The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  “You know this would break Mother’s heart. She would cry her eyes out if she knew,” she says.

  “If she knew what?”

  “You know what,” says the sister. “You know.” She tosses her head and reminds me that the dishes are waiting to be dried and wheels toward the kitchen, High School Orgies in hand.

  I will swear up and down I never laid eyes on it, I will lie my face off until I am tied in knots—I never saw that magazine in my life, Mother. I demand a polygraph test! Call in the FBI. Boston Blackie. Sam Spade. Get me City Desk! We’ll get to the bottom of this! Find out who is infiltrating our household with this despicable literature!

  • • •

  I was a very good boy right up until the age of eleven. Everybody said so. I stayed out of people’s way and didn’t ask too many questions. I sat up straight at meals and when visiting other people’s homes, I said Thank you for the lemonade and Please may I use your bathroom? I never picked my nose except behind closed doors and when grown-ups spoke I was attentive. I was often pointed out to other children as an example. “Why can’t you behave like Gary? Look at him, he doesn’t wriggle around like a trapped squirrel during Prayer Meeting, he sits up straight and listens and Gets Something Out of It.” And then one day in 1953 I said out loud, “Oh, to hell with it,” in connection with a sack of garbage Daddy told me to take to the garbage can. I was standing on one side of the screen door and he on the other. I was wearing khaki trousers and an old Boy Scout shirt of the older brother’s. I was surprised to hear these words myself. They just sprang out, like a sneeze, “Oh, to hell with it.” And a great darkness fell over the earth.

  Daddy was speechless with apoplexy. He thought I had said “Go to hell” to him.

  I was sent out to sit in the car. It was a hot day, the sun beat down. I sat in the backseat, the window rolled down, pretending I was on a train to Chicago. Kate came by. I told her what I had said and she grinned. “You’re up shit creek now,” she said.

  And then Daddy came out and drove me to the farm. He talked about how hard he worked as a boy and how Grandma brooked no back talk and if you didn’t toe the mark it was the leather strap for you, but of course Grandma never was like that to me at all. He said, “You go spend a few days on the farm and maybe it’ll make you think twice about what you say.”

  Aunt Eva was tickled pink to take possession of me. Daddy told her I’d said a swearword, and after he left, she cut me a slice of chocolate cake three inches thick with a glob of whipped cream on top. She said that everybody thinks swearwords sometimes and there isn’t much difference between thinking them and saying them, according to the Gospel. When she was young, she said, she used to go to the barn and say every bad word she knew, and that way she got it out of her system.

  I asked if I was going to hell and she said, Don’t be ridiculous. And then she did something that nobody in our family did, ever, she told me she loved me, and she threw her big arms around me and I took a deep breath of her and she squeezed and said, I wish you lived with me, Precious.

  I was so happy. It was a blazing hot summer afternoon. Grandma was taking a nap. Eva said we’d go swimming later in the river. We sat in the shade on the back steps. I asked, “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” I would take a trip around the world, I said. This thought didn’t seem to interest her. She picked up a bucket, and we headed out past the machine shed to the garden drenched in sunshine, picked a dozen ears of sweet corn, two cucumbers. Bees busied themselves among the vines, the pea vines and melons and pumpkins and squash, the whole jungly spread of vinous stuff, dipping under the broad fuzzy leaves. Eva picked a few tomatoes. I picked one and wiped it off and bit into it and sucked up the warm juice.

  Daddy came and took me back to town.

  —How’s Eva and Grandma?

  —Fine.

  —Did you think about how you need to control what you say?

  —Yes, I did.

  —And what did you decide?

  —I’m not going to swear.

  —I hope you mean it.

  —I do.

  In my head I thought, I’ve got to get out of here, damn it.

  Cousin Kate was the only one I could say it to and she said, “You’re damn right you do.”

