Catapult Read online

  *

  She’s in bed, almost asleep, when her boyfriend touches her.

  He says, “My toenails feel soft. Are your toenails soft? We’ve been sitting in wet shoes all night.”

  She draws up her knees and checks. She finds her toenails are tough as teeth. We’re not the same person, she wants to tell him.

  He curls her hand in his, tries another tack. “How was volunteering today? I heard you say at dinner he was quite the terror.”

  She takes her hand back. “He’s not so bad.”

  “That’s probably your influence.”

  She purses her lips though she knows he’s being nice. He believes in lulling each other to sleep with compliments. He wants to wake up in each other’s arms, plan a trip to Germany, send their children to Montessori schools. He wants a future that comes as painlessly as possible.

  He says, sleepily, “Kids like that, they just need good role models.”

  “I may not go back there,” Jill tells him now, dragging her two arms under her body for warmth. Lying on them. “I probably won’t.”

  *

  Near the end of the session, Angelo had asked her from under the table if maybe they could do math. He’d wanted to do ten times things. Ten times two TVs. Ten times four microwaves. Jill thought she understood why he wanted to play this game, so she’d put her elbows on her skirted knees and pushed her eyebrows up.

  “Did you have to live on the street for a while, honey?” She’d frowned, happy to have stumbled on this chance to flex her pity. “Did you lose all your stuff, your TV and your microwave?”

  Angelo hadn’t responded to that. Instead, he’d crawled farther under the table, across the room and into a box of donated clothes, where he buried himself in scarves and jackets.

  She’d sat silently in the little classroom, feeling ridiculous. It would have been humiliating if one of the other volunteers had come in and found her like that, crouching in a plastic child’s chair, alone, Angelo completely out of sight. But it would have been even more awkward to admit to the staff that her charge was hiding from her. So she just sat there, bleakly, reading on and on about cars and trucks and things that go. As she read, she saw out of the corner of her eye the toy airplane sitting on the math book, now dry. That’s when she’d felt an impulse to put it in her own mouth. She’d wanted to shut herself up, show Angelo that she understood everything. If she hadn’t been afraid of someone coming in—a teacher, another volunteer—she’d have put that plane in her mouth like a bit, like some horrible, punishing snack, and then she’d have crawled across the floor and into that box of clothes after him.

  She’d wanted to do that! But the box of clothes across the room stood unmoving, and she’d had the strong impression she was all by herself. Wind plucked the green out of the trees through the window. The toy airplane windows looked up strangely at her, like black squirrel eyes. She blinked hard, twice. You’re not even here, she thought.

  *

  After her brother is convicted and sentenced, he calls again. This time they don’t talk much about weather. She can imagine what February in the northern Midwest is like without asking, and the truth is, it doesn’t rain very often in Hollywood. They interrupt each other and pause. They’re always awkward without a season in common. After a while, her brother talks a little about his car, the one that was impounded, and then he starts describing his drive home the night he was picked up by the cops.

  “So you get off the 4 at Washington. Then you know how Washington curves?”

  She knows those curves in her sleep. That was her world, those were her streets—she can feel how badly he wants to get back.

  “Imagine doing those curves and getting to the top of the hill, and now you’re right next to the high school, and it’s downhill from there. You can see it. The house. You’ll be there in a minute. Less. You’re almost home in bed already. You could almost just go to sleep and wake up in the morning, you’re that close. You’re almost safe. The light is on. It’s right there.”

  In a flash she sees it all. The tall maples freighted with snow, Manny’s old house down the road, her own stucco bungalow. She sees icicles hanging from every window, a light coming from her old bedroom, the old Magnavox throwing blue shadows across the yard.

  “Did they catch you at the corner stop sign, then?” She’s trying to capture the whole scene, trying to get back home again if she can, straining to see everything.

  Her brother pauses, though, confused. “What do you mean? Where?”

  “The one at Washington and Pine.”

  She hears his frustrated sigh. She hears him get bored, turn on the TV. “Jilly Bean. Jill. What the fuck? That stop sign’s been gone for years.”

