Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  “Movie?!” she said. “Show?! This isn’t make-believe. It’s marriage.”

  “You keep saying that! Why don’t you marry yourself?”

  She thought he was just acting out but he wasn’t. They got in the van to go find a bottle of red wine for dinner and he almost ran over a lady in the crosswalk. He was on the phone with his office and ratcheting at them and in his anger he cranks the wheel and comes within six inches of pasting a lady to a lamp pole and then instead of apologizing to her, he yells at Debbie for warning him that the woman was there!!!

  He yelled at Debbie for yelling at him that he was about to kill somebody.

  So she told him he was an asshole and to get out of town and the sooner the better.

  “Whatever,” he said.

  She told her parents the wedding was off, as she tried to reach her travel agent and get herself on a plane back to California and call Misty and Georges and Patrick and wave them off though it was too late to cancel the giant shrimp shish kebabs, which had arrived that morning and were resting comfortably in the freezer at the high school, courtesy of Mrs. Halvorson, the superintendent’s wife, a friend of Mrs. Detmer.

  Mr. Detmer kept asking where Brent was. “Gone home,” said the Mrs.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Good riddance,” said Debbie.

  Oh, she had seen this coming for six months and she had denied it and denied it and denied it, trying to make things work out, and then today the man had left for good, having barely avoided a manslaughter charge, and she couldn’t be happier. Except she wished she could call the lady they’d almost killed. A tall dark-haired lady in her fifties or early sixties, dangly earrings, maroon University of Minnesota T-shirt, shorts, sandals, knobby knees.

  “No idea,” said Mrs. Detmer.

  Debbie fixed them a meat loaf en croûte, meat loaf encased in a light pastry crust, and sautéed green beans. She was happy. She had cut herself loose from the Misery Express and told the engineer to take a hike, which she should’ve told him back around Christmas. He’d been waiting for her to cut him loose and now she had. It was all clear in her mind. She had succumbed to an illusion. Craving a happy domestic life, she had invented Brent as Mr. Husband and coaxed him along and prompted him, giving him easy tests, watching him, and then came the big test—Lake Wobegon—and the boy failed miserably. Because he was a jerk.

  She had an appointment to teach aromatherapy at the veterinary school in Davis as an adjunct professor—she’d sell the house in Santa Cruz and buy a little farm and raise llamas and teach. She had come to a seam in her life and once she had crossed over it, she would move forward, no regrets. She was centered, she was directed, she was intact.

  “I first knew it yesterday when we were talking about what to read at the ceremony and he insisted on reading this long poem by a friend of his called ‘Diptych of Desire’ so I said okay, I’ll read Whitman. So he says he hates Whitman. As if I am supposed to know that. ‘I celebrate myself and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’—What is the problem there? It means nothing, he says. It’s just a lot of gas. Okay, I said, fine, no Whitman. It’ll be Whitman-free. How about the Song of Solomon? ‘Come away, my love, for lo the winter is past, the rains are over and gone.’ And so forth. He says, ‘What about “Your neck is like a tower of David and your breasts like two small rabbits”?’ I said I didn’t think it was appropriate. We didn’t have to get into breasts. We could do ‘Comfort me with apples’ or one of those. Why breasts? He says, ‘Why do you have to be in charge of everything all the time? Down to the last detail. You can’t give an inch. We’re always fighting over the smallest things.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You read anything you want. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.’ ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘I’ve been down that old passive-aggressive road with you before. I read about breasts and you’ll be very cool and distant for the next six months.’ I said, ‘Go ahead. Read it. It’s not important to me.’

  “‘No no no,’ he says.

  “So then we haggle about the music. More of the same. He wants this, he doesn’t want that. Okay, okay. I’m trying to go along with him. And then he says, ‘You’re not really going to have that creep come down in the hot-air balloon, are you?’ ‘What creep?’ I say. ‘You mean my old friend Craig?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘your ex-boyfriend.’ I said, ‘Sure, that’s the plan, you knew that.’ He says, ‘I never knew that.’ ‘Yes, you did,’ I say. He says, ‘Couldn’t you have found somebody to pilot a hot-air balloon whom you have not been intimate with?’ I said to him, ‘Brent, I am not going to start a life with you in an atmosphere of jealousy and distrust.’ And he says, ‘Okay, then don’t.’ I said, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ He says, ‘I came here even though I didn’t want to. I came here for you. It’s not for me, that’s for sure. I want you to know that.’ And I said, ‘Baby, you are out of here. Right now.’ So he is out of here.”