  • • •

  Kate is older than I, and even then she dwelt on a plane of sophistication extremely rare for Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. She was a devotee of The New Yorker and shared copies with me and pointed out the best things and explained the cartoons. She wore her dark hair short with bangs in homage to the great Audrey Hepburn and she acted in school plays, but usually as the mother, or the maid, dusting the drawing room as the curtain came up. She didn’t care, she loved to perform. She liked to say things to make people’s jaws drop, and then be nonchalant about it, What’s the big deal? and walk away, cool. She told a girl from Youth for Christ that she thought it was okay if people had sex, so long as they loved each other. The other girl burst into tears and said she would pray for Kate, but it was all a big show. If you dared her to show her underpants, she would. If Miss Falconer needed someone to sing a solo at the Christmas choir concert, Kate’s arm was high in the air, her hand fluttering.

  Kate knew sophisticated songs. She read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She smoked. When she was in the mood, she spoke in a Hepburn glissando, cool and thrilling—she’d say, “Darling, what a day I have had, I am in an absolute state, the things I put up with, don’t ask me about it”—not a Lake Wobegon way of talking, and she’d reach into her coat pocket and pull out her Herbert Tareytons and plant a cigarette between her lips and say, “Darling, I have been dying for this since noon,” and light it and let the smoke trickle out her mouth and draw it up her nose. Once Kate and I ran into Aunt Flo downtown and Kate quickly hid her cigarette behind her back and said, Hi Aunt Flo, and when Flo passed, Kate smiled at me and exhaled smoke, cool as could be. She learned to smoke at Bible camp, from some unsaved kids the Brethren tried to convert, and she also learned how to swear and dance the shimmy.

  That spring in 1956, her poem “soliloquy” was rejected by Miss Lewis for the Literary Leaf—

  death is easy like taking a bath

  with an electric fan and waving hello to god

  you could die like walking in front of a bus

  or jumping into the big blue air

  or doing almost anything

  you could die by living in minnesota

  god is love but

  he doesn’t necessarily drop everything and go save everybody

  does he

  Miss Lewis told Kate she was a sick person. She sent the poem home to Aunt Ruth and Uncle Sugar, and it scared them silly. How could Kate talk about putting an electric fan in the bath? And why wasn’t “god” capitalized?

  Kate announced that she planned to attend Athena College in Melisma, Iowa, where, on May Day every year, the students run naked as jaybirds across the Quad and through the fountain and into the Arboretum (PROF DOFFS DUDS AT MAY DAY DO was the headline in the Minneapolis Star). Uncle Sugar said he would rather eat a can of Dutch cleanser than have her attend a school like Athena. But Kate just laughed. “Darling,” she said to me, “I don’t intend to spend my life baking cookies and waxing the kitchen floor. I am not a scrubwoman. I am an artist, my darling. Artists are put here to paint big strokes of color in a dull gray world—and if some people prefer the dull gray world, too bad for them. Don’t be a bump on a log. Wake up and die right.”

  A few days after the “soliloquy” scandal, Kate waltzed into school in a blue angora sweater unbuttoned three buttons from the top, a dramatic touch. She seemed even more coltish and Oh Darlingish than usual, flying around the halls, crying out Woo-hoo and blowing kisses and striking a Come Hither pose and hugging people. It was the day of the spring talent show. The whole student body packed into the auditorium, and the lights dimmed, and the sp
otlight focused on the microphone in front of the blue-and-gold L.W.H.S. curtain. A girls’ sextet sang “Green Cathedral” and a boy in a red-striped suit lip-synched to a Spike Jones song and a sweaty girl in a pink formal played “Deep Purple” at the piano in a studious way. Leonard Larson recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Painful. The sextet returned and sang “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Kate hated them because they wouldn’t let her join, even though she sang better than any of them. They rejected her because she wasn’t cute enough. They sang a third song about wanting to be loved by you, boop-boop-a-doop, in which Cathy Tollerud did a stutter-step rag doll dance that showed flashes of white panties, and boys around me whooped and whistled, and right after that came Kate, determined to show them up. She danced to the Doo Dads’ recording of “Dance Me”—

  Baby, baby, I’m your man.

