned from her parents that marriage, no matter how bad, was more or less a given. As long as neither complained, they would keep charging ahead, building a fortune and a future, evolving, if separately, and remaining polite.
Kristen whirled around under the blue and white sky. A woman who loved her philandering husband might invite him to come home. She might look the other way when he pulled out the checkbook for the monthly child support payments, maybe even allow him to keep a small picture of the child in his wallet.
Kristen was not that woman.
For the first time in her life she had no ties, no parents or husband to consider, no office to report to, no mission or meaning. Her business cards had overnight become pointless. She had no hobby beyond working, no friends outside the office, and no other interests. She had reached her fiftieth birthday, black and white with no shading. Lacking an identity, she could be anybody. The thought was terrifying.
With another shove the sky resumed its revolutions, and she spun in circles, unbound. What did she want? If she could take any job in the world, what would she do? Where would she live? What did she love?
The merry-go-round creaked and groaned.
Yet, some good might come of this enforced vacation in Sparta. She would visit with long-lost relatives and old acquaintances, fill her lungs with clean prairie air, and find closure. When she returned to California, life would be good again. All she had to do was put in the time, planning and preparing for the next round.
She figured three days.
END
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