Divine Intervention
When I return to the Midwest, there are storms of biblical proportions
When I left New York, it was over 100 degrees. When I return to the Midwest, there are storms of biblical proportions. At the beach, the sky goes from overcast to blue-grey, the color of a winter sky at a 4pm sunset. Lake Michigan, always brackish, turns a color I’ve never seen before. We hear thunder and finally get out of the water, but I’m still hesitant. I insist, maybe it just will pass over us! Nah, someone’s brother tells me, showing off the weather app on his phone. The lake water is so beautiful, but he says it’s the perfect conductor for lightning.
Standing in the sand, neck bent, face to the sky, I watch as the clouds come in, towering over us. They take gargantuan shape, fleeing the coast and spreading inland. It’s still warm, but the wind picks up. We gather up our things and hustle up the narrow wooden stairs of the bluff. I make it back to the cottage just in time to evade the downpour, and when it comes it’s monstrous and loud and smells so good, but I'm disappointed too. The past few summer it’s either so hot or raining, so hot or raining, so hot or raining. Doesn’t matter if it’s here or there because it’s somewhere.
Of course I’m thinking about the climate. I remember (the term people say when they get older) when the summer rain was just the occasional phenomenon, when once or twice a summer it came, usually during day camp at Peterson Park, and they made us take cover in the sticky field house with the din of industrial fans to watch a movie, or do crafts, and cars would get stuck in the flooded underpasses of the highway.
Or when Mom got stuck in the car while it hailed, or one of my last nights in Chicago before I moved and a summer rain came while I left a loft party on North Avenue, and I trudged home in my boots and drop-ship dress, hair and clothes and everything dripping onto the linoleum floor of The Hat as I waited for my order of mozzarella sticks.
At the house, Dad is limping with a cane and depressed. He’s been depressed for months, either ever since he turned 70, which was last year, or ever since he learned he had a heart ablation and had to get a surgery; I’m not sure which but probably both. I make him laugh for the first time when I emerge from my room on Saturday morning for a glass of ice water.
He asks me if I’m hungover and I nod, silent and half-blind, and that is when he laughs. Dad is 71 now and his knee has a small fracture from a surgery that was supposed to fix it and as a result he’s depressed about that too. He and my mom go to Walmart for groceries and they return with crutches in tow from the Goodwill.
An hour later Mom learns from a neighbor that some of the dead tree in my parent’s backyard has fallen onto the deck, not destroying it entirely but dislodging a whole side of the railing. Happy 4th of July?
When I finally get out of bed, I wake up from a dream that is so completely real, I’m convinced it must be from an alternate timeline in another dimension. I theorize this most of the time because it’s the only way to explain why my dreams are so vivid and full of specific narrative detail. How else would I make all that up, if it wasn’t real somewhere? In this dream there’s Hayden “from the Bayou” who is smitten with me, and comes to my rescue (I can’t remember what for—but I think a flood) with a pack of boys who I joke must all be in a band, because they all look alike and they say they’re all best friends. They’re from Atlanta and Minneapolis and New Orleans, all with long unkempt hair and mustaches.1 I was just sitting in the back seat of their truck, but when I open my eyes I’m actually on the couch, wrapped in my grandfather’s blanket, the ceiling fan spinning on high.
This used to be his cottage, back when it was more of a cottage than a lakehouse, with a mold-smelling screened-in porch and mice that used to get trapped in the radiator. I didn’t really know my grandfather as a person because he died when I was ten, but he has always been considered “an eccentric.” We have a few of those in my family. My grandpa was born Bentley Cohen, but then he changed his name to Robert R. Bentley,2 a fact I only learned a few years ago when one day I asked my dad why the hell he chose “Bentley.” How surprised I was when I learned his first name had been the inspiration the whole time.
