Great North

Vanessa Norton

Alicia thought of the name as an unlucky coincidence. The owner of The Book Saloon, Ripley, had been the sole proprietor in Eugene to offer her a job. Had other shops been more receptive, she might have refused his offer on account of name alone. But Alicia was flat broke, and having seized her car’s engine, there was little she could do to get any further from the desert.

Sixteen hours to the South, in the burning interior of Death Valley, Alicia’s mother, Alice-Ingrid, dropped frozen jalapeno poppers into the steel fryer tub at The Badwater Saloon. She had tended bar since the days before the National Park and the tourists—when it serviced mostly truckers weary of the interstate. These were the men—Alicia assumed—who had peed in the bathroom at home. When the last one stood over Alicia’s single bed as she woke, his side-tilted front tooth glistening, she hadn’t been clear-headed enough to ask where he’d come from.

And what was the difference either way.

Now, she lived alone in Oregon. The sopping wet weather made everyone dress like they were on a camping trip. No one tried to be sexy. Even the Book Saloon’s owner, Ripley, a single, middle-aged man with a metallic brush of ponytail half-way down his spine, never fired a word he wouldn’t with anyone else. He worked seven days a week and slept in the back of the store on a cot beside an out-of-tune piano too heavy to get rid of. Once in a while, though, he carried on about his son being killed in a war he had no business being in.

“I even took him on my rowboat to talk him out of it.”

Alicia was pushing her broom beneath a bookcase with very little space beneath it.

“But the kid was determined.”

Another time, while Alicia was sweeping the corridor of cookbooks, Ripley told her that he suspected his ex-wife’s husband of messing with his teenage daughter.

“Why don’t you go back and kill him?” Alicia let go her tongue.

“She wouldn’t want that,” Ripley said, wiping the sweat off his upper lip. “She said so.”

“Yes—” All the while Alicia kept the broom moving. “She does.”

Ripley had hired Alicia initially to clean the store, but after a couple weeks, pressed her to package books for Internet sales.

“Be a lot better than cleaning, wouldn’t it?” His tone struck her as gratuitously soft. “I, myself, used to clean. I know what it’s like. I was in charge of an entire wing of a hospital.”

Alicia averted her pale eyes. This was why he had her wiping the book jackets with alcohol.

“I just don’t want to have to talk to anybody.”

“Then this job will be gravy.”

Truth was, she savored the act of hauling something long or heavy in her hands; a dangling mop, a wooden broom, a metal pail filled with bleach. Whisking in and out of the store, weapon in hand; busy, busy, busy.

The packing room was a hotbox addition separated from the rest of the store by a wool tapestry. Puffy, three-dimensional alpacas grazed hillsides while hunched women carried removable babies on their backs. Every so often, Ripley shoved aside the tapestry, handing her a wad of invoices. He’d smile through his outdated glasses, his mouth curved just enough for her to register that this was a smile, but without exposing any teeth or gums. When Alicia would go into the store to locate the order, she’d try to avoid him, not because she feared what he might do, but because of some other reason she didn’t yet know. He seemed to want to know something, she thought, but as soon as the thought came, it disappeared.

When orders were slow, she grazed the surface of the walls, reading newspaper clippings and the backs of black and white postcards of places she didn’t recognize. She ignored the gallery of photos of Ripley as a younger man; his ponytail then an undulating russet. His tightly drawn musculature riding up his jean shorts. The long, straight bones of his calves were not unlike her husband—John’s—even after his muscles had gone rubbery; barely distinguishable from skin. Alicia glanced at a photo; Ripley held a sapling in one hand, his bare knee plowing into the ground. Anything to keep busy, busy, busy.

Nights, she slept on a futon pulled from the curb, doused in vinegar and dried out in the sun. Her landlady, the darkest woman Alicia had ever seen who was not Mexican, taught her not to use bleach. “Gets nasty breathing chemicals all night,” she’d said. “You don’t want to hurt yourself.”

“I know,” Alicia had answered.

Showered, her strawberry blonde hair spun into a knot, Alicia sat against the cinderblock wall—her studio was once a garage—and wrote a letter to her mother using a crow-quill pen her landlady had given her.

Dear Genie,

I thought I’d call you that because it’s still how I think of you: the lady who grants wishes if rubbed hard enough.
I am writing to tell you that I am safe in the Great North, and that everything I thought about this place is true. It rains and rains and rains. Sometimes the water fills the gutter and rushes under my door. I found a place for now and a job, so need to worry. Not that you would.

Love
Allie

She folded the letter into an envelope. She did not seal it, but thought about how she’d mentioned the rain when it had not rained for over a month. It was summer now; mornings were foggy, but by noon the fog burned off and the sun rose hotter than she had ever expected. But, for months after she’d first arrived, it had rained, and she had never told her mother this.

She printed her mother’s full name on the envelop, picking over the pile of last names she’d accumulated over the years. She settled on her maiden name: Alice Ingrid Meyers, the name she’d had when Alicia was the kid sleeping on the felt cover of the pool table at the Badwater.

