History of Wolves(58)
I could feel Ann watching from across the room.
“Where in Florida does your family live?” she asked.
I couldn’t look at her to answer. I couldn’t bear to talk about Loose River, so I headed toward the doorway instead. “I want a snack. You want a Diet Coke from the corner store?” She always did. I whisked up my jacket, stuffed the photo and the card inside a pocket. Opened the door and rode the elevator down four floors, taking in all the jittery, stuttering sounds of invisible machinery. On the ground floor, there was a clank and a bounce. Why tell Ann I hadn’t been in contact with my mother in more than eight months? Why tell her that? Outside the apartment, traffic crawled steadily over icy roads, exhaust and snow mixing in the air. The cold instantly tightened the skin on my cheeks, calmed me. After a moment, I circled back through the rotating door and stood in the warm foyer again, where the light was bright over the mailboxes.
“Dear Mattie,” Mr. Grierson wrote in his card.
His cursive went loop-loop-loop.
“Thank you for your letter a few months back,” he loopsaid, slanting downward to the right. He went on:
What an unexpected thing, a real old-fashioned letter. I meant to write back right away, and then, after some time passed, it seemed likely I would not write at all. But Christmas is a good excuse, and it was a nice surprise to hear from you, I guess because I didn’t expect to get a letter like that. Hearing from an old teacher, I worry, can only be a disappointment. I remember running into one of my professors a few years back, and we just stood around with nothing to say, so I guessed that he didn’t remember me the way he said he did and was being nice. I vowed right there and then never to pretend to know an old student. What I’m saying is, please don’t take it personally that my whole time in Minnesota is pretty much a blur to me now. I just don’t have many memories of that year. Plus I’m not as young as I was, as I’m sure you know. Even so it’s nice to know that someone got something out of my lessons. I did work hard, and it’s good to feel that maybe all that work counted somehow.
I’m running out of room on this card! Florida’s nowhere I’d recommend. It’s like being squashed slowly by invisible hands. Ha, ha, ha. It’s hot is what I’m saying. The days go by pretty fast, and lately I just want a shopping-list approach to things. That’s about all I feel capable of at this point. Here’s what I want, just sitting down at the end of the day and seeing that I can check off the items. I’m not in the least what you say I am, though your letter was kind. I’ve learned a little about these things in my time, that is, the kinds of people who take the trouble to write me. I’ve found that some people who’ve done something bad will just go ahead and condemn everyone else around them to avoid feeling shitty themselves. As if that even works. Other types of people, and I’m not saying you’re this, necessarily, but I’m just putting it out there, will defend people like me on principle because when their turns come around, they want that so badly for themselves. My two cents, for what it’s worth. California’s awesome, though. Go, if you can.
Peace, God bless, and happy New Year!
Adam Grierson
On New Year’s Day I got up early because I couldn’t sleep, though I’d been out late the night before with Rom. I walked down the winding path that followed the Minnehaha Creek to Lake Nokomis. The sun never really rose. It was dark, and then it was just a little less so. When I got to the lake, I saw a hopeful fisherman pulling a red plastic sled of supplies across the ice. All the usual joggers and cross-country skiers had stayed home. They were sleeping in I guess, doing their resolutions on notecards, drinking their bright orange mimosas, getting laid. It was me and the sled man out in the world. His body made an acute angle with the ice; he was leaning that hard as he pulled. His sled had etched a long blue streak from one end of the lake to the other.
When the wind started picking up, I hurried through the trees to keep warm, peed in a brittle porta-potty without fully sitting down. Came out and left the lake behind, not looking back. Where did people in a city go to feel less trapped? On Cedar Avenue I stopped for a cup of coffee to warm my bare hands at a bakery that sold so many kinds of bread the loaves covered a whole wall. I stared at the bread for a while, then left without buying any. Instead I went to a bar I’d come to like, where the stools were painted to look like human legs. I let myself get drunk. I let myself slouch, like the sled man, at a very acute angle over the bar. Eventually I glanced at my watch and realized I needed to find a bus so I could meet Ann at our Laundromat—Ann who wanted to wash all our towels and rugs and curtains for the new year. “Fresh start,” she’d said.
For three hours, until my buzz wore off and our quarters drained, we washed and dried and folded our linens.
By the time we started back it was almost dark again. Ann said she wanted to see the rich people’s luminaries along the river, so we walked with our baskets the long way home, through an alley and down a winding line of shops. Between a closed camera store and a bank, we passed a crow pecking at a frozen breadstick in front of a lonely lit shop. The shop had science and health marked in blue chalk in the window, and inside a Victorian lady with a brooch smiled placidly from a poster. The sidewalk crow hauled its breadstick up to a telephone wire, and as it did, Ann paused with her basket and lingered by the glass. She had gone to camp with some Christian Scientists, years back, which made her think she was some kind of authority—and she stopped for a moment, reading silently through the window. “I thought they’d closed most of these reading rooms down. There’s, like, hardly any churches left.” Then she shook her head, shifting the weight of her basket from one hip to the other. “I mean, the thing I never understood, the thing that doesn’t make any sense, is how you can have a religion that offers absolutely no explanation for the origin of evil.”