Lamentations

By Janice Obuchowski
Photographs by Mike Belleme

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Listen: I grew up in Southern Minnesota, in a smudge of an agricultural town, one of several that dots the corridor between Sioux Falls, Iowa, and St. Paul. 

A point along the way, nowhere you’d ever choose unless you were its first settler, the generically named Thomas Smith, who’d come across a lake from which rose an island furred over in shrubbery. Smith named the area Mountain Sound, a moniker that makes no sense unless you imagine that he went in for the conceptual over the literal. Not a tiny island, but a mountain. Not a little lake, but a sound, water connecting to an ocean. Mountain Sound. The name eschewed reality; it suggested promise. History bore out that he deemed the name significant. Smith wouldn’t budge when, a few years later, as a railroad line was being built between Sioux Falls and St. Paul, the railroad pushed to rename the town Midway given its place between the cities.

Then, at the turn of the century, the townspeople—mostly Mennonites of Russian and German descent—started clamoring for more farmable land, so the town elected to drain the lake and demolish the island, which meant the already tenuous relationship between sign and signifier was gone. Mountain Sound, home to neither mountain nor sound nor lake nor island. 

Thirty years later, however, when New Deal funding came along, when the opportunity arose, the town created a new (artificial) lake replete with a new (artificial) island. Why? My best guess: Mountain Sound, the collective, wanted to do homage to its history. That drive toward origin stories, toward sense-making—so strong in us all—extended beyond the individual. But, oh, the state of affairs. The new lake, the new island: the town named them Mountain Sound Lake and Mountain Sound Island. My unimaginative forebearers could only tether these mild flights of fancy to the literal. Mountain Sound, my depressing childhood home.

As we touched down in Sioux Falls, Hannah squeezed my hand and murmured, yes, sure: it did all sound a bit dull. We’d just gotten engaged, and she wanted to meet my father, to discuss the wedding in person. She believed in the formality of the gesture and was also curious about my childhood. I knew much about hers, and had met her lovely parents, stayed in their brownstone in the Back Bay. She knew I’d grown up somewhere small, uninteresting, that my childhood had been emotionally impoverished, but I’d skimped on the details. Now I was trying to figure out what to explain, if I even knew how to. I’d wanted to say no, meeting my father would be impossible, but then I’d had the thought: maybe this could be a turning point, a chance for my father to see the good in my life. Of course, when I’d called to tell him, he’d only said, “Congratulations.” A stone dropped into still water. But here we were. This was my first visit since I’d left for graduate school six years before.

We rented a car to drive along Rte. 60, a two-lane highway. The landscape was flat, the horizon distant, all cornfields and bleached grass. At first, the space had absorbed Hannah, the way you could see so far out without interruption. Soon, though, its unyielding self-similarity made her restless. I understood. When I’d been young, I’d always been frightened to think this might go on forever, this might be all there was.

She said, “Vast is the wrong word, since that conjures a kind of majesty. What’s a word for vast plus dull?”

“Expansive,” I suggested.

“No, it has to incorporate farms and telephone lines and weird beige pavement and windmills and pale sky. It has to suggest smallness and largeness at once.” 

“The Midwest,” I said. “The heartland.”

“Is this the heart of the US?” Enormous steel silos and train tracks cut into fields blurred green, sage, and wheat. She drove, her hair back in a thick ponytail. She raised her sunglasses, glancing at me. “This isn’t your heart anyway.” 

We were going to my father’s the next day. That night we stayed at a motel that had matching polyester curtains and bedspread. The window offered a view of the parking lot, our rental one of three cars parked there. As Hannah slept, her even breath my solace, I stared at the popcorn ceiling, cratered gray in the dark, while my childhood hung heavy in the shadows. In the basement doing laundry, standing on tiptoe to read the dials and knobs. Sitting across from my father in our kitchen, eating toast, my feet swinging, not touching the linoleum, morning light across the kitchen table adding sheen to the butter dish, talk radio in the background.

Most often, I’d holed up in my bedroom, on my bed, either doing homework or reading. Endless afternoons into evenings, with a break to eat dinner, which—after I turned eight—either of us might’ve prepared. I became deft at warming things from a can: ravioli in thin sauce, beef stews, chicken noodle soup. We would eat bread and butter, glasses of milk. Where we’d shared preparation, my father had always cleaned. He’d wash dishes, wipe crumbs from the table with a dampened sponge. He liked things neat; he hated a mess. He’d raise the radio’s volume, in communion with men aggrieved about politics, suggesting everything upright and moral was decaying.