  Kiss me, squeeze me, hold my hand.

  Kiss me sweet and kiss me strong.

  And dance me, dance me, all night long.

  As she danced, she pulled her sweater down so you could see her bare shoulders. Then she turned her back and showed off more of her shoulders. She didn’t seem to be wearing anything underneath. She stood with her hands on the sweater as if she might take the whole thing off and boys whistled and yelled, “Do it! Do it! Do it!” and she smiled and flounced off to whoops and yells, and came back for a deep bow that revealed a little more. After the show, Daryl Magendanz saw her in the hall and grabbed for her bra strap and didn’t find one and threw back his big flat head and hollered, “She ain’t wearin no UN-der-wear!”

  Kate was sent to the school nurse, Mrs. Dahlberg, for inspection. Kate told Mrs. Dahlberg to sit on it and spin. The nurse threw her up against the wall and tried to stick her hand up Kate’s sweater when Kate squirmed loose and raced out the door and down the hall past the English classrooms and came pedaling for dear life around the corner by Home Economics as I was opening the door to the boys’ can.

  I had gotten out of Miss Lewis’s class to go to the library and do research on the Globe Theatre.

  Kate yelped at me and slid into the can ahead of me and we hustled into the far stall and latched the door and I sat on the throne and she sat on my lap with her legs braced against the door.

  “What are we doing?” I said. She put one hand on the toilet paper roll and lay back against me, her legs slightly bent, her brown shoes on the green door, and then she said, “You better pull down your pants so it looks like you’re taking a dump.” She hoisted herself up an inch and I slid my trousers and underpants down, and she sat on my naked lap. She told me what happened in the nurse’s office. I put my arms around her. I could feel her rib cage, breathing, her back against me. I put my face in her hair. She was a little heavy but it didn’t matter.

  A door slammed open and the nurse yelled, “Who’s in here?” I jumped and felt my innards quake and there were two little splashes in the toilet. Kate bent over and almost burst out laughing. She clapped both hands over her mouth.

  “I said, Who’s in here?”

  “Me,” I said. Kate snorted.

  “Somebody in there with you?”

  “No.”

  “Did a girl come in here?”

  “No, of course not, Mrs. Dahlberg.”

  “Come out here and let’s have a look at you.”

  • • •

  Kate shook from the effort of not laughing out loud. She scootched up and I slid out from under and opened the stall door and looked out and there was Mrs. Dahlberg breathing fire. Her hair had come loose and she was grinding her teeth. “Step out of there, young man,” she said. She was so ticked off she didn’t even recognize me as Kate’s cousin.

  I stepped out, pants around my ankles, shirttails out, my hands over my pecker, and she looked at me with pure loathing. “What do you think you’re doing out of class? You came in here to smoke, didn’t you.”

  “I had to go to the toilet.”

  She snorted. “Let’s see your hall pass.”

  I dug the pass out of my pants pocket. She shook her head. “If I don’t see you in the library in five minutes, young man, there better be a good reason why.” She wheeled around and out the door and lit out down the hall.

  The door slammed and Kate almost split a gut. “Good I had you take your pants down. Boy, she scared the poop right out of you.” She hoisted herself up and I slid under her, on the throne. I asked her what we should do now.

  She said, “Sit tight, darling, and wait for the coast to clear.”

  I sat, half naked, with my arms around her middle, and closed my legs. She said, “You know, they just might kick me out of school for hitting Mrs. Dahlberg.” She chuckled. “Oh well. If they kick me out, I’ll run away from home. I’ll hide out in the woods and I’ll steal for a living.”

  “I’ll visit you in the woods,” I said.

  She said, “That’s very thoughtful of you, sweet pea.”

