Human Being Songs: Northern Stories

By Jean Anderson

The public image of Alaska for those who live elsewhere tends to be bound up with the outdoors. But while that’s not necessarily false, it’s a far from complete picture. This collection of stories shows us what we’re missing: set in Alaska’s cities and suburbs, homes and back roads, cars and kitchens and bedrooms, it offers not tales of adventures, but quietly powerful psychological dramas, introspective explorations of the private triumphs and failures of personal life played out in an extraordinary place.
 
Jean Anderson delicately balances the lyrical and the experimental to tell the stories of hardworking Alaskans—teachers, laborers, dental hygienists, artists—worrying over fairness and equity and meaning, falling in and out of love, and pondering elusive, long-dreamed-of goals. Powered by a rich empathy, Human Being Songs shows us life in Alaska as it’s actually lived today—its successes, failures, and moments of transcendent beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781602233140

Jean Anderson

JEAN ANDERSON, the author of more than 20 cookbooks, has written articles for Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Gourmet, More, and other national magazines. A six-time best cookbook award winner (James Beard, IACP, and Tastemaker), she is a member of the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame and a founding member of both Les Dames d'Escoffier and the New York Women's Culinary Alliance. 

Book preview

Profligate

My mother carries her money in a plastic baggie. Sitting next to me on the blue plush plane seat, she extracts a shiny transparent lump from her purse and unzips it to count currency into the steward’s girlish hand: separate coins like raisins or buttons in the cool darkness of the plane, U.S. dollar bills neatly folded as Kleenex.

She’s buying us each a Maui Mai Tai, her idea but the young steward’s suggestion. Odd, since her strongest lifelong alcoholic beverage of choice has been beer, tiny amounts sipped warm from a teacup, when I was a child at least, for her pleurisy. She first asked the steward for two Bloody Marys but then decided she doesn’t care that much for Spicy Tom—do I?

I’m shaking my head, and the steward, who is barely twenty-one if my guess is accurate, appears to be flirting with my mother. Who is seventy-four years plus ten days—this trip is a birthday gift. The drinks and the flirting seem a blend, elaborate hand and body motions like a dance in place in the dark aisle from the steward, then a bottled juice called Fruitopia, over ice, poured with rum from two tiny bottles into two plastic cups, and pineapple chunks speared on long, elegant toothpicks. I’m thinking all at once, and I don’t know why, of how much Siberians love Ziploc bags, how they save them, use them for everything, but not plastic cups. The steward leaves us the tiny bottles of rum, twirls his fingers at my mother before he begins to push his heavy cart down the aisle, commanding us airily: Enjoy! And I know suddenly, though who knows why, or why this, or why now, that I too never have been—no, and probably never will be—profligate. Mom worried over that tendency in me once, I think: that her toothy daughter who drank milk like water during and after meals all through childhood would turn out to be profligate.

We’re flying to Hawaii from Anchorage—cheap off-season tickets that include three days in a close-to-the-beach hotel, my treat but my mother’s lifelong dream. It’s the first trip to Hawaii for each of us, Mom’s second time on an airplane, and I’m not yet thinking of Aeroflot, which I always do these days when I fly.

Her first jet flight was a week ago, Cincinnati to Anchorage, where I’ve lived for a year, to visit me—my twenty-fifth year in Alaska and her first time in the North. My most recent flights were to Cincinnati then back to Anchorage with Mom, one week ago, then on to Fairbanks together by car to visit my sons, and to treeless and windy Bethel in southwest Alaska three weeks earlier, alone, to teach dental hygiene techniques to nurses at the regional hospital. Before that, the chopped-up remains of Aeroflot: the Russian Far East, and then Siberia, which I love—six weeks teaching the same courses over and over, in Magadan, rainy Khabarovsk, Petropavlovsk, then Sakha, in or around Yakutsk.

These are words, places, even skills I never expected to find in my life, and all have come in the last three years: divorce, Anchorage, Siberia, dental hygiene education, and zoobastay (large-toothed in Russian)—a long-term health advantage I’d always viewed in my own case, in my own mouth, as a disadvantage—so ugly-looking—and now death. Again. Maybe Mom and I will learn to be profligate, facing death.

Do you miss Dad? I ask that while we sip at our Maui Mai Tais, and she stops sipping to answer. She places her plastic cup on my fold-down tray, which we’re sharing, touches her chin with a fingertip and her thumb—newly gnarled and yet beautiful, fingers still beautiful, a hand so loved, so amazingly familiar to my eyes that I feel shocked by the sight: nearly as well-known as my own fingers and hand.