After my father had finished cleaning, he’d watch TV. I wasn’t sure he cared much what images flickered before him, although he’d immediately switch away from anything with a laugh track. When I’d been very young, I’d watched with him, but by the time I’d started preparing dinner, I’d mostly retreated to my room to read. Bless the Mountain Sound Library and its librarian, Mrs. Landvik, who’d probably spent part of the library’s tiny budget on what she’d thought I’d like.

When I was twelve, Mrs. Landvik had said to me, “When your mother first moved here, she’d come a few times a week too. She was a voracious reader.” I’d felt this flash of attention, my neck prickling. She’d never said anything to me about her. No one had ever said anything to me about her—as if the whole town were keeping secrets. Mr. Stenson, who owned the gas station; our kind neighbor Rolph Hagerston, his beer belly sagging over his jeans: they had memories of her and could’ve explained her to me. But I couldn’t be too eager for information or she’d become alarmed. I had to be nonchalant or, at least, not frenzied in my interest.

“What did she read?” I asked.

Mrs. Landvik lowered her reading glasses. “Big books. Hard ones. She didn’t mind a challenge.”

Which books? Which ones? I chewed my inner cheek and stared at my toes, pretending calm.

“She wore a red dress I liked,” Mrs. Landvik said. “And she had a pretty laugh.”

I thanked her for telling me that and ran home, the books in my backpack jolting against my spine. I flung myself on my bed and cried. When I’d calmed, I went down to the basement—my father wasn’t yet home from work—to investigate a cardboard box in which he stored a few things from my infancy: a plaster molding of my impossibly tiny feet; a faded congratulations card from Rolph; a photo of me on my first birthday, looking startled in a highchair, clutching a piece of cake. And a picture of my mother sitting on the grass before Mountain Sound Lake. She was cross-legged, holding infant me in her lap. She had one hand to her brow, squinting. She’s smiling. She’s wearing shorts and a green shirt with long, belled sleeves. Her hair, caught in what must’ve been abundant summer light, was a glossy light brown. She had on rosy lipstick but seemed otherwise unadorned. She appeared happy but couldn’t have been. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have left.

I studied the picture. She was a reader. I decided she must’ve liked C. S. Lewis—and Susan Cooper and Madeleine L’Engle—that she went in for the same fantastical worlds I did. And then I thought, no. Or I thought, maybe, but Mrs. Landvik hadn’t mentioned my mother when I’d been reading those books—only when she’d suggested, sliding it across her desk, that I try some Jonathan Cheever stories. The book was maybe the biggest I’d ever checked out. I returned the picture to the box, set the box carefully back on its shelf. My father couldn’t know I’d investigated what he’d held onto, because then he’d figure out he’d kept a picture of my mother and he might get rid of it as he’d gotten rid of all other traces of her.

For once, I didn’t tackle my homework first. Instead, I started consuming The Stories of Jonathan Cheever, hunting for my mother’s temperament. I was too young for these stories, couldn’t fully fathom the characters’ dissatisfaction and despair. So many cocktails and secrets. These veneers of lives well lead, their constant shabby glamour. At first I was keen on “The Enormous Radio,” since a magic radio let a couple listen in on the lives of others in their apartment building. But everyone they heard was sad, as was, it turned out, the couple listening in.

Maybe my mother, having fled her unhappy marriage, had moved to Westchester. She took trains into New York City and drank gin midday. She kept me a secret from her friends, which cast a sophisticated gloom over everything she did. She thought about me all the time. At the end of her workdays (she was a secretary in Manhattan), she smoked cigarettes and worked on writing me letters. She never sent them, but in them she told me how much she missed me and wished I could come live with her.

For years, depending on what I read, my mother shifted and morphed. She was bright and cruel like Daisy Buchanan. She was naïve and doomed like Daisy Miller. What stayed constant: woe and longing in ferment beneath a pretty surface. Also that she’d gone East, which meant I wanted to go East too.

The next day, I called my father to confirm plans: Hannah and I were coming over at noon. “Yes,” he said. “Alright.” He hung up.

I drove us to Mountain Sound and through its center, past one-story brick buildings interspersed with parking lots, all abutting the sidewalks. It looked like an older warehouse district, a tiny industrial waystation in the midst of farmland. No old-timey charm, no urban renewal. In Hannah’s quietness, I could read that she saw the place as meager, as barren. I felt this well of sadness, having held out some tiny hope that she’d have said I’d discounted Mountain Sound’s charms. With an alchemic wave of her wand, she’d have rearranged my childhood into something wholesome.

