Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  The ladies clucked and bent to their work, turning scraps of cast-off clothing into warm quilts. (Which were bundled off to Lutheran World Services in Chicago. Where, after prayerful deliberation, they were sold for good money to a wholesale bedding house in Baltimore. The money went to buy vaccines for African children. The quilts were sold in gift shops on the East Coast as authentic handmade Amish for hundreds of dollars.)

  And all the while, Evelyn was stealing away now and then to visit her cousin in St. Paul who was non compos mentis in a nursing home, carrying on long conversations with dead relatives, a perfect cover for Evelyn to go two-stepping with Raoul at the Medina Ballroom to the strains of Vic D’Amore and His Chancellors of Dance. Who knew? Nobody. After Evelyn’s death and the whole story came out—the plane tickets, the souvenirs of the Ozarks and Branson and Reno and Daytona Beach, the matchbooks from resorts, the menus of Antoine’s and Bob’s Ribs and Le Coq—the ladies of the Circle wept for Evelyn and sorely missed her but they never discussed the secret life she led. That simply vanished into the Unspoken file. The subject was too painful. And that was the end of the Age of Interpretation. From then on, they discussed their grandchildren and their vacation plans. No more stories.

  9. DEBBIE COMES TO TOWN

  Two hours after Barbara found Evelyn dead in bed, Debbie Detmer drove into town in a blue Ford van and pulled into her parents’ driveway and started unloading her bags, expensive ones, blue leather, and noticed that Mother had not planted petunias in the big white-painted truck tire in the front yard. And the tire was gone and so were the plywood cutouts of fat people bending over. Instead, there stood a sign, with reflective letters on plywood: JESUS CHRIST: THE SAME YESTERDAY, TODAY AND FOREVER. She’d never seen it before. Wrong house? No. There was Daddy’s Ford Fairlane with the Bush-Cheney bumper sticker. She had come to town to get married on Saturday to Mr. Brent Greenwood, 39, of Sea Crest, California. The Detmers lived three blocks from Evelyn’s little bungalow but they hadn’t heard about her death yet. They had been out of the social whirl ever since January when Mr. Detmer slipped and banged his head. He was toweling off after his shower while watching the Today show on the tiny TV Betty gave him for Christmas, an interview with the oldest active pro ballplayer in America, a 62-year-old pitcher for the Salem Sailors named Bryce Brickel, who attributed his long career to God’s Will and good nutrition. Mr. Detmer was 72, an age when a man is proud of being able to still put his clothes on standing up, and he was stepping into his underpants and caught his big toe on the elastic band. He hopped a few times, reluctant to give up on it, and fell and concussed himself against the side of the tub, and it had made him forgetful and also intensely devout and a daily reader of God’s Word. He started calling his wife “Mother” instead of Betty. He might walk up to you in Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery and say “I think we are in the last days,” or “I don’t think women in men’s clothing is right, do you?” and there is Mrs. Detmer in her jeans, and she smiles and nods as if nothing is wrong.

  Debbie was lithe and lean, her hair red and spiky, she didn’t look like the old Debbie at all. That Debbie was a brunette and a little chunky. And also angry and impulsive. Fifteen years in Northern California had smoothed her out considerably. She had flown from San Francisco to Minneapolis, writing the vows for her wedding while listening to a semi-famous author next to her as he consumed four double Scotches and complained bitterly about the publishing business and how it chewed you up and spat you out. “There is no place for guys like me anymore,” he said. “All they want are novels by twenty-year-old girls with foreign names like Bhuktal Mukerji or something. About growing up alienated in L. A. and torn between cultures and anguishing about it and also there’s a lot of shopping and long lunches.” On his fourth drink, he asked for her cell phone number and she told him to get over himself, check into rehab, get cleaned up, join the real world, and find out where he fit in. She said it nicely. “You don’t have any time to waste,” she said. He broke down and said she was the first person in years who had dared to be honest with him, he needed a truth teller in his life. His breath was pungent, weaselish. “Have lunch with me,” he said.

  “We just did. I had salad and you had Scotch.”

