1
WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND
FROM THE PORCH steps of the house where I grew up, you’ll see the end of the road. There, the pavement dips down to reveal the town’s only traffic light, a gas station, and the roof of the Family Dollar store. Behind the store lies the Androscoggin and just beyond the river, the paper mill’s largest smokestack emerges like a giant concrete finger. From anywhere in town, you can orient yourself to this stack, or by the ever-present ca-chink ca-chink ca-chink of the mill’s conveyor belts, and find your way home even from a pitch-black walk in the woods. When mill shutdowns occur for holidays or layoffs, the smokeless stacks resemble the diseased birch trees dying throughout New England.
To the right of the porch you’ll see a street of clapboard homes, silent but for the occasional snarl of a jake brake on a logging truck or a motorcycle shifting gears. A mile or two out of town, the road narrows, and small creeks knit through pastures shadowed by hills, a working farm or two, a long straight road, cut hay, muddy cow paths, rotting leaves, or black ice, depending on the time of year. The seasons, they calendared our lives.
Farther up the road you’ll eventually bump into the North Maine Woods. If you look at a map, you’ll get an idea of the yawning jurisdiction of the area, which lies (generally) within the twisted pavement of Route 2, Interstate 95, and the Canadian border, their lines lassoing the wilderness within. The Woods are a deluge of spruce, fir, hemlock, and beech, a steady brown and green canopy fractured by silvery brooks or iron gray lakes. The damp mossy understory and thick brush, claustrophobic with tangled twigs and scant cabins, hide the chewed-up dirt logging roads that colonize the backcountry. I didn’t pay much attention to those darker, deeper woods because there were already so many trees right in our backyard.
My mother stayed home while my father worked: her making pot roast, him making smokestack money. As kids, we explored the world through textbooks and made classroom dioramas of what we thought a Mayan village or a Midwestern dairy farm looked like. The rest of the world seemed to be New Hampshire or Canada. Families didn’t go on overseas vacations and rarely traveled interstate. Our lives were focused inward … Red Sox games, union strikes, and grousing about the weather.
Monumental philosophical ideas were surfacing across America—feminism, environmentalism—however, there were no movements in Mexico but for people walking across the mill’s footbridge to work. We were more likely to dry bras on a clothesline than burn them. We lived in a Shrinky Dink world where everything was there, just smaller. We were lucky in this, felt safe with our doors unlocked at night, and ameliorated most of our sins within the latched doors of St. Theresa’s confessional. At nighttime football games, we watched our fire-twirling majorettes toss their batons skyward in a spinning, blazing fan. They caught them dead center every time. Those kerosene-soaked batons in the dusk of autumn, they smelled of permanence.
From October to April, oil-burning furnaces heaved in our basements while outside, the violence of chainsaws making firewood meant things were getting done. Winter insulted us with frequent storms that hurled wet pillows of snow into our faces or horizontal pellets of icy rain onto our footpaths. In a weekly dirge, we’d crack the ice on the walkway or throw one fat shovelful of snow after the other into white pyramids while our breath funneled out in smoky vapors. Passers-by on their way to work, unrecognizable in the bulk of their warmth, would wave a shallow hello as we huffed through our chores. As people and winter lumbered along, sidewalks became glacial, leaving everyone to walk in the middle of the road. We all complained, yet nobody ever thought to leave. Weather was just something we endured.
One year blended into the next with only slight differences in star athletes or town leaders and sometimes one turned into the other. Family businesses occupied Mexico’s Main Street, anchored by the Chicken Coop—“Good Eatin’ That’s Our Greetin’!” their tagline declared in flat red paint. The Bowl-O-Drome, Lazarou’s car dealership, WRUM, RadioShack, Dick’s Restaurant, the Dairy Queen, the Far East Restaurant (the “Chinah Dinah”), a carwash, and Maddy’s Pizza murmured with people doing their thing. Businesses opened and closed with the seasons and the sun. Before my time, Boivin’s Store, Stanley the grocer, T.M. Stevens Dry Goods, a theater, a livery, a dowel mill. Once there was even a hotel. At the rim of town, the mill footbridge, where three generations of my family and exponential relatives crossed, as did most millworkers who spread cretons on their toast before clocking in. We were stamped out like Christmas cookies, as good French Catholics were.
Everything else we needed was in Rumford, the larger of the two connected towns and the commercial center of our community. At times there were deep rivalries and frictions between Rumford and Mexico, but we were always tethered by blood, two bridges, a dependency on the mill, and by around 2009, schools and a single grocery store.
Overall, what we needed we had. Everyone knew everyone and we liked it that way—for what other way was there? It was quite the place, my mother always says. There was never any reason to leave. In our nuclear family of seven, we always had enough food, plenty of hand-me-downs, some spanking, and an unspoken love for each other, because frankly, nobody really spoke much about love at all.
