Cuttings
	Emily Van Kley

It was a Monday and Kendra sat at her desk, a bonsai tree on one corner and two ivies on the other, their leaves dangling just above the imitation wood floor. Nine in the morning and she was already narrating: The boss wanders by, his hair falling in greasy strings over his forehead. Pretending her life had a script, Kendra felt like she was both actor and director. Sometimes, she could almost make herself believe there was an artistic vision behind each dull vignette. While he waters the tree in the corner, he looks at his secretary, her short curls tucked behind her ears, her neck bent over a pile of invoices nearly as tall as she is sitting down. He thinks -- And there she was stuck. For nearly six months now, she'd been working at Wired Clips, a specialty paper clip company whose most popular design -- daisies in clusters of three -- graced the notebooks of sixth grade girls around the country. Still, she had no idea what went through the man's head. "How do you keep the fig from overgrowing its pot?' she asked as Mr. Willis passed her cubicle. He straightened, brushed at a few drops of water beaded on the twill over his left thigh. "I developed a formula. Circumference at time of sale multiplied by the room to growth ratio, controlled for indoor conditions of course. Then it was just a matter of buying the right pot, not large enough to encourage rapid growth, not small enough to cramp." One thing she did know: the only way to get her boss talking was to ask about his plants -- his only interest as far as she should tell, a bit of an obsession, really. Every worker's desk had at least three. He said they made a more productive work environment, but what he really meant, Kendra sometimes thought, was that they were the one thing in the office he had complete control over. Whenever she saw him walking through the cubicles with his forehead all puckered, a sure sign that someone had pissed him off by taking an hour and a half lunch or wearing an especially loud shirt, he'd appear minutes later, armed with a pitcher of water and a basket. He'd walk around the small office, pulling brown leaves from the fig trees, sticking his fingers into the bonsai to see if the soil was wet enough to cling. She'd never had a conversation with him about anything but plants, unless reading back a dictated memo or delivering phone messages could be considered conversation. Mr. Willis shut his mouth and sighed, turned back to his office, hitting the creeping charlie and shelf of baby tears on the way. Kendra got the distinct impression that he bored even himself. Suddenly it occurred to her: Mr. Willis was lonely. Kendra thought she knew something about loneliness. For months now she hadn't met a soul but her landlord's gawky twenty year-old son. He'd been dispatched to her apartment shortly after she moved in, to re-hinge a cabinet, and had hands that kept slipping somehow from his screwdriver to her knee until she finally had to make him leave his tools so she could finish fixing the damn thing. He still called once a month to see if her toilet needed fixing, or her sink, or if she wanted him to regrout her shower, again. Compared to him and to Mr. Willis, Kendra figured she was a sparkling beacon of personality. Or at least she had glimmers of one. True, she'd been miserable in high school because she "couldn't connect well with her peer group," according to her school counselor. But that was because she'd preferred the characters of a book, the way they unfolded their personalities gently, page by page, to the kids at school with all their brass and bustle. If a protagonist came on too strong you could just look up from the page for a while, stop and breathe. But since she'd moved to Minneapolis from her parents' house in Fargo, since her dreams had filled up with her father's sad eyes, his arm dripping red all over the clean laundry, she'd decided it was time to connect with people instead of pages. The hard part, of course, was the logistics. Kendra pressed her palms down on the top of her desk, careful not to upset the teetering pile of paper. She stood up, pushed back her chair with her thighs and stepped around her desk toward Mr. Willis' office. The blinds were drawn and the door open only a crack. She thought: bravely discarding any fear of what her boss might be doing to relieve his boredom in the darkness of his office, the secretary approaches, ready to open his sad life to the wonders of human interaction. He is about to find that there is someone in this city he can talk to. Kendra tapped on his door, feeling distinctly humanitarian. "Mr. Willis? May I have a word?" "Finished those invoices already?" she heard through the crack in the door. "No. Not quite." "Come in." She opened the door and, without being asked, sat in the orange plastic chair across from his desk. It was by far the brightest color in the office: no prints or photos on the off-white walls, ivies trailing everywhere but no flowering plants. Mr. Willis himself wore a gray suit coat and his usual gray-black twills. "You know, sir," the words dropped out of her mouth like cartoon anvils, "you can talk to me if you'd like -- about more than just plants, I mean." "Excuse me?" "Well, if you want to. If you're, I don't know, lonely or something. I mean, it's hard for me to make friends, too. Not that I'm saying it is for you. Really, it's nobody's fault, right? Big city. Everyone's got somewhere to be. I'm sure plants are nicer than, say, the guy who brings your mail." This is why the secretary rarely speaks; her brain shuts off under pressure while words keep coming. Mr. Willis cleared his throat and twisted his neck like he was trying to pull it free of its tightly buttoned collar. "In the future," he said. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your conversation at a more -- professional level." When Kendra didn't move, he glanced toward the door. "I'll need those invoices by four o'clock." She walked out past her desk to the copy room, shut the door and cried into the buttons of the fax machine. It wasn't the first time. *  *  * Throughout high school, Kendra's father had been her confidante. He'd move through the backyard of their West Fargo home -- gray vinyl siding and sparkling new windows with arches at the top -- trimming hedges with a T-square. She'd tell him about what she was reading, the joke Mr. Daniels had made about Emily Dickinson going on a lecture circuit that only she got. Sometimes she'd rush through what Tammy or one of her entourage had said in the lunchroom, just a table away from where Kendra was unwrapping her usual crumple of a cheese sandwich on white bread. How Tammy, like every other girl at that school, laughed at Kendra's hair, frizzy, uncombed, how she would pantomime a book on the table next to her, wait for her friends to ask her something, start the game, and then say, just loudly enough: "not now, can't you see I'm reading?" "The world is full of trouble, Kendra Mae," he'd tell her, shaving the waxy strips of yew needles where they'd grown spiky, star-like. "Nothing to do but keep on." She'd long sometimes to step up close to him, sink into the soft landscape of his chest and stomach, know that her ear mashed against him would hear a language of heartbeat and steadiness that she could never read. But the hedge trimmer or lawn mower or spray nozzle always took up that space. "You know what I mean?" he'd ask. So she'd return the next day, knowing that living in Tammy's world was simply a chore she had to perform. She spoke only when directly addressed, usually by her teachers. She watched her classmates cross paths in the halls, toss insults over their shoulders. She'd step to the side and hold her book up to her chest. *  *  * That night Kendra decided on a bath after supper, planned to linger an hour or so with Rushdie's newest novel until she could justify going to bed. It was May in Minneapolis, the evenings still so cool she couldn't sleep without a wool blanket wrapped around her against the wind trickling under her storm windows. As soon as she started running the water, she remembered her book sitting on the corner of her desk at work, holding down a stack of phone messages she'd forgotten to give to Mr. Willis. She didn't believe in starting new books in the midst of others. The characters jumbled in her head and started using each other's language; she forgot who was a Pakistani expatriot and who dreamed of designing a line of sportsters shaped like her ex-girlfriend. Cursing, she threw on sweatpants and shoes, a jacket, and walked the four blocks back. She doubted the office would still be open. Mr. Willis disappeared from work at precisely four o'clock each afternoon -- a nod and his car keys in hand often her only indication he was leaving. But maybe someone would still be there, like that balding guy in the back corner who always worked right through lunch break, shoving tuna sandwiches in his mouth while he ordered aqua -- not turquoise -- rubber coating for the new whale shaped model. But when she got there the windows were dark. "Fuck," she said, her evening stretching out in front of her, silent and interminably long. "Fuck. Fuck." She let her head fall forward against the glass of the door and to her surprise it rattled, unlocked. She cupped her hands around her face to see past the glare of streetlights reflected in the streaked glass. A woman emerged from the far corner of the room where she was emptying trash into a wheeled garbage can with spray bottles wedged over the lid and handles. Kendra knocked, not wanting to scare her. The woman looked up, squinting a bit into the evening darkening beyond the window, her gray hair long and pulled back in a faded red bandanna. As she walked toward the door, Kendra could see deep wrinkles meshed over her cheeks. "Office is closed for the day, dearie," she said, cracking the door. "I came for my book," Kendra said. "Pardon?" "My book." Kendra pointed in the general direction of her desk. "From work. I mean, I work here." "That a fact? You the one who takes care of these plants so well? I've been cleaning in town for fifty years and I've never seen plants look this perky. Come on in." She swung the door wide and Kendra walked through. "It's my boss," Kendra said. "He likes plants better than people." The woman laughed. She patted Kendra's shoulder as if it was a joke. "No, really. You should try being one of the people." "Maybe he likes that plants can't talk back." "Yeah." Kendra picked up her book. She flipped back and forth through the first few chapters. The old woman wandered back to her garbage can, picked up a spray bottle and a rag. She worked fluidly, her thick arm whisking the same pattern over desk and chair and computer. She looked comfortable in her faded flannel shirt and white walking shoes. The cavern of the