I parked half a mile down, on the street, since my father’s driveway only had room for one car. There was no front yard. The house was kitty-corner to a gas station and across the street from an insurance agency. I saw Hannah taking this in as we stood on the front step and I knocked, sweat gathering behind my knees. The window shades were down, which seemed both off and unwelcoming.

My father opened the door. He was unshaven, a roughness to his cheeks. He ran a hand along his head, which he kept shorn: an all-over grizzle. He was thinner than when I’d left for graduate school. He looked dazed, as if sunlight were foreign to him—or I was—which made me want to hug him. “Hello,” he said. “I thought we could go to The Cottonwood.” 

“Dad,” I said. “I want to introduce you to Hannah.” 

He put out his hand to Hannah, who shook it while saying how wonderful it was to meet him.

As we walked, Hannah asked my father how long he’d lived in Mountain Sound. Over thirty years, he told her. A red pickup rattled past. She said I’d mentioned that he worked for a farm equipment manufacturing company, and he nodded.

“He’s an engineer,” I said. “He works on designing the equipment and on helping with repairs.” 

My father suggesting The Cottonwood, its windowfront advertising Budweiser and Bud Light, held mild promise. When I’d been a kid, he’d taken me here Friday evenings. We’d get cheeseburgers and a beer for him, a Coke for me. We’d still eaten mainly in silence, but I understood the outing as generous. He’d been trying to let the ambience—the chatter of other families celebrating the week’s end; men in the backroom playing pool and keeping up cheerful, not too profane invective—be its own festivity. My father had been prioritizing my needs over his own, as he’d always been uncomfortable among others.

The restaurant had cheap carpet the color of moss and tables that would’ve looked at home in a cafeteria. Hannah suggested a window looking out onto Main Street, but my father said, “I’d like to sit in the back.” He wanted our Friday table, closer to the pool tables, alongside the wall. The table only seated two but I grabbed a third chair and let it jut out into the aisle. A couple glanced our way, trying to decide if they knew us. The man, in a baseball cap and jeans, who looked too old for us to have overlapped in school, gave me a nod, which I returned. I passed muster, if barely. They studied Hannah a little longer than was gracious, although their stares held nothing lascivious or judgmental. Just an awareness that she wasn’t from here. I wondered what my father made of her, if he was sifting through what, these last few years, I’d written about her in my monthly letters (a law student, ferociously smart; funny, direct, lovely; a woman with a beautiful laugh; my favorite library companion; someone who’d introduced me to sushi, to swimming in the ocean; who liked to drive to the towns surrounding Ithaca on tiny weekend adventures; who didn’t mind my constant chatter about books, who loved to talk through her observations and ideas) with the dark-haired young woman before him, in jeans and an “Ithaca Is Gorges” T-shirt, summoning all her (formidable) skills in small talk to combat his silences. 

A waitress came over, and I ordered my cheeseburger and fries, was again eleven years old, shy and inward and hopeful, if frightened by nearly everything. My father and Hannah said they’d have the same. “Jeremiah,” the waitress said. “Is that right? You were a senior when I was a freshman. Did you move back? Or just visiting? What’ve you been up to?”

She had freckles, hazel eyes. I had this quick memory of her near her locker with several other laughing girls. “Carla,” I said. “Just visiting. This is Hannah, my fiancée. We’re in grad school in upstate New York. And this is my father, Aaron Brenneman.” 

She put her hand out to my father, saying it was good to meet him, and my father shook her hand, semi-smiling, the lines around his eyes spreading as if he were wincing. She didn’t recognize him. I supposed he wouldn’t come on his own. The last time we’d had dinner here had been the summer after I’d graduated from college.

“Jeremiah is a catch,” Carla told Hannah. “Quiet but thoughtful. I had my eye on him when we were kids.”

“He is a catch,” Hannah said.

The stupidity of my blushing. I couldn’t imagine what my dad thought hearing this.

“I want to go to school,” Carla said to me. “MSU is pretty close. Where did you go?”

“U of M.” 

“Go Gophers.” Carla took our menus. “And now you’re in more school?”

“I plan to teach,” I said.

“You should teach here. Our high school could use a boost. It’s good seeing you—and nice to meet you too,” she said to Hannah and my father.

Hannah started telling my father how she’d grown up in Boston and gone to college in New York. She was now in her third year of law school. She recounted how we’d met at a party where, it seemed, everyone had studied chemistry but us. And she explained that we were going to get married in Boston next summer, but that otherwise our futures held some uncertainty since we were waiting to see what would come of my being on the academic market. We had to be prepared to go where the job was, and that, in turn, would determine where she took the bar exam.

