Midwest

It is summer of 1978, and a woman without a wedding ring drives east on the Will Roger’s Turnpike, the straightest route out of the State of Oklahoma. Drooping grasses and yellowed brush drop away on either side, leaning westward, as if to point her back to where she started. It is early afternoon and her husband will not be home for hours. The woman wears her dark hair long but full. It is a style fashionable to Oklahoma City women, and her eyes, big in her face as a starving child’s, are traced in black liner.  White cotton bellbottoms encase her thighs, and an embroidered peasant blouse of red and white covers her slightly sloping shoulders. The memory of a bruise blooms sallow over one cheek. She drives just under the speed limit, worried that the car will overheat in the desert heat.

The summer after my nineteenth birthday, Cedar Point paid me excellent money to wear a wig of raven tresses and full-length gown of rich blue satin and to be trailed by seven little people with names like Bashful. My friend Sara had gotten me the job. Thirty-two with a youthful face, she’d been hired the previous month as Goldilocks. 

On our lunch breaks, I took off my wig and scratched my scalp while removing cold cuts out of my Chef's salad; Sara talked incessantly about her new boyfriend Leonard, who worked at the local Lube Stop and with whom she was dabbling in S&M. 

Throughout my workday, I’d rest with the little people on the benches scattered throughout the park, waving grandly to Pinocchio, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rumpelstiltskin. We were all paid the same rate. Some of us, like the Big Bad Wolf, were paid to scowl and look menacing; others, like Sara, were paid to look bedraggled and confused. 

“On the other side then” “torrential against the shape of rain”
“I met everyone on behalf of” “the child who brought me here”
“The ground caves in at spots” “and beneath the streets are
seasons” “with their own rooms” “These must be the barracks,”
“where the whole situation sleeps and speaks” “in tongues

“A man comes to me” “with patches on his eyes”
“he has already been here” “behind me” “for years”
“He says” “ ‘Brother, it has been a long time’ ”
“I remember:” “this is a place” “outside of gender”
“I should not have called him ‘him’ ”

“The story is told” “of someone’s relative” “who died here
last spring” “There is war going on” “a dying war” “down
the road” “it is fought for ideas of lifelessness” “and dressed
like a parade” “with characteristics of language;” “having a trial
of dialogue” “with the memories of the dead” “A small place”
“sits heavily on the Past”

Maggie’s grandmother grew turnips. Maggie remembers the dirt under her grandmother’s fingernails and in the creases of her hands after digging them out of the backyard garden on the West side of Detroit. Her grandmother ate them raw, without washing. Maggie’s grandmother made rutabaga pies for the holidays, from a recipe her mother brought over from Hungary, when the family immigrated to the U.S. in 1910. As a child, Maggie was uncomfortable with root vegetables, and with their corresponding, foreign words. Tarlórépa, cékla, retek. Maggie ate her first turnip accidentally at the age of twenty-five, at an unmemorable restaurant, in the form of a cream soup.

Maggie’s mother grows tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers in her backyard garden, and occasionally, she bakes. Maggie’s mother has recipes that have been passed down through the family’s female lineage, scrawled on index cards located in the metal box she keeps in the pantry.