Give a Girl a Knife Read online

  My relationship to the place has always fluctuated dramatically between love and loathing, often with the seasons. During the six months of winter, snow covers everything like a silvery wash of old paint. Gray ruffs of plowed snirt (what they call snow-dirt) decorate the roads, and the sky is opaque white—light in color but heavy. The bears hibernate and so do most of the humans, although even the most homebound of us must surface to go to the grocery store. Tiny houses, some just two rooms wide, crowd the neighborhoods, making for a whole street-string of contented, fat-bellied houses exhaling round puffs from their chimneys. The smoke of local scrub pine—common jack pine and tamarack—smells cheap and perfumey, like pipe tobacco.

  The town doesn’t have that haunted, ghostly feeling of so many eastern small towns, no glint of former grandeur or long-lost wealth. It was never rich. Its industry is freshly aluminum-sided. Prosperity here feels self-sufficient—proud, but not extravagant. And come winter, when the lakes freeze over and the tourists leave, the town’s world seems to contract.

  The blanket of winter snow highlights all the landmarks. Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues loom tall in neighboring towns, graphic monuments to a real, still-happening logging era. Present-day loggers and sawyers clomp around town in beige coveralls and loose boots. I remember standing behind one of them in line at the Farm & Fleet store when I was around ten years old, close enough to catch some of his foreign scent, a strangely intoxicating mix of pine juice, musky chain saw fumes, and sweet sawdust.

  Then suddenly the snow mountains thaw, marking the end of winter. And during the three-month flash of summer, when the ditches light up with spring-green voltage, when the blue surfaces of the lakes shiver in the wind and the sun beats down onto your arm hanging out the car window, and when the tourists flip-flop around Main Street in swim tops under summer dresses, Park Rapids transforms. The people brighten like flowers in the sun, and the whole town feels quite nice, real Americana. Not ritzy, but resort-town fancy in an old-fashioned way—almost posh.

  In addition to the pine trees and the clear lakes, we’re known for potatoes. Notorious nitrogen hogs, potatoes take a lot and give little, and they enjoy the sandy glacial soil that surrounds my hometown immensely. One of the largest French-fry producers in America, our town’s largest employer, welcomes all visitors driving up from the big city, its series of white buildings at the south end of town stacked tight like a bread pan of rolls. Each fall, they fry hundreds of thousands of pounds of fries a day over there, and I remember that seasonal stench, smelling like the belch of the great agricultural machine, stretching out like a tarp overhead as my brothers and I played kickball in the yard. All the neighbor kids insisted that the fries we ordered at the local Hardee’s, given their initial fry just down the road, tasted better than Hardee’s fries everywhere else. French fries were revered and considered a local food.

  Even then, long before I made food my world, and though my fondness for Main Street was strong, I turned up my nose at the deep-fry emissions. There’s something about realizing as a teenager that you’re launching your life from the middle of nowhere that lends itself to grandiosity and tightens the collar of your nostalgia, a tautness that turns every pop song coming through the radio into a possibility for rising up. I grew up knowing that not only was nothing extraordinary expected of me, but that it was, in fact, gently discouraged. There was a proud monasticism in those clomping boots and resolute faces, and it had something to do with the harshness of the landscape. The people were tough. The “norm” was good enough. The weather, along with some leftover prairie practicality from the homesteading era, colluded to place bets against the dreamers. I harbored this feeling alone until I met friends who felt the same thing. My parents, having grown up in an even smaller town themselves, were oblivious to this notion; they did nothing to either support or dispel it.

  With private rebellion, I fantasized about my adult self who left my hometown long ago and was now triumphantly coming back with new eyes. I imagined surprising everyone with my swooping return—just a brief stopover, a holiday homecoming like in the movies—revealing the depths of my fondness for my little town. These histrionics were supported by the 1980s playlist booming from the car radio, from John Cougar Mellencamp’s “I was born in a small town,” to Journey’s “Just a small town girl/Livin’ in a lonely world…” Coming and going could contain so much precious drama. I made myself cycle through departures and returns until the daydream became a sort of simulated homecoming bulimia, a future I put myself through over and over. That was just how inevitable my leaving felt.

