The Marsh King's Daughter(54)

Also, we were out of salt. When my mother discovered that all of the salt was gone, she threw the empty salt box against the wall and screamed that this was the last straw, and why didn’t my father do something about it before now, and how was she supposed to cook without salt? I expected my father to slap her for yelling at him and talking back, but all he did was tell her that the Ojibwa never had salt until the white men came, and she’d just have to get used to doing without. I was going to miss it. Not all the wild foods we ate tasted good, even after they were boiled in several changes of water. Burdock root definitely took getting used to. And I never did like wild mustard greens. Salt helped.

The next morning, however, everything was quiet. My mother fixed the hot oat cereal we ate for breakfast without saying anything about salt. I didn’t particularly like how it tasted, and I could tell by the way my father pushed his spoon around his bowl and left half his cereal behind when he got up from the table that he didn’t, either. My mother ate hers like nothing was wrong. I assumed this was because she had a secret salt stash hidden somewhere in the cabin that she was keeping for herself. After my father strapped on his snowshoes and slung his rifle over his shoulder and went out into the marsh for the day, I spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon looking for it. I searched the storage room, the living room, and the kitchen. I didn’t think my mother would hide her stash in the bedroom she shared with my father, and I knew she wouldn’t hide it in my room. Though it would have been a good trick if she had, and it was something I would have done if I was her and she was me, my mother wasn’t that smart.

The only place left to look was the closet under the stairs. I wished I had searched the closet before it started snowing and the cabin got dark. When I was little, I used to shut myself inside the closet and pretend it was a submarine or a bear’s den or a Viking’s tomb, but now I didn’t like small, dark places.

Still, I wanted that salt. So the next time my mother went to the outhouse, I pushed the kitchen curtains open as far as they would go and propped one of our chairs against the closet door so it wouldn’t swing shut. I would have liked to use the oil lamp to search the closet, but we weren’t allowed to light the lamp when my father wasn’t home.

The closet was very small. I don’t know what the people who built our cabin used to put in it, but for as long as I could remember, the closet had been empty. When I was little I fit inside with room to spare, but now I was so big, I had to sit with my back against the wall and my knees drawn up to my chin. I closed my eyes so the darkness would feel more natural and quickly patted down the walls and the backs of the stairs. Cobwebs stuck to my fingers. The dust made me sneeze. I was looking for a loose board or a knothole or a nail sticking out that could be used as a hook—any place a box or a bag of salt could hide.

In the space between a stair riser and the outside wall, my fingers touched paper. The people who built our cabin nailed newspapers to the outside walls as insulation to keep out the cold, but this didn’t feel like newspaper, and anyway we’d used up all of the newspaper as fire starter long ago. I pried the paper loose and carried it to the table and sat down with it next to the window. The paper was rolled into a tube and tied shut with a piece of string. I untied the knot and the paper fell open in my hands.

It was a magazine. Not a National Geographic. The cover wasn’t yellow and the paper was too thin. It was too dark to make out details, so I opened the door to the woodstove and stuck a sliver of cedar into the coals until it caught fire and lit the lamp, then pinched out the taper and put the taper in our dry sink so I didn’t accidentally burn down the cabin. Then I pulled the oil lamp close.

Printed in big yellow letters at the top of the page against a pink background was the word ’TEEN. I assumed this was the magazine’s name. There was a girl on the cover. She looked to be about the same age as me. She had long blonde hair, though hers was loose and curly instead of straight and braided like mine. She was wearing an orange, purple, blue, and yellow sweater with a zigzag pattern like my leg tattoos. A+ LOOKS MAKE THE GRADE it said on one side of her picture, and MAGNETIC MAKEOVERS: ATTRACTIVE HOW-TO’S on the other. Inside the magazine were more pictures of the same girl. A caption beneath one of the pictures said her name was Shannen Doherty and she was the star of a television show called Beverly Hills, 90210.

I turned to the table of contents: Earth S.O.S.—How You Can Help; Fad Dieting: Safe or Scary?; Clip ’N’ Keep Booklet: Bonus Fashion Planner; Hottest New TV Hunks; Mr. Right: Could He Be Wrong for You?; Teens with AIDS: Heartbreaking Stories. I had no idea what the titles meant or what the articles were about. I flipped through the pages. Hot looks for school the caption said beneath a picture of a group of children standing beside a yellow bus. The children looked happy. No ads for kitchen appliances that I could see; instead the ads were for things called “lipstick” and “eyeliner” and “blush,” which as far as I could tell were what the girls used to color their lips red and their cheeks pink and their eyelids blue. I wasn’t sure why they’d want to.

I sat back, tapped my fingers on the table, chewed my thumb knuckle, tried to think. I had no idea where this magazine came from, how it got here, how long it had been hidden in the closet. Why anyone would make a magazine about only girls and boys.

I pulled the lamp closer and paged through a second time. Everything was described as “hot” and “hip” and “cool.” The children danced, played music, had parties. The pictures were bright and colorful. The cars didn’t look at all like the ones in the Geographics. They were sleek and low to the ground like weasels instead of big and round and fat like beavers. They also had names. I especially liked a yellow car the magazine called a Mustang because it had the same name as a horse. I assumed this was because the car could go very fast.