see our girls starting down the same path.”
“Soos wants to stay married to Brian. It’s Brian who’s not sure. I want to shake him sometimes for the pain he’s causing her. I think the baby picks it up too.”
“What else do men cause?” Jane asked.
“You haven’t been this bitter.”
“I’m just tired of disappointment.”
“I’m reading a book about the daughter of Galileo,” Solome said. “We should use it in our discussion group.”
Stephen Savard
Different pieces of conversation overheard. That’s what I was experiencing. All the conversations I’d had. The words circled, crossed over from the past, mixed into one another. I felt like I was flying over my life with nowhere to land, or I’d forgotten where the airport was. And where was the pilot? Wasn’t that his job? Solome and I picked up Gretchen and Dennis from the airport. What’s his name? I still didn’t know. I stayed in my room until Solome called me down. What’s wrong dad? Gretchen asked. His mind on something, I heard Solome say. Changes at the college. Mark Stephen at the house. Susanna and Brian and the baby. They looked at me like they did at college. Why did they look? That night I called out something to Solome. She woke and held me, quieted me.
It didn’t do any good to ask for help. My colleagues didn’t know what was happening. I saw it clearly sometimes. I had to stay where I was. Not ask for help from them. It only confused and frustrated my secretary. I wouldn’t call out again to Solome at night when I heard someone. I knew the voice came from the past, from someone already in another world.
I think Solome wanted to say something to me, but she swallowed the words. She wouldn’t ask anything of me.
At times, we had a language of politeness when meaning had gone.
It was deflection when there was something I wanted to hide.
It was imagination. Imagination was an ocean. I was trying to wash my words in it. I was trying to be shaped by language, or maybe it was language that would shape me— if I kept talking like I always had.
Solome Savard
Imagine a borrowed language. Changing. Unreliable. Imagine a language in flux, the dynamics of change and redefining the meaning of words, their messages and migrations, the different ways they could mean in combinations with other words.
Imagine spring after seven months of winter. A summer passing quickly.
On Friday, Solome had lunch with her mother at the Historical Society across the atrium from the museum shop. Her mother pushed her tray slowly. Others went around them. Afterwards, they walked through the rooms, looking at the paintings of Minnesota history and the artifacts, as they often did, until her mother tired.
“There’s an opening for an assistant in acquisitions,” Solome told her mother. “Part-time. I heard about it this morning. The Historical Society needs someone to research facts for the news releases and reviews of exhibits and programs.”
“Can you take the time to work?” Her mother asked.
“I don’t know,” Solome answered. “It sounds like something I would like.”
Later that afternoon, in the research library, Solome retrieved material on the Birch Coulee Battlefield Historical Site: the Battle from both U.S. and the Dakota perspectives for a change. She came across the native word for Minnesota, Mni Shota, turning it over and over, thinking of the changes to language. The word meant something about many waters— or something about clouds in the waters— or turbid white-edge water. When Solome wasn’t retrieving materials, she looked through other books, stopping here and there in the stacks. She turned down a Minnesota Public Radio program on the radio that was left playing in the stacks for some reason. It interfered with her reading. When Solome looked at the clock, it was nearly five.
Stephen was frustrated when she got home. She was late. He couldn’t find anything to eat. The dog was barking. Where was she? How could she be someplace else when he needed her? Solome didn’t want Stephen’s anger. Did she wish her marriage was over? She suddenly thought as she listened to him. Would she marry again? Was there anyone else she wanted to marry? How could she be thinking that? Where did those thoughts come from? The name of the Salome who asked for the head of John the Baptist was not actually mentioned in the Bible, but by other records, her name was known. Maybe that Salome was part of Solome also, a part that was veiled, hidden. If Solome wanted to be whole, she would have to look at her also.
Stephen couldn’t find a shirt he wanted. He had started getting out what he wanted to wear the next day so he wouldn’t have to face the decision in the morning. Solome was in the kitchen when she heard him yell for her. Would she become his caretaker for the rest of her life?
No, Solome couldn’t handle a job at the Minnesota Historical Society, not even part-time. Not for a while.
For a moment, Solome wanted Stephen’s head on a platter.
That’s why Jesus had to die for her on the cross.
Stephen Savard
In the fall, when the yellow leaves were shining through my window, I made a doctor’s appointment.
Solome went with me.
“If Stephen has Alzheimer’s, it will take years for him to become incapacitated,” the doctor told us.
The conversation seemed to move too fast. If Stephen had the disease, the diagnosis was still inconclusive. He talked past me. I wanted to wave my hand in his face and tell him that Stephen was sitting before him.
We left town after the appointment, not saying much to each other in the car.
We drove to the cabin on Crane Lake, past Ely, Minnesota, and Buyck, near the Boundary Waters, just under the Canadian border. I woke in the night. I couldn’t remember where I was for a moment. I had to think. There was nothing solid to hold onto. There were chunks and pieces of memories of the day’s events. I had driven somewhere. I was struggling with my thoughts. I didn’t know what was happening. I had to fight an urge to bolt from the room and run as far as I could. There were crossed signals. Nothing was clear. There were parts of a road. Trees rushing past. A sky looking through the trees. A wedge of light. A fighting not to drown in the absence of thought. The lake! That was it. Was a mosquito humming? No. A dog barking?— No. We had left Brown in St. Paul. Mark would feed him.
It was as if consciousness was a briefcase I carried and had to pay attention to and not leave it behind. I constantly had to think until I knew what it was. Where were the keys to the car? What if we needed to leave? I had to remember again where I was and what I was there for.
That weekend, Solome and I painted a corner of the cabin ceiling to cover a watermark above the door. I thought of all the winter ice on the roof hanging into the rainspout, leaking into the cabin as it melted. It gave me something to do.
Maybe I had become like the moon that shined through the trees at the lake at night, full and whole only part of the time. Maybe I felt I was never in the same place often, yet somehow there was a return to the same places. Maybe that’s the way I felt.
I thought of the frozen lake in winter, compacted, cracked, one edge lifting on another, groaning