  He was flying to Minneapolis to give a reading at the U. He hated making public appearances, but with a kid in college, he had to take work where he could find it. His last successful book was twenty years ago. His collection of stories got savaged in The Times by a guy he had voted against on a Guggenheim panel. He had a novel in the works but it was pretty rough. Notes, really. Sort of an idea of a novel. His editor kept telling him to take his time. But he was 58, for God’s sake. His wife was pushing him to take a teaching job, for the health insurance. A Lutheran college in South Dakota wanted him. South Dakota. He shuddered. He’d lived in Berkeley for twenty-six years. South Dakota. Why not the moon? Why not a nice case of prostate cancer? His wife wanted him to take the job. She kept telling him, “You’re not getting any younger.”

  Debbie gave him a pep talk about living one day at a time, maintaining a positive outlook, and doing what you can to improve yourself, and as she talked, it dawned on her that this was what her mother had told her years ago, after her freshman year at college.

  *

  The paint was peeling on the side of the house. She’d have to call a painter. A roofer too. Some shingles had blown off. She lugged the bags onto the porch and walked into the living room. Silent, shades pulled, musty, the temperature around eighty.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  The ancient oatmeal-colored couch sat under the picture of a man driving oxen across a field of brown stubble. In the bookshelf, there were rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and stacks of Electric Co-op magazines. On the coffee table, a bowl of plastic fruit. The TV was on with the sound off, a perky woman in a white apron frying up chicken in a pan and a smiley man with a headful of hair watching her. They seemed to be having the time of their lives. The strong smell of Lysol, and something else, urine perhaps. Do they need live-in help? Do I need to step in and take charge here? she thought. And then she wondered, Should I take Brent to a hotel? He could go nuts in this house. He was a little highstrung anyway. And without high-speed Internet access, he’d be lost. He’d have to use dial-up but maybe that wouldn’t work here. Could you get Google here? Cell phone coverage? If not, there was trouble. Then she thought: Hey. Look at it as a camping trip. Brent is a big boy. Let him figure it out.

  Brent was arriving on Thursday. She’d hoped he could come earlier and get to know people but he had meetings in Chicago. The wedding was set for Saturday at 1 p.m. although strictly speaking it wasn’t a wedding, it was a “Celebration of Commitment” and the time was approximate since aviation was involved, namely a hot-air balloon and a Flying Elvis.

  “Hello? Hello!” She started up the stairs, slowly, heavily, trying to make noise lest she surprise somebody coming naked out of the bathroom. “It’s just me,” she cried. “It’s Debbie, home from the sea!”

  Her father appeared at the top of the stairs, pants hitched up high, his hair wild, in stocking feet. He’d just arisen from a nap, apparently. “Hi, darling,” he said. “We’ve been praying for you.”

  “I just walked in the door this minute, Daddy.” She reached the top of the stairs and put out her arms to hug him and he stepped back.

  “I want you to be right with God,” he said. “God is moving the waters. He is bringing this dispensation to a close. We may not be here tomorrow. We’re waiting on Him.”

  He retreated into the bedroom and closed the door. She could hear him talking in there. She crossed the hall to the other upstairs bedroom, her old bedroom, and there sat her mother, her back to the door, sorting through old photographs in shoe boxes. She had a pair of headphones on and was singing along softly to something that sounded like “Blue Moon.” Debbie’s old four-poster bed sat under the eaves and her white dresser and her desk. Stacks of papers and pictures covered everything, old books,
catalogues, clothes piled up. “Mother?” She put her hands on her mother’s shoulders and the old lady let out a squeak and jumped up, as if attacked, and fell out of her chair.

  “Oh my goodness—” Mother moaned. She shut her eyes and tried to draw a breath.

  Debbie knelt and took her hand. “I’m so sorry—”

  “You surprised me,” said Mrs. Detmer. She was dazed. She dabbed at her nose.

  “I thought you were expecting me.”

  “Not until tomorrow.”

  “I told you Saturday.”

  “Is today Saturday?”

  “Oh my God.” She helped her mother onto a chair and went for a wet washcloth and there was Daddy in the hall with a pool of fresh urine at his feet and spreading.

  “The Lord has given us peace of mind,” he said. “I wish you could have it too.”

  *

  She pushed him into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She got him a change of clean clothes. Mother mopped the floor. “He’s fine,” she said. “He listens to evangelists all day on the radio and he has little accidents when he gets excited.”

  “Where did all that junk come from? In the bedroom?”

  “That’s Janet’s. And some of Kathy’s. I’m putting them in order.”

