Of course, she never told anyone that she purposely unraveled her nightgown or that she harbored dirty personal hygiene items and food products in her hair; never told anyone that sometimes when she made Eric coffee, she liked to put in it a grain—only a grain, so that he could never taste it—of salt or pepper, or the tiniest drip of spit. These were her secrets, these little crazy things she did that helped keep her sane.
She had also learned that the less Eric knew of Angry Housewives (she loved the new name; she had finally figured out she was an angry housewife) the better; if he found her curled up on the couch with a book, he was just as likely to fly into a rage (“You sit around all day while I’m in surgery for ten hours straight?”) as to ask, “Whatcha reading?” She had learned to read while he was at work or on the sly (nursing in the middle of the night, folding clothes in the laundry room), and to read fast, training herself to see like a hawk, swooping over the page, not missing a thing. Books became her comfort, her sanctuary, and she got scared when she thought of her life just a year and a half ago, when they weren’t a part of it. She had always checked out their book club selections from the library, but now she went to bookstores, buying them with the household money Eric gave her every week. Each purchase was another twinkling star.
In another of Merit’s rebellious acts, she decided her book club selections would only be banned books. It didn’t matter when or where they had been banned; what mattered was that someone had hated a book enough to try to ensure that no one else got a chance to read it (and possibly hate it too). She remembered her mother’s sister, her aunt Gaylene, coming to baby-sit. Merit’s brother and sister had been put to bed, but Aunt Gaylene had let eight-year-old Merit stay up and play with Lincoln Logs while she lay on the old-fashioned and lumpy horsehair couch that had come with the parish home. The radio was on, and Merit luxuriated in the peacefulness the oldest child of three is rarely privy to, but then her parents came back from their “date” (they had chaperoned the Luther League bowling party) and Pastor Mayes, upon seeing the worn library copy of Dr. Faustus on his sister-in-law’s lap, threw one of his famous conniption fits.
“How dare you bring that sacrilegious book into this house!”
“Sacrilegious?” laughed Aunt Gaylene. “Have you ever read it, Stanley? It’s a classic!”
Merit’s heart thumped—she would have been spanked and sent straight to her room for speaking to an adult in that snippy tone of voice.
“Well, it’s not going to be a classic in my house,” said the pastor, grabbing the book out of the woman’s hands.
Merit saw the flash of anger in her aunt’s eyes, but instead of jumping into the argument her father seemed anxious to push her into, Aunt Gaylene merely smiled and then, really surprising Merit, laughed.
“You’re a piece of work, Stanley,” she said, shaking her head as if remembering a good joke. She rose, held her hand out for the book, and repeated, “A real piece of work.”
Reading Dr. Faustus, Merit was reminded of the promise she had made to herself, that someday she was going to be as brave as her aunt Gaylene. More than fifteen years later, someday was long overdue. But Merit knew there was a price to pay for everything, including bravery; in her last conversation with her mother, Mrs. Mayes had described her recent visit with her sister in Sioux City.
“Well, you know, Gaylene’s never found a man for herself, Merit, and that sort of kills a woman’s spirit. Now, she says all she needs are her friends and her cats and her books, but I’m telling you, she’s living half a life.”
A part of her wanted to laugh; she knew Aunt Gaylene would have laughed, but the part that shamed Merit believed her mother.
November 1969
Dear Mama,
2:00 a.m. and I think I drank too much coffee—I feel as wired as a fuse box. We had book club tonight and talked about Dr. Faustus. When we asked what sort of bargains all of us would make with the devil, Audrey said she’d sell her soul for a chocolate eclair.
“That’s a pretty cheap sacrifice,” said Kari.
“Well, what does it matter if I sell my soul for a chocolate eclair to someone I don’t even believe exists?”
“You don’t believe in the devil?” asked Merit.
Audrey fluffed her hair with her hands. “I think he was just invented as a scare tactic.”