  “Maybe you only need some time apart,” said Mother. Hopefulness was her style.

  “We need a lot of time apart. Like thirty years for starters. Maybe more.” Brent was high-maintenance and she had known it, she just hadn’t known the extent. He was so completely wrapped in luxury-jet time-shares. His head was full of it, the break-even point of X number seat/hours, the turnaround sublets, the overage fees, and talking to him was like interrupting a man playing chess. Brent was business and he had no time for life. He was fine as long as he was on the phone, moving and shaking, but you put him in an alien environment—Lake Wobegon—where people live at a stately pace, and his sneering, bullying side came out. He was in love with her only in certain locations under favorable circumstances. A temporary regional romance.

  “Well,” said Mother, “whatever you want, dear, we’re certainly in support of. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

  Debbie didn’t mention what she had said to Brent as he packed his bag. She stood in the guest room door and said, “You are so putrid.” It was a word she liked to use in high school. It just came winging out of the past: putrid. He turned, stunned, and said, “What?”

  “You’re not a person, you’re a pathology,” she said. It felt good after all of the humming and harmonic converging, to haul off and sock the guy.

  “If I’m so bad, then why did you almost marry me?” he said.

  There wasn’t a good answer for that so she reached for the antique china pitcher on the bureau and as he cringed and ducked, she flung it at him and it shattered on the side of his head. He dropped to his knees and clapped his hand to his temple where he was bleeding. Slightly. But he groaned and made the most of it. She seized his bag, an expensive soft brown English leather thing, and walked to the open window and pitched it out the window unzipped and his shirts and underwear flew out and fluttered down on the Larsons’ yard next door. Mrs. Larson knelt at her flower bed, as if praying for her geraniums. She jumped when the bag hit the ground and glanced over her shoulder and then resumed work.

  “Why did you do that?” he said. He was sitting on the floor, nursing his head.

  “Just wanted to make the day a little more real for you, so you’d remember it, shithead.”

  “Where does all of this anger come from? Explain that to me!”

  She thought about it as he trotted over next door and recovered his undies. Mrs. Larson did not look up from the flowers as he collected his clothes. He stuffed them in the bag and headed downtown, forgetting his cell phone on the night table. Debbie threw it in the garbage where, a few minutes later, it rang a few times, weakly.

  She pondered the question further that afternoon, and then the answer came to her: he had been unkind to her mother and father, her family, her people. He had asked if her father had always been “that way”—and he said, “If your mother asks me one more time if there’s anything she can get me, I am going to scream.” He was sneering and supercilious toward them and their home, their books, their art, the food they ate, their conversation—he accepted
their hospitality and he laughed at them behind their backs—that was the reason for all of the anger. You don’t look down on people who are good to you. Maybe you can love your enemies, maybe not, but for sure you can be decent to your hosts, you prick.

  And then she recalled her own cruelty at age 17. And also 16 and 15. And 18 through, oh, 31 or so. It was dizzying. She had to lie down on her bed. The white chenille bedspread of her youth. The yellow sheets with the flowery borders. The maple desk that Carl Krebsbach had made for her 14th birthday. The old bureau that had been Grandma Berg’s. The old photos of the Beatles and Leonard Cohen and Anne Frank and Juliet Greco and Jacques Brel.