office at night is transformed by the presence of one radiant woman, her crinkly eyes and kind mouth. It feels to the secretary like being five years old, her father shooing away closet monsters when he plugs in the nightlight at the foot of her bed. The fat on the woman's arms waves back and forth, soft and inviting as a tub full of warm water, and all the words she might say hover around her head like a halo. Every phrase ends with 'honey' or 'dear.' "Do you need any help?" Kendra called. The woman laughed at her again. "You mean you don't get enough of this place during the day?" "This is different." The woman propped her hands on her wide hips. She shook her head and smiled. "Name's Nan," she said. "You know how to run a vacuum?" *  *  * Turned out Nan was something of a legend in the industrial cleaning world -- she cleaned each cubicle as if it were her own bathroom about to be photographed for the front cover of Better Homes and Gardens. After nearly fifty years in Minneapolis-St.Paul, she'd become so well known she had more work than she could handle. Kendra started helping her out a few nights a week, careful to wipe under every scrap of paper, empty the grounds from every coffee machine. Gradually, she got to know Nan's schedule, started showing up without being asked. In the meantime, Nan told her stories. Mostly, she talked mostly about growing up in a small mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Kendra heard how her father drowned in a mine flooding, how her mother stopped going to women's circle at church soon after, stopped calling her PTA friends, finally stopped leaving the house. How Nan started letting boys take her parking, lost her puffy skirted, twittery girlfriends, earned a reputation. How she couldn't wait to get out of there, left on her seventeenth birthday with her mom's old car, five hundred dollars from a boyfriend she'd convinced she was pregnant and a back seat full of stuffed animals and party dresses. She said she'd been alone in the city for fifty years, that her mailman had always been pleasant but when she finally asked him in for pie he looked at her like she had desperate old biddy written across her forehead and refused even to nod at her through the front window after that. Kendra told Nan about her attempt at college, how she'd signed up for web design and management courses, thinking she'd find a small press somewhere for whom she'd design book covers, how she imagined reading each manuscript and letting the characters speak to her of what they looked like, what shades colored their physical and emotional worlds. How for the first time she hadn't been able to read to save her life. All those manuals, all that crisp technical language. She'd tried to befriend Simon of the tangled black hair and unwashed blue jeans who sat a row across from her, but didn't know how to go about it. Ask him about the homework for last night? Ask what, had he enjoyed it? How she'd only been able to think of the kind of questions that would drop clattering to the floor, leave him squinting at her like he wasn't sure they were the same animal. How she dropped out after the first semester. *  *  * It became harder and harder for Kendra to get out of bed for work at Wired Clips after nights she cleaned with Nan. She took to drinking a twenty-ounce mug of coffee twice each morning to keep from dozing behind her invoices. As she walked to work from her apartment each day, she'd try to pull herself out of dream and into reality by focusing her attention on specific features of the people she passed. The trick was to do it all covertly, with glances so quick the subjects never guessed they were being examined. One day she counted five hooked noses, three with gaping nostrils, two pugs and a ski jump. The next she recorded two pairs of apple cheeks, four flat like saucepans, and one man with cheekbones slashed so high she broke her rule and let her eyes drink him in. Her mind was still full of cheekbone when Mr. Willis stopped by her desk around ten. "I'll need to speak with you before lunch," he said, turning one of the ivies so it would have to bend its leaves back over the center of the pot to catch the light from the window. "The Shiko account?" He shook his head. "It's the Shikito account. We've been working on this for a month. You'd think -- well, just knock on my door when you have a break." "I've got a break now." Mr. Willis flicked his eyes to the papers piled in her in-box. "I'm not sure you realize that your job is in jeopardy, Ms. Larson." "Excuse me?" "I've seen you fall asleep almost every morning lately; you gave Mr. Shikito my old extension number not once, but twice; it's been taking upwards of an hour when I ask you to run a short copy job. I have no choice but to believe you no longer think your work here is important enough to do well." Prick, Kendra thought, sad pretentious little prick. She said, "It's not that, I swear. It's just that I've got this night job now. I guess I'm a little less -- rooted than I could be, so to speak." "Well then I trust you'll do what's necessary to bring your work back up to an acceptable level." "I can't quit there, if that's what you mean." "I mean your responsibility is to maintain a level of competence at Wired Clips, regardless of what else you do on your own time." He flipped a hand dismissively, as if Kendra should know her own time was nothing but an indulgence. She imagined