  Not unlike the swinging temperatures here, the disposition of the place sways theatrically. It’s moody. Malleable. Dependent on perspective. Like many American small rural towns in the middle of nowhere, Park Rapids’s character is formed daily, in the imaginations of those who walk its streets. I discovered later that it can be anything you want it to be.

  —

  The idea that home could be split, or double-sided, came to me early. In a sense, I was born with it, because from a young age, when I thought about my hometown there were always two: Park Rapids and Pierz, an even smaller town a two-hour drive south, where both of my parents came from. Because they had moved to Park Rapids as adults, my parents thought of themselves as “imports” and their children, like anchor babies, true Park Rapidians. Pierz, still home to most of the family, was their hometown; Park Rapids was ours. In my mind, the two towns were as subtly indivisible as the pith from the peel, the flesh from the juice.

  There are three kids in my family—me, Bob, and Marc—and I am the oldest. My dad, Ted Thielen, was an only child, and subsequently the influence of his family took a backseat to my mother’s more assertive, matriarchal side. My mom’s family was thick with women, and none of them were shy. My grandma Dion, the eldest of seven sisters, had three daughters: Joan, Renee, and my mom, Karen. My aunt Joan, who never married or had children, lived in an urban part of St. Paul. Aunt Renee stayed in Pierz, married Keith Thielen (my dad’s first cousin, once removed), and had three kids, all boys, in such tight alternation with my mother’s output that it almost seemed competitive. Regardless of our double dose of Thielen genetics—think of it like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—the women alone would have laced the family tight. For much of my childhood, I identified as a cousin, as one of six as opposed to just three, and the only girl among them.

  In my memory these women are all crowded into the kitchen arguing over the contents of the pot on the stove, their voices joining to scale an imaginary mountain peak of volume. They’re evangelical about everything but religion. We’re believers, of course, good Catholics, people who observe the minor church holidays like All Saints’ Day and keep fans of palms on the wall year-round. But there was no proselytizing, no reference to the great mystery. That sort of talk was reserved for household details, and manners, but mostly for food.

  Their belief system could be summed up in three ingredients: butter, fermented pickles, and bacon. We really believed in bacon. Meat in general, actually. My uncle made the bacon and smoked all manner of pork at the family meat market in Pierz; he was the third-generation Thielen to run it (and later, his three sons, my cousins, the fourth). The place is so infused with years of pent-up woodsmoke that everyone who works there exits smelling like a smoky treat; dogs go bonkers around my uncle, yipping and chawing at his fingers. Every member of my family has consumed at least twice the normal lifetime supply of double-smoked ham, country sausage, Polish sausage, smoked wieners, and bacon, so much so that my forty-something living body might just be proof that the fear of nitrates is a contemporary myth. Homemade hot dogs, even if ingested in ridiculous quantity, will not hurt you. Pink smoked pork is holy.

  All the women in my family cook bacon slowly, reverently, as if performing a devotion. They cut each piece in half and lay it in a latticed pattern in a warm cast-iron pan, then stand watch over it, jockeying the pieces until the edges all turn crisp and the middles turn t
awny but remain pliable. “You don’t really fry it,” my mother instructed. “You want it to sweat a little first, then you flip it. Keep it moving. Take it out when it’s still soft.” Bacon cooked crisp enough to crumble is considered a sacrilege.

  Bacon had nonedible uses, too. Say, for example, that you got a sliver in your finger while gathering kindling for a summer campfire, my grandma would have a solution: She’d cut a two-inch length of bacon from the fatty swelled end, salt it heavily, lay the meat over the foreign body, and wrap the finger tightly with gauze.

  “Now go to sleep with this,” she whispered. “And when you wake up…” She paused and twisted her lips into a wry pout, foretelling something supernatural. “The sliver will be lying on the bacon.”

  I was doubtful but slept in a log position, my mummified finger propped on a pillow, smelling like breakfast all night long. Sure enough, the next day, before I even got out of bed, I unwrapped the layers of gauze, flopped the bacon over, and there it was: a tiny wooden shard lying on a sweaty slab of smoked pork.