  “Mother—”

  As if she didn’t have enough junk of her own, she had acquired sister Janet’s (gone to the Good Shepherd Nursing Home) and sister Kathy’s (gone to the cemetery) and was “organizing” all of it, in the sense of looking at it, sorting it, moving the stacks around, and then re-sorting.

  Mother went to supervise the shower and Debbie came down to the kitchen. The old silver-sparkle countertops and avocado appliances, the glass-fronted cabinets and everything in them just so, a big bouquet of silk flowers she had sent them several years ago, and a diamond-shaped clock on the wall, the hands stuck at five o’clock.

  *

  In the refrigerator she found some brown lettuce, a carton of wrinkled baby tomatoes, yogurt way past its expiration date, a tube of expired sausage, and miscellaneous chunks of cheese. The freezer section was packed with frozen dinners. She thought of calling Brent, canceling the ceremony, and booking herself on a return flight Monday morning. So much stuff to do this week!—arrange for the pontoon boat, find a place to store the food, talk to Craig about the hot-air balloon (Where should he park? Who would help him launch?), call up Randall and confirm the Flying Elvis, meet her minister Misty Naylor who was flying in on Friday, book the honeymoon suite at the Chateau Melis on the South Shore—and now she should take Daddy to a doctor and decide whether either parent had enough marbles to run a household. Too much! Way too much!!

  She said it out loud: “It would be so easy to give up right now and turn around and go back home.” And then the thought, You are home. Be strong. Make it work.

  Her new mantra: Make it work. Forget about world peace and saving the polar bears. Just make it work.

  She closed her eyes and hummed, a low hum from her solar plexus, feeling the warm vibrations in her pelvic enclosure. The centering harmonic, a healing force using the body’s own meridian powers to drive invasive toxins from the lymph system which collects every negative force around us, which can be a pool of poison, teeming with danger. The centering harmonic purifies and makes the system work. Daddy would be okay. Mother, too. The ceremony would be a beautiful gift to her hometown. People would see it and take the courage and strength to change their own lives. She sang to herself:

  One love, one soul.

  Here in the circle we are each made whole.

  One life, one chance.

  We come together in the circle dance.

  Turn, turn, turn to the right.

  Turn from the darkness toward our own true light.

  Growing up in Lake Wobegon Lutheran church, what she felt was dread of God’s judgment. God, all-righteous, his great hairy eyeball glaring down from the sky, reading your every thought and making black marks after your name. There is one way and you are not on it. Not even close. You might find it but don’t count on it, not the way you’re going. They said that God is love but nobody believed it for a minute. It was a culture of fussy women and silent angry men and horrified children. Now, having escaped all that, she felt happy, upheld by love, even though she was alone in her mother’s kitchen. The Sisterhood of the Sacred Spirit was with her.

  On the plane, trying to ignore the drunk author, she had written in her journal: Life is partly what we choose to do and partly who we choose to do it with. Time goes on and we must live in it and on the other hand we must dwell in the realm of the timeless. We are constantly growing and changing. Yesterday’s answers don’t always work for today. But let us always contribute positive energy to others. Put negativity aside and put forward our most positive expectations.

  Lake Wobegon was a pool of negativity. People who believed in disappointment. Especially in marriage. You look forward to it and get all excited and then it turns into a long sad story. So, don’t get your hopes up. Wanting something causes frustration, desire drives the object away. The trick is to not want it that much. Want it less. When you get to where you don’t want it all, then you may get it. And if you don’t get it, you won’t care so much. The Lake Wobegon Credo. She was there to prove that something else is possible.

  10. THE SALON WEIGHS IN

  “I hear Debbie Detmer is finally getting married to somebody.” “I heard that.”

  “Well, she tried out enough men, let’s hope she found a good one.”

  “I suppose it’ll be quite the deal.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me at all. She’ll probably put on a parade with a marching band and guess who gets to ride on the float and wave?”

  “Think she’ll invite us?”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “I’m busy Saturday anyway. Got to take Lily to volleyball.”

