Buddy System
We are another couple talking closely and eating enchiladas in shades of terra cotta color while the snow outside is being carved into desert elevations.
"Anything new happened?" he has wondered.
I have hesitated to tell him about my week's misfortune, that "My car was towed from the laundromat. You know, my secret parking spot. The laundromat's been redone so I guess the owner changed."
"I've been paying tickets like bills. Working in downtown St. Paul is as bad as it gets, not your neighborhood. I just don't have the time to spend on parking problems."
Despite his liking an expressive hot sauce, he is mild, veering on indifferent. I might have broached the subject of a wedding date when it wasn't on his mind.
"Did I tell you about the time Dana, my neighbor, outwitted the city after they towed her car?"
Of course, I couldn't tell a man about all the drudgery women endure when they are alone and not affluent. I didn't tell him how I went to the door of my building on a similar evening last year not just to admire the snow but to note its texture and weight. In my neighborhood, many exteriors can look ragtag and unwashed; the winter lawns off from the traffic also get grimy.
This was a sage snow, not the ill-meaning caustic stuff that swears around corners. Still, the evening news might proclaim it a snow emergency. In Minneapolis, they are calling "blizzard" when these emergencies are to keep the streets impeccably plowed. If the depth and force of the unexpected snow becomes inconvenient, people are ordered off certain sets of streets for the following day. They have until nine o'clock in the morning to remove their car from plowing zones or they will be ticketed and towed to a city lot. This upheaval costs $80 plus $5 each additional day. I guess it's gone up.
Two picturesque inches had fallen by eight o'clock, a snow as pleasant as the sight of housepainters in luminous summer descent. But enough was probably not the end of it. And whether the city was on east-west or north-south streets in the middle of winter was a heads-or-tails penny throw to me. So I knocked at the door of my knowledgeable next-door neighbor, Dana.
The Dana's in Minneapolis humiliate me, despite my being in graduate school. They have the veneer of being permanently employed, Dana at a company that manufactures wood paneling and hardwood flooring. The company's history includes prominent buildings such as the parquet floor in a mansion that is now a women's center. Any college in Dana's background no longer being of account, Dana is secure enough in the accounting department to tell about the company's president lunching at Lund's grocery on free samples.
The Dana's of Minneapolis are modest, soft-spoken, well-insulated women with weight problems and good faces. They get clever haircuts that don't need much management but give them the sunstruck gleam of varnished wood.
I didn't knock long on Dana's door because Danas tend to deplore importunity or panic if it doesn't fit the city situation.
When I first met Dana, she asked me from her apartment door, "Do you hear that shrieking couple upstairs? I'm beginning to think I should call someone." Then she invited me in and we attempted to define the mating preliminaries above her.
"You must stay somewhere else when they get this loud," I said because I usually saw Dana with a man curiously like her. Her looks in the male gender were noticeable, urban yet strapping.
Dana is not a hypocrite. Without emotional elaboration, she answered my covert question. "I did until recently," she explained. "We're not seeing each other anymore. He simply wouldn't settle down."
I had not heard any of this in high pitch or volume from next door. Dana seemed relieved to be rid of the man who was in her apartment as if he was an exasperating employer. Because she was sturdy like him, I felt despondent for her. Or maybe I was despondent.
"I'll bet you're just spinning your wheels in graduate school. But how can it be proved if I help you? You know, I'd probably get stuck on the way over and never dig you out of the drifts."
It was my first snow without an alley or a parking lot, and I thought I was making a fair deal in the city buddy system, dinner for help during a snow emergency that didn't look like an emergency. But I was straining a relationship that was too much like my car, not new and if it fell apart, I couldn't afford to repair it.
At graduate school, I shared an office with a woman who, in becoming liberated, had lost the very details of her life. She understood how chivalry can be withheld. Although her students liked her and so did I, her husband was either skipping some of his connubial obligations or dropping their marriage.
She informed me, "He's having an affair with his secretary who must have done years of research on beauty products.." Not needing a cabinet full of make-up, my office friend was candid though martyred.
I let her indulge in her dirge and, because it was not clear where her husband was living, we made a sort of support pact that I thought might extend to cars.
