THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD

A Novel

Barbara Henning

BlazeVOX[books]
Buffalo, New York

THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD by Barbara Henning Copyright 2009 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza Cover Photo by Miranda Maher Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Danielle Winter, Esther Hyneman, Lewis Warsh, Patti Henning, Bob Henning and Deborah Mutnick for reading early drafts of this novel and offering invaluable suggestions for revision. Thanks to Jan Kidd for helping with research. And thanks to Bill Kushner; the poem quoted in Chapter 16 was written by him (That April, United Artists 2000). First Edition ISBN 13: 9781935402251 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009923618 BlazeVOX [books] 303 Bedford Ave Buffalo, NY 14216 Editor@blazevox.org

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In early May 1972, Peggy called me from a phone booth in New York City, begging me to sneak into her uncles trailer to find a shoebox she had left behind. She said it was on the top shelf of the closet in her bedroom. I was afraid of her uncle, but I promised her that before I left town, Id get in there somehow and bring it to her. Thirty years later, I set it on the kitchen table and take off the lid. An old faded pink Kinney box. Inside a lipstick in a tarnished tube. I open it and some beige dust falls on the table in a little hill. A pair of stockings with dark seams, a gold chain and a heart shaped locket with her mothers photo on one side and a baby on the other, a Masonic ring, a mans watch, a white lacey slip, a small New Testament with Peggys name inside, the cover folded back and an inscription on the first page, For my loving daughter, Peggy, 1965, an envelope and a little red book with a gold string tied around it. I untie the string and open the bookblack ink, handwriting elegant, even and fluent, a cursive style from my mothers generation. One page written every year, beginning in 1945. Inside the front cover in faded blue ink: Betty Jean Peterson, born March 21, 1925, Detroit, Michigan, and in someone elses writing, an adolescents boxy uneven script, probably Peggys, at the bottom of the page: Died on November 4, 1971. I turn the page. January 1, 1945. Graduated from Denby high school with honors. Started my new job as a teller at Detroit State Bank. Helping Ma and Pa with money. Going out with Joey in his fathers Plymouth to Belle Isle every weekend. Dancing so much. I love to dance. Pa's been sick this year from something wrong in his lungs. Its so cold 7

outside, waiting for the bus to go to work. Resolution: quit smoking and grow my hair longer. I twist my hair into a knot at the back of my neck and clip it into place with a barrette. I have a jacket, an apron and a few photos of my mother, but no diary or letters. Inside the shoebox, there's a little notebook I started several years ago. I jot down today's date and a note about the color of Peggy's old house, the last house she lived in before she ran away. It used to be yellow but now it is painted beige and the porch has been closed in with storm windows. There used to be an old oak tree in the backyard with two swings. Our mothers were still young then, sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee together and laughing. Peggy and I would be swinging back and forth, higher and higher, maybe trying to figure out how we were going to steal cigarettes out of their purses and where we'd go to smoke them. You could ask your mother for a nickel to go to Jack's for a candy bar, I said to Peggy as we moved closer to the house, standing just outside the door. We heard them laughing and talking. Shhhhh, Peggy said and we crouched down beside each other listening. Essie, hes so sweet and steady. Im not used to a man like Larry. Peggy looked over at me and rolled her eyes. I hate him, she whispered. Well, dont wait around. You dont want another drinker, do you, Bet? Theres not many to pick from up here. If he is serious, its ok. Peggys mother laughed. You mean I should sleep with him now? Then we started giggling and my mother opened the door, looking at me sternly over her blue-rimmed glasses. What are you girls doing? Were you eavesdropping? Peggy and I had been friends ever since kindergarten. After my mother died in '67 when I was twelve. I went to her 8

