Survival Skills

By the time she turned sixteen, there was little that Laurie Novak had not learned about survival. The many life and death lessons that a girl needs to know growing up in South Dakota were told to her by her father. The short, clustered buildings of her medium-sized hometown offered only a little protection from the dangerous weather of the prairie, and Laurie was barely walking when he first started talking about how to not be killed by its extreme weather. Over the years and in many different locations, with each lesson putting a new strain on different muscle groups and aching the different parts of her heart, his lectures came to her in a steady stream.

At five she learned that if there was an electrical storm with blue flashes swallowing up the stars in their chemical soup, she must immediately squat down.

“Put your hands on your head, Laurie!” her father yelled. “And both elbows need to touch both knees.”

That position made her body a continuous conduit for the lightning to blast right through her, like a pinball, and shoot down into the ground, dodging all her vital organs. Her father had spent an entire May morning drilling her on it in their sloped backyard.

“It’s like leapfrog, Laurie.” He egged her to mimic his own crouched frog position.

“Why don’t you have her pretend that an atomic bomb is being dropped? It’s the same position.” Her mother ridiculed him, her face a chiseled black cloud hovering out of the kitchen window, her blond hair floating like smoke around her face. “Keep those teeth in your head, sweetie,” she yelled to Laurie before slamming the window shut.

Laurie blushed. Her mother didn’t talk quietly like the other women in the neighborhood. Her voice carried like fire across dry prairie grass through the neighbor’s chainlink fences. Laurie’s mother didn’t look like the other moms, who wore culottes and baggy T-shirts. In the summer she wandered around town in summer dresses without collars or cuffs or pleats and in the winter she wore tight jeans.

In the first grade, Laurie overheard the other mothers talking about her mother’s jeans in their adult huddle near the orange drink.

“She must have a constant yeast infection,” Mrs. Demaris said. Mrs. Demaris lived in the red, white, and blue split-level house on the north side of the Novaks.

The houses on their block had only thin ribbons of lawn so the housewives on either side of Laurie’s house had witnessed the lightning lesson. Laurie had seen both of their pale faces pressed against their window screens, eyes as wide as quarters.

“He had that girl squatted down half the morning,” Mrs. Demaris phoned everyone to report. “Her poor little thigh muscles. She’s only six.” Too young to imagine how pathetic she looked to them, with her boy’s haircut the color of raw cotton, her legs shaking from exertion and her eyes squinting in the sun, she had thought they were watching out of an interest in lightning safety.

“Snakes,” he said the year she turned seven, the year he got hard contacts and always had a red, irritated rim around his blue pupils. “Jesus Christ, all the snakes.”

They were parked at the Big Sioux River parking lot, waiting in the air-conditioned car while he decided if it was safe enough to walk the Indian trails that tagged along the river. Laurie looked out her window, scanning the bottom of the riverbank, expecting to see a hissing carpet of calico-backed snakes just lying in wait for a taste of thin leg.

Laurie had learned all about snakes while visiting her grandmother’s house that perched on the banks of the Missouri River. Her grandmother Marie lived in a dusty tourist town called Chamberlain. According to her father, Chamberlain was a hotbed of poisonous snakes, and seeing all the rattlesnake wallets and belts that were available in the gift shop of the local café, Laurie found that easy to believe. It was Chamberlain where she learned that if she accidentally stepped on a snake’s patchwork body and its fangs found her doughy calf, she had only minutes to cut an X into her skin and have someone suck the venom out of her blood before the poison began its quick progression to her heart.

“Like this, Laurie. Right over the fang marks.” Her dad held her leg firmly on his lap while he drew a small, black X on her skin that looked like a cross-stitch. “Instead of a marker, you would use a knife. You understand that, Laurie, right?”

Her mother rocked away in grandma’s recliner.

“I don’t have a knife, Daddy,” Laurie said. She didn’t tell him that she wasn’t allowed to play with knives.