  We did not hear the boy come in and pee in the urinal trough but he heard us and I guess he peeked through the crack between the stall door and the post and saw us in there and since he was a good boy he reported us to Mr. Halvorson, who came storming in a few minutes later, while I was imagining living with Kate in a shack in the woods and talking late into the night and writing stories for The New Yorker. She had just said she had to go home and put on a bra and I said, “You don’t have a bra on?” and she took my hands and put them up her sweater, and that was when he burst in with a triumphant shout and escorted us to his office and sat us down on hard oak chairs for almost an hour and gave us a somber talk about how we must accept the consequences of our deeds whether we intended those consequences or not—I had no idea what he meant—but he was so embarrassed by what had happened in the boys’ can that he could not bring himself to say what it was, except he used the word unnatural several times, and then he gave us a mournful look and let us go. It was a gentle spring day. Two cats lay on the sidewalk, soaking up the sun, meadowlarks sang in a vacant lot. The steeple of the Lutheran church rose up before us. Inside a soprano was singing. Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. Then we saw the hearse parked in back.

  “A funeral, darling, and it’s not ours. What could be better?” We went down the hill and headed toward the trees by the swimming beach. She sat down and leaned against a pair of birch trees. I sat next to her.

  “This is what I call a good day,” she said. “You ever worry that you might turn out to have a boring life? I do. I worry about it all the time.”

  I said I was worried I’d wind up going to hell.

  “Either there is one or there isn’t, and if there is, either you’re going or you’re not, and God knows which it is, so there’s not much to be done about it, is there?”

  • • •

  The sister returns to the porch, having stashed the magazine for blackmail. Toledo is at bat in the bottom of the seventh, their shortstop, Denny Davies, who poked the triple in the second, now knocks out a single—he has three for three. “I think Gary has something to tell you,” she announces.

  Daddy looks at me. “Go dry the dishes.”

  “I will in a minute.”

  I will not surrender. I never saw High School Orgies in my life and have no idea where she found it. I will go to the kitchen when I choose to and dry the pots and pans when I choose to and not a moment before. She leans down and whispers, “I’d be very careful if I were you, because you’re not going to get away with this. I could have that filthy magazine in Mother’s hands in two minutes!”

  And just then, out comes Mother, my old ally and defender, iced tea in hand, in her green linen pants and white sailor blouse, barefoot, her bushy blond hair tied back, and settles down in the white wicker chair with The Minneapolis Star. “What a lovely evening,” she says.

  “He won’t dry the pots and pans,” says Miss Misery. “And there’s one more thing—”<
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  Mother looks up. “They’re dry. I put them away in the cupboard.”

  The sister seethes. She steams, she fumes, she foams at the mouth. She informs Daddy that the pots and pans had to be rewashed because flies had walked all over them for the past half hour due to my disobedience. They are in the dish rack now and await my dish towel.

  He looks over at me on the porch swing, a pillow behind my head, glancing through the Collier’s, reading about peanuts, a leguminous plant (Arachis hypogaea), bearing underground nutlike pods.

  “Go do what you said you were going to do before I completely lose my patience.”

  I walk down the front steps. Frames of porch light stretch over the beautiful grass, and drops of water fly into the light. Thousands of drops enjoying a split-second life as individuals before mingling in the ooze. The grass is drenched, the ground soused. I pick up the green hose and crimp it to shut off the spray and drag the hose around to the side of the house, and in the shadows the Stenstroms’ cat, who knows my accuracy with water, slinks for cover in the lilacs.

  I set the sprinkler so it waters a sphere of backyard from the cellar steps to the tomato plants to the clotheslines, and I come in the back door into the kitchen, where the sister sits smirking at the table. I tell her she really ought to do something about her personality. And also her appearance. And she hisses at me, “Fornicator!” and stomps upstairs, and I dry the three pans and one pot she has rewashed, the ones that flies purportedly trod on, and as I put them into the cupboard I sneeze and a string of snot lands in the pot and I open the cupboard under the sink to get the detergent and there is High School Orgies hidden in a dish basin. Yes! Thank you, Lord! I slip it under my shirt, and return to the porch and plop back into my nest on the swing and sit, pretending to read about peanuts.