Liberty

by Garrison Keillor

“If you go and leave Irene here, you can’t come back, Clinton, it’s as simple as that. I’ve told you plenty of times: You have to take responsibility for the outcome of your actions, whether you intended them or not.” So they eloped to Wisconsin. A judge in Hudson married them, his secretary as witness, and Clint wrote “Just Married” in the rear window of his car because he thought somebody ought to and she made him wipe it off. On the way to the hotel, she asked if he believed in God. “I think so,” he said. She said she didn’t. She used to but not anymore. He was shocked. He had heard of atheists and now he had married one. And then it turned out she didn’t want to go to California and have a great time, she wanted to stay here with her family who drove her crazy. And then his dad died and Clarence needed him at the garage and there was no chance to go back to California. And so he never got back to California. The saddest words of pen or tongue: I meant to go when I was young.

  A wrong turn. He almost didn’t take it. His last day in California he went to Santa Barbara, applied to art school, and met Ronnie for lunch. A big orange sun and low clouds in the mountains, a freighter lying at anchor far out on the Pacific, and under the palm trees the Café Judah in a low stucco building that opened its arms to you and offered exuberant salads with fresh tomato and sweet onions and crisp leaves, not limp and defeated like the Midwestern salad. He sat at a table on the patio and watched a tall woman with great long legs walk by, sunglasses, full of energy and mystery. Ronnie was his classmate who drove out in his old Plymouth along with Larry the Leaner, nicknamed for his habit: He never stood if he could lean. Both of them thick as bricks. Got warehouse jobs and stole junk food from the supermarket so they could afford to buy beer. But Ronnie had warned him. “You go home, pal, and you won’t make it back here. Irene’ll get her claws in you and that’s all she wrote.” Larry agreed with him. “Tell ’em you’re too busy to go visit. You go home, you’re sunk.” Prophetic words from fools. And a few years later Ronnie and Larry got better jobs and fell into the arms of smart women who rescued them from idiocy and now they were Californians and Larry was doing quite well in mobile phones and when he came home to visit, he dropped in to see Clint and said, straight out, “What happened to you? How did you get defeated like this? Who beat you up?”

  But his daughter Kira went. Attended Concordia for three years and then landed a job managing a café in Monterey. Saw the ad online, called the owner, he hired her. Irene told her she couldn’t go until she cleaned her room, and Clint told her to walk away from it and hit the road. “If you postpone going until you get everything cleaned up, you’ll never go,” he said. He walked her to the car he had bought for her and shoveled her bags in the backseat and kissed her good-bye.

  She said, “Why are you so eager to get rid of me?”

  “I don’t want you to miss out on your life, kid.”

  His heart was breaking. Little Kira his volleyball star, the Can-Do kid, the good student, the good daughter who didn’t run around and always called if she was going to be out past 11 p.m. and who enjoyed her parents’ company and who (though she didn’t know it) was the glue that held her parents together. And now she was going to the West Coast, work in a café, meet some guy, maybe the dishwasher, maybe the owner’s idiot son, and that guy wouldn’t be good enough for her and he’d leave her bruised and desolate and she’d walk weeping in the rains of Monterey, but he smiled and gave her a long, tight hug, and she got in the car and drove away, her little white hand waving out the window, and he went in the house with tears in his eyes and stood at the kitchen sink and ran cold water from the tap and scooped it up to his face.

  “What’s the matter? I thought you wanted her to go,” Irene said.

  He wept because without Kira there was no good reason to have a home any longer. Not that he could think of.