“Oh,” said Merit, and honestly, those eyes of hers were like saucers. “I think the devil is real.”
“And what does he look like?” I asked. “Red and horned like Beau’s Halloween costume?”
“No,” said Merit softly. “He could look like anybody.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Slip.
Pink spread across Merit’s beautiful face, and if there were a thousand ships around, she’d launch ’em.
“It means,” she began, “that I think that’s where the devil shows up. In people. He sneaks into them and that’s why they do such evil things.”
“Give me that old-time religion,” said Slip.
Merit shrugged. “That’s what I believe.”
“So what would make you make a deal with him?” I asked.
Merit sat quietly for a moment, looking down at her lap. “I think we make deals with him every day.”
All of us looked at each other like “What the hell (no pun intended) is she talking about?”
“Merit,” I said, “I think your preacher daughter roots are showing.”
“Probably,” she said, and smiled. Then, turning toward Slip, she asked, “I’ll bet you wouldn’t make a pact with the devil. I’ll bet the devil would even be afraid to ask.”
Slip looked pleased, and Audrey looked as irritated as I felt. Just because Slip likes to carry a picket sign, Merit thinks she’s Joan of Arc or something.
“Well, I think I would,” said Slip. “If it were between my children’s safety and my soul, I’d give up my soul.”
We all nodded, except for Kari.
“That’s a hard one,” said Kari, her face pale. “Because if you had no soul, you’d have no chance of seeing your loved ones after you die. And I couldn’t stand not to see Julia or Bjorn in eternity.”
“Now you sound old-timey,” said Audrey.
“And I can’t really believe that you’d give up Julia in the here and now just for the chance of seeing her in what may or may not be an eternity,” said Slip.
“I believe there is,” said Kari. Her voice was steely, even though there were tears in her eyes. “I can’t say as I know what it will be like—but I believe it exists. And I don’t think a person should give up their soul for anyone or anything. They would gain nothing.”
“They might gain their children’s lives!” I said.
“But without a soul, your children would mean nothing to you,” said Kari. “All would be nothing.”
“It wouldn’t matter!” I said. “They’d still be alive!”
“Without meaning there is nothing but nothingness,” said the big philosopher.
So how do you like that, Mama? The woman who acts like Julia is God’s gift to the world wouldn’t even give up her own soul for her. Either I don’t understand the depth of her faith or she’s not the übermother I thought she was.
Aw, what’s your soul anyway? If it’s the core of you, the real you—hell, I give up pieces of that every day.
I’m sorry,
Faith
PART TWO
The Seventies
May 1970
HOST: SLIP
BOOK: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
REASON CHOSEN: “Because I think Tom Wolfe should be president.”
When a cop grabs you up off the ground, your impulse is to scream and/or wet your pants. At least mine was. Instead, I looked to my fellow protesters for behavior guidelines.
We were a sight, some of us drenched in fake blood, others dressed as National Guardsmen. Dori, a college sophomore, was asking her personal policeman why he didn’t just shoot her. Edith, a woman w
ho earlier had shown me pictures of her grandchildren, asked the officer pulling her to her feet to please take it easy, she had arthritis in her knees. There was no screaming, and as far as I could see, no one had wet their pants.
“So what are you arresting me for?” I asked, trying to put a toughness in my voice that I didn’t feel.
“I’m not arresting you,” said the policeman placidly. “We’ve just been asked to escort you off the stage. The band wants to start playing.”
A handful of people on the sidelines were booing and shouting, calling out “pig” along with any number of colorful adjectives. A much larger group of people, some dressed in traditional Norwegian costumes, sat quietly on the benches surrounding the bandshell.
Holding me by the arm, my badged escort took me down the steps and released me next to an old man holding a fiddle.
“More power to you,” he said in a strong Norwegian brogue.
“Thank you,” I said with a catch in my throat. It always touched me when someone I didn’t think would back me backed me.
