Courtney Kersten - Daughter in Retrograde: A Memoir

Your Reading For: March 17, 2012

Despite your splashing in the so-called Deep End of all things mystical and woo-woo, there is only so much you can know, young one. Today is a midwestern fantasymiddle of March and 82 degrees. What other magic do you need? Relish this heat, young sprite. The ultimate goal is presence, not prediction.

A woman sunbathes on her blacktop driveway.

The sun beats down on her, turning those spray-tanned shoulders and thighs pink as the lawn chair shes splayed out on. Two hollow beer bottles sit next to her as she slides her cat-eye sunglasses up her nose. Shes wearing that zebra-print bikini she found on sale back in November and has been waiting to wear since. Look in this womans closet and youll see her other treasuresshes been scouring the bathing suit sale racks since last September. Look in her medicine cabinet and youre not going to find any herbal supplements or glucosamine for her creaky knees. Youre going to find bottle after bottle of spray tan and crusty bronzing lotion collected for the past decade. Look at her againwere you fooled? Do you believe that shes been living here, in This Place of snow and silence and sunlessness, for the past five months? Or is she someone elsesomeone whos just visiting this rural Wisconsin pocket of a town?

Crane your neck, look just past her into the lawn, and her cover is blownthe remnants of her abound. Snows still melting in a dirty heap where she and her daughter lazily shoveled it after aDecember storm. You cant see it, but they carved their initials into that icy lump. Turn to the left and theres a stray fleece glove abandoned in the lawn that looks like it just might fit her delicate hand. Look at her right ankle. Zoom in on her lower shin youll see the blue bruise where a hairline fracture festers. She slipped on the ice two weeks ago and its ached ever since.

Yeahshes local.

Look to the west and its all lakes and white pine forests until you hit the Minnesota border. Look to the east and its rolling farmland and Holstein dairy cows until you wade into Lake Michigan. Look beyond that womans toes and youll see her home: a humble, hunter-green A-frame house with white shutters that sits beside a lake of six thousand acres. She grew up on this lake and knows the rivers and streams that branch off from it. She knows the way it collects algae and seaweed in the summer and the way it turns frozen and overrun with ice fishing shacks during the winter. She knows the way a white pine looks when youre lying flat on your back staring up through the branches. She knows what it feels like to live in this climate of extremesbetween the never-ending snow and humid summer, the calico fall and sopping spring, the gaping silences and fervent gossip. Look just north of her and youll see her ninety-year-old neighbor, Moses Sperling, dressed in a down coat and wool hat standing before a burn barrel where he sets his trash aflame each afternoon, letting a nasty funk loose in this lakeside neighborhood thatll stink until sunset. How does he always manage to park his barrel right on the edge of the property line?

Look back at her as she turns the page in her thick paperback novel and youll see the bubblegum scar tracing her left breast from a lumpectomy sixteen years earlier. Shes fifty-six now and back then she underwent experimental treatment, double the rounds of radiation and drugs dripped into her veins thats common practice today at half-dose.

But, look closer. Study her. See the way her heart-shaped face intently reads that page? See the way she smirks at the end of the chapter? See the way she smooths those blonde bangs off her forehead? Look even closerobserve the speckles of gold in her green eyes, those silver fillings in her back molars, the bubbling fleshon her elbow from when a boyfriend thrust her into the street at age sixteen. Now look beyond all thatcan you see it? Can you see those rebellious cells that lurk within her? The clues of her imminent demise? The trail of crumbs that leads to her ultimate end?

Of course not. Because she cant see it either.

Nobodys looking at those blood cells turning rogue within her. Not a soul is thinking about that radiation sixteen years ago now betraying the body it once saved. Nobody is aware that in this very moment shes living on the eve of the last year of her life. How could she know? How could anyone know? And even if she did know, if it had been transcribed to her in a telegram from beyond or spelled out in the steam from her coffee cup, would she believe it?

Probably notwho would want to believe that?

Zoom out and look at the end of the driveway. No, its not a miragetheres some girl with a scowl on her face clomping down it. Shes got on some stained polyester navy blue suit thats two sizes too big. Shes wearing those clunky orthopedic office shoes she found at the thrift store for four bucks. Shes a boomerang kid; a twenty-three-year-old with a penchant for impulsively buying plane tickets abroad, blowing through her meager cash, and then crawling back home again homesick and broke. Look in her passport and shes spent the past few years bouncing back and forthmostly between Latvia and the Upper Midwest. Look in her recent past and she just got backshe thought living in southern Italy for the Wisconsin winter would be grand until she ran out of money and ended up living off stale bread and rice until she could catch a ride home. She just got back from her recently acquired morning shift at the local derelict hotel where she works the desk.