house every afternoon after school, and her mother helped me with my homework. Shed lean over me, correcting my math problems and Id smell her flowery perfume. My mother never wore perfume. After work, my father or my brother would pull up in our old pick up to take me home. By the time Peggys mother and stepfather were killed in an auto accident, I was old enough to stay home alone. When I finally left for good, I brought the box with me, driving with my boyfriend Jay from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to New York City where Peggy was supposed to meet me. But when I arrived, she wasn't there, and I couldnt find her anywhere. Now I retie the book and put the cover back on the box. Outside the window, a neighbor is sitting on a folding chair. Her husband is raking some leaves into a pile. The woman leans down to pet a big blonde dog. He looks like Sam, our family dog, a golden retriever who used to sleep with me when I was growing up. Stretched out lengthwise, he easily took up half of the bed. The young woman stands up then and walks toward the house. Even though it is chilly outside, she's wearing light blue Bermuda shorts. She looks up at the sun and brushes her hair behind her ear. Her husband stands over a pile of branches, breaking them and putting them into a trashcan. The trees and grass are lush green, but in a few months there will be mostly dark skies, storms, wind and hills of snow, along with endless plowing and shoveling. In New York City the natural world creates only a minor interference with the tasks of daily life, but it never dominates our lives like it does heresnowing you into the house and knocking down the trees. In the city, you just put your boots on and take out your umbrella. Instead of acts of nature, its usually 9

the noise and the creative or destructive energy of human beings that makes us stand still in awe. I loved the city best at 5 am when I would coast down the empty streets on my bike to a yoga studio in Chinatown, the breeze on my face, the quiet rustling of people just waking, and the buildings crowding in around me. Then I'd wake my body up with a slow, rigorous yoga practice in a silent room with twenty other dedicated practitioners. After an hour and a half, I would be able to pass through the day undisturbed by any teenage nonsense in the high school where I worked. Then in the late afternoon, Id walk through Tompkins Square Park, photographing leaves and stones and little bits of this and that, or walking down the street, the sky blue or gray, and around the corner out of the crowd of strangers, suddenly a friend would emerge. But the sky wasnt always blue, and a friend could live a few blocks away and you might never run into her again. Sometimes Id imagine Peggy coming around the corner, with her bouncy walk and her bright red hair, appearing just like that, but she never did. Every so often Id call everyone we knew in common, and Id search on the internet, but I never found her. I remember lying on the bed in my friend Isabelle's apartment in Mexico with the bay windows wide open, ocean and sun all around me, the sun all over my body. I didn't realize that my body was hungry for sunlight. After that, I started to see the bleak side of things in the East Village, the dark side of the sun. If I stayed out a little later than usual and I am usually asleep before tenId have to skirt drunken tourists on my way home, trip over a homeless drug addict or a pile of stinky trash. I kept hearing a warning in my head, Go, get out of here now before you're too old to leave. 10

When I was seventeen, it was easy to slam the door on the cabin where I had grown up and climb into my boyfriends van. But leaving a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City is like throwing your wealth away. Youll never get another apartment there that you can afford. So I took my time. Twice my landlord offered me money to move. He could rent that apartment for five times as much as I was paying. And I could easily take a leave from my teaching job and find another job later when I was out of money. One night when I was lying in bed at 3 am, listening to some drunks smashing garbage cans against the curb. I thought, That's it. I'm going. Last Tuesday, I handed the keys to Stephan, the super, and climbed into my '93 Honda, filled with boxes, bags and suitcases. As I drove across Avenue A, a cavern seemed to form between the present and the past. I drove north on the West Side Highway to the George Washington Bridge and onto Interstate 80, cutting through the mountains, listening to Joan Armatrading sing, Im not the type who falls easily in and out of love. I started to weep and moan. I loved the city, my daughter, my friends and my students. What am I doing to myself? I wondered as I crawled around a mountain behind a big semi truck. Then the road widened and I passed him, picking up speed. Sometimes clarity comes when its least expected. Then I realized that I was crying not only out of loss, but out of relief, too. There was a break in the chaos and noise and I was driving through it and away from it. My future was open. Even though I had a sabbatical from school, I wasnt planning to return, and I had enough money to live for at least a year, maybe longer. I came back here to my childhood home thinking I might find someone who knew where Peggy had gone. I 11