Grandpa wore trousers practically belted up to his armpits. He was a mathematician, never talked about his past, and wasn’t particularly comfortable entertaining children, which I don’t blame him. I remember his voice, and how he chewed with his mouth open and brought over Greek food to our house for dinner every Tuesday, that is until he accidentally rear-ended my mom’s car while trying to park and wasn’t allowed to drive anymore. He died when he was 89, but for the last 20-or-so years of his life he had a companion, his partner, who my brother and I called Miss Audrey. She was English, very posh. In their prime, the two of them played tennis, never lived together, and vacationed at the cottage in Michigan. I think, if I could, I would like to die that way.
In Michigan, Jordyn and Zoey are like my cousins in that we only see each other once a year but each year feels just like yesterday, and no time has passed even though it has. I met Jordyn in the park when I was nine and she was eleven, the same age as my brother, although he hasn’t been here for the past few summers, which I am ardently aware of when anyone asks where he is. Whether it’s better or not that he isn’t here, I don’t know. Even without him everyone is still bickering, and my aunt is rolling her eyes, and Grandma is “coloring” in the other room, slowly losing her hearing, and hopefully not her mind, yelling What!? Sometimes when I hang out with my family, I fear who I’ll become. Then worry, well maybe I already am.
My mom and aunt fuss with Grandma if she sits in the rocking chair for too long, but Grandma says she just likes to sit and watch us. My aunt calls my mom sissy, as in sister and not the teasing way like you’re a sissy. Mom runs to turn on the TV to catch Wimbledon. She loves Coco Gauff and narrating whatever is happening on the TV, any TV, anywhere. I hear her narrate to Grandma, Tennis is a rich people’s sport, even the Queen of England plays it.
I vacuum the kitchen rug, season the salmon for dinner later, put away the clean dishes, load the dishwasher, and make three different breakfasts because I don’t know how to be anything else but helpful. I’ve never considered not being helpful, not when a tragicomedy is unfolding and someone is going to have a fit over who left the ice cream scoop there, or whatever utensil or bowl or battery charger or other object. Mom frazzles around even so, trying to eat a hardboiled egg but keeps getting up to fiddle around with the cleaning the house, egg in hand.
To constantly watch yourself from the corner of the room is agonizing. It’s why Dad keeps telling me I’m sorry, and Mom keeps telling me she’s sorry, and to forgive her and also him, and when Dad says it, I tell him, you don’t actually mean that, because if you did, then you might do something about it. That’s when he goes silent. When I know I’ve picked at the bone. I add, Love you! as a recovery. Love you is the only thing my family remotely understands, you’re annoying—but love you; you’re acting like an asshole, but love you. Get off my case, love you! Shut up, love you. I’m such a hypocrite when I do the same later, I text my roommate, my dear friend, I’m so sorry.
It rains again, and after dinner, the lights flicker on, then off, then on, then off. The generator kicks on, as do the others, and they rumble throughout the subdivision like car engines.
My family has such a serious case of being so far up everyone’s ass, it causes bad vision. The proof? All the women on my mom’s side have laughably poor eyesight, myself included. As for the men, 20/20 vision can only get you so far—emotional nearsightedness manifests in adult temper tantrums, knowing you’re always right, and philosophical debates nobody took enough college classes to prepare for.
At the dinner table, a gesture to my brother is misinterpreted, but for good reason. The gesture is a text when the room is extra tense and I can’t not think about him. I text him to say, you are missed, which is confusing. I don’t mean something like wish you were here, or I miss you, which is what that sounds like that means, because in a way you’re lucky that you’re not, and even if you were it would not make it any better, it being this, and probably would only make it worse.
The point is, anyways, you are missed in the way that no one else is as familiar with this tension as you. So much for a family incapable of communicating; even I don’t know how to be direct. It just comes naturally, like my eyeglasses prescription.
A few days after the rainstorms, I wake up and it’s beautiful, the sky clear and blue. But my gums are bleeding, and I see the imprint of someone having slept on the couch in the living room. Dad tells me Mom had a nightmare.
I’ve been writing about Michigan at least since I was ten or twelve. Once I wrote a mystery story, which I never finished, on a large pad of yellow notepaper. I sat on the hammock, writing the story in pencil. I named the character after my little cousin Miranda. That was around when I collected Nancy Drew books. I’d look for them anytime I was at an antique store. It was especially fun to see which edition the books were; the older the better. Each book had a different mystery, but the exact same narrative outline, which always included an especially riveting plot of Nancy getting kidnapped and having to cleverly escape her captors.
