Our fathers, who worked for the grand homeowners, grunted. They said it wasn’t anything special. They swallowed the bitterness of their envy and chased it with a nip of whiskey. The grand houses had huge windows.
We spend our nights cruising up and down Highway DD, a road that is more dirt and gravel than pavement—ten or twenty cars, full of people drinking and blasting trash rock and yelling dirty things to one another. We call the road Knockers. Most of the time, I’m with my boyfriend, Craig, his older brother Cliff and Cliff’s girlfriend Tammy. We’re all in our late twenties. Anywhere else, we would have stopped cruising Knockers a long time ago, but at the end of the world there is little else to do but go around and around and around.
Cliff drives an old Chevy pickup that is slowly disintegrating. Craig and I lie in the truck bed so worn out I can taste flakes of rust on his breath when we kiss. On clear nights, Craig and I shout faster faster faster into the wind. The faster Cliff drives, the more the sky above us stills.
Tammy has a reputation because she wears short skirts and high boots and lets her bra straps show. She’s a nice girl though. She loves real hard. Tammy sits so close to Cliff while he’s driving she’s practically wedged between his legs and the steering wheel. She knows he’s the type of man you have to hold real tight. Cliff and Craig are loggers for a small operation that clears land for people who need the money or want to build a house or whatever it is that people who own land do. Cliff says someday he’s going to start his own company and his little brother is going to work with him. They’re going to be rich like the men who live in the grand houses overlooking our Upper Michigan town. Cliff is long on ideas but short on everything else.
Growing up, we always looked up and wondered what it would be like to live in the grand homes looking down. At Christmas, our parents drove us along the overlook. Our mothers cooed at the beautiful decorations even though on every other day they cleaned those houses and took care of the children living in them. Our fathers, who worked for the grand homeowners, grunted. They said it wasn’t anything special. They swallowed the bitterness of their envy and chased it with a nip of whiskey. The grand houses had huge windows. We could see the perfectly decorated Christmas trees and the beautiful dining room tables and the illuminated chandeliers in the foyer. We never saw any people. In houses that big, there are lots of places to hide.
Craig and Cliff are very different, as fatherless brothers often are. Cliff is slick and smart though not as smart as he thinks. He’s the kind of smart that makes for trouble. He’s popular but he’s not kind. Cliff wishes he were anything but a Yooper boy dating a Yooper girl working a Yooper trade. We all grew up together. Anyone who knows Cliff can’t help but define themselves in relation to him. In sixth grade, we learned about black holes and how their gravitational pulls were so strong nothing could escape. In his textbook, Craig wrote Cliff’s name beneath a picture of a black hole.
Craig is sweet and smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for. After a long day of work, he smells like sweat and sap. He likes to read Decadent literature, especially Oscar Wilde. I’m the only one who knows that. He doesn’t hate himself for being a Yooper boy dating a Yooper girl working a Yooper trade. We’ve been together for eleven years, since we were sophomores in high school. We had a baby once, a little girl named Emma. She had his eyes and his dimples and my smile and my temper. She died when she was four and a half—got sicker than we knew was possible and needed the kind of help people like us can never afford. Craig asks me to marry him every month or so but I don’t know how to say yes in a world where our child isn’t alive. I don’t know how to say no either. I tell him soon.
In the winter, when Knockers is too icy for cruising, we go to the bowling alley, crowded, loud, thick with stale smoke. Tammy and I will hang out in the bathroom, especially if the boys are irritating us with their competitiveness. When their petty rivalries get really bad and they’re practically fighting each other for the next ball, I’ll roll my eyes and tell Craig we’re supposed to be having fun. He’ll say, “Ya Babe. Bowling is serious business.” In the bathroom, Tammy and I look at each other in the mirror as we reapply our lipstick and inspect our teeth. She says, “I’m going to marry that man, that Cliff Niemi.” She says it with all the hope in the world. I’ll smile at her reflection and nod and we’ll smooth out our skirts and return to our boyfriends. Cliff isn’t going to marry her. Craig told me his brother would never marry a girl like Tammy. Cliff wants to marry one of the daughters of the men who live in the huge houses overlooking the town—girls who would never marry a guy like him.
Tammy has dated Cliff since we were in the eighth grade and he was in the ninth. She loved him from the day he first noticed her because she wants to get out of our dead Yooper town. She hedged her bets early. Thirteen years later, I am always amazed that she’s still holding on as tightly as she ever did to the idea that Cliff will take her away even though it is the pull of him holding her here. They have two kids, boys. They live with Tammy who lives with her dad who is all the reason in the world for Tammy wanting to live anywhere but here. Cliff stays with her a few nights a week and spends the rest of his time with the other girls he’s sleeping with. Craig and I try to spend at least one night a week with her when Cliff is off being Cliff. We’ll play games and watch movies and help the boys with homework. We try to ignore how much it hurts.
One hot summer night, on one of those rare occasions when the air was thick and steady, Craig and I were sitting in the back of Cliff’s rusted out Chevy pickup shouting faster faster faster into the wind. I turned and looked in the cab and caught Cliff staring at me in the rear view mirror. He smiled this strange little smile, his lips barely curling upward, but his eyes were hard and angry. A chill slowly wrapped its way around my spine. I turned back around and leaned in closer to Craig. I whispered in his ear, “”Do you love me more than you love your brother?” and he squeezed my shoulder. He said, “Of course, I do, babe.”