“Sometimes you got to vonder vhot’s da verld coming to,” said the fiddler, shaking his head.
“I know,” I said, shaking mine.
Kent State. It was what had brought me and a handful of protesters to the Norwegian Independence Day celebration at Minnehaha Park, interrupting their festivities to reenact the unbelievable horror that had happened at the Ohio college.
“You want me to pretend I’m a student getting shot?” I’d asked the organizer who called me the night before.
“Yes. We want to do something visually shocking. We want people to be jolted.”
“But why the festival?”
“Well, usually at least one TV station does a feature on it,” she’d said, and I couldn’t argue with that logic. I know the real worth of a protest lies in how many people see or hear about it. Unfortunately, there must have been a big fire or a train derailment, because we had waited for hours for a camera crew that didn’t show up.
All the protesters had been cleared off the stage, and the city councilman who was acting as emcee stepped up to the mike.
“Sorry about that little incident, folks,” he said. “They must all be Swedes.”
This got an appreciative laugh; I had been in Minnesota long enough to know that anytime a Swede was denigrated to a Norwegian or vice versa, it was considered a good joke. But was that what we were to these people, a little incident, a joke?
“Now let’s give a hand for the song stylings of the Four Norsemen.” Amid applause, the quartet of older gentlemen, including the fiddler, stepped onto the stage.
Usually I felt jazzed up after an action, high on the belief that I was doing something to better the world, but now, standing alone in my (fake) blood-soaked shirt, I felt not only conspicuous but ineffectual. I saw two of my fellow protesters buying a box of popcorn, but where were the rest? A group of cops stood by a drinking fountain, where they were listening intently as one regaled them with stories—probably about the time he’d busted heads at a “real” protest like the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Feeling foolish, like a host who threw a party no one wanted to stick around for, I put on the sweatshirt that was tied around my waist, covering up my “wound.” I was debating whether to walk the couple miles home or check out some of the food stands to see if there was any lefsa around (Kari had turned me on to that particular treat) when I heard “Slip!” For a moment I thought maybe I was being summoned by a fellow protester—maybe this thing wasn’t over yet—but the person calling me was wearing a belted pantsuit with absolutely no traces of fake blood splashed on it.
“Hi, Faith!” I said as she and another well-dressed woman came toward me. “What are you doing here?”
Faith introduced me to her friend Nancy, whom she’d met at the Pilots’ Wives Association. “And her husband’s family is Norwegian, so—”
“So,” interrupted Nancy, “I thought Faith might be amused by this rather arcane event. I’m certain they’re not used to this level of folksiness back in Dallas.”
Holy pretentious nose in the air—was she serious?
“Arcane?” I asked. “What’s arcane about a group of people celebrating their heritage?”
Faith blushed for her friend, since fancy-schmancy Nancy didn’t seem embarrassed by me calling her on her fancy-schmanciness.
Nancy smiled at me as if I inspired pity in her. “Hmmm. You must be Norwegian too.”
“No, I came here as part of a demonstration.”
Nancy looked as if she’d swallowed pickle juice. “You weren’t part of that . . . that bloodstained group of nuts?”
I pulled my sweatshirt over my head to show her that yup, I sure was.
“We just got here as the police were taking people off,” said Faith. “What was it all about?”
“We were protesting what happened at Kent State.”
“Oh, that was awful,” agreed Faith. “I couldn’t believe something like that could happen in the United States.”
“Still,” said Nancy, “I fail to see what good it does to pour food coloring over yourselves—I’m assuming it’s food coloring—and interrupt a celebration people have been looking forward to for weeks.”
“Well, we thought it was so arcane that it needed something topical. And what’s more topical in this day and age than a protest?” I gave her my brightest, beamingest smile, which she did not care to return.
“I really don’t understand you people,” she said. “I don’t quite understand what it is you hope to accomplish.”
Faith looked like she’d rather be standing between Hitler and Stalin than us two.