drove across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and part way through the lower Peninsula. I put up a little tent in a state park just north of Otsego Lake. At night, I curled up in my sleeping bag, and listened to the rain falling on the car and the tent. I could smell the scent of pine trees. In the morning, I drove across the Mackinaw Bridge and then across the pretty much still unpopulated Upper Peninsula. For a week, I stayed with my cousin and his wife and then I found this flat in downtown Marquette, a two month sublet just a few blocks from the lake and the university. I take a book off the shelf in the living room with photographs of the rocks and cliffs in the Upper Peninsula around Lake Superior. The earth was broken apart and the cliffs were formed during the ice age. At certain points in life, our narratives are also broken by our desire. At these times something new can begin as it did on the foggy cold day when I first left home in June, 1972. I remember Jay turning left onto the road leading up to our cabin, the road my father and brother had logged and plowed. He was driving an old gray van with some big rust spots around the wheels. The grass was high, and a number of trees were down in the field surrounding the house. My father had left them there after a tornado because he was working for the county cleaning up hundreds of trees that had come crashing down the month before. A big tree had fallen near the house, and without thinking I ran through the rain to try to get Sam out of his pen, leaping over a fallen electrical wire. You could have killed yourself, my father hollered. He was standing outside in the rain in his red and black hunting shirt. The rain was running down his face into his beard. If that wire had been alive, Katie, and you put your foot into the 12

water like that, you'd have been electrocuted. And you knew that. You have to use common sense and think before you act. Sometimes you're so reckless. I remember scowling at him and dragging Sam around the house into the back door. While I was packing my bags, Sam was lying on the kitchen floor watching me. Every time I passed by, I stopped to pet him and say goodbye. He flopped his tail over to the side as if he knew what was going on. A giant hemlock tree blocked my view of the sky through the kitchen window, and I could see Jay leaning against the van, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me, one leg crossed over the other. He was wearing old levis, a frayed leather jacket, a pair of black sunglasses and his blonde hair was pulled back into a braid. He had a long strong nose and big hands. I would have gone anywhere with him. I remember sitting on the floor in the evenings as my mother leaned over me to stroke my neck and put my hair into pin curls. Her fingers were long and lanky, with red fingernail polish. Even though she had grown up in the country and worked most of her life as a gardener, she also always wore red lipstick, and she would change into a dress right before my father came home for dinner. After she died, as a young teenager, I missed her terribly. It helped to have a boyfriend. First there was Jimmy, then Ray, then Dave and finally Jay. When wed break upand teenagers always break upI would be so blue that even my stepmother, Audrey, would worry about me. With Jay it was different. I wasnt a child anymore. By the time I met him, my hormones were working in sync with my emotions. I was in love with him. I opened the screen door and hollered, Im almost ready. He sat down on the picnic table and lit another cigarette. I stopped before the refrigerator and picked up an 13

old photo from under a magnetmy mother, my brother when he was nine, and me when I was three years old. She is wearing an apron. I've always wondered why Audrey let that photo stay there, some small act of kindness or perhaps my father had insisted. When she married my father, she removed almost every indication of my mothers presence from the house. I put the photo in my wallet right next to another one of my mother and grandmother dancing together at my Uncle Joes anniversary party. My mother had been dead about five years when I decided to run away. While Jay was checking the tires on the van, I took an old brown suitcase out of the closet and some clothes. We might be living in the van for quite some timethree pairs of levis, some tee shirts, some big mens flannel shirts, and my mother's leather fringe jacket. Anything else I needed Id find in second hand stores. I took one long dress made in Guatemala that Audrey had given me for Christmas, putting a card on the package signed from Dad in her handwriting. I stood in the middle of my room and looked out the window at the woodpile, the forest and the outhouse. Dont forget to bring blankets, pillows, towels and things like that, Jay hollered. I stripped down my bed, opened the closet door and pulled out my sleeping bag. Then I filled a paper bag with supplies to last us for a few days, some peanut butter, jam, bread, a gallon of orange juice, four boiled eggs, four apples, a bag of chocolate chip cookies. From the top drawer of my fathers dresser, I gathered about twenty dollars in bills and another ten in quarters. Including my savings, I had almost $200. When everything was in the van, I went back into the house, sat at the table and wrote a letter on a piece of looseleaf paper. 14

