party.
The photo of Solome and Jane Mead, a friend since high school, who was like a sister.
The photos of New York on their visits to Gretchen.
There were photos of several trips Solome and Stephen took to Europe. There they were in Madrid.
Stephen Savard
It came in waves. The forgetting. The remembering.
Over the summer, work began on a new student center. It would be completed in a year. I could see a piling for the corner of the building from my window. I could hear the cement trucks.
I was functioning. Completing my work for the day. Knowing where my briefcase was. My car keys.
Then the pot hole.
What was that game in which a woman pushed something like a teakettle on the floor and two other women rushed ahead of it, sweeping the ice clean and slick? Shot put came to mind, but that wasn’t the name. Ask Solome—
Why did I care about it anyway? I thought as I got in my car.
Sometimes men played the game also.
Most days, I was myself. Then papers jumbled on my desk. Moved by themselves. A forecast— What was there wasn’t there any longer. Looking at something what was it?— what did I have to do? Think of the word I needed but couldn’t find. Everything tumbling. Get a grip. Keep it buried. Don’t let them see. Get ready for the meeting. Where’s the briefcase? Call Solome. Look in the car. Not there. Not here. Can’t go to the meeting without papers. Secretary— print out minutes again. Get lunch bring to me. I don’t have— I’ll eat while I prepare for the meeting. Then the candidates for sociology and religious studies departments. Get their resumes. Jan— they’re in briefcase.
Solome Savard
Imagine an American memory. Minnesota winters. Sledding. Ice skating. Shoveling after a blizzard. Then summer baseball. Hot dogs. Paul Bunyan.
Imagine a woman’s black gabardine evening bag. A daughter looking at it. Imagine earrings in a dresser drawer. Two mounds of sequins like the sun on an afternoon lake. Why would Solome remember the mound of sequins that were her mother’s earrings? Why did those images stay in her mind at times? How often did she think of the past? And who was she with a misspelled name, Solome, a name different from others? It all harbored in her memory, that gift she wanted to name again and again.
Solome purchased a chest-of-drawers. After it was delivered, she found a stain mark down the edge. She wrote a letter to the company. A man came from the furniture store in the afternoon, and decided there was nothing wrong. He didn’t offer to repair or replace it.
Imagine an American house. An American dog.
A husband confused about the day. In need of his briefcase.
Money paid for a flawed piece of furniture.
Imagine wanting something and wanting something. The feeling never stopped barking; gnawing like a squirrel in the attic, like our dog, Brown, that didn’t stop barking.
Solome lived in America, yet the neighbors acted like they were in a country where they turned each other in. What could she do? It was as if part of her crossed through the walls of the house and settled in the dog, and she called out for someone and called out for someone in the dog’s bark.
What could she do with a dog that stayed chained in the backyard? She asked her Thursday afternoon discussion group. Jane Mead suggested putting him to sleep. Brown had dug a trench along the back of the house in frustration, uprooting a flower bed and an old toy buried long ago by one of the children. The yard man would fill it in again.
The dog didn’t bark while Solome was there. Once, in a dream, during a nap, she’d heard barking. She woke and knew what the neighbors meant. But why had they called the police? Who was it? Not the Grunswald’s. They were friends. Possibly the Morgan’s. More probably the Bernard’s whom she hardly knew. Or someone on the next street.
What did she want? Her business was the house and children, but now the walls were moving and she was unable to hold them back.
Solome e-mailed their oldest daughter, Gretchen, in New York about the neighbors who had called the police about their dog, Brown, because he barked when she left. She didn’t mention who she thought it was, and Gretchen didn’t ask.
Once Solome wrote that she was worried about Stephen.
She heard the yard man raking leaves in the back yard. Brown was yapping and jumping at him. Solome yelled from the back door for Brown to be quiet. She finally closed him in the garage.
At noon, Soos stopped by the house with the baby. Solome made sandwiches for their lunch. Then Soos put Susan down for a nap and ran errands while Solome watched her. Soos had started a romper for Susan. Solome finished it on the sewing machine while Soos was gone.
Stephen Savard
Our son, Mark Stephen, wanted to develop his own course of study at the college. He joined some students who formed a protest group. I was embarrassed that my son’s name was in the college newspaper. I knew my colleagues talked about it behind my back.
The students had sit-ins. They had marches. They chalked the sidewalks. There were demands for multiculturalism.
“You don’t know what you need to know,” I said to Mark, irritated that he dropped by my office without notice. He walked by Jan with a sense of entitlement, though she told him I was on the phone.
Sometimes Mark stopped by the house on weekends. His returns were nothing more than a meal for Solome to serve, his clothes to wash, his room to clean after he left, and a few sharp words between us as I was becoming more and more, what was the word he used— irascible?
“Why do you stay at Cobson and embarrass your father?” Solome confronted Mark one evening at dinner. “You could go to another college if you want to act like that.”
“I want to go to Cobson,” Mark snapped back. “I like the climate there. My friends are there.”
“What you do reflects on your father.”
“Ideas change. I can’t be your boy scout any longer,” Mark said and left.
“What’s gotten into you, Solome?” I asked. “You’ve never snapped at him like that.”
“What’s gotten into you?” She returned.
Solome Savard
When she was in high school, her parents bought a small cabin on Crane Lake, five hours north of St. Paul, near the boundary waters on the border of Canada. The shore was eroding, though they didn’t know it at the time. “Fitting,” her mother said. She kept the cabin after Solome’s father died, though she seldom went there. “It’s probably overrun by mosquitoes or fallen into the lake.”
But the cabin had not fallen into the lake. Solome went there when she needed solitude. Sometimes Stephen came with her. Her mother wasn’t interested in the cabin any longer, nor the children, though Mark would go occasionally with some friends. Her mother thought of selling it, but Solome asked if they could hold onto it when her