“I have one. And until you are old enough, I’ll carry a knife for you.”

Her grandmother, who even though she was Laurie’s mother’s mother, acted more like she was the mother of her father, appreciated his lessons. Her own children, including Laurie’s mother, had learned all about polio, dust storms, tornadoes, and tractor safety in a similar, urgent tone.

“I knew a girl who was killed by a snake,” her grandmother bragged. “She reached in a bush at school to get a ball and the damned thing was waiting. Got her hand.” She held up her own shaky hand to look like the head of a snake. Laurie felt weak. She crossed the living room to sit on her father’s lap. “Her parents, they were Finns, they asked all the little girls in her class to be the pallbearers.” Her grandmother added a third pair of socks to her feet, bending over in her chair. “That was a good summer to be a mortician. We lost half our class to scarlet fever and one of the Anderson boys to rabies.” Laurie pictured a boy foaming at the mouth and his scared family cowering behind their living room furniture.

“Summers in South Dakota are no place to have kids hanging around,” her grandma added. Nobody had to say that South Dakota winters were no place to have a kid either.

In the winter, Laurie spent all day under fluorescent lights at school and in pitch darkness any time she stepped outside to run to a warm car. They ate their family supper in front of a television set as anchorpeople talked about everyone who had died that day of hypothermia or by falling through the ice.
“See?” Her father would raise a blond eyebrow at Laurie from across the table.

Laurie knew all about falling through the ice. She knew that there was only a second to get out of the cold grip of the water before her body began demanding sleep. “Always fight to get out, no matter what. Or you’ll fall asleep and die,” the old people warned, tapping on the ice with a stick.

“Die, schmie,” her mother taunted when Laurie told her about dying from hypothermia. “You’d probably have it worse than that, your limbs would turn black and we’d have to cut them off. You’d spend the rest of your life going to work as a head and shoulders on a skateboard.”

Laurie avoided the river in the winter while all of her friends went there to ice skate. And in the summer she stayed far from the edge.

“You can’t chase the turtles, sweetie. The turtles around here are snapping turtles. They can snap off a pinkie finger like it’s a pretzel.” He held up his own, hairy and white, not pink at all. They were in the car again, looking at the river.

“Really?” She tried not to be disappointed that the only water she was getting close to that day was the sweat on his forehead.

“Laurie. That water is too fast for you to go near, anyway.”

That spring the Big Sioux rolled slowly by their parked car through its eroded path, as sluggish as maple syrup. Other springs, after a winter full of snow, the water was freezing cold and rose to flood a mile around. The river grew into a grabby hand of water just waiting to rip a small girl right out of her tennis shoes.

It hadn’t rained all month and Laurie was already at the Guppy level in swimming class. She felt that her dad was overreacting. Even her mother had commented on her improved swimming. “You’re not bad, Laurie. You even swim faster than some of the bigger kids with longer arms.” Laurie wondered what she knew about swimming, since her mom only ever dangled her legs in at the pool.

“I can’t dive, though. I just jump in feet first.” Jumping was scary enough. Any time her head was submerged in the pool, Laurie panicked. It felt like she was being suffocated in a water coffin.

“God. Who cares if you can dive? You can dive when you’re a Minnow.”

Laurie’s dad didn’t ever want her to dive, but if she did, he had lessons about diving, too.

“Feet first, first time. That’s your diving mantra,” he always said. Necks were snapped all summer long in Sioux Falls parks and pools, and the kids that dove without checking the water’s depth wound up dead or wearing itchy metal halos.

Even though there was more diving at the lakes than the rivers, Laurie’s father was calmer at the lakes. At least at Lake Alvin, even though her feet could get caught up in weeds and drown her, the water couldn’t sweep her away. At the lakes it all came down to a girl’s ability to tread water. It all came down to thigh muscles.

To increase her stamina, her father held water-treading practice sessions anytime they stayed at a hotel with a pool. Never getting anywhere near the water himself, he yelled down at her waterlogged ears through cupped palms.

