History of Wolves(44)

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.

“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.”