Mr. Willis driving home from work in the afternoon. The boss pulls onto a black asphalt driveway, turns off a spigot in the garage so that he can move the sprinklers in his work clothes. His son comes home from school with a bruise ringing his left eye and the boss says 'just go back tomorrow, next time don't answer when they tease you. It's your responsibility.' Kendra picked a leaf from the disoriented ivy and twirled it between her thumb and forefinger. She looked up, enjoyed the hard set of his jawbone. "My responsibility," she said, "has nothing to do with you." She put the leaf down carefully and started gathering up her purse, her coffee mug. "I quit," she said. *  *  * When Kendra told her, Nan wasn't at all surprised. "I suppose you'll be working full time with me then." "Would you mind?" Nan looked down from the ladder she was using to dust a top bookshelf at the Christian Science Reading Room. "Honey, I don't know how you put up with hanging out with an old lady all the time, but I haven't had a woman friend since I was about your age. I'd be glad to have you." Kendra thought about the landlord's groping son, of her downstairs neighbor who once invited her over for lumpy mashed potatoes and leathery beef, and who, when they'd finished eating, had asked if Kendra would stay and watch her three year-old while she met a "delicious" man from her office for drinks. A friend, Kendra thought. A woman friend. She grinned and sloshed the mop in big circles over the marble floor. The former secretary wonders how to celebrate such an occasion. She bites her tongue over "thank you" and "thank God for you," though she realizes it's the first time in forever since she's thought God might be a possibility. "I'm glad, too," she said. *  *  * That evening after work, Kendra invited Nan over to her place to celebrate the new partnership. They stretched under the stars, or what they could see of them from the top of Kendra's apartment building. The sky was a dull purplish brown where it hung over Minneapolis. Beside her, Nan shifted. "Honey this is great, it really is. But my tailbone's about pushed back into my stomach and my joints are aching from this damned cement floor." She sat up, rubbing her knees, her hips, her elbows to prove her point. "Anyway, seeing stars just halfway like this -- it's enough to make a soul depressed." "It doesn't take the stars to do that." Kendra flopped clumsily to her side, let her arms fall over her face so that she found herself looking out between her own elbows at Nan's knees. Like the rest of her skin, they were pink-going-on-red with blotches of white like reverse freckles. The colors, combined with the way her calf swelled out below the mottled edges of her kneecap, reminded Kendra of raw bratwurst, the kind her dad cooked in beer for his work picnics when she was a kid. She'd been thinking about her father and the one thing she couldn't tell Nan: the day she came home to find him crouched in the backyard, sheets pegged to the clotheslines running on either side of him, their ends flicking up in the breeze. She'd peeked around the corner to ask for gas money, when she saw that he wasn't pulling pillowcases from the laundry basket at his side, but had an old wire hanger in his hand, the kind he hung his dress shirts on to keep them from getting little bunches in the shoulders where the clothes pins pinched. He was drawing the hook slowly over his skin, starting behind his watch face and turning his arm to let the cut wrap around to the light underside of his tanned skin. His arm was bent so that the straight red lines spilled across each other toward the inside of his elbow. He looked up when she dropped her keys on the deck. A gust of wind and three red dots appeared at the bottom of the sheet behind him. "This way it only hurts me," he said. "Honey. Somebody needs to hurt. This way it's just me." That night, alone in her room, her skin became a tight casing around her. She began to feel trapped by its smooth surface, its seamless presentation. She could understand the need to open a wound, to free whatever was pressing from inside. She thought of the Swiss army knife in her drawer, a present from her Uncle Hank last Christmas, how she'd never had a reason to use it. She'd decided just then it was time to leave. Nan said, "At home, the stars spread out like they actually belong in the sky. None of these city lights to drown them out." The lights didn't quite reach a patch of near-black straight above them. When Kendra squinted, she could almost make out Signus the Swan. She tried to follow his wing to the stars of the summer triangle, but they were lost in the purplish glow. It's strange," Nan said. "There's something about getting old makes you think about your beginnings. I left home all those years ago and only now I'm dreaming about what I left. I swear I've seen people in my daydreams I haven't thought about for fifty years. Like my Uncle Niilo. Did I ever tell you about him?" Kendra shook her head no. "Well now I'll tell you, that man had character. You'd go to see him and walk away shook up. Not like he was especially frightful or anything, although he did have one hand with just the thumb left -- mining accident, you know -- and when he got going, he'd shake that thumb in your face and all the bumps on the top of his hand where the fingers would have come out of, they'd sort of wiggle under the skin, little bits of knuckle