“Hang in there, Laurie. You don’t want to drown, do you?”

When Laurie was eleven they stayed at a Ramada Inn in Omaha. It had a big outdoor pool shaped like a kidney. They had a two-hour practice session that was observed by an older girl who was lying out on a lawn chair, slick with baby oil. She had buck teeth and red hair, and Laurie guessed she was in high school.

When Laurie climbed out of the pool the girl called to her. “Hey, is that your dad?”

“Yeah.” Her leg muscles burning, Laurie dried herself in front of the girl.

“He’s a sick bastard,” the girl said and picked up her magazine again.

“What?” Laurie’s dad was across the pool, gathering up their things. “Why?”

“It’s pure pee in there. That pool is toxic. It’s like swimming in a toilet bowl.” The girl shook her head. “What the hell was he yelling at you about?”
“We were practicing.” Laurie blushed. “Treading water.”

“Whatever.” The girl snorted.

“How long can you tread water?” Laurie asked her, inching towards her father, who was holding open the door to the hotel.
“Who cares? It’s the goddam prairie. There is no water,” the girl said.

By the age of twelve, the frequency of the lessons increased and Laurie’s world felt even more dangerous. She began studying on her own at the library. She studied books on alien abductions, the killer bees that travel up from Mexico, and cases of spontaneous combustion. She memorized field guides of poisonous plants and snakes and she sat at the microfiche machine with tired eyes and a notebook full of stories of kids who were mutilated in freak farming accidents.

The August 23 paper had the story of a gangly teenage boy who was knocking apples out of a tree with a tennis racket when he was so precisely struck by a lightning bolt it was as if he was made out of metal.

Sobbing through the screen door, the father somehow managed to give a quote to the newspaper reporter: “What a waste.”

When her mother picked her up at the library Laurie tried to imagine her in grief. Laurie asked what she would do if she drowned.

“Cry,” her mother said, pulling out into traffic. “I’d do a lot of crying.And depending on whose pool it was, talk to a lawyer.”

“What would dad do?” Laurie didn’t have to ask.

“Leave,” her mother said.

Her parents never spoke about their past, and all Laurie knew was that they had met at Concordia College in Minnesota where he was on a singing scholarship and her mother was, according to her, just killing time and breaking hearts. In the early photos they made a happy, handsome couple, held together by big groups of equally handsome friends. The photos of her parents dwindled after she was born and most of the remaining ones were taken by her mother, of Laurie and her father. Laurie knew that marriages fell apart and people ran out of things to say. But Laurie knew that in this particular situation, she and her dad were to blame. Her mother couldn’t stand the lessons and Laurie and her dad couldn’t stop them.

In the seventh grade, after a lesson on what to do if a stranger grabbed you, Laurie heard them fight. Her dad finished showing her the elbow to the solar plexus, and her mother screamed at him in their bedroom upstairs.

“It’s not normal! She’s so scared of the bleachers collapsing that she won’t go to basketball games!” Muted by the thickly insulated walls and wall-to-wall carpeting, Laurie could not hear his softer response.

Laurie had been thinking, How would I survive if he stopped?

The lessons continued, and by the time she entered eighth grade she could start a fire with two sticks, a magnifying glass, or a damp match. She could make snowshoes using the floor mats of a car and two safety belts. She could tie a tourniquet, make an inflatable dummy out of her own clothes, and with a toothpick she could remove a splinter or a bullet.

Around the lessons, the seasons dragged by and the animosity between her parents grew larger until there seemed to be no oxygen in the house anymore. Her father must have felt breathless in the house, too, because he talked of moving to a bigger house in a roomier, more exclusive neighborhood.

“I’m sick of being eyeballed by nosy neighbors all the time,” he complained.