I’m applying aloe to my sunburn in the mirror when it makes me think of the last bad sunburn I had, which is when I was nineteen and in Europe with my two friends from college. The trip was fun but also harrowing in that we had planned the entire thing (three weeks) while on our first train ride to our first stop (Copenhagen). Big Europe trips are quite memorable like bad sunburns.
At the tail end of our trip we were in a small coastal town in Italy with a rock beach. We stayed with a woman in her mid-30s at her AirBnB. She had her room and kept to herself while we had two rooms and the bathroom upstairs. In the morning she set the table with pastries and fruit and coffee, but most memorably, like the sunburn, she came to our rescue with olive oil.
We had laid out at the rock beach all day long. Hadn’t even thought about sunscreen, until Em pointed out that we were looking red. We went looking for sunscreen, but couldn’t find a store that sold it. All the pharmacies were closed. God forbid there was no aloe. When we returned to the AirBnB, we were bright red. That’s when the pain came. I’m pretty sure Ander Claire cried. Em’s sunburn was not that bad. Mine was medium bad, but still pretty bad. Our AirBnB host implored us to take cold baths. The bathroom was entirely pink and so were we. One by one we took baths, then lathered ourselves in olive oil for relief. We were shrimps. And in the bath it was as if, one by one, we were being poached.
Ate two halves of hamburgers that did not belong to each other. One half of one hamburger, the other half of another hamburger. Five years gone like the hamburgers in my stomach, the hamburgers that don’t belong to each other. How bout that. Molly talks about the pencil fiasco at the Art Institute. The pencil fiasco! The pencil fiasco! How I love the pencil fiasco. How I try to squeeze a life into a week, but I can’t.
Mom still worries when I leave the house on foot. Are you sure you don’t want to take the car? Cottontail rabbits run across the manicured lawns of the bungalows, on the street where my old babysitter lives. At Six Corners, bouquets of flowers decorate the intersection, fake plastic ones stuffed into the street partitions.
Down Milwaukee, I pass the long-shuttered Portage Theater (Hot Dog Fest: May 29), Guss’s Bakery #3, Today’s Avon Store, the Kurdish Cultural Center of Illinois, and the United Serbs Soccer Club. Two friendly bartenders smoking outside Miska’s Liquors (taproom attached) tell me to have a good night. A shut down nightclub is always ghostly and taunting me, in this case Capitol Night Club, dubbed both “troubled” and the “Northside’s Premier Polish Disco” which makes me wonder if they ever had beef with Podlasie. A shirtless guy tells me I’m not Julia Roberts, and he’s right. I walk a little faster.
Mom puts her feet on the dash while I drive us back home from the Milwaukee Art Museum. A week earlier I saw an ad for the Gertrude Abercrombie exhibit and knew I had to go. If you asked me if I had a favorite artist, I will now put her to the top of my list.
The rain comes down again. It’s so intense the windshield wipers can barely handle it. Mom tries to rest but never can, and out of the corner of my eye I notice her stuffing balled-up pieces of napkin into her ears to try to make it quiet. It rains hard, then stops, rains again, then stops.
Back at my parent’s house the cicadas are back at it, and the lightning comes, and I’m on the couch again, this time looking through the window. The sun is going down and the brambles in the backyard are so overgrown you can’t even see the train tracks. A cicada hums his dying tune and quiets. A crow caws and flies over to a branch on the tree, and I’m so struck by how green it is, how lush, how vividly the sun shines onto every leaf. I think it’s funny. How the only time I have anything to say is while it’s happening. How the only dreams I believe in are the ones that aren’t real.
If this sounds like you, or you know for a fact that these are real people, please message me
The R. doesn’t stand for anything, just R
there’s a quote from the timmy chalamet movie where he’s henry v, “family consumes us.” i think that’s true for everyone, and is still beautiful even if ever-present