I knew from Dad’s lectures that the zone included the shoulder area, and behind it the heart and lungs. Viewed broadside, it was roughly centered on the rear of the shoulder. It gave the hunter the best chance at hitting vital organs. From that range, he could hardly have missed. It wasn’t “hunting” at all.
I was sickened to my core. To see something so alive, innocent, and trusting, callously exterminated by stupid old men, gaining nothing but a short-term buzz and buying into a deluded fantasy of how that defined them in the eyes of the world, just seemed so crass and pathetic on every level. I kept quiet, but they could see my anger and sense the contempt I had for them.
I obviously decided that I wouldn’t be going with Dad on any more trips. He said nothing, and while on some level he seemed relieved, I could also feel his disappointment. And I’m sure he and Mom could feel mine. As I grew, I became less at ease in the home I was born into: developing more of an awareness that I was a misfit in this household, in this town, and that while I didn’t measure up in its eyes, the feeling was mutual.
I was getting ready for school one morning; it was about 7:45. The phone rang and Mom switched on the TV. We saw one of the towers in the World Trade Center smoking. They said a plane had crashed into it, and showed the replay. I looked at Mom and Dad; we all thought it was a terrible accident. Around fifteen minutes later, another plane smashed into the second tower. I was scared, and so was Mom, and we held each other on the couch.
“New York,” Dad scoffed, as if it were happening somewhere across the world. “Something or nothing.”
I don’t know to this day if he really believed that or if he was putting on a brave face, perhaps in the belief that Mom and I might become hysterical. I stayed home with her, sitting on the couch watching the events unfold, nervously eating candy, until it got too much and we had to switch off. Dad went to work as normal, in his hardware business in Minneapolis. It would never have occurred to him to do anything else. He smelled of the store: paint, turps, oil, sawn wood, glue, and metal particles that seemed to cling to his hands in particular. No amount of washing or aftershave could disguise that odor.
Sometimes Dad spoke so slowly I could feel myself perishing inside, desperate for him to finish his sentence so that I could resume my life. On a few occasions he would halt his speech in a pained pause, where he seemed to be evaluating whether or not it was worthwhile continuing.
As he worked increasingly longer hours, Mom and I did everything together and that “everything” involved food. Or what Lucy would describe as crap: sugary, salty crud. We ate whole pies, pizzas, and cheesecakes till we were sick. We would lie on the couch, immobilized, barely able to draw breath. We were almost drunk, almost drowned by food. Tormented by stomach cramps and acid reflux; beyond satisfied, in real physical pain, sitting in abject self-hate which throbbed inside us like the garbage we’d just eaten, yet just wanting this mountain we’d tipped into our guts to subside, to be broken up and processed by our bodies, the pounds of fat sticking onto what was already there. Just wanting that to happen so that we could start again. Because when it happened, we just felt so empty. We needed, craved, the same again.
Poor me! Daddy was a coldhearted NRA stumpy dick, who shot furry little animals with his subsitute prick! Momma was a big fat pig who stuffed herself, cause she wasn’t getting enough schlong. BIG FUCKING DEAL, SORENSON! Doesn’t willpower factor in here? Doesn’t self-respect? Is there a fucking core? A person in there?
Then I saw myself in the large, ornate mahogany-framed mirror in our hallway, just after my exams. A blimp. I could no longer eat what I wanted. So I dressed in black, became a goth, a fat goth. I could draw, and I could paint. Always. But I could no longer eat what I wanted, because I wanted more than anybody could eat.
It caused problems at high school. Before my weight gain I had been not exactly popular, but, although quiet, thoughtful, and a little small for my age, I’d been able to go along with the usual games and schoolyard antics. Now I was sticking out from the crowd. It was strange the way the other girls looked at you: first a discomfort, then a cruelty would seep into their eyes. It was like a slowly dawning nightmare, where the people seemed like themselves on the outside, but were possessed by a demonic force. I had—quite literally—outgrown Jenny. I knew she was embarrassed hanging around with me. Then one day, in gym class, when a group of girls started tormenting me, she joined in. I couldn’t even hate her. Like my mom, I had convinced myself that I was unlovable, and was suffering some sort of just retribution.