Laurie grew into a teenager with slouched shoulders and dirty blond hair. She made a few friends, and at the beginning of ninth grade, she had her first dry and disappointing kiss. Then she was tangled up in her own discarded clothes in the back of Chris Larson’s Suburban like a kitten caught in yarn.
Laurie had waited for the lesson about sex to come but it never did. The only advice on sex and dating was what she received from her girlfriends.
“Just don’t tease,” they warned. “Guys hate a tease.”

When she turned fourteen, she got her learner’s permit. That winter, before she was allowed to drive a car unaccompanied, her dad took her out back and showed her how to dig a hole in a snowdrift for protection. He directed her to dig a hole the exact size to fit a freshman girl who was wearing a pink, puffy down coat and told her to climb in and pull her legs up to her chest.

“If the cave opening is against the wind,” he counseled, his words muffled by the snow as if spoken through a pillow, “you can survive any snowstorm for a night.” He talked to her with his face poking into the small opening and Laurie could just make him out through her foggy, frozen breaths.
“You know what to do if your car breaks down in the winter?” he asked.

Laurie knew not to get out, no matter what. You turn the car heater on for little periods of time and conserve the gas and batteries, but you never leave the car. People who left their cars got disoriented and found themselves lost in great, seamless acres of snow.
“You don’t get out,” she mumbled through frozen lips.

“That’s right. This snow cave is a last resort, only if you have to get out. Like if your car has burst into flames,” he said.

After the snow cave was finished, they went inside the warm house. As she unzipped her coat and took it off, she felt her father’s eyes on her. The heat of all the shoveling had made her sweat and her shirt was sticking to her chest. Laurie usually hid her breasts under large sweatshirts and bad posture so she wasn’t surprised that he was confused by the sight of them. She had suspected for a while that he had no lessons for this.

For the next two years her father worked late and on the weekends. He barely spoke to Laurie, avoiding her eyes and asking polite questions about school. She asked polite questions back about the promotions and prizes he was winning as a result of his new focus at work.

A month before her sixteenth birthday, he moved them into the dream house with all the room and lots of lawn to separate them from their neighbors. For her birthday, he gave her a cellular phone.

“Just remember to keep it charged.” He was bashful with this final lesson, and he left that same day to move back to the Rhode Island coast where he had been born.

Her mother broke the news to Laurie on the giant cedar deck that hovered like a space ship over their huge lawn.

“Your father left, honey,” she said.

It was a day so hot that it was hard to imagine any future at all, so Laurie didn’t ask if he was ever coming back. Below them the neighbor’s dog was panting in circles around his own tree-less yard.

“You know how we can tell we really moved up in the world, Laurie?” her mother asked, looking down at the gray dog. “That dog is inside a cedar fence instead of chainlink. That’s the big goddamn difference.”

“Did he say why he left?” Laurie asked.

“He said his work here was done.” They waited for the dog to either go inside or just lie down to die in the brown grass. “You know that kid you told me has a Nazi quilt hanging up in the living room?”

“Yeah.” Laurie had a quick flash of that kid, Randy, pushing her up against a washing machine with his hands as quick as two tumbling dragonflies to her zipper in the dark, the whole room smelling of Tide.

“That was being raised by wolves,” her mom said. “That kid had it bad. It’s a hundred times worse to learn the wrong lessons than to learn no lessons at all.”

That night she was at a party in a fancy house in the Tuthill development. There was a below-ground pool glowing in the dark and lightning flashed far off in the distance. There was a boy at the party that Laurie had liked for months. She had even written him a note and signed it, “Love and other indoor sports, Laurie.” But now he was in the pool with his shadowy hands under the water undoing some other girl’s wet bra.

The thunderclaps came closer and the kids in the pool cheered at the sound of them. Laurie couldn’t get in the water with the lightning that close, so it was nothing personal about the boy she liked and the other girl. She stayed at the edge of the house, protected under a thin aluminum overhang, as the kids started pairing up and disappearing together into the dark corners of the pool.

Laurie stayed by herself with her back against the house, her thin halter top no protection from the sprayed gravel on the wall, counting the space between the lightning and the thunder.