Love in a Time of Empire

It had snowed lightly in the night, always great, all the better for people who lived in ratty neighborhoods. It gentled everything. Chill, the clean snow said, everything may be a shambles but it looks as good as it ever did. This is the time of year when if you have a male in the household, the new snow said, and of course every household has a male in it who is not incompetent or a sadist or anything in between, the male hitches up the sleigh and everybody drives over to Grandmother's house. Imogen thought to herself, nothing wrong with that. Greeting cards were right. Snow is good. She got into her car in the early dark. This particular new snow said the world is not overpopulated, the streets of neither St. Fursey nor Duluth are salted, democracy protects the poor from the hobby wars of the rich.

Imogen Tenebray's present rental was in a firetrap building at the northwestern corner of her childhood town, St. Fursey, Minnesota. Pickups stood everywhere, some still working, most not, not just in the street but in front and all around the beat up houses and mobile homes. Snow had fallen and then drifted some more into the center of a pickup left with the hood raised. People lied to themselves about what they knew how to fix and what they didn't. Imogen's neighbor had given up, so the air filter, the distributor cap, and even the deepest hoses each had its own soft roof ofsnow.

Imogen's father and mother had had a man to do all of their property, so Imogen herself had a taste for woods clear of junk willow growth, pastures not gone to goldenrod, and lawns without pickups parked diagonally. But she was thirty-four and long ago had been married, and even had a child, and she didn't live with her parents any more. And another thing: she was learning to control her fantasies. OK to have OK fantasies, not OK to have dismal ones. So in the last three years she had learned not to make mental pictures of her little boy. She also did not make mental pictures of her ex-husband doing any of his favorite stunts. OK to make mental images about St. Fursey covered with new snow. OK to fantasize in church on those few Sundays when she was willing to sit through Fr. Joey Tad's sermons. Not always OK to fantasize in church, however. Last Christmas of 2002 he had preached on Holy Innocents about Herod ordering the death of all little boys under two, and Imogen got up and left. She was learning how to live OK, or even more important, how not to live badly.

On this Monday morning she drove happily in the dark, passing the lighted reindeer of her neighbors' yards. They were not the reindeer of last year, but from Christmas of 1999 or 2000. No one took them down. The reindeer were always lighted, summer as well as winter, their stringy heads turned to regard you or bent down to graze. When someone's power was cut off, the reindeer went off. As soon as they agreed to meet with the company and work out payments the current ran back out to the reindeer.

She didn't even push a tape in this Monday because she had done a hard, good piece of work over the weekend and now could escape to her other, easier job, which was in Duluth. She had Fridays and Mondays in Duluth, as executive director of Women for Peace. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays as school socialworker in St. Fursey. She had gotten a call on Friday noon from Vera, the St. Fursey School secretary. Could she help: one of her little kids, Kordell Plaxico, was in a bad spot. Mr. Plaxico had called the principal's office to tell Vera that he wasn't taking any more of this...