Even in art class there was no respite. I was working on a portrait of an old man. When I came in one morning, it was defaced, the figure rendered fat with black paint, the face altered to a crude, cartoonish approximation of my own. BLUBBER-ASSED BITCH was scrawled underneath it in big letters. I was mortified, saw the others in class laughing, but I couldn’t show it to my teacher. I disposed of it discreetly in the trash and started another, my hand trembling as I sketched.
Other people could see that I was becoming more detached and withdrawn. A teacher, Mrs. Phipps, recommended to Mom that I should see a doctor, as I was possibly depressed. We went to our family physician, Dr. Walters, who had been feeding me antibiotics and antihistamines since I was a kid. He told my mother I was suffering from “lethargy.” “I want to avoid pejorative terms like depression,” he said to us.
Even I knew there was no such designated medical condition. But I could barely bring myself to shower or brush my teeth. Even the three minutes of the buzzing electric toothbrush was excruciating, and I’d pray for it to end, counting down the seconds as I poked it around my mouth.
But Mom still loved me. She showed it by treating me. Treats. Our life was one long round of treats. The dictionary describes that noun as “an event or item that is out of the ordinary and gives great pleasure.” There was nothing out of the ordinary about our “treating” regime. And every pleasure it afforded was short-lived compared to the slow, throbbing pulses of pain it constantly left us in.
Um, hello! Wise the fuck up! And the doctor, in
Potters Prairie, Otter County
, was a fucking quack? Now who would have thunk that?
A nerdy kid called Barry King was my only friend at high school. He was as skinny as I was fat, a shy and awkward boy with Harry Potter glasses. As is often the irony in such situations, in retrospect I now clearly see that Barry, with his slender, athletic frame and dark, haunting eyes, needed only a minor change in attitude to be rebranded a conventionally good-looking kid. Sadly he was unable to take that small but giant step. Like me, he jailed himself with his self-consciousness: his movements, walk, glances, nervous, inappropriate pronouncements, they all invited persecution. In response, we created our own world, one which both sustained and shamed us. Our refuge was science fiction—we were particulary obsessed with Ron Thoroughgood, a British sci-fi writer—and Marvel comics. We’d bring in comic books and first draw the superheroes and villains in them, then create our own characters.
The world we constructed from those materials not only defined our present, but would also be our future. We made plans; he was going to write sci-fi adventures, and I was going to illustrate them.
We hung around the Cup of Good Hope Cafe and Johnny’s One Stop, eating candy and potato chips, and drinking soda, always soda: Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, Dr. Pepper. Hiding, always hiding. Him behind those unflattering frames, me in my fat suit, peering out from the thick, black curtain I’d allowed to grow over my eyes, which made my father squirm in silent rage. “It’s my style,” I’d shrug, when he confronted me about it.
All the while I craved that comforting spike of sugar, awaiting, in choking anticipation, its future promise. One time Barry and I were heading to the Cup of Good Hope, when a group of kids from high school stopped us and started being abusive. They called Barry a retarded geek and me a beached whale. They said we were having sex. That he was a skinny pervert for fucking a really fat chick. One of the boys punched his face, knocking his glasses to the ground but not breaking them. They laughed as he picked them up. We walked for a bit, then went to the Cup of Good Hope. He sucked soda through a straw which sat on his fat lip. I remember him saying, “Nobody understands us here, Lena. You’ve got to get out.”
His words chilled me, even then. It was the way he said “you,” and not “we.” It was as if he knew then that he himself would never make it.
And he didn’t.