On the subject of transportation though, her eyes wouldn't focus on the obstacles of the present. She hardly seemed to see me, suggesting, "Do you know what we should do? In the summer, we could find a ship going to Scandinavia from Duluth harbor, escape everything. I've heard of it done."
Well aware of the price tag for traveling to Scandinavia, I was also aware that there were no passenger ships that would depart from Duluth.
So I teamed up with Dana when the snow stacked the odds against us. She could lecture on the city, on which bank might condescend to remember me, on where the potential men definitely were not, on why people at the university resemble wartorn immigrants. Living on loans and learning that professors valued punctuality more than my research unless I needed ride home, I became attentive with Dana.
Gentle and insistent, Dana's knock is probably somewhat like a midwife's. She doesn't pamper absent-mindedness; it is a case of critical ill-preparedness, one missed appointment away from mental illness.
"Do you have problems starting your car in below-zero weather? Don't you keep a shovel in your trunk? You've got to get a pail of gravel."
In the way that some mothers turn ordeals into games, Dana makes South Minneapolis a game board and our parking a short-term predicament. We have to get our colorful markers to a winning square on the variable streets without its taking all day.
First though, we note the texture of the snow, whether it is a light Parisian glitter or spongy as moss, crusty as heather, soggy as a load of Nordic laundry or, worst of all, so sticky that it nears the weight of communist cement.
Since the English language only has one word for snow, I made a game of snow phrases at a century-old desk that I bought for my graduate studies. I had not anticipated spending $175 on two tickets and towings. After I rescued my car from the neighborhood detention lot, I spent more loan money on phone calls to a college friend in Boston with the idea of transferring to heavier tuition levels. This year, I have budgeted better but now I dread the new central car jail under a freeway where it is so dim and expansive that a person feels as if they are at a shopping mall in Hades.
To a Dana, I am about as ready as a student without footnotes or signatures. Dana has tools in her trunk: jumper cables, salt, gravel, shovels, cardboard for traction, a pair of her old boyfriend's leather gloves for grip, an assortment of window brushes.
Dana teaches me when I'm at the wheel: "Quick now, turn your wheel! I'm going to rock it! Now floor it!" Dana does not despair at the swelled womb of winter any more than a midwife gives up.
We cruise the streets, the white spaces between parking possibilities that are, on steering in, chunky. Too often the streets are illicit, busy bus lines like Lyndale and Nicollet and 36th Street reserved for cars coming off the freeway. The lucky chutes or chargeable squares long ago bought by the city.
Dana always wins since her game piece, a new Horizon the yellow of a cereal box, has a defroster that works. If the wind doesn't throw its cards across our perpendicular pathways, we get a view from Dana's windshield down the alphabet avenues, Aldrich, Barton, Colfax. Dana's car seats are hospitable, the bolsters nappy, and the carpet vacuumed to resemble a July lawn.
After she saves her $80 and we have scoped out the dead-end moves, we see how my blue Toyota fares. Dana hides her displeasure at its worn, sickly aspect and the cheerless dark vinyl of my car seats, the existentialist gloom of the books in the backseat. Kierkegaard in the Scandinavian being my most procrastinated coursework since I found out about his broken engagement, I have used him as a scarecrow for materialistic vandals.
With Dana and her windshield scrapers, the time in the weary wail is diminished and I don't have to pick up this card: "Go directly to the car jail. Get $50 cash and go directly to the car jail."
During this brutal, beautiful weather, I have come to respect the Danas who punctiliously and pragmatically go to their jobs. I was not acing city life while Dana usually has something refreshing in Tupperware and can exhibit a gallery of needlepoint. Her bookcase has a representation of thoughtful literature about which she says, "I think that C. S. Lewis's Narnia books have made the strongest impression on my life of anything I've read." She had a lovely set of volumes that I thought might lead to Dana admitting a dependence on religion. But she was not that gauche.