  LAKE ARCTURUS LODGE

  It wasn’t my husband that wanted the bear, it was me. Erich has always been so generous, so optimistic about people. When we opened for business, the lodge was empty as a lost castle, but he just said, “People will come when they do.” He talked like this sometimes, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with him. He sounded like he’d given the world and its problems a good once-over and made up his mind without regrets. I admired his peace, because I was always getting trapped in thinking one way about a thing and then thinking the exact opposite. For instance, when we came up in ’23 to these forsaken woods, I felt punished first, then blessed. The snow, especially, was a blankness I craved, not a blotting out, but a nursery for us. That first winter here we were born. I can’t tell you how beautiful it was. We saw trees grow woolly as beasts with snow. We saw a moose with a beard of ice drop through the lake’s crust and disappear altogether.

  Funny, I don’t remember exactly what Erich looked like then—though that was only a few years back, no time at all. I can remember what I did to him, but not what I saw. I held the teakettle with a damp cloth when I filled his cup. Sometimes, I broke ice from his moustache so he could talk, tiny corkscrews like claws, which melted in my fingers. He already had a moustache, though he was barely twenty years old, and now I remember what struck me then: his eyes were two different sizes. I used to wonder if he held one eye open wider than the other, if it was a matter of muscle rather than structure. I still don’t know. My husband was good at everything else, so what did I care if he wasn’t good-looking? He’d learned English in two years flat, the way other people learn cards or knitting. You could hear his determination in the way he talked, how poised he was in everything. From the beginning he spoke in a way that made me ashamed to have spoken English all my life. He was elegant as a diplomat, but more sincere.

  Of course, he has always been good with his hands as well. He built this place with a crew of three in just two summers. During that time, I stayed in Duluth and scrounged up nice linens. Also carpets, couches, drapes. The third summer he put on a blue suit and I put on silk stockings and a hat, and we sat down to wait for guests in the lobby. I remember how miserably we chatted through those hours, our legs neatly crossed, our fingernails white. We had never courted properly (we met as teenagers, ate chicken, got married), but those first days at the lodge had all the ceremony and panic of a long date. Was there no future at all, we wondered. No guests or children to verify our efforts at contentment? We said many foolish things in our wish to escape such awkward circumstances. We talked of Chiang Kai-shek, of butterfly migrations, of stew.

  “There’s something in your hair,” I told him one lonely afternoon.

  He lifted his hand cautiously.

  “Here,” I said, rising. But I was lying, and he was already at the mirror in the hallway, turning his head. I remember his bow tie was crooked and looked something like a badly plucked flower. I couldn’t help smiling at him. Even then, I was always getting kindness and cruelty confused, so I can’t be exactly sure why his dishevelment made me so happy.

  We had to coax our first guests to us. The locals were suspicious. You know how logging people are, so territorial and shifty. They couldn’t understand why we made such a show of everything,
why we carted in candelabras and pickles. I admit we didn’t know why we did these things either. After Mamma’s inheritance was gone, we spent a great deal of time washing things down, fluffing pillows, pressing napkins. We made an earnest effort to be as grand as possible. Can you imagine? We had ideas about hotels from Davenport and Redwing; we expected weekenders, not hunters and fishermen. But who rides the train to Duluth, then takes a steamer to Marais or a float plane to Ely for the weekend? The lodge had five big rooms upstairs and two small rooms off the lobby. The longer the place sat empty the harder we tried, until everything started seeming like an instance of decoration. In those first days, I floated lupine petals in the water basins, arranged butterscotches in bowls. I knew tea roses would die, but I planted them anyway, in a daze of hopeless opulence and inevitable waste.

  We didn’t know the first thing about lake country. I grew up on cobbled streets, with sidewalks and gas lamps; my husband had escaped as a teenager from a nail factory in Bremen. I admit I thought of our lake primarily as transportation to town and scenery through our windows. I was bewildered to see Erich so charmed by it. I remember watching him sink an arm into the depths, splash up a bit of water into his mouth, flick his face dry. He took the boat out at night and rowed to the logging camp on the far side of the lake, where the rocks were as wide as automobiles. He learned to trap from the logging people there, who kept him some nights. He learned to bring down a pine without fuss and float it across the waves, slim ship bound for furniture.

