Suicidal Sun

Mother and I race across the Alaskan backroads. We have an hour. An hour to drive home, bake cookies–cut, shape, bake, and wrap–then drive back again, all before the church social begins. We’re a gold-trimmed blur on rural road.

This is new. Deadlines, baking. Alaska. Whenever I tell my friends back home about life in the wild, I start with the sun. Sunsets before lunch, I say. It’s as unnatural as a girl with a beard. I might drop an analogy too. How if the Alaska sun were a teenager girl, she’d be suicidal: razor blades against the wrists, head in the oven, feet on the ledge. She’d be the one yelling, “To hell with you all.” Then darkness. Then back again for an encore. 

And that’s just the winter sun. The summer months create a different set of issues. Light-blocking curtains, midnight sunburns. Higher suicide rates. 

It’s important to keep an upbeat attitude though. Take it on the chin in with a grin. Sniff the fishy, perfumed air. Laugh at these stubborn cycles of light.

Yet becoming one of them, a local, remains elusive. They make pointed comments. They call us cheechako. Outsider. Because we’re new. Because we drive a car with California plates.

I explain that daddy needed a change. Picked Alaska out of a hat. Said God spoke to him—so, God’s hat. Announced it at breakfast one morning, “Pack now ladies, we leave at the end of the week.”

I further explain that it took a bit longer to put it all in motion. To get out of the lease, quit jobs, finish the semester. But eventually it happened, our family heading north out of San Diego. Without a plan. Just God’s Will pulling us like a magnet.

This northern exodus took three weeks, three weeks in a gold Plymouth station wagon, moving like pioneers along the Pacific, through mountains, forests, across British Columbia. We followed the Matanuska river. I saw a bear. We drove until we reached the mouth of the Cook Inlet. “Welcome to Anchorage,” said the sign. Snow on the ground. 

We stopped in front of a clapboard house hunched below the Chugachs. Daddy said it was our new home.

As usual, Mother made it all work. Fixed up the house. Got a job. I got one too, briefly (hostess). Then I enrolled at Bacon High, named after a dead politician, not a pig (though he may have been one of those too). At The Bacon, as we call it, the students reiterate that Alaska isn’t like the rest of America, that one can’t just waltz into their state and be accepted. 

‘Cheechako, why you here?’ they say. 

Or, ‘Yo, cheechako, go eat your lunch somewhere else.’

Mother’s driving with ludicrous speed now, gut-punching the slow-moving cars, whipping through construction zones. She’s careening. And talking to herself. She has me on cop detail. I say, “Radar waves? How am I supposed to see that shit?”

“Don’t sass,” she says. “Just watch the hills and bushes. That’s where they always hide.”

Now she’s complaining about my lack of friends at The Bacon. She says I’m being asocial–again. I have a new excuse in Alaska though. It’s the never-ending darkness. “Sucks the warmth out of the room. No one speaks to me.”

You should have been dating by now, she continues. “You’re seventeen going on old maid.” 

Then she insinuates that I am a lesbian. And yet if I was dating, I’d be a tramp. It’s what daddy calls a lose-lose.

I decide to put an end to her rant. “Cop!” She clenches the wheel.

“Where?” She looks over her shoulder. 

“Behind that sign back there. Guess you got lucky.”

Inventing crises, one of my many talents.

We drive in silence now. Except for her humming (a song about Jesus). Except for the concrete hum under our feet. I breathe fog on the glass. Then wipe it clean, then fog it again. I see my reflection between strokes, hairs blooming on my chin. I count five strands today, two more than yesterday.

If only I were a boy.

So, this is what I’m thinking about while mother ponders cookies and police cars: I’m thinking that I might be turning into an Alaskan bear.

In the lunchroom of The Bacon, there’s a poster with facts about our new home. It reads:

Flower: The Forget-Me-Not
Motto: North to the Future
Land area: 1st out of 50
Population: 47th out of 50
Density: 50th out of 50

Our chariot arrives sans citation. Forty five minutes to spare. Run, she says. We cross the driveway. Inside, daddy will be sleeping to the roar of sports, oblivious to our scurrying, oblivious to the little elves baking cookies behind his ear.

Mother curses the oven now. It’s the oven’s fault we’re late. I steal away to shave.

I know that I’m not supposed to do this, that shaving will only make my situation get worse. It’s like eating at Dairy Queen while dieting. But it’s effective against hairs in the same way a 1300 calorie Blizzard is effective against hunger.

I even think about stealing daddy’s straight razor. His Hashir. Marble handle. Delicate, deadly. I think about stealing it from under his fat, sleeping nose.

The cookies are finished, she says into the hall. My chinny chin hairs are finished too, broken and torn, laying in the drain pipe waiting to be washed away by spits of toothpaste. Did I get the streamers, she barks. She only has two hands, can I please open the car door? Do I have to move so slowly?

The vehicle jerks into motion. Watch for cops, she says. We drive even faster this time. On the horizon, the sun is choking out its last words, its hero cry: “remember me,” and all that.

It’s dark everywhere now. It’s dark as day.

We bounce into the parking lot. Mother looks at her watch. Says we only have five minutes before the congregation of forty comes marching through the hall doors. Five minutes to line up lukewarm cookies across the span of the reception hall.

The car slams to a halt, hits the parking block. Mother’s cursing to herself now. Run, she says. We push open the doors and begin tearing away the aluminum foil on the trays. Three minutes, she says. We can hear the hymn hitting its final cadence.

And now the cookies await hands and teeth, while we girls stand on opposite ends of the room. To greet and meet.

“Stand up straight Jenny,” she says in a whisper. “Try to make a good impression.” After a pause she squints and asks, “Is that blood on your chin?”

But the room floods with parishioners before I can answer.