left in there, I figure. That could be a mite disturbing." Despite herself, Nan was looking up at the stars again, her arms clutched under her knees. Kendra sat up and scooted closer. Nan smelled like pine cleaner and heavily scented lotion -- lilac, maybe. She continued. "But Uncle Niilo, he was a good old Finn: a church-going man, a Lutheran. Went to the Finnish language service every Sunday -- that was before all the immigrants got old and they started services in English -- he just had this thing inside him you could never really name. I think if he was born in a different time he would have been a wizard of sorts. Like how he'd go out in his flannels and suspenders and chop wood for hours. I'd watch him swinging those stringy arms over his head and down fast as lightning, and didn't matter how thin the log was, or how tired he must have got, he always hit the axe directly in the middle. Never missed. Just wasn't natural." She turned her head toward Kendra. "You ever chopped wood?" Kendra hadn't. "No wonder you're so frail. That and the stuff you eat. I won't even call it food. All those little soybean cakes and weird sauces." "Nan -- " "OK, I know. I'm sorry. But you've obviously never eaten fresh venison. That's all I'm going to say." "Deer? Gross, Nan. Didn't you ever watch Bambi?" Silence for a few minutes. "Nan?" Kendra looked at the outline beside her, saw shoulders jerking quietly. What had she said? "Yes?" This quiet and wet-sounding. "I just -- what's wrong?" "Oh don't pay me any mind," Nan said, taking short, careful breaths between words. "I'm just old and tired and sometimes the thought of cleaning another desk in this city -- . Well, I'm not always sure why the hell I do it." "You miss home." "Yes dear, I guess I do." *  *  * Next evening, Kendra got ready for work as usual. Wednesdays were library nights. She and Nan worked through most of the bookshelves in South St. Paul starting at six, sometimes dragging themselves to Nan's truck after two, so tired Nan would have to doze in the front seat for an hour or so before she could drive home. Kendra thought about what would happen if Nan died. The bereft calls her mother, "She's gone," she says. "My only friend, ever." Her mother feels mildly sorry and then after the proper amount of time has passed -- about five minutes -- she says this is a sign the girl needs to find some friends her own age. Furious, Kendra jerked a pair of bleach-splattered jeans from the hamper. She'd just shoved her left leg in when there was a knock on her door. It was Nan with a smile so big her cheeks were pressed back in three long folds on each side. She was dressed in a long floral skirt and a t-shirt with printed flowers to match. "You're going to clean in that?" "Hard to go to work in St. Paul when you're in a truck on your way to Upper Michigan." "What?" Nan let her smile drop for a minute, leaned in, serious. "I'm done working. I decided when I was driving home last night. This city's going to make me bitter and old way before I'm ready." She paused, smiled again. "And unless you want to be bitter and old before you hit thirty, I suggest you come with me." Kendra looked out the window, down the round sides of her crumbling brick apartment building. She saw the crooked pane that had always been stuck in its warped jamb, a crack just above the windowsill; no way to fling the window up and reach out into the night air in summer, no way to fold her apartment in its own warmth in the winter. She felt miles away already. "Are you serious?" she said. "Right now?" "No time like the present. I've packed up my stuff, canceled my appointments. We're gone, honey." *  *  * Next morning found Kendra bouncing along a northern Wisconsin highway on the cracked vinyl seat of a '82 Ford pickup, forest green with primer gray over rust circles along the running boards. Everything she cared about enough to take with was crammed into the truck bed along with Nan's kitchen table, her trunk full of clothes, and an extensive lawn ornament collection, complete with two sets of gnomes, a Dutch girl with puckered lips and a plastic deer family. Over the whole mess they'd thrown a shredded tarp, stolen from where it was bunched next to four cans of interior paint for the apartment across the hall, a perpetual restoration project of her landlord's. They'd bought bungie cords at a gas station that were now a criss-crossed tangle over everything and they'd hooked the bungies into the sturdiest rust holes on the side of the truck. Kendra had left her apartment keys on the living room floor: let her landlord come up for once when he realized there was no check in his mailbox this first of the month. *  *  * As they drove through the Northwoods, Kendra could feel their surroundings pulling tighter around her. Trees crept up closer to the road, branches reached out like they were choosing her: maples, birch, aspen, spruce and jackpine. Red pine, and white. They were just starting to turn, color fading down from their crowns: sharp red, deep maroon, yellow and brown and orange. A few leaves had already fallen on the shoulders of the highway, long since slimmed to one lane each way. For the first time since they left the city, she pressed her face up to the window and stared. Then she rolled the window down, inviting the trees to come even closer, to enter the space between her and Nan and fill it with leaves, let branches run between their shoulders and