Dear Dad, I dont want to live up here anymore, so Ive decided to go on my own. Im on my way to Mexico. Dont look for me. You wont find me. Dont worry about me. Im fine. I borrowed some money from you. Ill pay you back when I get a job. Ill call soon. Katie. I folded the letter in half and set it in the middle of the round oak table in the kitchen. I wrote, For Dad on the back of the page and put a saltshaker on top of it to hold it in place. Then I turned and walked away. Now, I can imagine my fathers agony when he found that letter on the table. It must have seemed like the closing act in his marriage to my mother. Even though he couldnt express his emotions or help me with my grief when she died, I knew he loved me. I had lived with him for seventeen years. I have a photograph of him when they brought me home from the hospital, a young man wearing a white tee shirt and holding my baby body against his chest. But after my mother died, he would come home and fall asleep in the recliner in the living room, every night for hours and hours, and I'd walk past him from the kitchen to the bedroom to the kitchen. I remember sitting across from him, watching him breathing, snoring, his chest filling with air and then the sound of his rhythmic snore. My daughter Lilly ran away when she was fifteen after I tried to stop her from going to the Limelight, when the police were busting the place every week for drugs. She went to her girlfriends house less than a mile from where we lived. I called her there and told her I loved her, and she said she needed to take a break from me. Even though I was very anxious and couldnt sleep at night, I let her be. After a few nights, she came home with a new tattoo on her shoulder and a gold ring in her right nostril. She told me she wasnt using drugs and I didnt have to worry about her. Of course, I never 15

stopped worrying. Even now that shes married to someone she loves, a guy who seems to love her, too, and shes deeply involved in her studies, I worry. I've outlived my mother's death age, and I want my daughter to live, too. When I was her age, I was convinced that my father didnt care that much about me. I didnt see his pain. When I finally called home after a few months had passed, he asked, Kate, is that you? Yeah, Dad, its me. He hesitated and then he asked, Are you coming home? When I said no, he said in that case he couldnt talk to me. He just said goodbye and hung up the telephone. After that, whenever I called, hed say, Excuse me, and hed put Audrey on the line.

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When I wake up in the flat I'm subletting, it's still dark and I'm disoriented, not remembering where I am. Then I turn over on the air mattress and reach for my alarm clock. 5:30 am. I sleep better on an air mattress in this empty room than I did on my bed at home. If I were really adventurous, I'd sell my car, buy a pickup, and head directly to Mexico. So cold here, it's hard to get out of bed. I stretch my arms overhead and then roll over, slip my feet into a pair of wool socks and put on my bathrobe. After showering I do an hour yoga practice. Its good stretching out my body with these postures, like taking a dress, rolling, wringing, and shaking out each section independently until it is perfectly dry and at ease, and my mind is calm and empty. Then I drive to Skandia to see whats happened to the cabin. The lilac bush in the front yard is covered with little green clusters of buds. In a few weeks it will be purple blue. The night before my mother planted it, there was a storm and lightening struck a young tree out in the meadow, making a wound right at the place where the branches broke away from the trunk. I remember hugging the tree and wondering what it would feel like to be struck by lightening. My mother was on her hands and knees digging a hole to plant a new bush. Sitting in the car on the side of the road now, I look up at the trees and the lilacs to remind myself of the ever-transforming world and that in this equation, my presence is not required. Then I move on, taking the back road home, weaving the car through the woods and passing by a cornfield marked, Prison Property. The trees form a green ceiling over the road. Around a curve, I slow down as a little deer stops in her tracks, hears me and then turns back into the forest right where she first emerged. Half a mile more and a turtle stands 17