Dana was dependent on something - her two sisters who were also installed at jobs with unassailable companies. Because of her veneer, I hadn't expected that Dana was from a town in Northern Minnesota whose mines were definitely depleted. Dana's father was of course involved somewhere in this, however she knew him while he was walking out to find fresher prospects. Although Dana's last name, not a common one, was that of a prominent Minneapolis family, Dana did not hide the information that her delinquent father came back and was not welcomed. Dana and her sisters ra rely visited the dismal demesne that they didn't refer to as a hometown and she was reluctant to return to it in conversation.
Yet I didn't feel deserted knocking on Dana's door and finding that she was gone. I had wracked my radio for word about snow emergencies and found that I had to move my car or set my alarm for early morning. Donned in a shapeless ski jacket, a dull boy's beanie, and the mangy sort of scarf that covers disfavored faces, I was ready to risk the streets, a sexless creature. Dana would not recommend me going out alone but she would recommend the costume.
I like a nighttime cruise, passing homes that have the glow of people drinking cocoa while a few blocks away, rundown houses are being raided for cocaine. The snow with its opulent texture and its carefree consistency seemed to make all things possible. It would redress inequities, boulevards peppered by the street and yards that had become hardened and hollow. All would be like papier mache wedding cake samples.
In Minneapolis, women under thirty are often offered a career in prostitution; at the same time, women go the other way, often spending months in celibacy between marriage prospects. I deluded myself into such a reactionary mood, away from the down-to-earth Dana. As if I was above the game board instead of being a game piece, I let myself soar and feel celebratory.
I planned airplane trips and that a male friend would welcome me in Scandinavia. I was going to make presentations on Scandinavian feminism despite the Kierkegaards not wanting public mention of the women they had jilted. I did not see why I couldn't translate the newly national writer, Garrison Keillor, into the Swedish. I putzed around in a cloud of crystals, forgetting that two million people surrounded me. Eventually I saw that I would have to concentrate completely on finding a parking spot.
Having found my bearings on Barton Avenue, I pushed on with my marker through the flying snow to where I had previously made a bargain with an angel at a laundromat near Lyndale Avenue. I hadn't told Dana about my dubious finish in some rounds of our game. Nitpickers do not disregard this sort of sign: "Customer parking. Trespassers will be towed." One thwarted evening, I had the cunning to prop a load of laundry in my back seat. Afterwards, I parked there a second and a third time, and protected my anonymous host.
There were other forces at work besides simple law, I felt, parking and walking under the city streetlights that grow stronger and brighter as overspreading trees. In the morning though, I would have to take the top card from the pile of circumstance.
Until then, I would be correcting German language quizzes, a task similar to shoveling for me since I was in graduate school to teach college Swedish and stop teaching high school German.
A faceless crowd before me, scads of strangers that might be in a crazed state over a mishap with a quiz if I met them, my mind drifted to Dana. The new snow brought speculations with it, a pleasant thought that Dana's boyfriend had returned, craving her sanity.
She would explain, "I couldn't refuse to see him. He was like a boy, broken-hearted because he didn't like his new teacher."
Or she might be shamefaced, rationalizing a late night out: "Would you like to see the new container for salad lunches that I got at my Tupperware party last night? Linda's husband had a friend over and he wanted to know about Horizons. You know I took those woman car mechanic courses so I was fluent. He lives over on Fremont at a place with one of those little parking lots. He let me park there last night."
Such a scenario was probably in my stack of strangers. But Dana's life was at an old game board, a game that couldn't be concluded sometimes because of balking setbacks and slow gains. When I saw her next, she would probably chatter about staying at her sister's, a house full of aging wood and thrift in a more mixed neighborhood of Minneapolis. Her sister worked at a day care center and had a child of her own.
"Putting money in a house over there is like buying St. James Place in Monopoly," Dana would say and still with extreme sensibleness, "I've got Bonita here. Say hi, Bonita. Do you think people are right in saying that she looks East Indian?" And then she introduced her sister's mulatto child whose father, not at her house everyday now, is black, not East Indian.
Coming back from the university and seeing an extra-long couch in the window of a second-hand furniture store, I was imagining a tired man slouching on its sheen and suggesting that I must become a bride when a whisper came from Dana's doorway.
