Seven Mile Bridge. Michael M. Biehl

lead in every one of them. I remember somebody telling me my mother was in some plays as a student, but I had no idea theater was such a big deal to her.

      Beneath her college yearbook is one from Oshkosh High, 1943. It looks amazingly similar to Sheboygan North, 1972. The index lists all of the pages on which my mother appears, and I peruse them. She looks about twelve years old in her graduation picture, but no question about it, she was a pretty girl. She’s in the Drama Club again, and there’s one candid shot of her in a hallway. She’s carrying a stack of books in front of her and laughing cheerfully at the camera. Her hair is up and she is wearing an oversized white cardigan sweater with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her books partially conceal the big blue varsity-size “O” on the front of the sweater.

      Oddly, the next item I remove from the box is a duplicate copy of the 1943 Oshkosh High yearbook. Can’t have too many of those around, can you, Mom?

      The next layer in the box includes my brother’s high school yearbooks and my college freshman class book. Beneath those I find a brown vinyl album with the words, “Our Wedding” in gold script on the cover. Inside are snapshots from my mother’s second wedding, when she married Ray. What a cheesy-looking reception. Paper plates, paper cups, plastic forks for the cake. I remember it was in a rented hall that was part of a tavern and drunks from the bar staggered through on their way to the restrooms. I’m in some of the pictures, dressed in a cheap polyester suit, hair to my shoulders, refusing to smile for the camera and affecting the look of a communist revolutionary, or perhaps a mad poet.

      The wedding took place in June after my freshman year. It was only the second time I had met Ray. The first time was the previous December when I came home from Madison for Christmas.

      * *

      December, 1972

      “So this is the college boy, eh?” Ray gripped my hand so hard it brought tears to my eyes. He was short, about five-eight, stocky, and muscular. His crew-cut was gray on the sides and black on top. He pumped my hand up and down like he was using a cross-cut saw.

      “How do you do,” I said.

      “I do great.” He looked at my mother. “Hey, honeybunch, what say we get your boy here a haircut while he’s home. He looks like one of them hippies.”

      I had prepared myself to like Ray. When my mother told me on the phone that she was dating a man she had met at work, I was happy for her. Ray delivered fruit to the Piggly Wiggly store. The checkers who smoked, like my mother, usually took their breaks in back of the store, on the loading docks. One day, she explained, Ray had lit her Tareyton and one thing led to another, “so maybe smoking’s not as bad as they say.”

      My father had been dead for over a year. It was time for my mother to move on. She needed companionship, affection, and help with the house and my brother. I was determined to accept Ray, to appreciate whatever there was to appreciate about him, and above all, to get along with him.

      “You’re not one of them hippies, are you, son?”

      Son? Jesus Christ. I hated the guy instantly. “No, sir.”

      “I hope not.” Ray tossed my suitcase into the trunk of his car and slammed the lid. “These peaceniks with their pot smoking and their war protesting make me sick.”

      I smoked pot and had attended several anti-war rallies, but I held my tongue. My mother was giving me a look that said “lay off,” so on the way home from the Greyhound bus depot I talked about sports, college courses, and no politics. I remember feeling painfully drowsy in the car.

      It felt odd returning to my room after three months. Everything was just as I had left it. My mother had not even dusted. Yet it was not exactly as I remembered it. The desk was smaller, the ceiling was lower and the window was closer to the bed. My memory had distorted the room’s dimensions.

      That was the strangest Christmas Eve of my life, even stranger than the previous one, after my father died. My brother seemed different, unusually quiet, distant, and fatuous. Ray dragged us to his church for a candlelight service, which had never been part of my family’s traditions. It was an evangelistic, Jesus-freaky church out in a rural area, and the congregation did a lot of amen-ing and hallelujah-ing. My brother kept giving me goofy looks and I was fighting the giggles through most of the service. Right in the middle of “Silent Night,” Jamie got to me with his wavering falsetto, fluttering eyelashes, and the mockingly exaggerated expression of piety on his face. At “’round yon Virgin,” I let out an audible snort. Ray looked at me like he wanted to kill me on the spot.

      Coming out of church I enjoyed the crisp, clean air on my face. The pipe organ was playing “Joy to the World,” and a gentle snow was falling. For a moment, I had a slight hint of Christmas feeling, something I hadn’t experienced in two years. Then just as I was about to get in the car, my mother looked at me sharply and said, “You embarrassed Ray.” The only thing Christmassy about the ride home was that it was silent and cold.

      Back at the house, we all drank spiked eggnog, even Jamie, while we watched an unbelievably corny Christmas special on the Philco. My mother went into the kitchen to wash dishes when the ten o’clock news came on.

      That was the year of the infamous Christmas Bombings. For a week, American pilots had been flying thousands of sorties, dropping bombs day and night on cities in North Vietnam. The reporter said it was the first time B-52s, which were imprecise area bombers, had ever been used against cities.

      When the report ended, I said, “So much for Peace on Earth.”

      “You got a problem with it?” said Ray.

      “Yeah,” I said, taking advantage of my mother’s absence from the room. “I have a problem with carpet bombing civilians on Christmas Eve.”

      Ray waved his hands in the air. “Oh, here we go. I mighta known, with the long hair. Tell me, Joe College, how else we gonna get the Gooks back to the bargaining table?”

      “We don’t need to get them back to the table, we should just pull out. The war is lost, why are we still killing people?”

      Ray downed an eggnog in a single gulp. A creamy drop trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Those aren’t people,” he said. “They’re inhuman beasts.”

      “I don’t believe that.”

      “That’s because you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” He thumbed his chest. “I fought in the Pacific in World War Two—I know. And the Gooks are worse than the Japs.” He poured another eggnog, spilling some onto the coffee table. “Just pull out. What about our POWs? You think we should just abandon them? What it if was you over there rotting in a bamboo cage? Or your brother?”

      He pointed at Jamie, who had a blithesome grin on his face and a goggle in his eyes. I guessed he was feeling alcohol intoxication for the first time in his life. He raised a wobbly index finger in the air and said, “Fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity.”

      Ray’s lip twitched. He stared at Jamie. “Mind your language, son.”

      “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Jamie.

      Roy flushed. “How’d you like me to wash your mouth out with soap?”

      Jamie gave Ray the same look he always gave me when I challenged him athletically. Ping-pong, snowballs, whatever, Jamie had tremendous confidence in himself physically, and he did not even remotely understand the concept of backing down.

      “You and whose army?” sneered Jamie.

      Ray glowered. His face was beet-red. Then, he smiled amiably. He stood up and pushed the coffee table aside. “Okay, tough guy,” he said, waving a hand toward himself, “let’s go. Ten bucks says I pin you in two minutes.”

      I did nothing to stop it. My brother was going to get in trouble and Ray was going to get his clock cleaned, and both of those outcomes were fine with me.

      Jamie stumbled when he stood up, but only as a ploy. Dropping to his hands, Jamie swung his legs around in