In the drowsy dusk of summertime when the sun dipped under the foothills and the humidity of the day invaded kitchens and bedrooms, people flocked to their porches. There, they chatted while night knit itself into a tight blanket. As the sun sank, one by one, mimicking fireflies, house lights flicked on and porch lights flicked off and people streamed inside for the evening. The sounds of clinking dishes, faint music, vehicles purring, and light-as-vapor laughter scented the air. Night fell like a bruise.
During those school-less summer days, I often sat on the dusty curb in front of our house and counted the out-of-state license plates as they sped by on their way to somewhere else. When I could finally drive, I’d cruise around with other teenagers, pivoting our used Monte Carlo in the Tourist Information Booth parking lot before another revolution through town. My parents thought the Information Booth was where all the “druggies” hung out, but really it was a harmless venue in a small town with nothing else to do but drive around in circles.
My parents shaped their own well-worn paths. While my father walked back and forth across the mill footbridge to and from work, my mother lugged laundry up and down the cellar stairs, day after day, one skinny arm cradling the laundry basket, her free hand gripping a Vantage, a cigarette brand whose packet featured a bull’s-eye graphic design. With a screech and a whack, the screen door would slam shut after she elbowed it open. She would dump clean laundry on the kitchen table, snap each article of clothing three times, fold them sharply into tight wedges of fabric, and stack them like the reams of white paper my father brought home from the mill. When the screen door wore out, my mother replaced it with a new one that already came equipped with a squeaky spring. She left it defective, announcing herself into infinity with only my father to hear. His hearing, long dulled by the hum of paper machines, was the perfect match to her perpetual clamor. My mother, she’d let her Vantage expire before finishing it and send me to fetch her a new pack from the corner store. I’ll time you, she’d say. Now GO! And off I went. She didn’t need to tell me twice.
Things stayed in this balance, with minor adjustments every now and then, until America’s working-class towns started to ebb alongside the industries that nourished them. The future? We knew nothing of it. Our horizon trembled like a fragile convex meniscus, brimming away from the landscape that held it. All of what was before us was not as bright as what had passed.
* * *
I LEFT MAINE in 1985 after graduating from high school to attend Beloit College in Wisconsin, where an oily, vomit-like smell—the “cheese breeze”—gusted from the nearby Frito Lay Cheetos factory. Even in the funky scrum of Wisconsin air, I believed I had left my past behind. All the old ways and places fell out of view. Little did I know there were armies of us across America who felt this way: hopeful young adults from small towns who were trying to find our way, another way. What none of us foresaw, however, as we marched down those roads not taken by our parents, is that leaving home can be as complicated as living there and as inescapable as our own DNA.
After college, I lived in dozens of places and rotated through dozens of low-wage jobs: short-order cook, cocktail waitress, ski coach, dishwasher, nanny, graphic designer, shipping manager, chairlift operator, gardener, copywriter, high school gym teacher, real estate assistant, to name a few. In 2001, I married a US Coast Guard officer, but in 2009 a permanent job and home still remain out of reach. His duty stations, while not always perfect, are always determined by a perfect stranger (his military detailer), so the only constant in our mobile life is that we are constantly mobile. With him, I slingshotted around the world and back only to return home each time with a dimmer sense of “home,” though my parents still live in the same house and my four siblings have settled in the Northeast. I keep returning to Maine, of course, but my visits are always focused affairs: holidays, weddings, family birthdays or anniversaries, and funerals like my grandfather’s, which brings me home now, in April 2009.
* * *
SPRING HAS ARRIVED in Maine with driveways full of snowplow debris; salt stains, shredded earth, and derelict mittens lie in the wake of its embracing path. Dirty buttresses of snow linger like pocked monoliths, meting out the season’s arrival. The swollen Androscoggin pushes flotsam downriver in the commotion of spring’s thaw, and soon, hatches will burst along its surface until summer opens like an oven.
My mother comes out to the porch where I’m standing. The house sighs with winter’s leftover lethargy. “Want to go for a walk?” she asks, her face pinched with the sharpness of her father’s death.
We head up Highland Terrace and stop to peek in the windows of an abandoned house, one I always liked, with its wraparound porch, turreted roof, and buttercup-yellow paint. “The owner is sick but refuses to sell,” my mother says as we walk across its battered porch. So this once elegant home sits there, shedding its brightness, yellow flecking the half-frozen ground. Spray-painted in the road near the driveway: “Fuck you, bitch.” The fug of the mill swallows us.
We reach the top of the hill, and from there, my old high school. To the east, snowmobile trails; abutting them, the mill’s landfills. To the west, the football field slices the horizon. Beyond, lazy fingers of smoke lick the sky.
Inside the school, my mother stops in the office to chat with the principal she knows well. The lobby’s smells—warm mashed potatoes, Band-Aids, and damp socks—remind me of Greg Chiasson, my high school on-again, off-again, lumberjackish boyfriend. Greg lived near the town incinerator, whose sweep of ash always whispered across his front lawn. I loved Greg like I would a sorry stuffed animal, one who had lost an eye or whose fur was rubbed raw. Kelly, a girl who wore her black, perfectly feathered hair like a weapon, was in love with him too. When he and I fought—usually over her—I’d listen to sad songs on my cassette player over and over until he called for my forgivingness in a pattern of pain and redemption.
