Read an Excerpt

Wasteland Oasis

Indiana 2008

If we were to arrive at this wedding by helicopter here’s what we would see.

An expanding patch of unnatural green. Neon green. Denial-of-impending-annihilation green. An over-bright amoeba, surrounded by the stacks of Northwest Indiana. Windowless steel mills, smoke spume, ground that appears as if the skin has been scraped away, a rusty, gouged tableau, wasteland gray interrupted by the peacock blue painted exterior of U.S. Steel Gary Works—as if someone in charge had consulted with a home decorating guru. Shall we try blue, Darling? Costume-party, feather-boa blue? Blue to accent these badlands that would stretch all the way to forever, except for the khaki bumper of Lake Michigan.

This decimated plain, punctured by the green of the golf course, is where my father-in-law, age seventy-five, is about to wed his long-lost, newly found, pinkly smiling, high school sweetheart, in the presence of middle-aged children who would not exist if this father, and this mother, had married each other the first time they were in love.

 

Byway, Skyway

Illinois/Indiana 2008

Of course we don’t arrive by helicopter. Linnea and I fly from Minneapolis to Chicago, then drive the rest of the way to her father’s wedding.

The quickest way to get to the communities lining the Indiana Dunes from downtown Chicago is via the byway of the sky. The western entry to the Indiana Toll Road is an elevated highway built on a scaffolding that laces into the far Southeast Side, a steel filigree supporting the highway up and over the old steel workers’ city. Even knowing what’s ahead, the highway inclining under the wheels of the car as it passes through the toll gate, the signage making clear that this is the exit onto the SKYWAY, it’s still not immediately apparent that this is not just a road but a bridge breaking into open air, so then a shock, the way first the old East Side port and then downtown Gary open beneath us, a pictorial centerfold. Gary is a splay of old-century granite stitched together by the steel docks and bridge girders, contained by the jade release of Lake Michigan, cleaner now than when I was a girl, capped by the granulated blue of a mill-punctured sky.

Linnea is driving. I slap her on the shoulder as the Skyway rises over the centerfold. I hadn’t expected we’d motor into such familiar and unfamiliar cleaving. We are driving toward a gathering of her side of the family, but driving through the Old Country of mine.

When I was teenager I often ended up on the Skyway by accident, veering onto the wrong exit south from the Loop, usually late at night, my car full of friends, likely drunk or high, when the yellow streetlights cast a dingy pall over the toll bridge gates, suggesting the gateway into Hell or at least Purgatory. Once you enter the Skyway in south Chicago there are no exits until Hammond, Indiana, so those lit-up CHICAGO SKYWAY letters over the toll plaza caused my stomach to tighten. Where am I? Do my friends think I’m a bad driver?

                                                How do I get off, out, home?

By comparison, on this June afternoon, the sky could not be a crisper blue. I could stay in this hanging moment forever, Linnea’s steady, square hands clutching the steering wheel, the windows rolled up so as not to muss my shoulder-length hair I’d so carefully flat-ironed in her sister’s bathroom, back on the shinier side of the city where we’d spent the night, my chest, overexposed in my low-cut sundress, goose-pimpling in the breeze of the air conditioning, the Skyway incline out and over, the spread of old avenues opening, hail forgotten city, full of grace.

I almost forget we have someplace to be.