  I was a believer.

  Both my dad’s and my mom’s families had deep roots, many generations, in Pierz, reaching who knows how far back into the old country—which included a large part of the butter-loving, German-speaking portions of present-day France, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Germany itself. The origins of one branch of the family, my grandma Dion’s mother’s side, were a bit more mysterious. They’d emigrated from Silesia and Bohemia, the Czech side of the Hapsburg empire, and arrived in America with decidedly Eastern European tastes, a wicked dry sense of humor, and possibly a dose of mystical powers. My mom always said, “Wherever Great-grandma was from, they treated poppy seeds like gold…,” her voice trailing off dramatically. Sometimes I’d hear her and her sisters saying something about “gypsies,” which when I asked them to expand upon, warranted a swift change of subject.

  My grandmother very effectively cultivated this mystery by never saying a single word about it but dressing up in a gypsy costume on regular occasions and lending out her ability to read the palms of the walking public. She wore a fur stole, the fox’s face attached to its tail midbite, a flouncy red skirt, and armfuls of stacked bangles. As she read people’s palms, she spun long convincing stories, made meaningful eye contact, and tightly grabbed both of their hands. She sat in corners doing this at the grand opening of my dad’s car dealership, fiftieth-wedding anniversaries, town festivals, and prom after-parties, never once telling any of us in the family whether or not her powers of intuition were real or fabricated. Sometimes, weeks or even months following one of these readings, a stranger would tap at her door, asking for another consultation. She never read the palms of her family, further deepening her powers.

  “Where was Great-grandma from?” I asked Grandma Dion once, leaning forward on the counter.

  “She was German!” she spat. “We all spoke German in the house. Plattdeutsch!”

  “What did she make, Grandma?” I asked.

  “Acchh,” she said, “she made roast beef, you know, and boiled potatoes, and at lunch we made hash from the leftovers of both, nice and crusty in a cast-iron pan. Everything fried until it was very crisp!

  “She made poppy-seed coffee cake, of course,” she continued, pointing to the coffee cake sitting on the table, a black gush of rich poppy-seed filling oozing out of its cut sides.

  We mixed-European-breed Midwestern mongrels are always outed by our coffee cake. Sour cream—probably Polish. Cardamom with icing—had to be from some part of Scandinavia. Our poppy-seed streusel pointed us to origins somewhere east of Germany. Between the poppy seeds and the stiff lace-edged potato pancakes and the fortune-telling, my best guess was that we hailed from a place somewhere between old Transylvania and the hometown of the Brothers Grimm.

  Wherever this homeland was, it gave birth to fermented sour dill pickles, our family dish célèbre. My aunt Renee was the first to give our collective obsession a name. “I don’t have a sweet tooth; I could take or leave desserts. What I have is more like a sour tooth.” More precisely, we’re fermentation fiends. My inner harpsichord trills to the thought of those fizzing sour pickles—their acidity softer and yet more probing than the vinegar kind. Just thinking about them makes everyone in my family, myself included, drop their heads, close their eyes, and softly stamp their feet. We all grew up not only eating them at every family occasion but also drinking the briny juice whenever we needed a little pick-me-up.

  “DO NOT cut them!” Grandma Dion would shout. She was not into spears or slices; intact pickles were the only shape allowed. I held my knife stiffly in the air. “Cutting lets all the juices out!” As if they were water balloons.

  Grandma always kept rows of her fermented pickles in her basement cellar, but everyone in the family quietly acknowledged that her younger sister Helen really made the best ones. Aunt Helen, the second-born of the seven sisters, spoke with a loud, hoarse swagger and was a fantastic storyteller. She’d spin crazy tales for as long as you had the patience to sit, flipping between true stories, fictional tales, and absurdist fantasy without transition, forcing us to distinguish fact from fiction for ourselves. The hardest hugger I’ve ever known, she squeezed us kids as if to juice us, her sharp rings burrowing into our soft skin.

