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Transcript of 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
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.