Early Warning

THERE WERE no kids Minnie had ever seen who had been improved by adult influence, and she thought this in spite of all the conferences over the years in which she had said, “Perhaps if you took Billy in hand,” or “Perhaps if you helped Janie attend more closely to her homework…” Janet, she thought, would have said her parents wrecked her, but Minnie thought she was a strange combination of daring and alert, strong and brittle, overprepared, too smart for her own good, and never ready. Minnie liked her. You could run down the list of what Frank and Andy and Lillian and Arthur and Tim and this mysterious boy Lucas had done to her, and you could imagine how these cruelties (whether intentional or not) had affected her, but she was the same girl she had always been.

When she got to Iowa (she still would not go all the way to New York), she slept one twelve-hour night, and then she was up, her hair washed and combed, her bed made, her bag unpacked, and her clothes put away. Minnie was a week away from starting school, so she sat in the kitchen while Janet fixed herself a hard-boiled egg and a piece of toast, which she ate neatly. She washed up after herself, and then sat down across the table from Minnie. She looked haggard and grief-stricken, but she said, “I should do something.”

“Why don’t you take some courses?”

“Where?”

“ISU. Iowa. Drake.”

“I never applied to graduate school.”

“You can still take some courses. Night courses, if you want. Ames and Iowa City are pretty quiet, at least compared to—”

Janet smiled. “That would be a change.”

“Do you want to talk about—”

Janet shook her head, and Minnie wondered which thing she didn’t want to talk about — what happened after she got to San Francisco, or what drove her to San Francisco in the first place. But that was neither here nor there. Janet was sitting in front of her, as ready as anyone Minnie had ever seen to take advice. Minnie said, “I always say, choose the place, not the school. Then you’ll be happier.”

“I would choose Iowa City.”

“Me, too,” said Minnie.

So they did it step by step. The girl would not take a penny from Frank, referred to his wealth as “blood money,” but she was willing to take a loan from Minnie of $250.00. This was when she admitted to Minnie that she had given all her savings to the Peoples Temple at the last minute, after everyone she knew was gone, as a kind of desperate gesture. “How much did you have?” said Minnie.

“Eleven hundred dollars. I had a good job. I was making fifty bucks a night in tips.”

Minnie asked no more questions, just helped her find a small apartment on Gilbert Street, within walking distance of downtown, and a part-time job at Things, Things, and Things, which was an expensive but cheerful shop on Clinton. She helped her buy a bed and a chest and a lamp and some bedding and a chair. She went with her to the registrar’s office, and, yes, there were quite a few courses she could take. She chose an advanced French-conversation class and a class in art history. Minnie paid the fees, which were small, since she would only be getting adult-ed credit. Then she left her there, sitting on her bed, on a very warm, humid, sunny afternoon, with a sad look on her face, and as she drove back to Denby, Minnie wondered if she had diverted Janet to a less self-destructive path, or if she had just supplied her with the setting for more of the same.

1978

IT WAS NINE. Henry was dressed and had eaten a bowl of oatmeal. It had been snowing for fifty-three hours. Henry knew because he remembered getting up in the dark two nights ago to take a piss (from the Old French, pissier, twelfth century, origin unknown), looking out the window, thinking that it was snowing again — what was that, the tenth storm since Thanksgiving? — looking at the clock, and going back to sleep. With the howling winds and the sad attempts at plowing, some drifts mounted to second-story windows, covered cars, blocked streets. He had tenaciously kept shoveling and sweeping his little walk — if he hadn’t, he would not be able to get out the door. It was fortunate in some ways that he had sold his car and not purchased another: he would have hated to see a new car simply buried in snow for four months on end. And having no car meant that he wouldn’t set out hopefully for, say, Milwaukee, only to be stranded, trapped, and frozen to death. On the other hand, if you walked everywhere, as Henry did, being frozen to death or blown away in these winds was also a hazard.