We Are Still Married (19 page)

Florence answered. She had an icepack on her head and looked dazed and weepy. “Val hit me,” she said. “With a storm window. He was up on the ladder—” She started weeping in earnest. “I was trying to help—I didn't know it was so heavy.” She leaned and Judy caught her and walked her in and sat her in the big blue easy chair covered with clear plastic. A photograph of their daughter Sherry sat in a gold frame, the poor girl whose life was ruined when she was elected Senior Homecoming Princess, missing out on Queen by (it was said) three votes, losing to a girl who had despised her since they were five.

The haunted blond face made Judy forget about La Pasionaria. She perched on the arm of the blue chair and held Sherry's graduation picture in her hands, wishing she had the power to change that tragic life that kept going wrong. Wrong college (Concordia in southern California, full of successful Lutheran girls) and then the stigma of dropping out after a month, then a bad job (secretary in a Lutheran Life & Auto office where she sat staring out at the empty parking lot), then a bad relationship with a basketball player, finally a bad marriage to his younger brother, and three little whiny children and a messy little house and a problem with Bailey's Irish Cream, and now she hardly ever washes her long blond hair, all because she couldn't be Queen.

“How's Sherry?” asked Judy.

Florence said, “She's just fine. She's very happy.” Florence's left eye was swollen shut and there was dried blood around her lips. Judy thought:
That bastard. Storm window my foot. Why does she lie for him?
She wiped off Florence's face and went to get her more ice and then she found the cat's body in the freezer. Yes, it was a cat all right. On the plastic bag, written in black grease pencil, was the word “MAGIC.” Judy shuddered. She shut the freezer door.
Magic.
The man certainly made no attempts to hide his tracks. Odd for a Lutheran. The first priority was to protect Florence from seeing this, assuming she hadn't already. One thing to be beaten by your church-deacon husband but quite another to know the man kills pets and uses the bodies in cult rituals. Judy shuddered to think of what she had to do, but she got out a grocery bag and was about to open the freezer when the phone rang. It was Mavis, asking if she could help. Judy thought. “Yes,” she said. “Tell them there's no show. Just lock up the church and go home. Can you do that?” Then she put the cat in the grocery bag and carried it out and put it in the trunk of her car. She was going to confront Val with it directly, no tiptoeing around.
Explain this. And then explain why you're belting your wife around. What sort of secret group are you in and what activities are they engaging in? And exactly how many other members of the church are involved? Tell the truth.

She found Val when the red boat towed him to shore and Dr. DeHaven (who had been in his basement, not at the cabin, which was now his son Jim's anyway, whose dog it was, an old fishing dog named Bruno, now deaf) gave him a couple antihistamines on general principle and drove him home. Judy drove all around town looking for him and there he was sitting on his own back step, bewildered. He told her the truth about his poor cat Magic. She felt sorry for him, but not so sorry that she couldn't pass on the Memorial Day chairmanship. “I hope that, in all this confusion, you haven't forgotten that you're the chairman of Memorial Day,” she said. “We're all counting on you for something good.” He was too weak to resist, and he was so worn out that he went to bed and slept twelve hours and forgot all about Memorial Day until the morning of the 30th, when he saw flags all over town. He panicked. Then he saw me and thought,
Speaker.
I was heading into the Mercantile to buy a white shirt. I was in town visiting my Aunt Myrna and Uncle Earl, two of the greatest people in the world, so I was in an amiable mood. We'd just eaten chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast. That's how wonderful they are. Val took my elbow and told me how wonderful I was and then and there, on the sidewalk outside the Mercantile, under Lorraine's seductive glance, he popped the question.