"Miss is an odd word, isn’t it?" she answers.

I miss him sometimes, I say. Funny I guess, since we were together so seldom, Russell and I living in Alaska. Because they never visited me. Not once over the years. Travel a reckless behavior that Dad seemed to consider impossible. But I do miss him.

His jokes, she says.

That’s it for me too. What Dad would have said, always a joke, about this or that.

He wouldn’t have liked this, she says, lifting her plastic cup and sipping. Do they really drink so much as the newspapers say? In Russia?

Not the people I’ve met. Statistically though. I’m nodding. It’s a big problem. For Alaskans too. Maybe the climate.

Drinking’s one way you can break free, I suppose. But then people drink in Hawaii too, don’t they? I read that in a travel book. She’s smiling again, sipping. This is very sweet. Too sweet for you?

I’m shaking my head. I can hardly believe what Mom’s doctor told my sister Lorraine last month: metastasized, profligate cells, no treatment possible, less than a year. And that he thinks Mom already knows. He feels certain she knows, after all her surgeries. That there’s no need to tell her, he thinks. She wouldn’t want to be told in words. It would be too difficult, too painful for all.

She looks pretty good to me, almost well. Dark and mysterious-looking as always: pretty, yet elusive. Bittersweet, a secretive look, and not gray at all. But pale and thin. But then she’s always been thin. And white-skinned. Dark and yet fair—as I am. And as inconsistent. Timid-seeming then startlingly bold, each of us. But she wanted to come—to see Alaska, then fly on to Hawaii. I’m thinking that: she wanted to.

He was proud of you. She’s speaking of Dad again I know, her mind filled with shifts and curves like my own. Did you know that?

I’m hunting for words, but she’s going on. "He wasn’t so—easy a man as most people thought. But he never did mind not having sons."

Then: Those neighbor girls—Brianna and Mallory? They remind me of you and Sis. They’d like the taste of this. She lifts the plastic glass like a toast to the dark air of the cabin and sips. She’s wearing her new wedding band, the one Dad gave her for their fiftieth anniversary three years ago. Her first wedding band, with its faint tracery of orange blossoms on the delicate braiding of the band, which I loved to look at as a child, had worn through and split with age.

Rather than sell the house our sons grew up in, Russell and I rented it to the oldest, to Mitchell and his family, after we divorced. Two years ago. Mom and I stayed there for our three days in Fairbanks last week, like campers in my former home, with Mitch and Abby and their baby girls—my grandchildren, Melissa and Daisy, an infant and a toddler. That week brought Mom her first real sight of her great-granddaughters. Mom and I slept in the little-girl bedroom, Daisy’s now, that was Mitch’s room once, then the guest room.

It was eerie for me sleeping there, pasts and futures shuffled together like a game of cards in the midnight sun, the way things often feel in Siberia during their White Nights, or even in winter. Change in the air there: Alaska-in-Asia, the Russian Far East—home but not home at all. Which may be one reason I love it. But eerie, like Mom’s first visit to my former home, the house I lived in and loved for twenty years, then suddenly hated.

And Mallory is my former neighbor, a tomboy and nonstop talker who’s eight years old and always rides up breathless on her pint-sized boy’s bike, with her six-year-old cousin Brianna pedaling hard behind on her own pink bike. They’re part of a big Athabascan family, my neighbors for years till Russell and I divorced. Through two marriages for Mallory’s mother and with more births and deaths in their clan than I could count or even remember if I tried.

The girls came to visit Mom, to talk, every day during our few days in Fairbanks, just as Mallory and her older sister Lauren used to visit me when I lived there. They’d show up like clockwork on their tiny bikes back then, often at mealtime—Russell hated it—sometimes twice a day or more often. So Mom already knew them in a way, Mallory’s family, from my phone calls and letters over the years.

Did they show you how they make raspberry jam? Mom is smiling and I’m shaking my head again.

Mallory and Brianna? Mom saw them, I didn’t, like the dancers from Yakutsk, the Sakha Circus at the Tanana Valley Fair in Fairbanks last week—even sandhill cranes that nest in summer in Siberia flying overhead while they danced. I’ve probably missed Mallory, and the wild cranes and the birch woods and that raspberry patch at the end of our driveway, as much as anything else since I