Chicago in winter is one thing.
She never believed me, but there is a difference, between this and say Wisconsin. When I lived in Wisconsin, I lived on Lake Michigan and to get home had to drive through miles of cabbage farms; the houses on the farms made more of shadow and shape than mortar and brick and beside certain decrepit structures fields stretched out like screams.
In the spring – and here is what I mean, my point – the fish the lake had swept ashore before freezing began to thaw along with the dead heads of cabbage farmers pitched into ditches before the first frost and the smell was impressive and there was no spring fever, no ides of March, just spring: the rot of everything that had once lived.
When I told her I sometimes missed Wisconsin, she said she couldn’t see what there was to miss. “You need to get out of the Midwest,” she told me. “Have you ever noticed every highway runs straight to another state?”
She told me I couldn’t be from the Midwest. “People from the Midwest don’t talk the way you talk,” she said.
I told her a story about my parents’ dog, how I came to visit one day and he was hyperactive, tried to “instigate play.”
She raised her eyebrows, “Instigate play?”
“Yes,” I said. “Instigate play.”
“I like the way you talk,” she said. “You must have been rich in a past life.” She believed in past lives, described chandeliers and spiral staircases and long gilded cigarette holders.