in the spring, send new shoots to curl around and into their armpits. She imagined her father here. He stops the car, pulls out a weed eater to trim around the tree trunks. But the forest goes on for miles and he doesn't know where to start. The trees have scattered themselves over this land; they have no need for his attention. "People actually pay to come up here and see this," Nan said. "Bus tours -- old people, like me. Maybe I'll see if I can be a tour guide. I had a friend put herself through college that way, course it was only ten years ago when she went back. But she said the tips were good, especially if you knew the right places to have the bus driver pull over for pictures, and if you knew how to talk a UP accent." Nan's speech was already changing, her vowels flattening and stretching out, her word endings more abrupt. Nan slowed and pulled onto the deeply rutted shoulder in front of a sign that said Ashland, Wisconsin. "You ready?" she asked. "Are we here?" Kendra was confused. Whenever Nan had talked about Wisconsin in the past, it had been with her eyes slightly narrowed and a curled lip, like the state existed just to get in the way of people trying to drive through to the UP. Usually she was talking about the cops, how they would give you a ticket for going six miles over, how you had to pay tickets on the spot or go to jail. Nan shook her head. "Follow me," she said, and took Kendra's hand, pulling her toward an overgrown two-track, the pathways matted with pine needles and wild raspberry growing between them that scratched Kendra's bare legs. The sun was high enough now that it made bright waving patterns on the ground in front of their feet, imprinted leaves across their shoes, rolled the shadows down the skin of their bare arms. The road traced its way through a few hundred yards of forest. Nan took short, stiff steps after the four-hour drive, but walked fast enough that Kendra nearly had to jog to keep up with her. Then, suddenly, the woods fell away and everything was water. In front of them, blue, the lake's surface calm and polished to a shine that faded into a thick line on the horizon. Looking that far, it was impossible to tell sky from water and if it wasn't for the huge tower of a rock a few miles out, Kendra would have had no idea of distance between her and the end of what she could see. "This," Nan said, spreading her arms wide and high like a revival preacher, "is Superior." Kendra struggled to be profound and failed. "It's huge." "That it is, dear. Cleanest biggest lake in the Western Hemisphere." "Can you swim in it?" Kendra asked. Nan laughed. "Sometimes. Like between mid-June and mid-August. And only here on the South Shore. Once you get into Minnesota and Canada, swimming in Superior isn't much more than running in and running out screaming. Feel the water, you'll see. You could go in now, but I bet you won't want to." Kendra crouched, placing her whole hand, fingers spread, just below the water's surface. "Damn," she jerked her hand back. It was cold. "Right. So you can imagine it a few hundred miles north." Kendra sat down on the smooth pebbles that blanketed the shore, and Nan sat down next to her. They stayed mostly silent until they got hungry and then walked out of the woods as if trying not to wake a newborn. *  *  * They'd just passed a sign that said Yes Michigan! and Welcome when Nan broke the quiet. "So I was thinking I would drop you off at Uncle Niilo's old cabin while I drive into town to check out the old parsonage. Last few years I was here, they were renting it out one bedroom at a time." "You want to live in town?" "Most of the folks here haven't heard from me for fifty years. I'll have to ease my way back into their lives -- can't do that living out in the woods. Besides, I don't mind sharing a kitchen -- give me some company," she said. It occurred to Kendra that she hadn't called her parents for months, that as far as they knew she was still taking messages for Mr. Willis in the midst of all his fabulous plants -- her mother's only comment after the one time she'd visited and Kendra had stopped by to show her her desk, trying to prove that she'd found a kind of place for herself, if not people. She almost asked if Uncle Niilo's cabin had a phone, but she clamped her mouth down on the question. What would she say to her dad? That this woman was different? That she loved because it was as easy as an apple tree unfurling into blossom? And what would he say back? Watch out, Kendra Mae. Love easily turns soft and rotten. Nan swerved suddenly at a narrow break in the trees, an old gate sticking out from the underbrush in pieces. "Here we are," she said. "I hope. It's been a while." The road was tightly packed red-brown clay with veins of gravel surfacing now and then running in ribbons through it, the rounded heads of larger rocks emerging sometimes alone, sometimes in clusters. Nan didn't slow down at all and Kendra had to prop her hands against the dashboard every time they fishtailed around a corner or crashed over an especially protruding rock. They bounced a few hundred yards, pulled down a steep dip in the road, swung around a stand of black spruce and into a clearing of wild grasses that rolled to lakefront below. Nan called out the name of the lake, and though Kendra didn't catch it, she could see a rocky shoreline tracing around the far edge -- a pond compared to Superior. Kendra slid out the truck