Skyler
Skyler never did understand why her father had placed the above-ground pool as close to the train tracks as he did. Because of that, she always made it a point to wave to the people who were riding on Amtrak when it sped by her house, even though she knew the windows on the train were tinted and she couldn’t see anyone. But then she thought she was glad the windows were dark, because the only time she really saw the train was in the summer when she was in the pool. She wasn’t too keen on anyone seeing her in the only bathing suit she owned anyway – a baggy, one-piece that she had bought at Goodwill one day. She regretted buying it even then, but it was green sticker day at the store which meant everything was half price. So how could she resist buying a black bathing suit for only $4? She couldn’t.
Besides the problem with her ill-fitting bathing suit (which by now had faded to a dirty grey), there was also an issue with the pool. The plastic liner on the bottom hadn’t been installed correctly, so if Skyler’s feet happened to touch the floor by mistake, it kind of felt like she was walking on a jumble of plastic bags. When that happened, she knew she always made an awful face and that was an expression Skyler wouldn’t want anyone to see.
Luckily, Amtrak only came by twice a day – once in the morning taking people from New York City towards the Midwest and then another train speeding by in the opposite direction in the afternoon. The train was called the Lake Shore Express and when she asked her father about it, he said the train started in New York City and made its way to Chicago. Skyler hadn’t been to either city, although her father told her that he had been to New York once and didn’t like it very much.
“What did you see?” she remembered asking him.
He kind of shrugged, thought about it for a moment, and said, “I figured I had to go see Times Square so that’s what I saw.”
“Oh, and that fancy toy store – F.A.O. Schwartz,” he added.
Skyler didn’t remember getting any kind of fancy toy ever, and before she could ask him if he had bought anything, he told her he had taken the revolving doors into the store, looked up and down at all the people, and walked right back out.
Meanwhile, since the train only sped pass their house at those very specific times, you would have thought it might have been quiet where they lived. Technically, it could have been, but there were two “Cash Paid for Metal” places near them. Thus, it seemed that on most days (even Sundays!) there was a line of pickup trucks waiting right outside their house to pull into one of the lots. There weren’t a lot of jobs in the area, so her father told her that dropping off old radiators, washing machines and various car parts was a good way to make some money “on the side.”
Sometimes Skyler thought her father said strange things, but she figured out that he meant to say side hustle, while she was thinking he was talking about food, as in a side dish. The thing is that Skyler loved reading and especially loved picking up cooking magazines and leafing through them when she was standing in line at the supermarket. After such a shopping excursion, Skyler sometimes would come home and walk into the kitchen in her house and pretend that she could bake a cake or even make a fancy dinner if she wanted to, if only she had the money to do so.
Besides the metal places, there were a few farms near them, too. One summer, her father wondered whether she should get a job picking strawberries, or help a local farmer run the farm stand. But Skyler protested and said she’d rather work at McDonald’s than do that. Apparently, her father was horrified that she would even consider working at a fast-food place, so he dropped the idea that she should work at all, and luckily ever since, she had a quiet, peaceful summer.
But then Skyler turned 16. Suddenly, her father decided she had to start making some money or at least learn how to do something. When Skyler protested again and told him that she liked to spend the summer reading, or sitting in a lounge chair by the pool, he stared at her.
“Well, you have to learn how to do something. You’re going to be graduating from high school next year, what are you going to do then?”
Skyler was already worrying about her senior year. Would her father make her take AP classes or even a couple of AP tests? They hadn’t talked about college yet because she figured he didn’t have any money for that anyway, and besides, she didn’t really want to do more schooling. Why sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher drone on and on about some book or some historical thing? If she were that interested in it, she figured she could just as easily read about it on her own.
“Maybe you should take culinary arts,” her father told her one day.
Skyler probably looked at him like he was insane, and he stared at her for so long, waiting for an answer, that she had to say something.
“I know how to cook.”
“You do?” he asked, and she thought he looked like he was about to laugh.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Cook something for me then.”