  He wanted her to go and get all the richness of life—passion, grandeur, bravery, adventure—everything he had tried to protect her from—he didn’t want her to make his mistake, come trotting back home to board her father’s sinking ship, sit in an office at Bunsen & Daughter Motors, marry some available boy with mechanical aptitude, never experience true independence, get old in her childhood home. Shades of the Colleys! Mrs. Helen Colley sent her daughter Mary off to Stanford and six years later when the grandpa succumbed to an infected hemorrhoid and the family fortune turned out to be a catacomb of debt, young Mary returned and got old fast living in a welter of family stuff, rooms jammed with mystery boxes and busted furniture piled on piles of old newspapers and catalogues, two old ladies, mother and daughter, living as sisters in the narrow labryinths between mountains of junk, the stench of cat urine and the flicker of an upstairs florescent light, the voice of Caruso, the whirlpool of dementia pulling them down together, a promising young woman sacrificing her life to her mother—you only had to remember that sad old rotting hulk of a house with vines growing out of the roof and you were glad to see your daughter decamp for California. Go and godspeed. Have a big romance and then another and another, go off in sunshine or darkness and know that we are not watching and noting your expensive new jeans and interesting hairstyle, your loud laughter, your vivacious-ness among strangers (compared to your dutiful daughterliness at home)—go have a life, darling, come back when you feel the urge.

  The night before she left, he and she walked by the lake eating ice cream cones from Skoglund’s and he gave her a little speech. “Boys want to get in your pants. That’s their main idea. So be sure you choose a good one, one who won’t see yours as the first in a long series of pants. But a funny one. So that after he gets in your pants, you can have some fun talking to him. You don’t want to lie there with your pants off and listen to him talk about real estate.” “Oh Daddy,” she said, embarrassed. That was a good sign, he thought.

  23. IRENE

  She had showered and dressed and watched Clint and Clarence head uptown together and thought maybe she’d like to run away from home today. She hated the Fourth and also she had an inkling that Clint was bewitched by the Pflame woman because he had left the house that morning without noticing the platter of deviled eggs she had made, nor the potato salad. She made it all for him, just the way he liked it. It wasn’t for the Fourth of July—there was a truckload of potato salad downtown, gallons of glop, the ratio of mayo to mustard 4 to 1, instead of 2 to 1, and hers had chopped scallions and paprika. Not that anyone cared. Evelyn Peterson used to care about potato salad but she was dead. And evidently Clint didn’t care anymore because he was over the moon about Miss Pflame, the Internet goddess.

  He was so gone with that woman he had no idea how much his own wife knew, that was how far gone he was.

  She’d asked him last night, “Tell me if this is sweet enough,” and gave him a little slab of rhubarb pie she’d made, and he ate a bite and then went out on the porch to check his phone messages. He was all caught up with that woman.

  Irene had made six strawberry-rhubarb pies the day before, for the winners of the three-legged race, the arm-wrestling, the egg toss, the chicken race, the shoe-lacing contest, the Tug-of-War (Men Under 40 versus Men Over), and the fat men’s race, six or seven fattycakes lumbering red-faced a hundred yards, their breasts bouncing and sweat pouring off them—Clint had tried to cancel it on safety grounds, but Viola said, No way, it was a high point of the Fourth for her. And a prize pie for the pie-eating contest. As if an idiot who had stuffed the most pie down his gullet would care about winning a pie. But Arlene was in charge of prizes and it was a tradition.

  Last year, the pie winner was Duke Carlson, who downed eighteen slabs of blueberry pie, kept them down for the required thirty seconds, and then disappeared into the toilet for a few minutes and came back grinning and accepted his prize, a pie. Ridiculous. Why couldn’t we go back to doing the saltine contest: You eat a dozen, and the first one to whistle is the winner.

  The three-legged-race winners last year were Dale and David Walters and Jim and Johnny Jirasek, a tie. The Jiraseks and the Walterses had been bat
tling for supremacy in the three-legged event for the past five years. They trained for it. They could run three-legged as fast as just about anybody could run two-legged.

  And another pie went to the winner of the arm-wrestling held under the last big elm in the park, which took an hour, large men grunting, big fists locked, and after endless rounds the championship came down to Earl Larson and a big galoot from Millet.

  They glared at each other and put their elbows on the table and locked hands and Mr. Berge slapped the table and the men strained, their huge shoulders swelled up, their backs bent, their faces turned red, sweat popped from their foreheads, the crowd got rowdy, minute after minute passed, people jumping up and down, screaming, the two combatants forehead to forehead, two men who’d done heavy labor all their lives and milked cows and hoisted lumber and hauled rocks, fighting now for supremacy, sweating, grunting, and then a child laughed out loud and that’s when Earl let a fart. It sounded like a gun went off and lifted him out of his chair and it took the starch out of him and the Man from Millet pinned his arm and threw his head back and laughed. The smell in the air was like buzzards had died from eating rotten eggs. The winner collected his pie and walked away, the loser walked away, everyone walked away, and nothing more was said about it, but half an hour later, people walking under that tree looked at each other and said, “The sewer’s backing up.”