“So you wouldn’t teach here,” my father said. “You wouldn’t consider it. As the waitress said.”

“I’m going to teach college, not high school. She misunderstood because I didn’t explain it fully.” 

But, I was thinking, I had explained my career track to my father—clearly, sustainedly, in the letters I’d been writing since I’d arrived in Ithaca. I’d told him a tremendous amount about where I lived, what I was studying, reading, what it was like to teach undergraduates, what articles I was publishing and where. I was always careful to contextualize what I was describing, knowing it would be foreign to him. I’d been imagining the letters helped us both: I could formulate my thoughts without being affronted by his lack of response. He could take in the details of my new life at his own pace. In the moment, it might be too much to imagine his son in a seminar taught by a professor famous for his ideas about structuralism. But then he could mull over what I was describing and maybe come around to some of it. He might even, heaven forbid, be proud of me. 

All that effort I’d put in, trying to make myself known to him. How foolish to think the good news of our engagement would somehow get him to emerge from himself, to encounter the world as it existed around him, not just—because it wasn’t as he wished—as something to endure.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I went outside, around the side of the building next to the trash bin, and put my head against the wall. The alleyway smelled of old grease and deliquescent garbage, and, God, my instinct for flight was so strong, as if I’d never been away at all. That glorious day I’d known for sure I was leaving, that thick envelope in the mail. I’d gone down to the basement and taken out the photo of my mother. “I like big books too,” I told her. “I also don’t mind a challenge.” 

When my father got home, I showed him the acceptance letter, explaining the full funding, how exciting this was. We’d never spoken about college before this. He sat at the kitchen table, his lips parted, a sign he was gathering himself to speak. “You’ll need a car,” he said. “To travel back and forth during the holidays and summers.” Twice his mouth opened, then closed, a goldfish seeking oxygen. Something inchoate that couldn’t be formed into syllabic sense. Sadness, I realized. He was sad.

To be in large lecture halls and write with alacrity all the ideas my professors had about literature was heaven. I sat in the library for hours, a kind of discipline, a kind of dreaming. I was assigned a thesis advisor, Professor Kroeker, who’d been in the department thirty-five years. His tiny office brimmed with books, overspill from his bookshelves stacked on the floor and his desk. He’d go over my writing with me, pointing out when he thought I was onto something and cautioning me when my thinking became “derivative” or “unsupported.” He dressed like a weatherman on the local news, in boxy suits and wide ties. When he was pleased with my work, his grin said we were on some wonderful adventure together. My senior year, he asked me my post-graduation plans and I wished he hadn’t, since I was trying, for at least another few months, to measure out my life in syllabi. Life post-college: it was just a gray blanket, a heavy nothingness.

“Have you considered graduate school?” he asked. “I have some ideas about which programs would be good for you.” He listed astonishing schools, the ones I’d thought were beyond me when I’d applied to college.

“I’m here on scholarship,” I said. “I don’t think such good schools would fund me.” 

Without condescension, he explained that getting into a PhD program in English was different than getting into college—if I got in, I’d be funded. But these programs were small, selective. My applications had to be top-notch. He would, if I wanted, help me with this process.

I owed my acceptance to Cornell to Jim Kroeker, kind man, terrible dresser. I owed the shape of my life to him. He showed me I was allowed to be ambitious on my own behalf.

I got the acceptance in May. I hadn’t told my father I’d applied. I knew he expected I’d be back home that summer—working, as I had the previous summers, on the assembly line at his company. All I could think about was the impending quiet. College, even for a shy kid like me, had been filled with happy noise. The dorms, the dining halls: always there was chatter, a constant buzz. And I had made some friends, guys with whom I’d go to the occasional football game, to parties. The silence of my upbringing: it had been an acute loneliness.

I skipped my college graduation: I hadn’t told my father about it, not anticipating he’d want to come, but Professor Kroeker and his wife had me over to celebrate my getting into graduate school. We ate custard with strawberries, toasted with champagne, and it was all so delicious, so sweet. Professor Kroeker said I was like Odysseus—that Ithaca, for me, would be both a place of departure and a homegoing.

Back in Mountain Sound, I asked for additional hours at my job. This was pragmatism—I needed to make all the money I could before I set sail. I also wanted to retreat into long, numbing days of manual work. Guilt ate at me.

A month elapsed, and I could no longer bear it. It was a Saturday. We’d just finished dinner. Rush Limbaugh was talking about the triumph of Republicans having regained control of Congress. My hatred for him swelled: his pugnacious oratory, everything a grievance. I turned off the radio. My father, putting dishes in the sink, asked me to turn the radio back on.