door and there it was: a weathered A-frame, wood faded to thin gray, a small deck out front and two windows, glass cloudy but intact. On a ragged board nailed next to the door, the word sisu had been burned in shaky cursive. She touched the letters, felt the tremble of the fingers that had seared them into wood. "What does sisu mean, Nan?" "Well, that's a hard word to pin down. Something like bravery mixed with toughness, almost bullheaded like. It's a kind of quality people either have or don't have, not something you can learn." "Is this Uncle Niilo's writing?" Nan looked. "Must be. He loved that word, always said it was a comfort to the immigrants when they found out life was so different here. They told each other they had sisu, and then they had a reason for working themselves sore in a country that didn't care much about them." Looking out at the trees standing against the clearing, the thick trunks, the bold streaks of pine needles against sky, Kendra could understand how a person might feel strong here. She saw her arms flushing pink in the late August sun and the flesh beneath felt solid, whole. She stepped onto the path worn into the grass from decades of an old man's wanderings and knelt, running her fingers over the packed dirt. She found a tangle of tree roots just breaking surface by her knee and traced them, hooking her fingertips under where they intersected to see if they would move. They didn't. She brought her face nearer, saw the smooth shine of the knobs sticking out from the top, how they were worn from years of human feet. She became aware that Nan was speaking. "Kendra Mae, what in the world are you doing?" she asked, propping her hands against her hips. "Face down in the dirt like that -- I leave you out here by yourself I might come back to find you plumb crazy, running around naked with wild hair." "You just might, Nan." Kendra said, laughing. "But maybe I'll have gone sane for once." *  *  * They unloaded Kendra's things: two bookshelves, a twin mattress -- no frame -- an oversized backpack full of clothes, enough dishes for one. Kendra waved as Nan drove off to ask about the parsonage. She walked once through the cabin: a bedroom with a length of plywood nailed in the corner, shielding a toilet and mirror, a small kitchen with stairs to a loft above. Then she walked over to a rickety outbuilding Nan had called the sauna and slammed her hip into the door until it wobbled open into a tiny room. There was a bench running along the length of it, a small cloudy window on the inside wall with cedar boughs bound together above. She opened another door into a box of a room, paneled in cedar and with a cement floor that sloped from the sides down to a drain in the middle. Benches had been built in three levels like stairs along one wall, dented metal buckets lay scattered on the floor around a squat little stove, its top open and piled with lake-smoothed rocks. She went to the stove, turned the handle, and the door fell open. The iron was at least an inch thick, rusting, and covered in soot; Kendra's arm was smeared greasy black before she even reached in. With a cracked leather glove she'd found under a bench in the changing room, she removed the charred chunks of wood left, perhaps, from Uncle Niilo's last fire, one of which turned out actually to be a stiff mouse hide, its insides long since turned to powder and mingled with the ash an inch thick over everything. She cupped the mouse hide in her glove and thought of her favorite storybook when she was younger. It's main character was a mouse named Nellie. Her father read the book every night for a while, his shoulders hunched away from the chair he'd pull up next to her bed so that she had to strain to see the pages. Nellie had an unusual imagination for a mouse -- she spent her days lounging on her back in the branches of an old oak tree, dreaming up through the leaves. She'd imagine herself a pilot in a little teacup airplane, a scientist with a paper napkin lab coat. Kendra always mourned at the end when Nellie's mother discovered her wearing an acorn top helmet and leading ant charges, made her come inside for hot chocolate with her mousy aunts. The book ended with Nellie falling asleep warm and happy in her mother's lap, but Kendra never believed it. When she'd asked her father why Nellie couldn't be an army general, he'd said "Pretend things are never real, Kendra Mae. That's why we call them daydreams." He could have been speaking then about the fights Kendra remembered from her early childhood, most of which centered around how much time her mother spent away from the house, how she'd hire a babysitter so she could run errands for most of the day and then take off to "tie up some loose ends" as soon as he returned from work. The fights had stopped by the time she reached junior high, but not her mother's absenteeism. Daydreams perhaps meant for her father the possibility that your wife could be satisfied with your halting, wooden sort of love and finding, in the end, no reason to prevent her from seeking something more lush elsewhere. Kendra wondered if he'd remembered Nellie on the afternoon of his blood speckled on the cotton summer sheets. Had his body been stuffed full of what he'd settled into: his job managing the appliance department at Sears, his wife sharing the space of their house and little else, his accordion gathering dust in a basement corner ever since Kendra could