You made your bed, you lie in it! This was what Alicia’s grandmother had told Alice Ingrid when she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen. The other girls were shipped to LA to have their babies lifted from them in secret.

Now, Alicia pictured the curved crevice digging in the corner of her mother’s lip, deep enough to mistake for a scar. Her skin, leathery beyond her years; her bleached hair, brittle even when it was wet. But what she felt were her mother’s quick, child-like movements, the way she’d leave a room without looking to see what was in it.

In the morning, the landlady appeared outside Alicia’s door with a tattered bicycle. She told her it had belonged to a lover who flew to Argentina and never came back. “That one was always running off,” she said. “But he was the love of my life.”

The bike was no beauty; its pink paint had peeled off in wound-shapes, scabbing up the frame with rust. The seat’s hard skeleton was exposed, its leather rolled off, stuffing flown away. If her husband could see this, he’d shoot at it.

“I love it.” Her words formed awkwardly, but she meant it.

“I wanted to see a young woman riding this bike. That’d make Frank happy.” The landlady’s eyes twinkled in the sunlight, illuminating lighter tones of brown that reminded Alicia of the tiny gold pebbles a lucky person could pinch from an abandoned mine.

If the wood was varnished and stained dark enough, Alicia’s rag could produce—almost magically—a reflection devoid of detail. In wood, she was all broad strokes of light, her thin, strawberry blonde hair a solid crown.

Internet sales were slow, so she was cleaning when Ripley stomped into the back of the store.

“Goddamn meth-heads robbed the bakery across the street,” he grumbled. “We’d better watch our asses.”

She drew a deep breath and worked her rag along the legs of the piano, digging it into a rounded crevice. John had gotten into the stuff; sat in front of the television shaking the tablets inside a jar of ether until all the color had rubbed off. The next day, he’d be scraping it off her cookie sheets. She didn’t mention this to Ripley; didn’t trust him to believe she felt herself above the ravaging kind of drugs.

“Assholes,” she said.

That night, after she cleaned herself and the dishes and put them all—one pasta bowl, a wooden spoon, a bent frying pan with half the Teflon scraped off—away, she sat on the futon and wrote to her husband.

Dear John,

All fine here. Nothing to worry about, not that you would.

I guess I just wanted to tell you that I am sorry about the baby. The way I see it, you would have been set against it before it even arrived. I think it’s obvious why I had to do what I did, at least obvious to everyone but you. I thought you should know at least that.

Allie

She lay back and allowed her thoughts to wander, all the while, she kept her eyes wide open, focusing on a spider web that had started in the corner. In her letter, she’d considered telling John about the rain, how much of it came to Oregon. She wondered if he was still living in the picker’s shack they’d rented near Randsville. She remembered the smoke smelling like burning plastic and wondered if the house—or Johnny—still existed at all. She even questioned whether they had ever been happy—something she had not questioned, not even when she drove to that doctor’s office in Palm Springs, which she knew would be the end. Now, she did remember: they had that thing you don’t question. They each knew when the rain was coming; that engine exhaust smell—everyone knew what it meant—but no one bothered to mention. No one but her and John. It might have been all they’d had to talk about, but it was something, something they both felt at the same time and even if he was turned away, she could just look at him and know what he was thinking.

She would not feel this again; she knew. Not here—not anywhere.

She folded the letter and sealed it in an envelope with his PO Box on the front. Writing out his full proper name caused her arm hair to stand straight, her skin to turn cold.

When internet orders finally came, Alicia was ready with the two letters, held beneath her clothes by the elastic rim of her underwear. The first order was for a book of poetry by someone named Frank McGrath, who she’d never heard of. She found the book sealed in a plastic bag. It was scarcely heavier than a pamphlet you’d pick up at a health clinic. The buyer, Mr. Henry Kirwood of Augusta, Maine, had paid almost forty dollars for it.

Alicia dropped the letter to her mother between its flimsy paper cover and a blank page. Then she wrapped the book in brown paper and taped it. She slid it inside a recycled puffy envelope and taped Mr. Kirwood’s name onto its front and stamped the Book Saloon in the upper left-hand corner.

The second order was for a book on phenomena. It would ship all the way to Australia.

She slid the letter to her husband between its hard cover and the printed glossy page and wrapped the book in brown paper, sealed it, then placed it in a cardboard box half-filled with soy peanuts. She lay the invoice over the book and dropped several handfuls of peanuts over it, then closed the box. She sealed its creases and corners with plastic packing tape and adhered the address.

All this time, Alicia felt unusually light, like her heart held the weight of a humming bird’s brain.

She dropped the packages into a crate and carried them out to the front counter where Ripley was eating a fig he’d pulled from the tree in the parking lot.

“All ready for the post office?” He blinked receptively.

“Ready.”

Then she returned to the packing room.

Vanessa Norton is from Buffalo, NY, and now lives on the foggiest beach in California. She completed her MFA in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon in 2007 and has since read at several literary events in and around San Francisco and been granted residencies at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, as well as the Jentel Artist Residency Program. Her work can also be read in South Dakota Review, Breakwater Review as well as the anthology, Sex for America. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, a multi-media collaboration on the sense of home in late capitalism and a blog.