  The lake yielded up our tables and chairs in this way, and other surprises too. The summer we opened we found a floating broom, a fox pup under our canoe, and Leif Williams. Leif was our first real guest, and he just capsized his boat during a storm, so we didn’t charge him anything. We were nervous as new mothers around him. During the night, we argued over whether we should leave a lantern burning in the hallway, whether we should wake him for breakfast or let him sleep. Leif was a good sport, a middle-aged fisherman with a cabin out west, and we convinced him to stay a few nights after the storm dissipated into occasional columns of rain. With his pale blue eyes and black eyebrows, Leif had a shambling, uneasy, angelic look about him. He said his mother had died in an avalanche in the Rocky Mountains. After a few glasses of Canadian gin, he confessed he’d clawed his way out of the snow and left her buried beneath him. He kept saying, “I just wanted to survive, but now I can’t do nothing. I’m a napkin. I’m rust.”

  We kept him for three nights. We gave him pies and towels, a boat ride to the falls, a kite. By the time he left, we were disconsolate and proud. We felt as if the very best of ourselves was paddling off toward Canada, the only useful thing we’d ever done.

  Goldie came next, and she only came because I asked her. I sent her a simple but pleading letter, and she arrived at the logging camp across the lake with two trunks, a kitten in a cage, and a hammock from Mexico. The hammock was a gift for our porch. Goldie was my second cousin, tall and frizzy-haired, unmarried. The first thing she said to us was: “I’m so, so sorry!” She gripped my arm, almost painfully, explaining she was late, she was unkempt, she was tired. I told her “Nonsense!” but in truth her apologies were charming, inventive, almost intimate, like confessions. When I told her to stop apologizing, she apologized—warmly, enthusiastically—for that.

  She settled into one of the rooms on the second floor, shyly, hanging her frocks on the bedpost, and stayed for a long time. When her kitten left stools like crusty larva behind the drapes, Erich swept them discreetly into a basket. I never told him that I asked her to come.

  My husband wanted babies and I gave him guests instead. Should I be ashamed? By the time the lodge opened, we’d been together five years. I was the only married woman I knew without children. We didn’t sleep well at night—there were mosquitoes, heat waves, other lonelinesses—but it wasn’t that we didn’t try. I should revise that a bit. I had nightmares in which I was sick, blistering with tumors, malignant as death: I was pregnant in every one. I woke up with my hands on my breasts, arms crossed, my own fingers harassing my nipples like mouths. In my dreams, I lived in a pit of children. Their hands were the same size and texture as their gums, as their earlobes and faces. Everything could gnaw in a hideous, painless way without teeth.

  I won’t pretend I wasn’t chastened and relieved to wake up empty, myself. I really thought I might be able to avoid that kind of grave forever, if I tried. Erich grew melancholy after a time, but I grew industrious. After the first week, I boiled Goldie’s sheets and ours in an iron pot over the fire out back. I stayed up late one night and baked a slippery yellow cake with canned pineapple.

  “Her name is Sugar,” Goldie said of the kitten, around that time. That was a night when we were feeding Goldie pike caught two lakes over, the gin Leif left us, and imported jelly. The kitten was on her lap, humming unremittingly. Goldie made a face, then put her hand on my husband’s arm when he stooped to retrieve her plate. “Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t that just the first thing you’d think of?”

  I saw him sit down and put his head in his hand, as if thinking the matter over very seriously. Since Goldie had arrived, I’d seen something new in him, a tolerance and almost gift for inanity. It was like hearing him speak in German, seeing this ease with something so alien to me. I knew him only as hard-minded and grave. With her, he lifted his eyebrows. He grinned in a way that parted his moustache.

  “Will the cat understand his name? Or is this name for you?”

  “It’s how I feel about him, I guess.” She took a curl from her head and placed it absent-mindedly in her ear. “He’s stupid, of course. He won’t know Bob from Pumpkin.”