remember? She looked at the tough, collapsed little mouse in her hand and tossed it gently into the stand of pines behind the sauna. *  *  * When she heard Nan's truck knocking over the rocks in the driveway Kendra was shoulders deep in the lake, wind-ripples splashing water up her neck. She dunked under and dragged her head back and forth through the water so she could feel her hair pulling out long and straight behind. Nan disappeared into the cabin and came out a minute later, walking stiff legged down the steep hill. "I couldn't find a towel anywhere in that tangle of stuff you've got. But I found this." She held out a fleece blanket, pink like Kendra's room when she was in elementary school. Kendra didn't move. "Oh come on, girl. Don't be so bashful. I'm just another woman and three times your age at that." Kendra blushed and took a few sliding steps against the rock and muck of the lake bottom. She reached the bank, bent over and gripped at grass ends for balance. The skin around her arms, thighs, and breasts prickled against the breeze. Nan laid the blanket around her shoulders. "You're going to have to pack some weight on those bones of yours if you mean to make it through a winter out here," she said. Kendra turned and wrapped the towel around her, tucking one end tightly between her breasts. Nan told her about the parsonage. The front porch had slid forward into the juniper hedge and the church had sold it to a guy named Bernie, the son -- didn't that beat all -- of her best high school friend Vi who he said was living in the new senior apartments one block past the stoplight downtown. She said they'd go visit her first thing in the morning, but in the meantime, the sauna was calling her sore old bones and she supposed it wouldn't mind if Kendra brought her young ones, too. After an hour of stoking the stove with the least rotten logs from the pile under the cabin stairs, the sauna was ready. Nan showed her how to sling ladles full of water onto the rocks from the top bench so that steam rolled up to curl around them and settled on their skin. Before long Kendra couldn't tell the difference between her sweat and the water hanging thick in the air around her. It was the second time she'd been naked in front of Nan in a matter of hours. At first she'd had to force her eyes away from the older woman's flop of a stomach lying over the loose gray triangle of her pubic region -- she hadn't seen a naked woman since her mother caught her watching late night HBO in junior high and certainly never with a body real enough to look so worn -- but soon she found herself forgetting how strange it all was. Eventually she forgot to be embarrassed for either of them. Kendra sat with her legs sprawled out and her head rolled back into the heat. Nan showed her to lay a cool washcloth over her face when the steam rolled too thickly to breathe and she brought in the cedar boughs from the changing room, explaining that it was tradition to tie them in bundles and smack them against the skin. "To get the blood flowing," Nan said, and then she demonstrated, hitting the branches against her thigh and back until they were flushed deep red. Kendra burst out laughing at the spectacle, gasped at the hot air. The room began to smell musty and sweet. "You wouldn't be laughing if you knew how good this feels," Nan said. She gave Kendra's leg a good whack. "See?" Kendra nodded, still giggling and helpless. Her father's face came, his square, clenched forehead in the wind of a Fargo afternoon. She laughed at him, too. The daughter's skin breathes water in and sweats it out. It collides with cedar and comes out whole; the smell is incredible. She is indestructible in this heat. Nan shook her head. "There's something we just have to do, might sober you up a little." She winked. "Follow me." She lead them out into the changing room, past the haphazard piles of their jeans, jackets, underwear, opened the door with a great jerk and when she hit the night air started running, her arms making wild circles next to her body. "Come on," she yelled, and Kendra started running too, her skin steaming but not cooled by the night air. Nan reached the shore and kept running, pumping her knees high until she tipped and splashed into the water, lying out on her side. Kendra walked in, still grinning but nervous about the mud-rock bottom. As the cold water rose, the shock of it against each new strip of skin felt like a discovery. Nan called her a wimp and splashed an arc of water in her direction. Then she threw back her head to the sky -- black and fuzzy with clouds, stars in jagged patches across. "Well, girl," she said, "I may have gotten plumb old, but that sky looks the same as it ever did." Kendra looked up with her, slid her gaze down to the ragged tops of white pines on the far shore, their branches curved up like they were supporting the sky. She shook her head. "It's all just been here," Nan said. "Waiting." That night, Kendra dragged her mattress outside and watched the stars until she had scratched her arms bloody from mosquito bites. Then she hauled it up to the loft so that Nan wouldn't have to climb the stairs and fell asleep with the shine of moon outside her window washing everything in silent gray. As she drifted off, she thought she heard Uncle Niilo snoring along with Nan in the bedroom and the sound was like water against shore.

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