Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (19 page)

And I’m almost to my minivan when a flash-freeze of wind aims itself right at me like a stun grenade. According to the calendar it is the middle of March, and winter is supposed to be on the downslope, but just try telling that to the weather. I angle my torso like a ski jumper, arms tight to my sides, and enter the whipping snow. Ugly Brown is flapping away in this gale that feels like it’s been saving up since somewhere over the western prairies just to blast me and my little acreage. While I’ve been inside getting ready, this wind has sculpted snowdrifts in front of my door, next to my farm truck, and over the hood of my minivan.

The distance from my garage door to the end of my driveway is about half the length of a football field, but I can see that the road itself is pretty clear and it’s just my driveway that looks like a scene from
Dr. Zhivago
.

If I can just ram my way through fifty yards of oscillating three-foot snowdrifts, the ones that seem to have arms reaching out for unsuspecting and preoccupied women like me, I’ll be fine.

Because here’s the deal. Once I’m driving down the road toward the nightclub with my two free tickets, I’ll be out on the town on a Saturday night as a single woman with plans to meet someone of the opposite sex for the first time since, no lie, the Reagan administration.

I skip the minivan tonight and decide to take the farm truck instead. It chugalugs the gas, but it also has beefy tires and four-wheel drive, making it a better hedge against all those icy drifts now standing between Pete and me. And it’s not until my gloved hand is on the door handle that I notice how well my hair’s brown
roots, and my brown ankle boots, and my Ugly Brown sweater all color-coordinate with my transportation option of the evening, my farm truck, “Cookie.”

As much as I eschew signs, omens, and snowflakes in particular places, this unplanned symbiosis of earthy hues is a development I interpret as containing
a deeper meaning
. Okay, a sign. I am certain now that I was right to ask Pete to accompany me tonight because my hair has brown roots, I’m wearing a brown sweater, walking in brown boots, and getting into a brown truck. Hey, if everything is random, then
you’d better just go on and grab some meaning wherever you can find it.

A blizzard in such a serendipitous circumstance as this seems like only a minor inconvenience.

Cookie rams the biggest driveway snowdrift head-on at 25 mph. That’s as much speed as I can muster, stomping my pointy-toed boot on the accelerator and jamming the stick shift into second gear, but it’s not enough. My truck lodges in the snowbank, both front tires half-buried and spinning.

And of course I know not to gun the engine. Anyone who learned how to drive in a snow state knows not to gun the engine when you’re stuck in a drift. Especially when you’re in a hurry. Because you’ll only make it worse.

And I can’t believe I’m actually stuck in my own driveway, because just think of the good luck that has gotten me this far. It has taken the hands of fate striking the hour of destiny on the solar system’s great cosmic clock, what with the calling of the radio station and the winning of the tickets and the asking of the man. And now I’m going to be felled by something as pedestrian as the
weather
? I don’t think so.

Maybe I am this excited about the prospect of being out on
a date with Pete. But maybe I just want to be a girl again for one night.
Please, God, let me do that one little thing
. Then I’ll go back to being a broke, single, underemployed, man-hating mom. A statistic. But just for one night I’d really like to dance and listen to live music and drink and have some actual fun with another adult. A male adult.

I thought I’d followed all of the intricate steps necessary, in their proper order, to make this spontaneous moment happen. Now this.

I look up, as if by some miracle of spiritual physics my frustration could penetrate Cookie’s roof, and say a prayer.
Sir or Madam
, I mouth to the concave brown Naugahyde upholstery overhead, and whatever, whoever, is beyond it.
Please let me get out of my driveway. Please. Because do you really think men like Pete are a common occurrence? Do you really think you scattered them all over your frozen creation down here like pinecones or something?

And then I gun the engine. And maybe I gun it again, putting both feet on the accelerator this time, just for that teensy-weensy bit of emphasis.

Cookie’s roof says nothing in return, but her front tires respond to the accelerator accordingly. They grind themselves deeper into the drift until her wheel wells are packed with snow and the sickening, ratcheting, wind-up sound of rubber on ice reverberates through the cold.

