After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey Read Free Book Online

when you leave.”
    I step beyond the terminal, into the air outside O’Hare, and it’s like inhaling shards
     of glass. And then there’s the snow. Endless shoveling. People get nutty about it.
     After a storm, people emerge blinking but single-minded, their only thought to dig
     out their cars, buried in drifts before their homes. And then, when they finally free
     their cars, they drag old kitchen chairs out to mark their places. Stake their claim.
     Drive down a Chicago side street in January. Amid the snowbanks, chair after battered
     chair. Like so many thrones for Old Man Winter.
    Chicago. I am of that place. Spires loom. The sky, a soiled shroud. Even as a kid,
     I knew it was my Old Country. Where leaves get trapped and battered in dark gangways.
     Where cabbages boil in every kitchen and bitter steam stains dim windows. Where old
     Polacks nurse Old Styles in taverns on Ashland Avenue and, outside, women wait huddled
     for buses grinding streets that stretch to the horizon. From my grandmother’s attic,
     I could see the garbage dumps beyond the railroad tracks. They had been filled years
     before I was born. Covered with new soil. Sodded with fresh grass. New land. And pipes
     were stuck here and there, spewing fire. Burning off the methane. At night, I’d stare
     out the window, watching pale blue flames flicker like hopeful campfires of settlers
     on the prairie.
    #
    Winter, my mother always kept the house as cold as possible. “Put on a sweater,” she’d
     say whenever I tell her I am cold.
    I am cold every day. Some days, I wear three sweaters and two pairs of socks, sitting
     there in the basement with my brother, the afghan pulled over us, watching Hogan’s Heroes . Imprisoned men having fun.
    At night, my mother would drop the thermostat to fifty-nine. I’d sleep in a knit hat
     and socks.
    In the depth of winter, mornings still black as sin and the wind blowing jagged crystals
     of ice-snow against the bedroom window, I’d go downstairs for breakfast and my mother
     still would not raise the thermostat. What she’d do instead: Turn on the oven and
     open it. I’d pull my chair in front of it. Eat my breakfast and stare at the flames.
    One night I couldn’t stand it anymore, and on my way to bed I turned the thermostat
     up. To sixty-two.
    The next morning I come into the kitchen, and as I sit down she plants herself before
     the oven and blocks my warmth.
    “Did you touch the thermostat?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t gaslight me,” she says.
    I look at her.
    “Do you know what gaslighting is?”
    “No.” (I’m ten. What does she want?)
    “It’s a movie,” she says. “It’s all about this man who tries to drive his wife crazy
     by dimming the lights in their house, and whenever she asks, ‘Is it getting darker
     in here?’ he says, ‘No.’ And she starts to lose her mind. But this detective, Joseph
     Cotten—oh, you know I’ve always had the biggest crush on him—saves her from her cruel
     husband. Turns out not only is he trying to drive her mad, he’s also leading a whole
     double life outside the home.”
    She looks at me.
    “That’s gaslighting,” she says.
    “I didn’t do anything,” I say.
    I went out into the frozen morning. School. The only sound the crunch of my boots
     on iced-snow and the scream of another Final Approach.
    #
    Final Approach.
    Over and over, that’s all we heard.
    Life in the shadow of O’Hare. ORD—what this land was beforethe airport was: orchards. Men took it for the airport’s original name: Orchard Field.
     The origin of ORD. Acres and acres of apple trees. As a boy, I rode my bike to O’Hare,
     circumnavigated its fenced-in perimeter. That’s how I found the forgotten orchards.
     A patch of the past. In the fall, their apples rot unwanted. All that remains. That
     and the cemetery. Graves at the far edge of a runway. Chain-link fence. Weathered,
     worn stones. The remains of settlers. Germans. Some Swedes. Their church was here.
     After