And then her father left the house, got in his car and drove away. It was the weekend, so she wasn’t sure where he was going - definitely not to work at the milk-processing plant since he only worked during the week. Sometimes, he told her that he liked to drive up to the lake and just sit in his car, so she figured maybe that’s where he went.
Skyler wasn’t sure what to make of his request, plus, she knew that they didn’t have much food in the house. But one thing she did know was where he always kept a 20-dollar bill.
“Just in case,” he told her.
So, she grabbed the 20 bucks that was in a pitcher on the windowsill in the kitchen and started walking towards Dollar General. When she was younger, she remembered her father telling her that they lived in a “food desert.” She remembered him laughing when she asked if that meant if they went food shopping would the store have lots of sand on the shelves?
“No, it means that there aren’t any supermarkets near us that sell healthy food for us to eat, like fruits and vegetables,” he had told her.
When Skyler got older, she understood what he was talking about, but she didn’t think it was entirely accurate since they were surrounded by farms, even if their growing season was short because of the harsh winters.
Skyler was still thinking about this as she was walking to Dollar General, the only real store near them. She also had to make sure that she stayed really close to the side of the road when she walked over there because there weren’t any sidewalks where she lived. Most of the time she had to walk on people’s lawns, or “people’s weeds,” as her father liked to call them, since no one around them really had gardens or lawns. Or anything that resembled any of the pictures she saw in some of the other magazines she might look at – the ones called Southern Living or House Beautiful. A lot of times, cars would speed over the hill right before she got to Dollar General and many of them would flash their lights at her, even in broad daylight, because she guessed her walking just surprised them. Or maybe they were just in a hurry to get to the cash-for-metal-place.
Skyler walked by one house that she thought was really pretty - a big, brown colonial that she called the “brown honey house.” In the summer, she frequently saw an older woman set up a wooden fruit stand outside near her driveway and advertise that she had eggs and honey for sale. She never did see any chickens walking around, so she wasn’t sure how she got the eggs. But she did see a bunch of bee boxes all stacked up in different colors, so she figured that’s where the honey came from.
Maybe, Skyler thought, she could learn to make tasty things like apple butter or honey. She wondered why they didn’t teach courses like that in school. You know, food you could learn how to grow or make, and then sell. That could be a job, right?
Skyler walked by the town sign that always made her heart skip a little. Her mother, Anne, was born and raised in the town of Schuyler and decided when she gave birth, her daughter would be named after the town. Anne died unexpectedly from a stroke on the first day that Skyler went to kindergarten. So, it was kind of a miracle, both Skyler and her father thought, that she even went to school at all after such a traumatic event.
One day, one of her English teachers, Mrs. Hammond told her that the name of the town she lived in meant “scholar” in Dutch. Skyler found herself suddenly interested in Holland and even went out of her way to look up anything and everything she could find about being Dutch and the Netherlands. When her teacher asked her, “Why this sudden interest in all things Dutch?” Skyler said that the only “Dutch” thing she knew growing up was a bakery called Holland Farms. And while some people liked all the sticky sweet baked goods they sold, Skyler didn’t.
Skyler grew to like Mrs. Hammond and her English classes. And when Mrs. Hammond started to assign long passages for the class to read as homework, Skyler inevitably told her that she had read the entire book.
“You read the whole book in one night?” Mrs. Hammond asked her the first time she did this.
Skyler remembers nodding, but she thought maybe Mrs. Hammond didn’t believe her. So, Skyler started telling her not only about the plot, but what she liked and didn’t like about the story. She remembers Mrs. Hammond just nodding and handing her two more books which she read over three consecutive evenings.
Skyler finally got to the Dollar General and when she walked in and saw a shelf with breadcrumbs, and boxes and boxes of crackers, she started to laugh.
“There’s our desert,” she thought. “All that dry stuff.”