in the middle of the road with his neck stretched upward. Too late, I roll over him and look back in the rear view mirror. Lucky guy. He continues his journey across the pavement and I continue at 45 miles an hour, making an angle back across the great wooded peninsula. One hour later, I find my way back to Marquette. In a cafe on Washington Street I drink a cup of tea and work on my manuscript. Just as Im putting the papers into my bag to leave, someone clears his throat loudly. I look over at the next table at a tall guy in his fifties wearing dirty glasses and leaning over a stack of books. He smiles at me. Are you a writer? he asks Well mostly a photographer, but I do some writing too, I say and then I go on about how I grew up here and about the book Im writing. Some combination of fiction and memoir, I tell him. He takes off his glasses, bends them into a more correct form and puts them back on. Craig tells me hes an environmental reporter, a watchdog. He moved here in the seventies from Detroit, and ever since hes been struggling to stop companies and government agencies from encroaching on the forests and ruining the water and soil. The big mining companies keep people employed, but they have done a lot of damage, pouring asbestos fibers into the lakes, filling in the wetlands with waste products, and contaminating the soil. Thats just a short list, he says. He's a pleasant man obviously committed to improving the environment. When he stands up, I notice that he is stooped over, his physical frame collapsing like a green plant in the dry season. But there is plenty of fresh water here. Its always surprising to see people settle for a life of illness and discomfort when strength and wellbeing are easily available. Perhaps his political work became more 18

important to him than taking care of his body. Craig takes me upstairs to the studio where he has an office and where his wife paints murals, close ups of tree bark. The one I like best is a light green grid with a subtle suggestion of a leaf pattern. I thank him for showing me their studio and then I go on my way, heading a few blocks north to Northern Universitys big cold pool. Ive discovered that when I swim the crawl, I hunch my shoulders, giving myself a backache later in the day, and so its the backstroke and the side stroke, back and forth for half an hour, and then at the end, several laps of the crawl. As Im reaching forward, I think about my father and the way he shut the bedroom door after my mother died and disappeared for hours. Maybe he cried in there, but I never saw him cry. How could he cut me out like that? I glide forward through the chilly water. Tucking my head in, I take a breath. And then that slow shocking discovery that my mother would never return. The loneliness I felt when I was in the house with him comes back into my chest. Why these feelings now? I forgave him long ago. I take my body under water to the bottom of the pool. Twenty laps today, twenty-five tomorrow and so forth. At the library I pick up my email and search on a White Page website for Peggy Riley in Marquette, Michigan. No one. I widen the search, I narrow it. I go to New York. I search around and come up with 27 possibilities. I scan the back-up information. Only four are in Peggys age range. I copy down the numbers. I pull up my file of research and compare notes. Only one is a new number. Even though Im sure its a fraud, I decide to pay a search company $29 to try to find her. I type in her name, her last known addresses at her uncles house and on Pine Street where she lived with her 19

mother and stepfather. The report will be back in a few days. On the shelves, I find the yearbook from our junior year and I start looking for different people, friends of Peggys. I make a list of six and search for their numbers in Marquette. I find four. Then I open the email I've been saving for last, from Gary Snow, a musician I used to know in the eighties from the East Village. He used to wait tables at Cafe Orlin. Just before I left town, I ran into him at an opening in Washington Square Park. It was raining, and he was wearing an old gray raincoat, his gray hair in a long braid. He stood under the arches smiling at me. He was tall and a little hefty with big arms. Ive always liked men who have big arms. I think maybe they will scoop me up and carry me away. I like your new photos, Katie. I saw a few of them in Cafe Pass. Too bad youre leaving, I was hoping we could hang out together. His voice was very deep, the vibrations resonated into my body. Owww, I said to myself, but to him I said, Theres always email. So we exchanged addresses and since then weve been writing every day, telling each other the stories of our days, our problems and joys and such. In todays email he talks about how much he loves his daughter and his son, and then he describes an irritating woman in the restaurant where he works, and then he goes on about the possibility of a better job in the Village and a gig he might have playing his sax for a television advertisement. And in parenthesis he adds, Katie, I cant get to sleep if I read your email before going to bedwith your body and your bath in my mind. I warn myselfDont get too involved with him. You live on the other side of the continent and theres something about email and a writer writing sort of love letters that could 20