Well, I'd once recited the Gettysburg Address at Memorial Day and heard Aunt Eleanor afterward declare it the finest performance of the spoken word she had ever heard, so I said okay, and two hours later I was in procession behind the Sons of Knute honor guard, heading up the hill to the cemetery, full of magnificent oratory about home and community and family and friends, about life and death and the price of coffee, a lovely extemporaneous speech that as I hiked up in the hot sun and stood in the hot sun in front of the GAR obelisk and listened to the Ladies' Sextette sing “Abide With Me” and young Ben Tollerud recite “O Captain! my Captain!” seemed to expand larger and larger in my head until it came to include the entirety of all essential truth about our existence on earth. For a minute there, facing the crowd of familiar faces that looked like a Monet painting when I took my glasses off, I was in possession of a vast brilliant message, a gift of the Holy Spirit, and felt like Jeremiah must have felt when God said, “Here, say this.” And then somehow it came loose. Maybe it was the note the ladies hit on “foil the tempter's power”—Arlene had quit the group a week before, saying she was too old and her voice was ruined and she couldn't sing anymore: a blow to the other five because she was their best singer, and Florence was no prize as a replacement—or it might've been the Lord's Prayer coming on the heels of the Address and making me think, “Our Father Who art in heaven, hallow this ground so that I shall not die in vain,” but die I did, in plain view of everyone in town, including the ten or twelve I've wanted all my life to impress. I gave a horseshit speech.

What I wanted to talk about was whether the boys of the First Minnesota Brigade, including the one buried here, who made their heroic and brutal counterattack on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg against Longstreet's army that had found a great vacancy in the Union line and was swinging into position against its flank to roll up Meade and run him straight to Washington and win the war for the Confederacy—whether those boys thought of us in the future and what the country would come to, what they were fighting for and who would keep their memory—would they have
liked
us? or would our America horrify them? And how all two hundred of them jumped up off the grass and ran toward the smoke. They could've run for the river but they ran into the smoke, because that's where everyone else was running and they were loyal to each other, loved each other, so in some way they loved the nation and us and our life that owes so much to them. Only forty of them came back out of the smoke; the rest were dead or wounded. Young men in the spring of life. A hot day, thick smoke, horses shrieking and men screaming horribly in that unbearable cannon fire around the peach orchard and meadow. But they all ran into the smoke, and how this somehow changes everything. The citizens of death. Our duty to honor them, a
lovely
duty. It's a civic duty to look at death and thus see life clear, and how life—the furtherance of life—is the purpose of the state and community—parenthood—the value of storytelling—our connection to each other—It was a long horseshit speech, stumbling around in the thickness of my mind and trying to seem profound by saying dumb things and pausing after each one, and when I talked about loving each other, all of my neighbors looked down in the grass and waited for it to stop.

I soon obliged them. There was applause. They all congratulated me afterward and said it was wonderful, except Clint, who put his hand on my shoulder and said, “One nice thing is that when it's done, it's all over,” and he was right. I am so sorry about all of them lying dead on the hill, the trooper from the First Minnesota and all the old women and the farmers, all the kids who died of diphtheria and influenza, and now my classmate Corinne, and I wish my speech had been great, just as I wish we could bring them all back to life, but it's over and now summer can begin. School can let out. Baseball gets going and the sweet corn begins to get serious. Soon the very first ear will appear—on Aunt Myrna's good china platter one Sunday after church, a faint yellow ear of corn, steaming hot, glistening with butter and crystals of salt—and then the life to come will start to begin.

I
T HAS BEEN a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown
was such a sweet line all those years on the radio, the standard opening of each week's story, a pleasant, modest,
useful
sentence, considering how many writers stew over their opening lines (e.g., “Ray opened the refrigerator door and bent down to look for the margarine”), and most stories stop there and wind up in the wastebasket, brilliant stories wasted because the first sentence wasn't as brilliant as what would soon follow, so the writer quit and his masterpiece, his
In Our Time,
his
Great Gatsby,
his
Collected Stories of John Cheever,
never got written because the first sentence opened like a rusty gate, and is it so different for you and me? The marvelous work we could do if only we didn't have to
begin
it but could start in at the middle. The things we could accomplish if only we didn't know what we are doing until later.

It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon
gets you right in there, into the dim recesses of the Chatterbox Cafe, the air lit up with the smell of hot caramel rolls, where three heavy men in dark-green shirts hunker in the back booth under the Allis Chalmers calendar (“Krebsbach Farm Implement / New & Used Since 1912 / JUniper 5610”) and drink black coffee, refilled by Dorothy in her big pink uniform, who doesn't ask if they'd like more (Do bears pee in the woods?), she just pours, as they commiserate on the lousy world situation and console each other with a few beloved old jokes about animals in barrooms. There was this man who trained his dog to go around the corner to Bud's Lounge with a dollar bill under his collar and get a pack of cigarettes and bring them home, until one day the man only had a five, so he put it under the dog's collar and sent him down, waited an hour, and no dog, so he got mad and went to Bud's and there was the pooch sitting up on a stool drinking a vodka gimlet. He said, “You've never done this before!” The dog looked straight ahead and said, “I never had the money before.”