She walked over to where the canned goods were. She knew they usually had a couple pieces of chicken or a package of hamburger in the freezer, so maybe she could just make a casserole or something. She picked up a can of black beans and then a couple of cans of tuna too. She realized that it would be nearly impossible to defrost anything in time for dinner, so maybe she’d just make a tuna casserole. She picked up a can of mushroom soup, remembering her dad used that when he made it, and right before she was going to check out, she picked up a bag of potato chips. She had read somewhere that if you crushed up the potato chips, you could use them as a topping, or something, on the casserole. Unless of course, she ended up eating them on the walk back. Skyler loved potato chips so much that she couldn’t think of any that she didn’t like. Well, actually, she wasn’t particularly fond of the dill pickle flavored ones. But all the other flavors she thought were just fine.
By the time she got home, her father’s car was in the driveway. She started to wonder whether maybe he had driven to the real grocery store and was going to make dinner after all. When she walked inside, he looked at the bag she was carrying.
“Dinner?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Skyler said, unpacking the few things she got.
Her father went over to the fridge and opened the door for her to look inside. Skyler saw some lettuce, a couple of tomatoes, and a package of chicken cutlets.
“Did you go shopping?” she asked.
“Yep.”
Skyler looked at him. “I can make tacos,” she said.
“Didn’t pick up any tacos.”
Skyler sighed. “Right. How about rice and beans?” she suggested.
“We have rice?” he asked.
Skyler sighed again. “How about a bean and chicken casserole, then?”
“With cream of mushroom soup?” he asked, handing her the can.
“Yeah.”
“And potato chips on top?” he continued.
Skyler looked at him and started to wonder how he even knew that.
“Got you something too,” he added.
And before she knew it, her father handed her the newest copy of the food magazine she particularly liked. The one that cost nearly $8 an issue, which she thought was just an insane price for a magazine. Especially one that just had pictures of food and most times a complicated recipe on how to make whatever weird thing they had photographed on the cover.
“Oh wow, thanks,” Skyler said.
She watched as her father opened the can of beans for her with a can opener while she started to unwrap the chicken he had bought.
“Be careful cutting up that chicken,” he said. “I just sharpened that knife.”
“I’m not a baby,” Skyler told him.
“I know.”
And when she looked at him, she couldn’t tell if he was really happy that she wasn’t a baby anymore or sad because she was a teenager. She figured maybe a little bit of both.
Skyler thought she heard the sound of something clicking and she wondered if it was the train. But then she realized that it wasn’t time for Amtrak to go by their house. Skyler turned around from where she was cutting up the chicken and saw her father fiddling with the stove. It sometimes had a tendency not to light, and he’d have to turn on the gas, wait for the hissing sound, and then use a match to light the damn thing.
Skyler heard a loud “woosh” sound as her father got the stove lit. Then she saw him pick up the bag of potato chips she bought and shake the bag a little.
“Long walk home?” he asked her.
Skyler started to laugh. “You know I can’t resist those.”
“Yep.”
Skyler watched as her father held the bag in one hand, tilt his head back, and pour whatever was left, mostly just potato chip crumbs into his mouth.
“Kind of crunchy and dry, just like the desert,” he said. And then he even winked at her.
“Wanna go in the pool after dinner?” he asked.
Skyler looked at him. “Can you fix the liner?” she asked.
“Can you get a job?” he asked her right back. But then he quickly added, “Promise me you’ll never go near either of those metal places.”
Skyler wanted to laugh but when she looked at him, he looked really serious.
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Because there are men there who might take advantage of you,” he said.
This time Skyler couldn’t help laughing. “Oh boy,” she said. “What about Dollar General?” she asked.
Her father shrugged, “Not ideal, but at least it’s close.”
Skyler watched as he picked up the empty potato chip bag. He crunched it into a ball and tried to throw it into the trash can. Except he missed and it landed on the floor. As he bent over to pick it up, he had a big smile on his face.
“Besides,” he said, “Maybe you can get a discount on potato chips.”