Angle of Attack

On account of books, I went pretty much AWOL from my own adolescence. On summer afternoons I'd slather my legs with baby oil then lie outside on the sagging nylon chaise with a can of TAB in one hand and a thick paperback in the other. In winter, I made a tent of my yellow ruffled bedspread and read by flashlight. I read with an intensity that frightened my family, or so they tell me now. Mostly, I read dreadful books—Harlequin and Silhouette romances, two or three a day, borrowed from a neighbor nearly my mother's age. By the time I was fifteen, I had—like Eric Carle's very hungry caterpillar—methodically munched my way through my parents' bookshelves: Gone with the Wind, From Here to Eternity, Marjorie Morningstar, Mila XVIII, Trinity, and an anthology of war stories. (My father was the reader.) When I found Henry Miller on a topmost shelf, then The Joy of Sex under my parents' bed, I read them, too.

While I was reading, I grew at least a head taller than most of my classmates, including the boys. I got glasses, then pimples, then scaffolding in the form of braces and training bras. I barely noticed. I guess you could say I took these developments lying down. Years later, friends would ask me what it was like to grow up in Alaska, which seemed as exotic to them as Outer Mongolia. I'd gaze back at them, speechless and stupid as a cow. No, we didn't live in igloos. No, we didn't mush our huskies to the grocery store. Yes, we had summer in Fairbanks. Hadn't I grown up just like them? I didn't know. Somehow, I'd used bad literature the way other people use drugs and alcohol, to escape from the dullness of daily life. People fell in love and fell off of cliffs in novels. They rode horses and got married and died in childbirth or in battle. Things happened in novels, but never to me. Things happened in New York City, never in Square-banks.

One day when I was thirteen or fourteen, I was reading on the brown tweed sofa in the living room, from whence I was supposed to be minding my brothers and sisters. As a rule, nothing short of the promise of two-fifty an hour would induce me to bring my self and my book into any region where the savages roamed freely. I was lying down, of course. My white cat, Friday, curled like a fat incubus on my chest. My mother was running one of her interminable series of errands. My father had left early that morning for the Bush. He'd flown one of the company planes to a village whose name probably began and ended with a hard k sound: Kobuk, Koyukuk, Kwingillingok, Kongiganek, Quinhagok, or perhaps (an exception) Eek. Years later, my father's company would become flush enough to hire a full-time pilot. In the early days, though, when my father needed to go somewhere, he flew himself. It was rare for him to return inside of a week; sometimes he was gone for months.

In the landscape of my childhood, my father's frequent and prolonged absences were the salient feature: he missed birthday parties, recitals, concerts, confirmations, and graduations; he wasn't around for bee stings and tonsillectomies, Mom's speeding tickets, even the birth of one of my sisters; he was away for the August 1967 Chena River flood, which forced us to flee our ground-floor apartment by canoe; and he was gone in March of 1976, when my mother, blinded by spring sunlight, drove the CarryAll into the side of a slow-moving train.

When my father was home, loose change from his pockets spilled into cracks between sofa cushions. We had steak for dinner and ice cream sundaes for dessert. Afterward, someone—often my mother, gone...