We Are Still Married (27 page)

“DANGER : WILD ELK,” says a sign in the meadow. “UNPREDICTABLE AROUND PEOPLE. DANGEROUS WHEN CLOSER THAN 30'—AVOID EYE CONTACT ESPECIALLY DURING RUTTING SEASON, AUGUST—OCTOBER.” Or elephants could appear, it seems, or a band of riders on horseback in mail coats and dull-silver helmets with green plumes, talking to each other in a soft, chirpy language—
the trees are so fantastic.
We walk up the road and into a grove of redwoods, Marilyn and Curly walking ahead, so he can avoid eye contact with Larry. The towering trees make us all tiny, almost invisible, as in childhood I dreamed of being. They summon up in me from childhood a devout silence once inspired by stories in books. What I once felt about Adam and Eve, Robinson Crusoe, Laura Ingalls, and Lewis and Clark, I now feel in the presence of redwoods.

Back in the van, and this time Larry takes the wheel, and we roar away, packed tight with our suitcases and knapsacks, tapes and Walkmans, loose jackets and hats, our flotsam, our newspapers and guidebooks that are packed with interesting facts about fascinating places to see.
This trip is a bust.
My wife and young Moe are the only sweet ones left; the rest of us have soured on each other. “I'm
tired
of family,” Marilyn said, succinctly, a few days ago. “Why do we have to do so many things together?” asked Curly. “Why can't we split up?” And now Larry, who has suffered in silence, is expressing himself through his ferocious driving, passing car after car with a vengeance, throwing us poor passengers around, a vanload of unpredictable, ill-tempered elk sitting dangerously close to each other and becoming a little nauseated, too. “Please don't drive with your Walkman on,” I said a few cars ago, afraid he might be tuned in to a heavy-metal station, but he couldn't hear me. And now I am going to wind up this letter. If this boy in blind frustration takes us head on into a lumber truck and my blood-soaked tablet is found in the ditch, I'd like for my last words to be a complete sentence. The family that she and I made out of a sudden middle-aged romance is a real family. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Please drive carefully. Thank you so very much. And now let's all welcome a wonderful little city, always a favorite here on 101—here's
Garberville!

I
T'S A LARGE MOMENT when you leave a place where you have lived all your life and sail away over the edge. I am forty-five, and it felt enormous on Monday, September 28, around 1:00 P.M., when my wife and I packed a bike, a swivel chair, and two big suitcases in the back of our red Chevy Blazer and drove along the tree-lined avenues of St. Paul and out of town, east toward New York City. On a sudden urge, I stopped at the bank and got more cash. We drove out on U.S. 12 toward the St. Croix River and Wisconsin. A bright fall day. “This is you and me—we're really leaving. Can you believe it?” she said. She is a city girl, born and bred in Copenhagen, and she never really took to Minnesota. To her, New York was the best idea we'd had since we got married. We cruised along at fifty-five, looking at the last stretch of Minnesota pasture and thinking. In 1961, a friend of mine named Barry Halper drove his white convertible out that highway to start a new job, as a newsman at KDWB, and ran into the rear end of a schoolbus that had stopped to let kids off, and was killed. He is still a real person to me—still nineteen, tall, with long black hair falling over his forehead, still (as I get older and older) talking about becoming a comedy writer in TV. All the time I lived there, I would occasionally run into someone who knew Barry, and it was sad to think that when I crossed the river there'd be nobody to remember him with.

Not far north of 12 is Marine, where I lived for four years, and where an old friend I haven't seen for seven years got into a big, ridiculous argument with me that I now think was actually caused by my hitting him across the shins with a softball bat hours before during a game. I walloped a high pop-up and tossed the bat aside in disgust and nailed the catcher, my friend, who hours later accused me of something—insensitivity, perhaps—and we quarreled at the end of my driveway until he stalked away into the night. So long as I lived in St. Paul, there was a chance we might bump into each other, and smile, and our friendship click back on, but when the river is crossed the break becomes permanent, along with all the other dumb things I did here. I felt like stopping for a moment. The bridge was coming toward us fast. Then the Chevy thrust forward, and, flaps down, we rose up and over the river, landing in Wisconsin, heading east.