I only saw Greg once after graduating from high school. He visited my parents when I was home from college one Christmas break. He and my mother chatted while I leaned against the kitchen countertop. “Peckerhead,” my father said when he saw Greg. He called all the boys I dated Peckerhead, but only if he liked them. If he didn’t, my father would sit at our kitchen table like a boulder while the boy fidgeted by the kitchen door in blank-faced silence.
My mother and I leave the school and follow the dirt path behind the football field past Meroby Elementary, where I got in a fistfight with Lisa (nee Blodgett) Russell. Lisa and I took turns swinging horizontally at each other’s head until a teacher intruded on the brawl. When I looked in the mirror that night, I was sure I looked different, the way you think you do when you lose your virginity. It was my first and last bare-knuckled fight, except for a few unconvincing swipes at good old Kelly one night after a dance. She volleyed back with sharp red fingernails.
Down Granite Street, an untied dog follows us, growling.
“Just ignore him,” my mother says.
The dog sniffs my heels, his tail down. He sits down in the road. I walk faster, looking over my shoulder until we are out of his sight and he is out of ours.
We skirt the Green Church, the library, the town hall, the fire station, and through the mostly empty and oversized parking lot at the Family Dollar where someone is inside a parked car eating their lunch. Nearby, Lazarou’s car lot is filled only with puddles, and where the bowling alley used to be, a sunless cavity notched into the side of a hill. Behind it, St. Theresa’s, our shuttered Catholic church where I received my first Communion, the sacrament of Confirmation, and made my first confession to Father Cyr. I’m sorry I lied to my parents, I said to him, though that itself was a lie.
On the corner at the traffic light is a newish gardening store, newish to me anyway. Lawn decorations, perennials, stuffed animals, and miniature tchotchkes for terrariums strain the well-stocked metal shelves. As in many small towns, most of the mom-and-pop shops have closed over the years. In their place, discount stores like Walmart or local iterations like Marden’s Surplus & Salvage, Wardwell’s Used Furniture, the What Not Shop thrift store, and other such secondhand outlets and pawn shops appeared, as if everyone here deserves only leftovers.
I’m inspecting a snow globe when I hear my mother shout, “Kerri, guess who’s here? Do you know who this is?” Inevitably, she plays this remembering game, often in the grocery store, where she will stand next to someone, grab them by the arm, and ask if I remember so-and-so, and I will stand there, frozen in the frozen foods, staring at my mother and so-and-so, everyone’s eyes like dinner plates, waiting for my answer. Sure, yes, I remember you! I had said yesterday to Mr. Martineau who lived across the street from my grandfather. After Mr. Martineau left my mother told me he has Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t remember you, she whispered.
“Kerri, come see who’s here!” she shouts. I walk toward her, my steps jiggling the shelves of dollhouse-sized terrarium décor as if I’m Gulliver. My mother raises her arms upward like a magician: “DO YOU KNOW WHO THIS IS?” she asks.
“Hi,” the woman next to her says. “Long time no see.” I don’t recognize her beneath dry yellow bangs that slump over round eyeglasses hiding her pink powdered cheeks. On her bulky sweatshirt, something plaid.
“Yeah, what is it, about twenty years?” I say, looking for my mother who has wandered off.
“Where do you live now?” she asks, leaning on the counter, arms crossed like a fortress.
“Oakland,” I say quietly, feeling bad, not knowing why.
“Wait, Oakland, Maine?” she asks.
“California,” I say. “Near San Francisco.”
“Oh,” she says. “I went there once. Didn’t like it. The people are not very nice. I never found anything good to eat.”
I look around for my mother, the exit.
“It seems quiet around town,” I offer. “Much less going on than when we were kids.”
“Not really,” she says.
“Really?” I say, wondering if she means there is something going on or there isn’t. “I went by the Recreation Park yesterday. It’s just so … so different,” I say.
I glance at her around the periphery of her glasses, our conversation. She stares at me over the top of her rims, as patient as a road, looks at me without blinking: my leather jacket, my Prada eyeglasses, my expensive jeans.
“Nope,” she says. “You’re the one that’s different.”
My mother reappears and as we leave the store she says the mill plans to shut down Number 10 paper machine, and others are on a transitional schedule, meaning they too may slither to a slow, hissing halt. In the past few decades, with technology displacing people and digital media overtaking print, the production of coated magazine paper—our mill’s primary product—has become as precarious as the livelihoods of the men and women who make it.
“Nobody will want to live here anymore,” my mother says, panning her hand from one side of the street to the other. Homes sag with ruined lawns.
Around the block, we pass Kimball School, where I and generations of my family attended K–4. On Friday afternoons the entire school gathered in my Aunt Linda’s homeroom, where she taught fourth grade, to sing endless rounds of Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling,” a tune that filled innocent kids with vague titillation with its refrain:
My DING-A-LING!
My DING-A-LING!
I caught you playing with your own ding-a-ling!
Copyright © 2020 by Kerri Arsenault