From the story Angelfish

As in:

Beth actually came to enjoy recounting how Marjorie’s first marriage was so tenuous that it broke up over popcorn. His name was Robert and the two of them departed Whitman College, just three days into their sophomore year, to go make lots of money at a fish factory in Alaska.

Beth told the story to illustrate Marjorie’s misguided impulses and as a broader example of the unresolved mysteries of youth.

“Spontaneous combustion of the brain,” was actually her favored description.

Beth recalled how Marjorie had sprung from the cab of Robert’s weathered, orange pickup truck, accosted her in the lushness of her garden, explained the situation in less than a minute, then bent the brim of Beth’s sunhat back in order to kiss her hard on both cheeks.

“This was goodbye,” Beth said dryly.

Marjorie was in for gutting fish for about six months. Robert had two years “max” in mind. Marjorie was in the kitchen reading a book on the Dutch Masters when Robert, smelling heavily of tobacco and halibut, began hollering about her inattentiveness to the popcorn she was supposed to be tending on the range. His advice to “turn it down and shake it” was not all that important in the larger scheme of things.

“In an acrid smog of Jiffy-Pop,” Beth explained, “a marriage built upon fish money hit the rocks and sank into the icy waters of Norton Sound.”

Next story segment, Aphorisms

From the story Angelfish

As in:

When I visited Seattle five weeks after Marjorie’s miscarriage she had begun to eat again but her complexion was ashen. By then, she’d left the small house on Capitol Hill where she and Gregory had been living and moved in with friends in West Seattle. We walked Alki beach in a misty rain. I told her I thought she loved Gregory. She exhaled a stream of smoke and bit her lip.

“I think so too,” she said, but the look on her face was that of a child left alone in a strange place.

“He would like to hear that,” I volunteered.

“You think I don’t know?” she replied in frustration.

Our sister Leslie tells me I tend to be too linear in my approach to things. I tell her that running a small business is not as easy at it looks, that there are times when it is necessary that the faith life requires be reduced to a handful of aphorisms or sports metaphors. It lessens the handwringing.

“Life isn’t like football,” Leslie says.

“But at least there’s a clock in football,” I reply.

When I arrived at Marjorie’s place the following evening with a thoughtful approach to saving her marriage a woman named Susan answered the door to explain that my sister would not be receiving visitors. There was a misunderstanding, I explained, I am her brother. Of course she’ll see me.

We argued.

Susan sounded a lot like something she’d read recently. This made me angry, which only confirmed Susan in her diagnosis, which only made me angrier. I would have kicked against the door were it not for the appearance of a second woman with a camera poised to capture the scene of a typical white male from eastern Washington in a hostile display of insensitivity.

So I captured a deep breath, aimed what was left of my heart at Susan and told her to tell my sister that I loved her, that Gregory loved her too, and that I had to go.

I’ve never felt worse leaving Seattle.

It’s not long after you cross Lake Washington that you realize you’ve left a complex metropolis and are headed toward a gaping landscape where wind blows against basalt palisades and an unmasked simplicity.

Or so it seems.

Next story segment, Amoebae

From the story Angelfish

As in:

Our rooms on the top floor are as we left them when Marjorie and I went off to college. On a small table between my bed and the window is my black, compound microscope still ready to magnify onion skin or amoebae. On the wall above my cherry wood dresser are boxes made from glass and stained plywood. They still hold arrowheads and coins.

Half the ceiling is covered by an Alaska state flag that Beth brought back from a trip to Juneau in 1959, the year Alaska became a state. It was a gift for my 15th birthday and came with a pamphlet telling the story of Benny Benson from Chignik, the 13-year old Aleut orphan who’d won the state flag design contest with his simple constellation of gold stars on a blue background.

From Marjorie’s corner bedroom, there is a better view of the stunning terrain. Through a gap in the poplars spreads a rumpled quilt of farmland reaching toward a butte above the Columbia River. A country music station still has its red and white tower atop the butte. Many years ago, the newspaper in The Dalles reported that high winds funneled up the gorge had blown the tower off its footings. What the paper didn’t report is that the wind was merely an accomplice to the chain whose other end was attached to the hitch of our friend Gordon Blancer’s Jeep.

“This was a pure act of hippy militarism,” Gordon explained years afterward, well aware of the inherent contradictions. “And this wasn’t something I needed drugs to do. There were higher motivations.”

To wit he’d just about had enough of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.” When the tower crashed to the ground with a magnificent thud, Gordon was heard to exclaim: “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida-baby!”

On the outer sliding door to Marjorie’s closet, Janis Joplin’s image perspires in a pink, blue, and red haze. From the opposite wall, between the windows, a perplexed Judy Garland, as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, stares at Janice in black & white, as if to ask “what the hell?”

On Marjorie’s desk is a framed picture of Beth leading a mule at the Grand Canyon in 1952. This time, when I notice the photograph, tears roll down my face faster than I can wipe them.

Next story segment, Marigolds.