“Dad,” I said. “I’ve been accepted into a PhD program to study English. It begins in August. I’m going to move to Ithaca, New York.”

He turned off the water, his head bowed. He reached for a towel to dry off his hands, then left the kitchen. 

“This is important to me!” I called after him, hearing him climb the stairs, feeling frozen, feeling as if I’d failed. “Goddamnit!” I cried. I had the impulse to hurl his portable radio into the sink. I went upstairs and without knocking opened his bedroom door. He’d drawn his curtains and was curled in a fetal position atop his made bed. His cheeks were damp.

“Dad,” I said. “This is important to me.” 

“Please don’t leave me,” he said. “Jeremiah.”

I backed out of the room, closing the door, leaving my father in the dark, crying.

For the rest of the summer, we pretended none of this had happened. The day I left, my father stood on the front step, watching me pack up the car. In me was a constant squall, wind gusting. Outside was dense quiet. I cried my way through Iowa, and as I drove the endless highway, past fields of corn at their summer peak, all I could think was my mother also must’ve done this drive. In my duffel bag, tucked into the pages of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, at Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” was the photo of my mother squinting into the light and holding me. I’d stolen it because I didn’t know when I’d be back, and to hell with my father anyway.

I had to get back inside. Leaving Hannah alone with him was unfair.

I went up to the counter to pay, wanting to be an adult, not a child, and still trying to gather myself. Carla, as she rang me up, said, “Family is always a crisis. My dad drinks a six-pack a day.” 

“He hasn’t read any of my letters,” I said. “For six years, I’ve been writing him letters.”

She handed me my change. “You take care of yourself, Jeremiah. Your Hannah is so pretty.” 

I sat down again and saw my father’s relief. Hannah, stalwart, patted my knee, a tiny Morse code of concern, and I nodded to tell her I was okay. She said she’d been telling my father how ready she was to be done with coursework, how eager to get out there and practice law. That I was different; I’d study happily for the rest of my life—for me, scholarship was the thing. Carla set down our plates before us, smiling with admirable equanimity. 

I took a bite of my burger, greasy with beef fat, making me queasy. Then I started talking about my dissertation, explaining that it traced how mobility—broadly defined as both literal movement and the spanning of social strata—related to notions of success and happiness in Modernist and post-Modernist American novels. For example, in The Great Gatsby, James Gatz and Nick Carraway, from North Dakota and Minnesota, respectively, had gone East, and their movement, their migration had to do with self-reinvention. The novel’s literal transportation was important: cars were signs of both ascendency and doom. A small car accident after the first party; Daisy running over Myrtle in Gatsby’s car; Myrtle’s husband, an auto mechanic who owns a garage, murdering Gatsby. In several ways, Gatsby’s death—evidence of the corruption of the American Dream—was inextricably tied to movement gone awry. We also had to consider Nick taking himself home at the end, unable to bear the East any longer.

Never mind that I was discussing how these attempts to reinvent had ended in death and flight. I wanted my father to listen to me.

At first, I surprised Hannah, who’d set down her burger as I’d begun to talk. Rare for me to take any sort of stand, which of course was what I was trying to do. Toward the end of my disquisition on Gatsby, she set her hand on mine, which was gripping the table. My father was dipping the occasional French fry into ketchup, his mouth working as if it were crumbling. He kept his gaze on his plate. “Congratulations,” he said when I finally stopped talking.

“No,” I said. “What are you even saying congratulations for?”

He shook his head and suggested we pay the bill. I told him I’d already paid it.

We walked back, finally all of us quiet. Hannah held my hand. When we got to the front door, my father hesitated. He didn’t want us to come in. Well, I didn’t want us to either. I thought with shame about how little and cheap the house would look to Hannah, even though that shouldn’t have mattered. The horizon shimmered with diminishment. On this visit, everything had become less. Mountain Sound seemed even smaller and more barren. My father appeared older and weaker except for that fundamental need in him to reject my having left. I was less too. Not a grown man returned home to celebrate his impending nuptials, someone able to be compassionate toward the parent who’d stayed put, raised him, kept him clean and fed, but instead some young jerk flaunting his luck, his love, and hectoring his dad with ideas—trying to impress, to show off. Oh, I felt ashamed.

“I would like that picture back,” my father said. He clutched the door knob. He was looking past me.

“No,” I said.

He said goodbye and went in. Hannah and I walked to the car.

“I am this place,” I said.

“Bullshit,” said my lovely Hannah.

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