  “Stupid’s a good name.”

  “Stupid?” Goldie asked. She lifted the cat up under the armpits and stuck out her tongue at it.

  Erich was beaming. I was impressed by his ease with her and, at the same time, irritated. He grew up in a German factory town, worked like a dog to stay alive during the war, snuck away on a boat when he was sixteen. He always seemed to me like a wizened old man under his young skin, his soul worn to the point of serenity. Who was I to forbid him whimsy?

  Later that week, I told Goldie my husband needed help in the garden, and out she went, apologizing as she left for not helping sooner. I was half in love with Goldie myself for years, so I knew what it meant to be around her. She was five years younger than me and so thin she was always bent forward or backward at the waist, as if unable to fully support the upper half of her body. She believed she was ugly, which made her lovelier than she was. Even I liked to watch her in humid weather, pulling hair from her ear in a perfect coil, like the tendril of a newborn plant. She was superficial, an oddball with nice teeth, but we couldn’t get enough of her. We gave her meals we couldn’t afford, grew severe and nasty to each other in our guilt over the waste, came from our quarrels clean, as if they were a form of hygiene.

  Goldie stayed so long, we went through all the pickles and scented soap in the pantry. With these amenities gone, we spent days on the dock, shoeless, Goldie and I playing cards, Erich reading about fishing lures in out-of-date magazines. It felt a little like I imagined university might feel if we’d gone, all that indolence and talk, all that lazy thinking. In July, we watched a hornet hive form high in a tree, bulbous and sound as a football. In August, the lake started to smell and dry up a little, leaving strangely punctured fish on the shoreline. When the muskrats came for the fish, I started to worry that Goldie had misunderstood my invitation. She had been with us for almost five weeks; she was kind, but not rich, and Erich knew it.

  One morning around that time, he woke up and put on old trousers instead of his suit. I could only guess he’d picked up part-time work across the lake, chasing or climbing, whatever grunt jobs they gave foreigners. I watched him work a soft leather belt through the loops. He was just about to leave the room when I bolted up and yelled, “Wait!” He turned around.

  “Why don’t we talk?”

  “Sure,” he said.


  “We don’t have to have everything worked out,” I told him. But you know how people say things to convince themselves, how every word is part lie because it crosses out and denies one quadrant of truth. Of course everything had to work out.

  “It won’t,” he assured me, coming back, putting his hand on my forehead. Reassured as I felt, I disliked how he needed so little from me.

  I started to cry. One half of my body was under sheets. The other half, like a figure on the prow of a ship, arched mutantly toward him. What was wrong with me? I kissed him, resentfully. I held my lips over my teeth and bit him until he came back for me. I wanted him to wear trousers—he was a clown in his suit, an imbecile—but I didn’t want him to want to. We were far too young to stop pretending.

  Later that day, I went into town and telephoned Grace Wilson, an old Saint Paul acquaintance who I knew from rumors had married well. I made her agree to come to the lodge by reminding her that she owed me. In high school, I’d covered for her when she accepted marriage proposals from two boys at once and needed an excuse for one when she saw the other. It was a sacrifice of my dignity to do this, but Goldie wasn’t going to pay our bills, and we had hornets in the pantry. My mother’s good silver was tarnishing, and I couldn’t bring myself to polish anymore what no one used.

  The Wilsons flew in from Duluth on a chartered float plane. The plane sent waves knocking against the shore, drenching the steely rocks, overturning Erich’s cedar-rib canoe. When Grace stepped out onto our dock, I saw she was wearing white gloves and a funny type of moccasin. She held out a booted foot and said, “Look what I bought in Duluth! Indian shoes. What do you call them, Harold?” She touched my sleeve. “Good for creeping.”

  She took a few tiptoeing warrior steps across the wet planks.

  Two nondescript boys in raincoats lumbered onto shore and commenced digging a hole beneath some pines. Harold, not one of the fiancés from high school, surveyed the lake, stepped gingerly over an invisible hazard on the rocks, and made his way toward the woods. Erich called after him, “Can I take your bag?”