  The ladies of the Bon Marche Beauty Salon could’ve written the book on Debbie Detmer. You can run away from home, but don’t assume that your secrets are safe out there, honey. We know people in California and they know other people. Word gets around. People talk. The walls have ears. You were named in a divorce suit brought by that landscape architect’s wife in Berkeley who alleged that he did your yard and garden and did you too. You were seen drunk at an Indian café, yelling at the waiter that there was cardamom in your jhimmi-jhammi though you had specifically said you didn’t want any and you stood up and lunged at the manager when he tried to calm you down and in the end your gentleman friend had to shovel you into a cab. He took a different cab. Your cleaning lady, whom you fired, told people that you talked to your stuffed animals and you binged on TV soap operas all day. Also, that you hired female masseuses with crew cuts. You were once seen sitting at a stoplight in your BMW, with your right index finger two inches up your left nostril. Not pretty.

  Myrlette and Luanne and her sister Lois felt terrible about Evelyn on Saturday. She was dead. Sonya had seen her body being hauled away. Luanne called Florence. Florence was crying so hard she couldn’t talk. Myrlette and Luanne and Lois went in the toilet and cried on each other and then went back to work. What else could you do?

  Six ladies sat under the beehive dryers dozing or reading Show & Tell (“Angelina: Brad Won’t Do It Anymore”), the smell of permanent and bad coffee in the air. (“Have a cup of Luanne’s coffee, you won’t need a permanent,” said Myrlette.) Luanne snipping and razoring, Lois washing, Myrlette blueing and highlighting, but Evelyn was on everyone’s mind. They had taped to the mirror—next to a snapshot of Lois’s daughter Mary who married the periodontist and son Todd whose greenhouse in Tulsa sold 60,000 poinsettias last Christmas—a big photograph of smiling Evelyn, a rose taped below it and over it, in crimson lipstick, “Our Angel”—a terrible shock, a tragic loss, and yet—“It was how she wanted to go, in her sleep,” said Myrlette, and they all knew that was true. No sickness, no decline, no hobbling around the Good Shepherd Home looking cadaverous and dribbling cof
fee down yourself, peeing your pants, rocking back and forth, a caged animal in the zoo, your mind turned to sawdust and your hip shooting with pain at every step—not for our Evelyn! A rousing good time at Moonlite Bay, a couple of drinks, some laughs, come home, wave good-bye, go to bed and don’t wake up.

  At Moonlite Bay, they served slabs of pie the size of trowels and the drinks are all doubles and triples. Some people finish dinner and drive off in the wrong direction. Like Evelyn. Instead of south, she went Up.

  “It’s what she wanted!” cried Luanne. “Bless her heart, she didn’t suffer one bit. She got out of this world the easy way.” Luanne’s parents wound up in wheelchairs, looking like two mummies, no idea who they were or why. Every hour somebody would haul them off to pee, what was called “timed voiding,” so life was just waiting for lunch and waiting to tinkle. Her mother didn’t speak to her for months and then she said, “Tell Papa when he’s done putting up the horses, we kept supper for him.” Golden years. Ha.

  *

  “And she didn’t have to be here for Debbie Detmer’s triumphant homecoming,” said Lois. “There’s a bonus.”

  Evelyn was not fond of Debbie Detmer, especially after she wrote to Debbie and asked her to contribute to the Lutheran church, whose education wing needed major repairs after a tree fell on it, and Debbie sent a check for $100. The woman could afford a Frank Gehry beach house on stilts with a curving glass front and a fifty-foot redwood deck (featured in the January 2001 issue of Luxury Home) but she couldn’t pony up serious money for the church that taught her about the Good Samaritan, Daniel in the lions’ den, the prodigal son, etcetera. One hundred dollars! She paid more than that for her toilet seat cover! Myrlette was Mrs. Detmer’s cousin and she knew the inside story of how Debbie had broken her parents’ hearts. An only child who was given everything. Her father worshipped the ground she walked on, her mother waited on her hand and foot. And then somewhere around age fifteen, the princess had turned cold and cunning and spiteful and foulmouthed. A demon entered her body, and she told her mother she hated her. She went to parties and stayed out until 2 a.m. and came home drunk. She totaled the car, twice. She actually joined the Communist Party USA. She proudly announced the loss of her virginity (to the football co-captain Kirk) in his parents’ laundry room on a pile of old drapes. She openly campaigned for Homecoming Queen and was elected senior-class attendant and was so miffed at Mary Ellen acing her out for Queen that when Kirk (who was Mary Ellen’s steady boyfriend; Debbie was only an adventure) presented the bouquet of carnations to Debbie at the ceremony, she stuck her hand down the front of his pants.