  Someday she might come back here, when she was done with California, and move into this house and live out her days. She could be an old lady here and little kids would visit and she’d give them cookies and tell them stories about when she was very bad. Once upon a time there was a young woman named Debbie and she ran away from home because she was afraid of being normal. That was the worst thing she could imagine. So she hurried out to California and lost her virginity as soon as she could, to an older man who was very sad about something, and then she learned to be a freak, making it up as she went along, and then she held cats and dogs on her lap as they breathed in healing smells. Oh, and she also used a lot of cocaine at one point, children. And she ate some mushrooms that gave her dramatic visions of ocean waves and rainbows rising from peninsulas and gargoyles falling out of trees. She was original and creative and vibrant and independent and praised by one and all and then one day she suddenly got very sick of herself and had to get away and she came back here. It’s peaceful here. You don’t have to be wonderful here. You can just be who you are.

  19. A PASTORAL CALL

  Pastor Ingqvist had talked to Barbara on the phone and left messages for her, offering help, and she had left a message for him—“We are all doing very well, thank you, so don’t feel you need to be concerned.” On Thursday he thought he’d better walk over and knock on her door and see how she was doing. Maybe she had heard about the fiasco at the Evelyn memorial and he should assure her: it wasn’t that bad. The man was harmless and left peacefully. Mrs. Ingqvist had heard via Dorothy at the Chatterbox that Barbara was planning an outdoor memorial service on Saturday at which the ashes would be fired from a cannon, but she wasn’t sure how. So that was that. Lake Wobegon Lutheran was entertaining a group of twenty-four Lutheran pastors from Denmark on Saturday and if Barbara wanted to change her mind and hold the funeral in the sanctuary, he might have to wave off the Danes. Funerals had right-of-way. If she had something else in mind, fine. He just wanted to make sure.

  The little memorial service at church had raised $225 in Evelyn’s memory to go to the flower fund and he should make sure that was all right. So, he walked over to see if she was at home and accepting visitors.

  And he wanted to explain about the Danes, if she was curious why a busload of visitors was coming on the day of Evelyn’s memorial service. The Danes were on a two-week tour of the United States. They had been sent over by the Danish Lutheran Board because they had signed a profession of doubt—there was a great stir about this in Copenhagen, big newspaper headlines (PRIESTS DENY DIVINITY OF JESUS)—and then the Hellerup 24, as they were known, took a more radical step and denied the Queen’s right to be head of the Danish Church, and then all hell broke loose. Agnosticism was acceptable, but not an insult to Queen Margrethe, so the Hellerup 24 had been packed off on a junket to America for a cooling-off period. The Danish Lutheran Board thought it important that the troublemakers should visit Minnesota and Wisconsin. The twenty-four, given their druthers, would’ve focused on the coasts, but the Board had reminded them that the Midwest is the Lutheran homeland. It also reminded them that their pensions were at risk and they might be forced to live in rented rooms in Ahlborg, the Danish Omaha. So the twenty-four had relented. They would land in Minneapolis on Thursday night, go to Walker Art Center for the Poul Henning exhibit and attend the Minnesota Orchestra on Friday, and board a bus Saturday morning and come up to Lake Wobegon for lunch.

  The guy in Bishop Ringsak’s office called on Monday to suggest that the Danes might appreciate salmon and small red potatoes (boiled) and a light salad to start and perhaps homemade pie for dessert. And he suggested a California Chardonnay.

  “I think we’ll serve a tuna noodle hot dish,” said Pastor Ingqvist, “just as we would for anybody. I’m not going to spend church money on a California Chardonnay.”

  “It’s only a suggestion,” said the Bishop’s man. “But these are Danes. Not Norwegians. And the head of the delegation called me yesterday specifically about the menu. They’re in Boston now and he was a little concerned that you might be serving lutefisk.”

  “Lutefisk never crossed my mind until you just mentioned it.”

  “Well, don’t, is my advice. His name is Mattias Paulsen and he’s a nice guy but he said that if it was going to be lutefisk, they’d prefer peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  Lutefisk is cod that has been dried in a lye solution. It looks like the dessicated cadavers of squirrels run over by trucks, but after it is soaked and reconstituted and the lye is washed out and it’s cooked, it looks more fish-related, though with lutefisk, the window of success is small. It can be tasty but the statistics aren’t on your side. It is the hereditary delicacy of Swedes and Norwegians who serve it around the holidays, in memory of the ancestors, who ate it because they were poor. Most lutefisk is not edible by normal people. It is reminiscent of the afterbirth of a dog or the world’s largest chunk of phlegm. Pastor Ingqvist wrote on his calendar for Saturday: “Lutefisk?”