I hated Sundays more than any other day, as the promise of high school and a week of bullying lay ahead. The fearful anticipation of this was actually more crippling than the reality. Sunday was also the dreary, soul-destroying ritual of church, which seemed to foreshadow the slaughter. My mom’s folks, Grandma and Grandpa Olsen, would come to the house early for breakast, then we would walk to church together. It was a horrible trek, boring yet full of dreadful anticipation, and it meant walking awkwardly with my family, along an exposed road, but we would never, ever drive. Even if it was raining or cold, we’d huddle underneath umbrellas. If I protested Dad would explain that it was “family tradition.” Grandma would chat to Mom, while Grandpa Olsen was silent, only ever talking to Dad, and always about their respective work. I was made to dress in bright clothes by Mom. I felt retarded, it was like they drew the world’s eyes to me, much more than my preferred black ever could. Before we left the house, I’d force myself to stare at the image in the mirror. I was just like Mom, fat and stupid. A younger version, but dressed in the same ridiculous clothes. Dad barely looking at us. Shamed by us. Even though I was a teenager—a small, fat, zitty teenager who hid behind bangs—I was dragged along.
During vacations, I would go into Minneapolis with Dad, to work in the hardware store. I hated the silent drive, the flat nothingness ahead, the big hollow skies above us. The store itself was full of hokey old guys, both staff and the customers, some of whom I recognized as Dad’s hunting cronies, who came in to talk about shit. They were usually bored, ancient retired men who had DIY projects that would take years, if they ever got done at all.
Grandpa Olsen was like one of them. He died suddenly; a huge heart attack at the wheel of one of his flatbed trucks, in the parking lot behind his business. Fortunately, the vehicle was stationary at the time.
At his funeral, on a cold, windswept day by an open grave, Mom cried, comforting Grandma, who kept repeating over and over again, “He was a good man . . .” Noting my boredom and discomfort, Dad gruffly told me, in a very adultlike way, as if he were talking to a friend, he believed that Grandpa Olsen knew he was going to die, and that was why he’d climbed into the cabin of his rig.
Grandpa and Dad had shared some sort of joyless bond, as both were successful in business. Then Dad’s luck changed when Menards opened a new store in a mall barely a mile away. Dad grew very bitter. It was symptomatic of America’s decline, he said. He started to voice his support for various right-wing politicians, going across the spectrum from the authoritarian to the libertarian, eventually settling for Ron Paul. He even became active in one of Paul’s numerous doomed presidential campaigns.
We fought about this. We fought all the time on politics and social issues. Dad would debate up to a point, but whenever I was getting the better of him (which was more and more often as I was reading voraciously), he would raise his voice in threat, “I’m your father, and you will respect that,” he’d command, and the discussion would be over.
Dad told me to keep away from Cherie, a clerk at the hardware store, who was a few years older than me, but who seemed a normal, cheerful girl. “She’s not the sort of person you should be talking to.”
“Why?”
“You can never be friends with staff. It undermines me.”
“But they’re co-workers, I’m only working in the store.”
“Don’t sass me. You’re my daughter, and someday you’ll be running this place!”
The thought filled me with dread. But I knew it would never happen. Instead I grew to love Menards. Every grumble from him about their progress, and disclosure that his store was struggling, ignited sheer glee in my heart. If I saw a huge ad for the chain in the newspaper, I’d rejoice at their corporate firepower, envisioning it crushing that horrible Twin City Hardware store in its bleak strip mall, literally razing it to the ground. I’d rather live a destitute life than manage his store.
Then something terrible happened. It was the following spring, when things were just coming strongly to life after another brutal winter. I was sitting in the garden, reading
They Perish In Ecstasy
, the new Ron Thoroughgood novel. Mom was weeding, tilling the soil, preparing to do some planting. Alana Russinger, a neighbor of ours, came by and told Mom that Barry was dead.
I froze, lowered my book. Mom looked at me, then back at Alana. “That’s terrible . . . what happened?”
“I don’t know the details, but they just found his body in his bedroom this morning.”
“What do you mean?” I yelped, getting out my chair.
Alana looked at me with a pained expression, then turned to Mom. She dropped her voice and said, “They’re saying he hanged himself.”
I ran indoors and went to my room. Sat on my bed. Tried to find tears through my numbness. Nothing came. Mom walked in. Sat on the bed beside me. Said some words, about how Barry was in a better place, with God, and how he would never be unhappy again.
“How do you know he’s with God?” I turned on her. “If he hanged himself that’s suicide, and isn’t that meant to be a sin that stops you going to heaven?”