  The egg toss was a crowd favorite, married couples tossing a fresh egg back and forth, taking a step back for each successful catch, lobbing the egg back and forth, higher, higher, step back, back, back, a long toss lands in the lady’s bosom ker-splat, a man misjudges and the egg hits him in the shnozzola ker-splort, and finally it’s down to the last three couples, tossing the egg ninety and a hundred feet, and one splatters, and now there are two, and now we start to see that this is how marriage works, actually—the hurling of fragile living matter back and forth, the art of the catch. And then a man backs up for a basket catch and misjudges and the explosion of the egg, and we have a winner, which as in actual marriage is measured by survival.

  Irene took the deviled eggs and potato salad over to the motel to put on the buffet in the so-called Hospitality Suite for the big shots who probably weren’t even coming, according to Cindy Hedlund who was there already, whomping up the cocktail sauce for the shrimp platter. The big cabin—Cabin No. 1—smelled of Lysol and pine soap. Viola had been up since 5 a.m. hauling refuse out to the barn where Art kept refuse in a bare room, no stacks of magazines in the corners. The governor was famous for his sense of caution. After Congressman Olson had gotten nabbed in a public toilet, the governor had reduced his intake of liquids. His advance man had called Viola and told her that a private toilet was important. Also signage. There should be three or four large billboards welcoming the governor and his name should be spelled out in letters at least four feet high. Unfortunately the town had no such billboards. Clint told her to forget it—by the time the governor discovered that he wasn’t welcomed in four-foot letters, he’d already be here and unlikely to cancel on a technicality. Viola wasn’t sure. Dorothy had brought in two long cafeteria tables and set up a Hot Pot for the sausage and put out several boxes of Ritz crackers and some cheese. As much cheese as a governor would want, probably.

  Viola sat capsized on an old couch which she had covered with a pink sheet. Cabin No. 1 would have to be the entire Hospitality Area, she said. Cabin No. 2 was beyond cleaning—it needed demolition. She was worn out. “This whole shebang ought to be bulldozed,” she said. “That’s going to be my project this year.”

  “I know where we could find matches,” said Irene.

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  Cindy was putting too much ketchup in the shrimp sauce, not enough horseradish, and chattering about her daughters and their various triumphs in Minneapolis. Cindy had a low hairline and you wondered if maybe she shouldn’t have it waxed a little. She had taken up wearing big earrings and maroon fingernail polish since she started selling real estate. She was visualizing success, she said, and could feel that it was visualizing her.

  And then Viola said, “I probably shouldn’t say anything about this but I wondered if you’d heard these rumors about Clint.”

  Irene smiled pleasantly. “What rumors?”

  “You know. Just rumors. Someone said you and Clint were going to separate. I personally hope it’s not true. I’m glad he’s resigning as Chairman. He’s been working too hard, if you ask me.”

  “We’re going to be just fine,” Irene said. And then she laughed. “But if we weren’t, I’d still say we were.” She looked at Viola. “You know how it is.”

  “I asked my sister-in-law to bring potato salad for the picnic today and she shows up with two big tubs of mush she bought at a gas station on the way up,” said Cindy. “Can you believe that? It’s like I asked her to bring meatloaf and she brought dog-food. What’s the big mystery about making potato salad? You don’t know how to boil potatoes? Or a few eggs? You can’t chop celery? I don’t get it. I told her, ‘Laurie, you forgot how to make potato salad?’ She said, ‘What’s wrong with this?’ So I told her, ‘If you care about people, you ought to serve them decent food, not something made in a factory three months ago and loaded with preservatives,’ and she got all sniffy. She said, ‘Well, if you don’t want us to come, just say so.’ I want her to come, but don’t bring garbage, okay?”

