Dishes

“Ma, don't I always getthe dishes done?”“Why do you have to leave them sit? Why can't you just wash them now?”The girl doesn't answer. She doesn't want to tell her ma that the whole road seems to glow at this time of evening, that the light itself is different right now, gold and caressing. The girl and her family lives so far north that the summer sun doesn't set until 9:30 at night, and even at 10 pm, the girl can see a faint glow in the western sky. Until last year their road had been gravel, but the county paved it this spring. Now, skating in the long, late rays on the smooth blacktop makes her feel like she's weightless.But the girl says none of this. Only, “Ma, you know I'll do them.”“Oh, go on,” her mother says.And like that, the girl is out the door. It takes her a minute to lace her skates, pink Impalas that she bought with her own money, and then she's down their driveway and out onto the county road, where everything is gleaming. Waiting.Then she's doing it, the push to one side, the glide, and the transfer, and then the push on the other side, the glide, and the transfer. She thinks as she always does that rollerblading is not so much like flying but swimming, air rushing by her ears like lake water, her arms reaching forward like the front crawl, her leg kicking out in a frog kick. Push glide transfer.The girl goes a few miles down the road with nothing on her mind but light and air and pushglidetransfer before she sees the pink flowers — a giant patch of bull thistle mixed into all the big bluestem grass. She slaloms to a stop and picks her way over the gravel on the shoulder of the road to step down into the ditch. The clump of bull thistle is about ten feet wide, and the stems are almost as tall as she is. Even now with the sun getting lower, a dozen bumblebees weave in and out of the prickling stems, working the hot pink flowers for nectar. But if she looks just a bit more closely at the tufts of the flowers, she sees the other thing she came for, the thing that seems magical and secret: bumblebees sleep under some of the thistles. Some tuck themselves directly under the fuchsia tufts as if the flower heads were little umbrellas, while others bees cling to the green stalks, mixing their legs in with the spines of the thistle. All of their see-through wings are folded neatly on their backs. That has to be magic, the girl thinks, to know where bumblebees sleep?Now that she's stopped skating, she can feel the temperature drop that made the bees stop moving and foraging, that made some of them decide fold their wings and settle in for the night. The girl wears jean shorts and an orange tank top that says “Just Peachy” on it, so she feels the cooling July-night air on her shoulders, arms and legs. As she feels the beginning of a shiver, she can just make out a car coming up the road, and she does the next thing without thinking: she steps around the end of the thistle patch and ducks down behind the stems.She doesn't want anyone to see her there, especially not anyone from school. She does not want to explain what she's doing there, staring at bumblebees. She already feels different enough, a farm girl when so many of her friends are town kids, and she does not want to give away the place where the bumblebees sleep. It is her secret. Her own personal magic.The car passes in the lane opposite without even slowing, and that's when she knows her hiding spot worked. Good. After it has gone, the shiver that the girl felt starting before breaks through. She needs another layer. Tomorrow she'll tie a long sleeve shirt around her waist. She'll wear it like a fairy skirt, only putting it on if she needs it. And just like that she climbs up out of the ditch and skates off again, pushglidetransfer, the air whipping by her like air but also rushing past like lake water. The place did used to be a lake, a long time ago — she learned it in seventh grade science. Lake Agassiz. Push, glide, transfer.When she goes to turn in the driveway to her house, the same boxy gray car that passed her drives by again, and the girl wonders if it's someone she knows, someone from school who has just gotten their license and is out practicing. The road is perfect for practice driving, smooth and with very little traffic.After she leaves her skates in the mudroom, she goes into the kitchen, where the dirty dishes wait.The girl is skating in her fairy skirt, skating skating. She did the dishes before she came out tonight, which made her mom happy. She doesn't mind the chore, really, at least not washing the plates and cups, which her mom got from the Great Northern when the café closed; her mom can't stand to see anything go to waste. The girl likes how heavy those dishes and cups feel in her soapy hands, how she can bang them around a little bit without worrying they'll break. Can make a little noise and splash around and pretend she's working in the diner like her mom did, waiting tables, washing dishes, sometimes even cooking dinner if the cook needed help.Push, glide, transfer. Maybe rollerblading does feel like flying, but our girl can't know for sure because she has never been in an airplane, has never been anywhere you can't drive to. But she does swim. She lives in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, so every summer she swims in lakes and the town pool and even the old quarry outside of town where kids go to party and swing on the rope swing that carries you out over the quarry's water, and you have to drop off at the right moment or else get carried into the brush, and all of it's a blast, especially if you're with your friends. And that's how skating makes her feel, like she's swinging out free in the air, like she's swimming in the cold quarry waters.Push, glide, transfer — she can handle speed now. It isn't scary anymore, not like when she first started rollerblading. Still, when she gets to the junction of the gravel township road, she slaloms to a stop to look for traffic. There never is any traffic, but she stops anyway. Her mother would want her to stop, and she wants to stop, too. Besides, the junction is not too far from the bull thistle patch, the Great Thistle Mother, and she can't skate by without at least saying hello to the bumblebees, without going over to watch them at least for a moment. It is like dipping her fingers in the holy water at St. Cyril's, except the bumblebees are her religion and no one else's. Watching them is her way of saying a “Hail, Mary” or tapping her forehead and chest with holy water.Tonight it's still warm and the patch is alive with bumblebees, at least a hundred, the girl thinks. They crawl over every hot pink tuft, working their needle legs through the long, soft petals of the thistles. Some bumblebees are large and some are small, some bumblebees are black and yellow, but others have a bright belt of fuzzy orange around their middles. The bumblebees with the orange sashes would be her favorites except she doesn't have a favorite. She loves all of the bumblebees, each and every one. Having a favorite might be hurtful, she thinks, so the tricolored bees with their orange cummerbunds are only her favorite in the most secret part of her heart.If a bumblebee lands on a thistle that another bumblebee is already occupying, one of the bumblebees may fly off, but other times the girl has seen both bees keep to their own area and share the thistle. They cooperate, they respect each other's work. The girl likes that about them. Intent on their own foraging, they give each other privacy. Space. They are both tolerant and polite. If she makes the mistake of leaning in too close to study their great shining eyes or translucent wings, a bumblebee will sometimes rise up off the thistle and fly an inch or two in her direction until she backs away, but that's all. They never fly any closer and never sting her. They do not seem as if they are even interested in stinging her. They are not like yellowjackets or white-faced hornets. Once a yellowjacket stung the girl on the ankle, and her skin turned red and stayed hard for a couple weeks.Now she says aloud in the July evening air, “You just want to work on your flowers, don't you?”The bumblebees hum in response.The girl goes on watching for two minutes, three minutes, five — she loses track of time when bumblebees work the bull thistles. She knows she is standing there in the road ditch on the road where her parents live and farm, but she is also someplace in the air with the bumblebees and their transparent wings, which she knows are lighter than garlic husks. The girl has never touched a living bumblebee, never even tried to, but when she finds dead bees on the road, she carries them home with her. She knows they weigh about as much as a postage stamp, and that the black, yellow, and orange fur on their bodies is not fur at all but short hair that feels the same way the tough velvet hair covering the foreheads of the steers in her dad's barn.The girl is thinking about the bumblebees so hard that she does not hear the car coming down the road until it is too late to hide in among the thistles. Fine, she thinks fine. Let them see me. See if I care.The car slows as it approaches. The driver's window is open and the girl tries to look inside to see which of her friends from school is out practicing their driving, but whoever it is has the visor pulled to the side so the girl cannot tell.She's waiting there in the thistle patch for someone — one of her friends or even someone like Jules Gerber or one of the stoner kids in her grade — to call her name, still standing in the ditch before tiptoeing out into the gravel so she can skate over to the slowing car, when she sees the first bumblebees exit the thistle patch. They fly in a line, half a dozen, then a dozen more, leaving the thistles, heading for the car's open window.It surprises the girl. It surprises her enough that she stops moving in her skates, and in the moment that it takes her to stop, more bumblebees join the exodus. The large and the small ones, the yellow-and-black as well as the orange-belted ones — they all fly toward the car's open window and go inside the car. Dozens of them.She hears someone yell inside the car, and then the car begins to move. Erratically at first, then faster, down the road. Hundreds of bumblebees follow it. The black and orange, the larger ones and the smaller ones, the ones with the orange sashes. A swarm.The girl shivers. Something about the line of bumblebees, the cooling air, the boxy gray car — something makes her shiver. She wants to get home. Fast. She clomps out of the gravel onto the paved road and begins to skate, pushtransfer, pushtransfer. The whole three miles home, she skates without stopping, without even gliding. She skates as fast as she can, air rushing past her like water, like the wake from a boat.When she gets to her parents’ house, she is out of breath, and her face and armpits are wet. Who was in the car? It wasn't a kid from school — it didn't sound like a kid. The girl thinks for a moment she should say something to her mother about the car but she doesn't. Her mother might tell her she cannot skate any more on the road, and the girl could not stand that.She sees a dirty coffee cup on the counter where her dad left it after dinner before going out to the fields again. He likes to drink his coffee from the banged-up café cups with their thick lips and handles — he likes that there's enough room for his fingers. The cup's dirty, so the girl does what