“Well, I personally don’t like to sit back as all these atrocities occur. I figure I have to do something to express my outrage.”
“Outrageous is more like it,” said Nancy. “Most people think you protesters are nothing but a bunch of—”
“Nancy, please,” said Faith, finally getting off the fence. “Slip is very dedicated to—”
“Faith, I’m sorry, I don’t care to discuss this anymore.” With that, she turned on her stacked heel and began walking toward the pavilion.
“Sorry,” said Faith glumly. “I don’t know what her problem is.”
“I’ve heard worse,” I said, appreciating her apology. “Hey, you don’t have to stay with me. Why don’t you catch up to her? You came with her, after all.”
“You . . . you won’t be mad?”
“Of course not. I just feel sorry for you having to spend more time with her. She makes Leslie Trottman look like a font of liberalism.”
Faith smiled. “She has her good points . . . I’ll bet.”
I watched her catch up to her misguided friend and decided I’d head for home but was stopped in my tracks by the fiddler of the Four Norsemen.
He had stepped to the microphone, holding his bow and fiddle at his side.
“Bee-yoo-tiful day, isn’t it?”
The crowd signified their agreement by applauding.
“Ya, and it’s pretty nice to sit back and listen to da music, isn’t it?”
Again, the audience clapped.
“Vell, I yust hope you’re grateful dat you can listen to music on a bee-yoo-tiful day, because dose kids from Kent State can’t. And I tink dose people dat vere up here hed da right idea. Dose kids need to be remembered. Let’s all take a moment out of dis bee-yoo-tiful day to sit in silence for a moment and remember dose kids.”
Quiet fell over the crowd, and as the fiddler bowed his head, so did I, thanking him and hoping that his amplified words somehow reached Nancy and all the other Nancys in the world.
JERRY WAS SITTING on the front steps when I got home.
“Hi, honey,” I said, eager to report on my day in the trenches and to hear how he had held down the fort. (The kids had accompanied us to several demonstrations, but we thought this one might be a little too dramatic for them.)
“Slip,” he said, standing up,
and immediately I could tell something was wrong.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, my heart racing. “Where are the kids? Are they all right?”
“The kids are fine, Slip,” said Jerry, “but your mom called. Fred—”
“Oh my, God!” I said, and the words felt like stones I could choke on. “Fred—is Fred dead?”
“Oh, Slip, no.” Jerry took me in his arms. “God, no. He was wounded—not bad, not bad, Slip—he got some shrapnel in the arm, enough to be sent home.”
“He’s alive?” I asked, pressed against my husband so my heart wouldn’t fly out. “Fred’s alive?”
“Yes! Yes, he’s coming home!”
I can’t say that I had been constantly worrying about Fred, but the fact that he was in Vietnam had been like having a bad tooth; you could go on blithely with your business until you took a bite of something and nearly screamed with pain. I had lost four pounds, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but on me it’s the equivalent of a normal person’s dozen; I chewed my fingernails until the quick bled and it hurt to dial a phone or scratch my arm. But I was going to get what thousands of others did not: a brother who was coming back from Vietnam, alive.
I clung to Jerry, sobbing, until Flannery came out of the house, her face puckered with worry.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” she asked. “Didn’t they like your protest?”
That night I hunkered down in the bathtub, a half-foot-high layer of bubbles covering me like a suds comforter (I always use plenty of bubble bath in the tub—if there’s one thing I need an obscured view of, it’s my naked body). The water was just on the verge of being too hot—just the way I liked it—and my nose was only a half inch above the bubbles.
“Ahhhhhhh.” My body felt weightless, and as I closed my eyes, all thoughts of the protest, of Fancy Nancy and the fiddler, of my brother Fred coming home drifted away in the fragrant steam cloud that rose above the tub. I was a mermaid; no, I was a being less complicated than that—I was an amoeba, floating along in water and bubbles that smelled of hibiscus.
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