That evening, the Minnesota Twins won their division championship in the American League, down in Texas, against the Rangers, 5-3. By the time Herb Carneal came on the air with the play-by-play, we were in Oshkosh, and WCCO (The Good Neighbor to the Great Northwest) was long gone from our dial. I read about the Twins' big win the next morning in the Milwaukee paper, which was not so excited about the event, and neither was my wife, for whom baseball is a book in a foreign language, interesting but not informative. So I didn't suggest that it might be fun to stop in Chicago and look for a Minneapolis paper.

Tuesday, we poked around Oshkosh with friend Thatcher, who showed us the truck factory, and said
Farvel
and drove to Sandusky, Ohio. Night reached us near Gary, Indiana, and as we sped east on the turnpike we heard part of a White Sox broadcast as it faded out and part of another one, perhaps the Indians, fading in. Long pauses in the broadcast booth, a quiet crowd in the background, ruminating: you could tell that their team was out of the running. That night, the Twins lost to Texas. They lost again Wednesday and went north to Kansas City and lost three there. We reached Pittsburgh on Wednesday (Three Rivers Stadium was lit up for a Pirates doubleheader, and I told my wife it was probably her last chance to see a game this year, and she agreed that it probably was) and New York on Friday evening. The moving van arrived Saturday. Sunday, October 4, the last day of the season, as the Twins got shellacked 10-1 in K.C., we looked around at our apartment that resembled a landfill, and took a long walk. A warm evening, and the streets full of people, a river of yellow taxis flowing uptown on Eighth Avenue, and a sky almost full of skyscrapers—graceful old brick and stone ones—lit up. She was so happy. We walked and walked. “What are you thinking?” she asked. “Do you miss Minnesota?”

“Sure, and I miss Pall Malls, too,” I said. But I was thinking about my team. You stick with a team for years, like a not-so-great marriage in which you're still loyal and hopeful, and then, the day you break up, she loses fifty pounds and gets a haircut and becomes an overnight success. I wished I were in Minneapolis to see all the phlegmatic Swedes go wild.

The Twins arrived in Minnesota in the spring of 1961 from Washington, D.C., where they had been the hapless Senators, but that didn't matter to us. They were ours, and we were proud to have them—Camilo Pascual and his big tabletop curve, Pistol Pete Ramos, Bob Allison, and the mighty Harmon Killebrew, America's nicest power hitter. It was my first year in college, the same year my friend was killed. In 1965, the Twins made it to the World Series and lost to the Dodgers, and then, for years, the Series looked as remote as the America's Cup, Minnesota not being a major center of yachting, but even those thin years—when the team lost, and attendance fell, and the careful owner, seeing the gate receipts dwindle, reduced his payroll costs by ridding the team of star players like Rod Carew and Lyman Bostock—seem like a bright, green paradise compared with the gloom that fell on the Twins when they moved from the old ballpark in Bloomington to a domed stadium downtown for the 1982 season. In Minnesota, a Northern state, where one is forced indoors for much of four months of the year, the idea of spending a summer afternoon in an immense basement is deeply depressing; it was a fundamental heresy, just as if the Lutheran Church were to incorporate Mammon into the Godhead and make the Trinity a Quartet. I tried to like the dome for two years and gave up. It was, is, and ever will be a godforsaken, unnatural, and unhappy place to play the game of baseball, and right there my old team and I parted company.

The American League playoff began Wednesday night in Minnesota, against Detroit. Gaetti hit two home runs, and Reardon struck out the side in the ninth with two men on base. The Twins won, 8-5, and again Thursday night, 6-3, Blyleven going seven and a third innings. I didn't watch either game—too busy, and our TV didn't work.

“I'm not really a Twins fan,” I explained to people in New York who congratulated me on the team's doing so well, and I tried to explain about the dome, but it sounded like sour grapes. Everywhere I wrote a check and offered my Minnesota driver's license for an ID, people said something about the Twins, such as “Hey, how about those Twins?” The man at the bank where I went to open a checking account treated me as if I were applying for welfare, but when he saw my former address he smiled and said I must be pretty excited. I wasn't, but I was grateful. The man at the newsstand, whose sister is married to a man from Excelsior, Minnesota, greeted me like an old pal. “Hey, your guys won!” he said, and they did. On Columbus Day, they beat Detroit to get into the Series.