Cliff gets Craig into trouble. He always has. When we were in high school, the two of them were always doing time in detention. Their mom was up at the school so often she had a standing appointment with the principal on Fridays at noon so he could review the boys’ conduct for the week. Last year, the two of them got arrested for stealing copper from abandoned houses up in Calumet. Like Tammy, Craig can’t escape Cliff’s pull. Craig took the fall and did six months at work camp because Cliff had a record and would have had to do real time. Every weekend I drove 112 miles out to Camp Cusino in Shingleton to visit Craig. Sometimes, I brought his mother and baked goods with me. Tammy came along now and again. I wrote him letters and took his collect calls and pretended to be angry about the whole thing even though I only wanted him home with me. Cliff never visited or wrote or did a damn thing. When Craig would ask after his brother, we’d lie, tell him that Cliff was busy working, keeping things going at work.
While Craig was incarcerated at work camp, Cliff would regularly bang on our apartment door in the middle of the night, drunk, slurring his words. Sometimes, he’d cry and make a real mess of himself. It’s a small town. The neighbors never said anything. Cliff would say, “I’m sorry,” and then he’d bang on the door some more. When he tired himself out, I’d let him in and make him some coffee because that’s what Craig would want me to do. Once, I left Cliff in the kitchen with his coffee and he forgot himself. He came into the bedroom I share with his brother and climbed on top of me. I could smell the cheapness of the beer oozing from his pores. The stink of him filled the room.
He licked my arm from my elbow to my shoulder and told me he would take care of me until his brother got out. I told him if he didn’t get off me, he wouldn’t want his brother to get out. Cliff laughed and kissed me, his lips wet and swollen. I gagged, tried to turn away. He got angry when I wouldn’t kiss him back so he punched me in the stomach. I tried to catch my breath. He fumbled with his belt buckle and he was hard against me as he tore at my underwear with his seething, self-entitled fingers. Panic sliced up through my throat cutting me silent. I closed my eyes and started slapping his chest with my hands. I said, real quiet like, “I will not be able to handle it if you do this. I will look at your brother. The only thing I’ll see is you. I don’t want that.” Then I bit down on his chin and I didn’t let go until I tasted his blood. I had already had my fill of hard living. I don’t know why, but Cliff stopped. He rolled away and lay next to me, holding his bloody chin. He whined an apology like that could make it all better. I pulled the sheets around me and told him to finish his coffee and go home to Tammy.
On the day Craig was released, I stood outside the work camp gates with a couple other wives and girlfriends also waiting for their convicts. My hair was done up, and I wore tight jeans and high heels. I jumped around nervously waiting, worrying. After the gates opened, Craig came running out, his hair long and messy in his face. When he reached me, he stilled and stared at me and smiled and my heart beat so fast it made me dizzy. He held my face between his hands and kissed me so long and hard with his perfect lips, I could feel it in the pulp of my teeth. When he pulled away, he said, “Goddamn, I missed you babe.” Then he turned around and gave the work camp the finger. As we drove home, he held me against him so tight, I ached in the best way. I forgot all the things I was going to say to him about making better choices and resisting his brother’s pull.
Later, we met Cliff at the Mine Shaft, the bar where Tammy works. He made a big show of greeting his brother, pounding Craig on the back as he hugged him. Cliff stood on the bar, raised a pitcher of beer high in the air and said, “My brother, home from the war.” We all cheered and drank and cheered some more. Later, when they were alone, Cliff told Craig he never wrote or called or visited because he wanted to make things easy for his brother. Cliff wanted to make things easy for himself. That’s who he is.
When Craig and I are in our apartment alone, I like to lie on his chest, kissing him along his collarbones while he draws lazy circles along the back of my neck with his calloused fingers. We talk about moving to a place where a good time is more than driving along country highways at high speeds long past the age where that sort of thing is appropriate. We talk about trying for another baby. We talk about selling our house. We haven’t been there since Emma died. We pay someone to take care of the place. Even when we drive by, we stare straight ahead because if we look at the house, all we see is Emma, in her nightgown, standing on the front porch with us on a late summer night. She’s holding our hands and the three of us are laughing and staring up at the stars and Craig is singing us silly songs. We talk about using that money to get away from everything bad we’ve ever known but the house is one more thing still holding us here, swallowing light.
If we lived in one of those big houses overlooking town, Emma would be nine and going to school and making us crazy. That’s what we tell ourselves. We visit her grave almost every evening after dinner. We sit on the granite bench at her grave that we both worked overtime to afford. We talk to her. Sometimes we cry. None of it makes any sense. Craig always comes with me to see Emma; he never says anything coarse about it. Some men would think we’ve mourned long enough. Cliff once told us we were making things worse for ourselves, we needed to move on. Craig’s face settled into stone in that moment and he chose to defy gravity. He slammed his brother against the wall so hard the drywall cracked. Craig didn’t say a word. He raised one finger and pointed at Cliff. Then he took my hand and we walked away.
Up in Copper Harbor, you can look out on Lake Superior. The water yawns so wide and vast it feels like you’ve reached the end of the world. In the summer, we take the sailboat that Craig and I built ourselves, the sailboat we call Miss Emma, out on the water. We don’t talk about it but we both wonder what it would be like to break free from the things holding us down—to sail past the edge of all we know and all we can see.
Roxane Gay's writing appears or is forthcoming in Annalemma, Diagram, Monkeybicycle, Gargoyle, Keyhole and others. She is the associate editor of PANK and has a pretty website at http://www.roxanegay.com.