  *

  He then headed to Barbara’s, four blocks from church, her little bungalow with dead flowers in the flower beds and the grass long, thistles and crabgrass rampant. A bad lawn: a warning sign of personal distress. She had long been a sort of recluse in the congregation. Came to church less and less often and exited out a side door to avoid shaking hands with him. Sometimes he’d glance up from a sermon and catch her scowling at him. He counselled her when she divorced Lloyd—his standard talk: marriage is a story and it gains richness with time—“Not this one,” she said. A lifelong Lutheran and a complete mystery, not so unusual, come to think of it. Lots of sphinxes in the ranks. According to the church secretary LaVonne, Barbara was a heavy drinker from time to time and was dating a cashier at a convenience store, an obese man named Oliver. LaVonne liked to pass these things along.

  He knocked on Barbara’s front door and a young man opened the door, shirtless, his hair wet, a towel around his neck. “Hi. I’m Kyle,” he said, forgetting that Pastor Ingquist knew him, had baptized him, had confirmed him in the faith. “Come in. Excuse the mess. I’ll get my mom.” He remembered Kyle from confirmation class. Very bright, asked if God caused war and famine and if so, why, got confirmed, and never showed his face in church again.

  A big painting hung over the couch, swatches of orange and purple like tropical leaves, and he could see another in the dining room, similar but brighter, almost neon. Newspapers spread on the dining room table, and a wooden tray full of little jars of paint, and a stack of white dinner plates, unglazed.

  “Pastor.”

  He jumped. She had come up behind him. She was wearing baggy old jeans and a sweatshirt flecked with paint and she looked as if she hadn’t slept in days.

  “I came to see how you’re doing, Barbara, and see if we can offer any assistance with your memorial service—I hear it’s on Saturday—” She nodded. “I thought a lot of your mother. We all did. It’s been a big shock to everyone. Evelyn was the genuine article. She had a big influence on the lives of a lot of people. We’re going to miss her.”

  Barbara said, “Did you get my letter?”

  He shook his head.

  “Probably because I didn’t send it. I wasn’t sure if I had or not. Anyway …” and she waved for him to sit down at the table. “Moth
er left me a letter that leads me to believe that none of us knew her, Pastor—”

  “Call me David.”

  “David—my mother lived a charade, if the truth be told. She was faithful to a loveless marriage and a loveless town and she went to church every Sunday like an old firehorse but she didn’t discover her true self until she was almost seventy. When Daddy keeled over who had been her ball and chain, she was able to fly, and that’s the woman I want to celebrate. Not the Sunday school teacher and Girl Scout leader, but Evelyn herself. The old broad who said what the hell and took a lover who took her dancing and traveling and they went to shows and played roulette and God knows what. She had pieced together enough damn quilts and she wanted to live before she died and by george she did. That’s her, by the way, over there.”

  A green bowling ball sat on the desk, on a folded yellow bath towel. A big plaster patch covered the top and on the patch was written “MOM.”

  He said that he didn’t agree about the “loveless town” part but he wasn’t here to argue, only to offer whatever help she needed—what about lunch? Would they like a funeral lunch? She shook her head. He was relieved—he didn’t know how he’d merge the Danish pastors and the grieving Peterson family—and right away he felt bad about feeling relieved. “What about lodging for family members coming from far away?” She shook her head. “Got them all taken care of,” she said, “except for Roger and he’s strictly a hotel type of guy.”

  He wanted to say more. Life is complicated. We’re all leading double and triple lives. Everyone has secrets. We’d be happy to celebrate Evelyn’s life in all its complexity. But it seemed trite, unnecessary, so he said his good-byes and wished her well and Kyle walked him out on the porch and shook his hand again. He was turning to go when Kyle said, “I have to ask you about something—it’s not about my grandma, it’s about something going on with me.” The boy glanced left and right in a confidential way. “It’s about sexuality,” he said. “I’ve been living with this girl for almost a year.”