It takes me almost half an hour of working with the snow shovel and the pointed spade I fetch from the recesses of my garden shed to get free. I arrive at the nightclub Streeter’s and park what seems like miles away from the door because I’m so late and the place is so packed that it’s the only spot I can find. After a trudge across the frozen tundra of the parking lot, I am sweating
mascara and my hair looks like I did the Polar Plunge into a pool of slush.

How do other single people manage? Is a date really worth all this trouble? This is what I’m thinking when I see Pete, standing in the crowd that is milling around outside, and he is smiling my way.

“Wow, you look great!” he says, actually seeming to mean it. Which indicates one of two things: he is either legally blind and has failed to mention it, or he likes me as much as I like him and so doesn’t even register that I look like, and have the disposition of, a drowned blond wolverine.

And then we are inside, and even though it’s open admission Pete scores us two great seats on the mezzanine that circles the dance floor, and Uncle Kracker comes onstage, and he’s smiling and good-looking, and he starts to sing and his band sounds great.

After a few songs I see the real-estate agent who sold me my farm and she walks up to my seat and tries to pull me onto the dance floor and Pete motions to go ahead, he will save our seats. He will keep an eye on Ugly Brown because I am all camisole now, all faded jeans and vodka.

I’m dancing with a circle of women, some I know but most I don’t, but it doesn’t matter that my feet are still squishing inside my snow-soaked boots, because we are women without a worry or a care, all grinning one big grin. Yes, I think, feeling a carefree sense of well-being I’d forgotten was possible, it
is
worth it. Just to feel like this for a couple hours, it’s worth the slush and the wind and the rubber bands.

Uncle Kracker is singing that everything is going to be all right and I want to believe him and he crouches at the edge of the stage and points down into the crowd for a minute and seems to
point right at me. I look around, to either side of me, to the dancing women nearest me, and he laughs into the microphone while he’s singing and points at me again.

My real-estate agent and her friends see this and simultaneously release the universal rowdy-woman-pack cry “Woo-hoo!” into the night and we keep dancing and she leans in and shouts in my ear, “Cracker!”

The intimation is, of course, that you have to be a huckle-berryish, brassy country girl like me to attract the attention of a rocker named Uncle Kracker. For once my overly sensitive and politically correct self isn’t even offended.

Next Pete and I dance to a slow song and his arms around me are plenty tight but they feel more like support than restraint and I’m not absolutely sure but I don’t think that’s the third vodka talking. Back at our seats, the looming real world creeps in as the alcohol wears off and I get quiet thinking about the week ahead.

My divorce hearing, by my rough calculations, is scheduled for forty hours from now.

The music is blasting as the band plays their last few songs so I think my mood blends in. I think that no one notices that the woman who was dancing and laughing earlier is sitting down and is quiet and moody now.

Pete touches my arm, though, wondering. “Everything okay?”

I look at him and start to smile, and start to yell, “Everything’s great, everything’s cool,” but then I see his green eyes and that inquiring frown and feel the squeeze of his cabinetmaker’s hand on my wrist and so for some reason instead, I just tell him the truth. Actually, I yell him the truth. As loud as I can, so I can be sure he’ll hear me over the music.

“My divorce hearing is Monday!” I holler.

The band decides this is the exact second that their show is over and their song ends, and before most of the applause can erupt, my announcement reverberates across our section of the mezzanine. People turn and look at us, then laugh behind their hands, and I am mortified. What made me think I could date?

Pete says nothing, but his jaw goes a little slack in what I think is surprise and what I really hope is not embarrassment to be seen here with me.

“Let’s go,” he says, and with him leading and holding my hand we weave our way through the crowd and out into the parking lot. We walk between the parked cars in the general direction of my truck, not really in any hurry despite the cold.

“Hey, I want to show you something,” he says, his voice low. “What do you think?” He gestures toward an old pickup truck we’re now standing next to. I give it the once-over and see that it is a sibling or at least a first cousin of Cookie, except that it’s all white instead of two-tone brown.

“Of what?” I say.

“Of the truck,” he says.

