Back in Dellacrosse, the dining was divided into “casual,” which meant that you ate it standing up or took it away, and the high end, which was called “sit-down dining.” At the Wie Haus Family Restaurant, where we went for sit-down, the seats were red leatherette and the walls were gemütlich and panelled, decorated with framed deep kitsch—wide-eyed shepherdesses and jesters. The breakfast menus said “Guten Morgen.” Sauces were called “gravy.” And the dinner menu featured cheese-curd meat loaf and steak “cooked to your likeness.” On Fridays, there were fish fries or boils, at which they served “lawyers” (burbot or eelpout), so called because their hearts were in their butts. On Sundays, there was not only marshmallow-and-maraschino-cherry salad and something called Grandma Jell-O but “prime rib with au jus,” a precise knowledge of French—or English or even food coloring—not being the restaurant’s strong suit. “À la carte” meant soup or salad; “dinner” meant soup and salad. The Roquefort on the salad was called by the waitstaff “Rockford dressing.” The house wines—red, white, or pink—bore the requisite bouquets of rose, soap, and graphite, a whiff of hay, a hint of Hooterville, though the menu remained mute about all this, sticking to straightforward declarations of hue. Light ale and dunkel were served. For dessert, there was usually a Glückschmerz pie, with the fluffy look and heft of a small snowbank. After any meal, sleepiness ensued.

 

A poem called "Twin Cities" that leaves me nonplussed

It all makes me remember that period of time, when the years of actually being from the Upper Midwest but not in it began to accumulate, and I felt some kind of obligation to capitalize, in my fiction writing, on the now relative exoticism of my hick background.  I don't think it was anything I ever did very successfully, and I'm trying to think exactly why that was. 

For most of adolescence, my relationship to the entire part of the country where we lived was that of the child who grows up believing that her real parents are much better and shinier than the poor substitutes she's been stuck with.  (Never having lived outside the Midwest, I of course didn't realize how much of the Upper Midwest's trappings had become my own - and remain so.  I think that in the sort of predictable gesture of writing about trying to transcend these trappings, I only succeed in solidifying them.  That is, isn't there something provincial and tired about talking a lot about trying to escape your provincial roots?  But for a long time, I think that was the relationship with these roots of which I was most conscious.  I can remember a pathetic version of myself, home for an Xmas not so long after college, on the basement floor of a high school boyfriend's parents' ranch style home, how the most important thing I needed to ask him was whether I was different from everybody else.  Effectively asking him to confirm that I wasn't really from there.)

But in the stories that I wrote during that time, during that time that I was from but not in, I tried very hard to assume a kind of salt-of-the-earth know-how about the Upper Midwest.  I wrote about the kind of clichés that I assumed phantom readers expected to hear about, decking myself in a coarse Scandinavian heritage that had never belonged to me and studding my prose with colloquialisms I had never actually used.  (All the while, of course, unaware of the subtler provincialisms that inhabited my very syntax, and which I couldn't then write about.)  I was trying to animate a cliché from an enduring position of contempt disguised as pastoralism, and it never sounded much like anything but.  I think this was, in part, because I was suddenly trying to cash in on something that I'd previously rigidly distained or, at least, ignored.  The sorts of Midwest experiences I was trying to write about, that I felt like I was supposed to write about, weren't really the ones I'd ever had.  That much, now, is clear. 

Reading Franzen's and Moore's versions of the Upper Midwest, I'm trying to figure out exactly what sort of experience I did have.  The culture of jello molds and fish fries and hot dishes - the Praire Home Companion version - was something I observed but didn't experience from the vantage of a self-designated out-of-towner who didn't want to soil or tear the ticket out of town she was always clutching.  I don't have any interest in writing about the Praire Home Companion version that was never mine, and of which there's no need at all for more.  Was my version the cliché of white-knuckled resistance to being in instead of from?  Last summer, at my parents', I reread Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" and, for months afterward, cringed when I could perceive the very provincialism of contempt creeping into my voice, hulking and sullen.  A realization much harder to bear when you're in and not from again. 

 

 

The writer’s and reader’s mutual yearning for each other’s presence becomes the absorbing consolation for the failure to transcend the limits of the text.  If language fails to name or command, it still has the power of what anthropologists call ‘phatic communion,’ the power to create social bonds through meaningless gestures.  The reader must know that the poet has nothing to tell him, but know at the same time that he is communicating with him.  Writing becomes a way of perpetuating the writer’s contact with other lives, and thus preserving his own. (514)

                                      --"John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader,” Bonnie Costello (Contemporary Literature, 1982)

...even if I don't want to give up on the rhetoric of At-home.