I started running into former Minnesotans, who recognized me from my maroon Golden Gophers sweatshirt. They couldn't believe it, they said—the
Twins
in the Series! I waited in the 23rd Street subway station at Sixth Avenue with a man from St. Paul, who asked me twice if I thought they could win the Series. Not if they would but if it was a possibility for them, as if a mysterious spore we had ingested in our mothers' tuna hotdish made us constitutionally unable to be fans of a winning team. Those four times the Vikings lost the football championship took a heavy toll on him, he said, and he didn't want to be fooled again.

Friends called from Minnesota, including a woman I went to college with who had never been to a Twins game in her life. She said that Minneapolis was feverish, full of noise and banners—on the tallest building in town one night, lights spelled out “WIN TWINS”—and strangers in the street talking baseball. “You should come back for the Series,” she said. “I've never seen people behaving like this. God,
I've
never been like this. I'm excited, and I don't even like baseball.” A friend called to offer Series tickets, and called back the next night to cancel that—the friend of his who knew someone whose brother worked for the Twins was not returning phone calls. “The town is nuts. You wouldn't believe it. It's great. You just want to go out and walk around and grin at people. You better come back and see it. You'll never forgive yourself if you miss it.”

I still hadn't watched a single game. Our TV set had worked in St. Paul, but in Manhattan it was receiving triple and quadruple shadow images, each human figure a chorus line, against a soup of colors—it looked like video art. We were busy unpacking boxes anyway, and trying to fit the furniture from a big old Minnesota house into a skinny three-bedroom apartment, and in the evening, when most of the games were played, we felt like getting out of our mess and walking the streets and seeing the city that had lured us away from the Midwest.

The first game of the Series was on Saturday night. When I woke up Saturday morning, I found myself thinking about the game and how much fun it would be to be in Minnesota, soaking up all that jubilation and floating good will and good-humored anxiety, and go to Russell's house to watch the game, to sit jammed together in a den with ten or twelve people who all felt exactly as I did, so that if I said, “I really believe that they can win,” they would all know the exact gravity of the sentence. We could mention a former player or manager, and instantly all of us remember that man vividly. We could recall games, we could reminisce about notable seasons, and not much would need to be said to call them to mind. When all of you have lived in a place forever, you're able to touch each other with a few slight words.

My wife had friends to go visit that night, so I sat down alone to watch, in a living room where we had piled quite a few things to be sorted out later, including a big brown jug I'm embarrassed to be still carting around—a trophy that went to the winner of an annual church softball game between single men and married men, a series that ended twenty-some years ago. The church was a pretty strict fundamentalist outfit, whose younger members tended to drift away into larger, more moderate churches, and by the early sixties so many players on both sides had been lost to heterodoxy that the summer Bible-camp classic came to an end. The scores of all the games are painted on the jug. I forget why it wound up with me; I left the church as soon as I could, sooner than most of the others.

When I turned on the TV, the picture was so blurry I didn't recognize the place as the Metrodome in Minneapolis, and the crowd waving hankies didn't look familiar, either, but the voice introducing the players belonged to the old ballpark announcer, Bob Casey, and that stamped the whole thing as authentic and genuine. I started to get good and tense, and by “rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air” I was leaning forward. I said
“Go!”
as the home team and a crowd of shadows ran out of their numerous dugouts onto the yellowish-blue-green field, and I leaned forward and girded up my innards to will them to victory. Win, team. We really need this one. For all the Lutheran back yards with the rosebushes wrapped and the flower beds covered for winter, and for all the romantic gents in the taverns and all the ladies buying bedspreads in Dayton's, for all the little grain-elevator towns on the prairie, for the shut-ins, for all the kids in the Twins caps, and for me. I didn't come to New York to be pitied by a man at the bank because I'm from Minnesota. I don't want to stand in the station commiserating with fellow losers. Win. When they ask, “Where you from?” and I say where, I want them to smile and say, “Hey. All right. Minnesota.”