Most communication with Dana centers on duty. And her entreaty, "Glorianne! Do you have a minute?" might extend to the hour it would take to go out voting. Not intending to be in that city in two years time, I didn't mind my untidy tenuous cloud.
But Dana had the suspense of the trustworthy gossip and the invisibility of a witness. She said earnestly, "Could you look out the front door and see if a police car goes past?"
I did as she asked, opening my mail while I watched for the flag-blue that makes police cars distinct from the snow. Dana was shrinking to shadow, I supposed, because a scoundrel was doing something illegal outside of our building or a scoundrel was doing something inside to one of the women. Yet I was confident that Dana would not compromise my safety.
"Did you see any?" came a whisper as well-projected as an actress's on the Guthrie Theater stage.
When I said I hadn't, Dana materialized and ushered me into her apartment where she peeked past her closed curtains. But she resembled the well-meaning widow, spying at a naughty neighbor from a room lit by flower-bright upholstery. When I saw her drained face though, I remembered that her whole being had been reduced to a whisper.
Hushed, she said, "Would you look out the curtains and I'll tell you why. A police car went by, slowly, about fifteen minutes ago. Glorianne, they're after my car! I stole it from the city lot!"
Still sensible, she was disclosing a situation that was outside the natural laws of this world. The evergreen trees had bloomed with winter cactus flowers. Our snow had cures with crystals and the city was mining and selling it. An actor was president. I was agog.
"Can you look out there?" Dana cajoled me, courteously as ever, because I was reluctant to take the fugitive's role. She might have been reminding me to get a pail of gravel.
Then she quickly explained, "It was three minutes after nine this morning when I got to my car. A policeman beat me there and he was writing a ticket. And the tow truck was waiting down the street. I said, 'Oh, you don't need to do that. I'm just on my way to work.'"
I've never heard Dana raise her voice. She inflects it, making any topic one of mutual consent. The result is that she gets along with people. And she stood there, capable and clean as she always looks, just hefty enough to be strong, not fat.
"'Lady, we get started in the most congested areas,' the policeman said and slapped the ticket on my windshield. I saw a bonus in his eyes as the tow truck came to clamp my car. 'But you're congesting the street now,' I had to notice. 'Ma'am,' he said, downgrading me from lady, 'I know my job.' I was so mad! As if his job is to rip off women instead of helping them. I watched them lift my car and take it away. Then I was late for work."
Another occurrence not of this world's natural laws.
"Can I tell you the rest in your apartment?" Dana said hurriedly although she didn't forget my mail on her coffee table.
She kept her eye on a stretch of the street seen from my window. "After work, I went to the city lot on Nicollet. I saw my car right away. Of course, the bum there had no time for me. He didn't even see me because he was on the phone, trying to locate someone's Maserati. Probably had a bad name in the used car business. I wandered out of the office and sat in my car, put my key in the ignition. I just couldn't go back and give him $40. And the driveway ga te was open. So I started inching towards it. And then I drove out. It was all wrong. It was so wrong of them to tow it. Just the sort of bum who can't keep records."
Dana's dignity and indignation made her addition on the bill of reality seem right. I gave her a cup of coffee and then she babbled on for an hour, analyzing the entire city system and giving rationales for her behavior. I listened for the doorbell but I knew another kind of justice was in operation. I suppose Dana got it from her C. S. Lewis books. As she went on and on though, I could only see the emotional female that had emerged, confronted with something that was denied her, something taken from her, and that she had a once-in-a-blue-moon opporunity - to take what was hers.
Dana went back to her apartment hungry for supper, and we never talked of the incident again. It was as if it had never happened, a fictional event ruled by character and justice extending beyond the power of the human being.
Of course, I told my dinner companion only a portion of this, men being what they are.
"So when you see Dana, you won't act as if you ever heard any such story? Maybe Dana made the whole thing up. I like to imagine Kierkegaard appearing out of my backseat and arguing with the policemen."
My dinner partner was looking for the waitress, either for the check or to order a dessert tostada.
"I couldn't do that because I wouldn't have Dana's self-possession," I said. "I'm the kind that gets caught."
It seemed as if my companion didn't hear this but I could feel his cold feet nudging my cold feet under the table.
- 1996, Duluth -