  Irene said that that was the way it was these days. Young women were proud of not knowing how to cook. A sign of liberation or something.

  She and Clint had eloped, a big drama back in 1976. Their families, the Rasmussens and the Bunsens, had loathed each other for years since a Rasmussen tried to kill a Bunsen with a shovel in an argument over cattle getting into a cornfield, and her parents had forbade her to see him under any circumstances but she loved him because he was kind, he was no dope, he had interesting things going on upstairs, and he was mature and seemed unlikely to wind up on a barstool or running away with Jewel the cocktail waitress, so she went and shacked up with him and returned the next day and her mother wept and her father thundered—and two weeks later the young people found a justice of the peace in Hudson, Wisconsin, and tied the knot.

  “Some people simply should not marry,” her mother had told her. “On account of bad blood.” Now Irene was starting to see the wisdom of it. He had resented her affections all these years and finally he was about to lash out. History repeats itself. We want to believe in a New Day and a New Deal but if the water is bad, you’re going to keep getting sick from it.

  Cindy Hedlund gave her a book, Making Your Marriage Work for You, that described three types of marriages: the conflict-avoidance marriage, and the validating marriage, and the volatile marriage. Hers had started out conflict-avoidance and turned volatile somehow without her knowing it. A man’s emotional crises are subterranean. You go along with your life and one day the foundation collapses. He was a good man and then the Internet came in and he started living a fantasy life. It was all beyond her, how a little screen could come to take the place of real life. What was the appeal? And then Clarence decided it was time for him to retire and Clint to buy out his share of Bunsen Motors, which was fine except that poor Clarence was never cut out for business and sat in his office and read novels while Clint broke his back repairing cars, meanwhile the used-car business dwindled for lack of a crackerjack salesman. You needed a hustler to move those cars and Clarence was a dreamer. Used cars are where you develop new customers and build loyalty. Well, it hadn’t been built. And now Clarence and Arlene wanted to pull up the tent stakes and move to Florida for crying out loud. And Clint was supposed to pay for it. And right about then was when Clint took up with Miss Pflame. What a gruesome moment that was, discovering the letter from her about what a wonderful lover he was. An e-mail he printed on creamy paper like he meant to frame it or something. Jeez. You’re almost 60 years old and you’ve finally gotten the last of the kids launched and on their way and you think, Good, now I can resume my l
ife, and whammo, your partner is out dancing in bed with some tootsie he met online. It bruised Irene’s good nature and rubbed it raw. A treacherous passage. She woke up every morning feeling that she was walking a minefield, and a coffee spill could trigger the explosion, a misplaced newspaper, clumps of mud on the kitchen floor. He had recently suggested she see a doctor about depression and she told him he should see one about irrationality and that was where they were, fussing at each other, ever on the verge of decamping and flying solo for awhile. But last night was very nice. Last night was what she wished the next ten years would be like.

  Her younger sister Jeanine was married to Harry for twelve years, a depressive man who refused to seek help, and she divorced him (whereupon Harry got much better) and married Louis who made her very happy until he went down from a heart attack, on a fishing trip in Florida, just keeled over dead and fell overboard. Sank like a stone. They never recovered the body. Three months later Jeanine fell in love with a fisherman named Angelo whom she met on a bus to Duluth. He was missing the little finger on his left hand, torn off by a rope. He had been to China twice, had captained a submarine chaser in the North Atlantic, now he was captain of a luxury steamboat on the Mississippi. His crazy uncle in Duluth had died and left him a warehouse full of stuff people had stored and then forgotten about, and he expected to walk away with a couple million dollars. The Caribbean beckoned to him. He’d buy a 40-foot yacht and learn scuba diving and wend his way from Hispaniola to Antigua and Barbados. On the bus it seemed he suggested that she could come along. He said, “We could live on the boat and just go where we wanted to go. Free as the wind.” He had beautiful hands. He braided a little bracelet out of leather for her and he put it on her wrist.

  She was corresponding with him regularly. “There are men out there,” Jeanine said. “Don’t ever forget that. There is no reason any woman should be alone.”