be more about the imagination than reality. For a single person, though, to have someone to correspond with daily about your hopes and aspirations and the mundane events of every day life might be a little bit like being married. But the actual body is missing. Dear Gary, I write and then I talk about the book Im writing and describe the UP to him and the flat where Im staying. He says hes got some money saved and hes thinking of quitting New York City and moving back out west. He lived in LA for a while years back. And then I find myself thinkingmaybe when I get settled, hell follow me. Im just a crazy bohemian, he warns. I dont want to do anything that might hurt you. I sit in the stacks and read from On the Road. I love the way Kerouac traces his experiences, yes fiction, but autobiography too, a kind of loose, honest writing that follows trains of thought, as their bodies and minds wandered here and there. When I was young, I was attracted to their bohemian adventures, the rebellion, and the excitement of going somewhere new and looking for a different way of living. But as I reread now, I notice that the women in the book are mostly at home waiting for the boys to return from their adventures or standing on the corner or in a bar waiting for a connection. Sometimes they go along for the ride, but mostly the women are the ground, the home the young men return to until the women say no, not anymore. On the way home, I stop at Jack's on 3rd Street to buy some groceries. When, Im looking at the strawberries someone taps me on the back. Katie Anderson, is that really you? I look at him, quizzically.

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Its Jim, Jim Gordon. We went out for a while, remember, during tenth grade. I thought that was you, he says, smiling at me. Hes now a tall, solid man wearing a white shirt and a pair of levis. He used to be a skinny kid. I kiss him on the cheek and smile. His beard is rough, a day past a shave. When we were young we spent many evenings making out on Presque Isle and on the back roads in Skandia. Are you married now? he asks. No, not any more. Are you? Well I married Anele Young. She died last year, he said. She went to school with us, a year behind. Do you remember her? No, Im sorry. We have two children, one in college, and the other is married and living in Traverse City. I have a daughter, too, Shes back in New York. Wheres her father? Lives in Chicago, but theyre in touch. A woman with an overflowing grocery basket and two small children stops to wait for me to move my basket so she can go around us. Jim, have you seen Peggy Riley around? Do you know where I might find her? Of course I remember Peggy. You two were buddies. But I havent seen her since she left here. You mean in the eleventh grade? Um, I think she came back, maybe a year or two after she left, and then she left again. I remember seeing her once in the food co-op, a few years after I graduated. Any idea where she went? 22

I dont know. Maybe California. Its so long ago, I cant remember for sure. Do you ever see her boyfriend Bob around? Bob Johnson. Yeah, he works at Equitable on Washington Street. I pick up some strawberries and put them into the cart. Today Im buying only fruits and vegetables. Later Ill stop at the co-op to pick up rice and noodles. I look into Jims grocery basket. His diet looks particular too, gin and tonic with a carton of strawberries. He looks at me, smiles, cocks his head, and says, Its that kind of day. He works in Marquette General as a physicians assistant to a cardiologist and today they had a rough operation. He looks into my cart. Asparagus? Pretty soon you can hunt for it wild along the sides of the road. They're so good, you can eat them raw. I tell him Im in town for five more weeks, and we exchange telephone numbers with some vague plans for picking asparagus together. At home I call the number for Equitable. Bob Johnson is the manager. I ask him if hed seen Peggy over the years, and he tells me that hes never heard from her. Someone once told him that she was living in California, but that was a long time ago. Hes wondered about her over the years, but he knows nothing. He suggests I call Mrs. Conaris at the high school. She and Peggy were quite close. Then I call the high school. Im sorry, the receptionist says. Mrs. Conaris died two years ago. At night I go to the movies to see a Finnish film called The Man Without a Past by Aki Kaurismaki. Long slow takes, about a man who is beaten and loses his memory. Then he wanders away from the hospital and begins a new life with an 23

outcast group living in a shantytown. Ultimately he discovers that the simple life lived in poverty is superior to the life he had been living. When I get home, I make a few calls and theres a message from Jim: Were in luck. Its actually the middle of asparagus season. Im going tomorrow morning. If you want to come along, give me a call.

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