she's supposed to do: she takes the still damp dishcloth from the swan neck of the faucet where she put it to dry, and she washes her dad's cup, over and over. When she holds the heavy white ceramic under the stream from the faucet, she thinks it's like holding a rock underwater, like holding one of her dad's hands with its rocky calluses.Her dad can work eighteen hours a day if he needs to. Sometimes if he's out combining in the dark, she'll go out and ride with him to keep him company. It's too noisy to talk in the cab, but she helps him keep an eye on the hopper, and she likes the feeling of being so high up off the ground, helping bring the soybeans in.When the girl is done rinsing the cup for the third time, she feels calmer. Everybody in town knows her dad, and probably everybody in the county knows his fields. Some people even call the road by her dad's name. Out on L———’s Road, they say. Out past L———’s farm. Nothing can happen to her on her dad's road. Well, it's not his road, of course it's not. But just the same. She doesn't need to worry about anything on her dad's road.Push, glide, transfer.The girl wasn't going to come skating tonight, she wasn't. She wasn't going to put on her skates, or if she did, she was just going to skate up and down the road by her dad's soybean fields. Not go farther. But she gets outside and the air feels so sweet. The ideal temperature, not one degree too warm and not one degree too cool. She skates up and down the road, in front of her house, push glide transfer. She hears a magpie chattering as it flies overhead, feels the air so sweet against her skin, and the next thing she knows she is skating down the road, down and down, pushglidetransfer, pushglidetransfer. She makes her own breeze as she skates, and she thinks to herself, I'm fast, I'm faster than I've ever been. And when a light wind blows as she skates, it mixes with the breeze she's making, and all the air rushes in her ears like some ocean or sea. That's what her science teacher called Lake Agassiz when she talked about it — a vast inland sea. Bigger than all the Great Lakes put together, with sharks and giant beavers in its waters, and where mammoths and short-faced bears came to drink. The lake was right here where she skates — right under her feet, right underneath her skates. That's why she can hear water rushing, she thinks, and the idea delights her so much she starts to grin there on road all by herself.“I would have swum you, too, Agassiz,” the girl shouts then, and she says the name the way the Ojibwe kids say it: uh-GĂH-seez. She says it again because there is no one to hear her, and she says it a third time because she can. She bark-laughs at the sound of her own voice, and at the air that doesn't even feel like air, and at all the water and wind rushing by.When the girl gets to the junction of the paved county road and the gravel township road, she still feels silly and the air still feels like a kiss on her skin, so she calls out, “Bumblebees, bumblebees, how are the flowers tonight?”She is just tiptoeing down into the road ditch to go over to the Great Thistle Mother when up on the road, the boxy car that she has seen over and over seems to come out of nowhere. It comes from the opposite direction of the girl's house, from someplace to the west, and it skids to a stop up on the road, shooting past her by a few feet and then backing up. When she looks at the person who climbs out of the driver's seat, she understands that she does not know him.He is still ten or twelve feet away from her when he calls her the horrible word.When the girl hears it she knows. She understands what he is, even if she does not know who he is.She slams her feet in the gravel, pushing against the stones, but they catch in her wheels. She cannot push or glide.In the seconds before the man's hand can reach her hair or arm, before he can grab any part of her and pull her toward him, the air around the bull thistle patch begins to waver. The air wavers, and then it begins to swirl and circulate: a dust devil picking up dirt and debris, thistle heads and thistle leaves, and bumblebees. The bumblebees seem like they are being carried upward by the violently turning spiral, or else they are flying faster than the girl has ever seen them fly, responsible for a portion of the churning funnel that now reaches all the way up into the sky.In the milliseconds that the girl watches the dust devil, something is also beginning to happen in the roots of the bull thistle. At the base of the thick stems, water is beginning to bubble up. A small gurgle at first, but the burble grows into a fountain and then into a waterspout, rising up from the dirt at the heart of the thistle. It seems impossible, this spume of water that reaches up into the spinning air, but the girl knows as soon as she sees it that it is water from the old lake. Agassiz. And even though everything is happening in split seconds, the girl can still make out fuchsia green yellow black orange — and glinting wings. And instead of backing away from the coruscating water and roaring air, the girl lurches toward them. She throws her body, her entire self, onto the sticking spines of the thistles. Once she's inside the patch, thousands of bumblebees surround her, buzzing and beating their wings, walking over her, covering her. With the help of the water, the bumblebees begin to lift the girl off the ground, up and up and away from the thing that crawled out of his car in order to hurt her.Because the thistles and bumblebees and even the old lake cannot stand if this story ends another way. And neither can I.In that way the girl disappears. The girl disappears from her paved county road on a July night, her pink Impalas still laced to her feet.