  The pickles she brought to Easter and Thanksgiving were always perfectly fermented—mouthwateringly sour, never too salty. Like her sister, she put them up in glass jars fitted with rubber seals and old zinc lids, and Helen’s were screwed on so tight that we suspected rubber cement. To open a jar, she’d cover the lid with one of those soft rubber can-opening disks (a giveaway imprinted with the church’s seal), crank it hard, and spring the pickles free. Tons of bubbles hopped from the surface of the brine, like baby frogs in wet grass. The carbonation was as strong on the tongue as a sip of pop on a hot day. But the pickled cabbage at the bottom of the jar was the best part, the connoisseur’s reward. Whenever I dug down to it with a fork, Aunt Helen would interrupt whatever story she was telling—her spiel, she’d say—to shake a bejeweled hand at me and nod her endorsement of my cabbage-diving before turning back and continuing on.

  Our reverence for butter—used in great quantity—completes the family holy trinity. My mom’s butter dish was always there in the center of the kitchen, a prima donna presiding over all. I remember charting the two sticks’ diminishment through the day: going, going, gone…then miraculously replenished. Even throughout the fat-phobic eighties, never once was an ounce of guilt attached to its use. Just as my grandma did, my mom made a proud “acchh” noise in her throat—automatic dismissal of any imaginary detractors—as she scooped it up in huge, glossy lumps.

  Here’s how my mom made toast (a little procedure that endeared her to Aaron the first time he saw her do it): She waited at the toaster until the bread caramelized, then spread butter on its surface in dramatic whorls, like icing. Then she stabbed it with the tip of her knife, making potholes for greater absorption, and stood over it until the butter melted and filled every yeasty pore before reapplying a fresh topcoat of butter and sending it to us across the counter. As we ate it, the warm fat often dripped down onto our wrists, which made her beam and say, “Butter’s good for your brain.”

  Where others used milk or stock to moisten, she used butter: on dry mashed potatoes, on top of lasagna, on leftover braised beef. Nothing went into the microwave for reheating without a dollop of the yellow pomade schmeared on top. My mom’s dish of room-temperature butter was more than a mere cooking fat, it was an ointment, filling, spackle, emotional salvo, as essential to combatting the deep Minnesota winter as lotion. Her dishes got butterier whenever she felt the need to soothe us; and when things were bad, they fairly sobbed with butter.

  8

  GIVE A GIRL A KNIFE

  The overstuffed, rust-colored wing chair sitting in our living room was as high as a throne in a pulpit. Naturally it was where Father Reid—our priest at St. Peter’s Catholic Church and backyard neighbor—sat when
he graced us with his presence for happy hour, which he did a few times a year. He never called ahead.

  My mom jumped when she saw his tight grin and triangular nose in the high square window cut into the back door. It was rare to see any face at all in that window when the bell rang, as this entrance was used almost exclusively by neighborhood kids who were all too short to show. “Eeekk!” she squealed. “Fa-ther! You should have called!” She wiped her hands dry on a towel before opening the door.

  We all knew that he had come for one of our parents’ famous brandy Manhattans. Probably two.

  Following a sip, ice cubes fracturing, he closed his eyes and let the black low fringe of his hair settle against the fuzzy high back of the chair.

  “You like school?” he asked me, a shallow question deserving of only a nod. I was not going to try to pull a single story out of my wild fifth-grade life.

  My mom returned to the kitchen to put a lid on her rice. “You’re welcome to come in here, Father. I have to clean the pea pods,” she said, her voice blowing out into the living room. He glanced her way but stayed put.

  “You go on doing what you’re doing,” he rasped, gave me a weak smile, and stopped pretending to care. His beaklike nose floated up into the air and his face clouded over, as it did in church when the woman from the office got up to read the parishioner news.

  Now at 6:45 in the evening on a Friday, in the dark of winter, Father Reid was gone, having minutes earlier toddled down the rounded, snowy back steps and across the yard to the rectory. A house full of nuns lived right next door to him, but apparently they weren’t much for liquid company.

  In the kitchen, my mom peeled apples. “I thought he’d never leave,” she said. Her simultaneous respect and disdain for the church always puzzled me—why would you ever do something you didn’t really want to do? I never got that. I looked at everything, including religion, with what my mom called “a jaundiced eye.”