thirty miles to rosebud by barbara henning book preview

7/31/2019 Thirty Miles to Rosebud by Barbara Henning Book Preview

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THIRTYMILES TOROSEBUD

A Novel

Barbara Henning

BlazeVOX[books]Buffalo, New York


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THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD by Barbara Henning

Copyright 2009

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedwithout the publishers written permission, except for briefquotations 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, EstherHyneman, Lewis Warsh, Patti Henning, Bob Henning and DeborahMutnick for reading early drafts of this novel and offering invaluablesuggestions for revision. Thanks to Jan Kidd for helping withresearch. And thanks to Bill Kushner; the poem quoted in Chapter 16was written by him (That April, United Artists 2000).

First EditionISBN 13:9781935402251Library of Congress Control Number: 2009923618

BlazeVOX [books]303 Bedford AveBuffalo, NY 14216

[email protected]

publisher of weird little books

BlazeVOX [ books ]blazevox.org


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1

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, anenvelope 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 someoneelses 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. Goingout 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


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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 anold 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 overat 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 eaves-

dropping?

Peggy and I had been friends ever since kindergarten.

After my mother died in '67 when I was twelve. I went to her


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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 inthe 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 heragain. 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'sapartment 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.


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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 somedrunks 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 theWest 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 abig 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


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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 timessomething 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 oftrees 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


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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 leaningagainst 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 mymother 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


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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 inGuatemala 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 loose-

leaf paper.


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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. Itmust 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 againsthis 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


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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 goodbyeand hung up the telephone. After that, whenever I called, hed

say, Excuse me, and hed put Audrey on the line.


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2

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 littlegreen 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 onher 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, PrisonProperty. 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


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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 forhalf 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. Andthen 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


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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 couldhang 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 daughterand 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


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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, hellfollow 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 wanderedhere 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 waitingfor 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?


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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. Someoneonce 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


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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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