His regular ride is a royal-blue pickup, a newish one with cloth seats that he keeps scrupulously clean and waxed year-round. He also owns a plow truck and has told me all about the classic Mercury Comet he’s restoring. This white junker he’s pointing to is a little rusty, a little raggedy, and old.

“I just bought it this week,” he says, listing all of the work it needs—brakes, a new hood, new ball joints (whatever those are)—as if these are all valuable attributes. There’s even a crack running halfway across the bottom of the windshield. This truck
is what we call a “winter beater”—a cheap but tough vehicle you drive in the winter because you don’t care if it gets beat up by salt, snow, ice, bad drivers, snowplows, or suicidal deer.

“Guess what I named it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Cracker,” he says, nodding in emphasis, as if this should please me. Maybe the name is in homage to the singer we just listened to, but I don’t think so, and he has to explain the name to me.

“It’s the same make and year as your truck. You’ve got Cookie and now I’ve got Cracker. You’re the writer. I figured you might appreciate the
irony
.” This last word he enunciates as if it is on a vocabulary list and he has to use it in a sentence in order to get the extra credit.

“Are you making fun of me?” I ask, smiling now.

“Nope,” he answers, deadpan, “but it didn’t hurt to ask.”

And that’s how our meet-up, half date ends. Cookie and Cracker head off into the blowing and drifting winter night in two different directions. No kiss, no plans to see each other again, just a shared automotive bond—something, despite being born in the Motor City and spending the majority of my life in the most car-saturated state in the country, I’ve never experienced before.

The next morning my sons come back home, making the hundred-yard trek across the road, back to the Big Valley and up our plowed driveway right at noon. I’m a mother again, not a nightclub cracker, but I notice that the snowdrifts that were in my driveway are gone, the passage is clear now and lined with drag marks from a plow truck. Pete must have been here, plowed, and
left before I even woke up. I can’t think of anyone else who would plow my driveway without being asked. Or paid.

The boys are accompanied by their father, who shuffles along with them from his little rented place across the road, but only as far as the middle of my driveway, and then his shoulders slump and he turns back. I watch through the living room window as my beloveds walk these last steps alone: three refugees from the divorce war, trudging through the snow, returning to their frozen homeland.

I wonder what their father’s house looks like on the inside, how the furniture, art, and the lamps we picked out together look arranged his way now, and in a whole new place. I’d like to know, but he has never invited me in to see. Not that that’s enough to keep me out.

Because the next time I go to pick up the boys, Mr. Wonderful is not at home, and I’m invited inside the strange place by my sons and seize the opportunity to creep through the rooms like a burglar, noting the clean kitchen, the neatly folded laundry, and the dust-free bookshelves. In the midst of leaving us, Mr. Wonderful has somehow managed to make his emergency domicile, in a word, cozy, and it pisses me off.

Instead of being happy my sons have a nice place to share “parenting time” with their father, I’m disappointed that he’s not suffering more. Guilt over this toxic feeling and the others I bear him will creep forward through the years like something darkly contaminated. It’s sickening, and yet I can’t stop myself from feeling it.

On the Monday morning after my date with Pete I gather the boys together at the kitchen counter. It is early, maybe 6:00, 6:15 a.m. Weekday mornings require split-second timing. There’s homework to be checked, permission slips to be signed, string
instruments for orchestra class to make sure are in their cases, and growing bodies to get bundled up and off to school. To accomplish this, I’m still getting up by five and they follow at six.

“Family meeting,” I announce, and they groan but assemble dutifully at the kitchen counter and look at me with dread. In their experience, a family meeting is usually just an opportunity for additional chores to be meted out. To them, by me.

I’ve used family meetings to make weekly bathroom-cleaning assignments (three bathrooms, three boys: this is the kind of math I can handle), unveil a weekly chore chart, and give them snow-shoveling assignments. The agenda for this morning’s meeting, however, has only one item on it and does not involve physical labor.

I’m dreading this conversation, and the four cups of coffee I’ve already downed, doubling my usual intake, are not helping. Silence engulfs the kitchen, penetrated only by the sound of my own leg’s uncontrollable jiggling.