One problem with
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon
is that you couldn't go straight from that into talking about dreams of boundless grandeur and the many-rivered generosity of life, but, then, it was that way when I lived there, too. Dreams we did not discuss, they were embarrassing in normal conversation, especially big ones. We sat at supper, Dad at one end, Mother at the other, children in the stanchions along the sides, and talked quietly about the day's events. We might discuss the immediate future such as a history test the day after tomorrow or Bible camp next June, but the distant future, 1964, 1980, was inscrutable, due to the imminence of the Second Coming. And there was to be no grandeur. Once, just to see how it would sound coming out of my mouth, I said I was going to college someday. “College” rhymes with “knowledge.” I was ten years old and words were as good as food in my mouth. I chewed my food fast so as to clear the way to be able to say more. “I'm going to go to college,” I stated. My sister laughed: Who d'ya think
you
are? She was right, I didn't know.

What I didn't dare mention was my other dream of going into the show business, a faint dream because we were Christian people and wouldn't dream of doing immoral things, though I hoped to find a way around this. I mentioned S.B. to Mrs. Hoglund, the piano teacher, and she told me the story of the famous Swenson Sisters, who hailed from nearby Kimball, a girls' quartet who sang at summer resorts including Moonlite Bay and who, one cold winter day in 1954, won the St. Paul Winter Carnival Outdoor Talent Contest, and the next week boarded the morning Zephyr to Chicago and then the Super Chief to Hollywood. They signed a contract with Fairmont Pictures to make a movie called
Minnesota Moon
but then the producer, Leo Lawrence, took a deep drag on his stogie and growled, “Kids, I love this script, it's beautiful, I loved every bit of it except the cows and the lakes and the farmers—we're going to change them to camels and desert oases and thousands of Bedouins galloping hard over the desolate sands,” so the movie became
Moon over Morocco
and the Swenson Sisters became the Casablanca Quartet, dressed in vast black robes, their faces veiled, and their career went down like a concrete block and by 1955 they were back at Gull Lake, singing at Hilmer's Supper Club (Beer & Setups, Fish Fry—All U Can Eat Friday Nites), and their dream was just an old black shell of a burned-down house. What's more, they, who had gone away innocent and filled with shining hope, returned home four hardened women with dark-crimson lipstick who smoked Luckys and drank vodka gimlets and when they laughed, they laughed a deep laugh, like men, laced with pain, and so of course men would have nothing to do with them, and they fell into unnatural forms of love. There ended the story; she would say no more.
They tried to go too far,
and it should be a lesson to the rest of us: not to imagine we
are
somebody but to be content being who we are, Minnesotans.

I'm very proud to be a Minnesotan and have been proud since I was a kid and first traveled to see our beautiful State Capitol building in St. Paul. Our fourth-grade class got up at six o'clock and rode a schoolbus down to meet the governor. We had studied state government for a month, the duties of governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and other state officers, and the legislature and the state commissions and boards, which didn't prepare us for the grandeur and sheer magnificence of the great white temple spread on the crest of a gentle hill, the bank of steps rising to the pillars, the golden horses and golden chariot high above, and the dome, the largest anywhere in the Christian world, so it appeared. We camped in the bus, eating liverwurst sandwiches and drinking green Kool Aid, waiting for our 11:00 A.M. appointment. Mrs. Erickson said that she was trusting us to be on our best behavior indoors, but she didn't have to worry, we were stunned, we shuffled along with the dumb dignity of the barely conscious. Indoors was even more magnificent, such opulence as a child might imagine from fairy tales but never associate with our modest prairie state, long vast echoey marble halls, marble statues, oil paintings, and a room with a gold ceiling and a rug three inches thick, and there was the governor of Minnesota, the leader of our people, physically present in the room with us.