by Debra Monroe
I sampled one drink at Railroad Memories, another at Diamond Lil’s, then the Buckhorn. Finally, I chose the Sportsman’s because I’d been in the apartment above it before I was old enough to go to the bar. During my senior year, I’d left school during lunch hour with a girl whose brother, Brock, had dropped out of college to work at a factory in Colorado, then returned to Wisconsin with his pregnant bride, Leila, who already had two daughters. Brock’s father gave him the Sportsman’s as a means of support and a place to live.
Brock and Leila filled the rooms with big floor pillows covered in batik. Brock lit a joint and passed it around as Leila’s two daughters skipped past. I pondered this, then approved. If my parents drank in front of children, if everyone’s parents did, why should these interesting newlyweds be hypocritical about a peaceful, herbal high? I watched to see what else was different, what chores and responsibilities. Would this marriage be co-constructed by the wife? Brock stared. He’d read my mind, maybe. I waited. He waved his hand and said, “In the future, you understand, this will all be accepted.” He exhaled. “Pot.”
Pot, then. So far, I’d smoked just at night, and I didn’t like being stoned by day, the roar in my head as I went back to school, then work at the clothing store, then dinner with my parents and brother. Sitting in class and pretending to study, ringing up customers buying permanent-press slacks, eating while following family conversation turned complicated. Being stoned while not seeming stoned required strenuous exertion as I overcame obstacles, traversed sundry locales. To what end? Renewed gratitude for normalcy.
One evening, leaving work, I visited Brock and Leila. My sister was also a newlywed—her father-in-law had provided a small, remodeled house because there weren’t suitable places to rent. My sister talked about carpet pile, upholstery swatches. And I’d grown up watching that TV show, Bob Eubanks sending Brylcreemed husbands offstage, then asking wives in minidresses where was the most interesting place they’d made whoopee. The studio audience liked couples who fought, swatting each other with answer cards. Brock and Leila spoke softly to each other—amused, not angry, if children drew on the walls. Leila’s maternity dresses looked like a queen’s, hems swishing the floor.
Downstairs the bar was full of post-hippies who’d started communes on farms they’d bought at rock-bottom prices. In far-off cities, punk and disco were already underway. But I didn’t know. I pinned, snipped, and sewed paisley fabric into peasant blouses and graceful dresses. At a store on the edge of town that sold guns and fishing tackle, I bought a pair of moccasins that laced up to my knees. Adventitious protective coloration. A creature’s color and pattern will blend with the environs. And so I spent Saturday nights talking to people ten years older than me who were for the barter system and against capitalist exploitation. Men wore bib overalls. Their girlfriends wore bib overalls too, with silky shirts. There were also the lone men, all with spade-shaped beards.
I met another married couple. The wife had feather earrings and a proud way of tilting her head when she spoke. She asked where I would go to college, what would I study. English, I said, at the small college eighty miles south, in Eau Claire. She told me to read Marge Piercy or, failing that, Sylvia Plath. Week after week, like a teacher checking on assignments, she asked me: had I read these writers yet? The public library didn’t have them, so she loaned me her Marge Piercy books. One night she sat at a table and read aloud “The Implications of One Plus One,” poetic cadences mingling with the plastic slap of Foosball. When she was done, she said, “Jealousy is an emotion I choose not to feel.” Her eyes lingered on me. Her husband’s eyes lingered on me. Did one of them want to sleep with me? I wondered. I decided I had the summer to figure it out and whether or not I believed in free love, which seemed philosophically akin to the barter system.
Sometimes I babysat Leila’s children so Leila could spend time in the bar with Brock. When the girls were asleep, I was supposed to come downstairs for a beer and a bump. A bump was what people called a shot of whiskey or brandy or schnapps or Galliano. Infinite choices for bumps, I thought, surveying tiers of bottles in front of the mirror. Then one night the door swung open and a man stood there, a stranger-come-to-town, hero or villain, to be determined. Brock laughed, then climbed over the bar to hug him.
His name was Joe. Joe had ridden his motorcycle from Colorado. Then Brock started singing “Indiana Wants Me” and burst out laughing. When I asked Brock why, he explained that Joe was wanted in Indiana. I was wondering if it was polite to ask what Joe was wanted for, when Brock laughed again and said: “Don’t worry. He’s no ax murderer.” Something political? I thought. Joe had protested social injustice? Joe had the Sir Galahad hairstyle most men had—our pastor, the young tenor on The Lawrence Welk Show. Maybe Joe’s hair was trendy. Or a sign of allegiance to reformers who’d hoped to fix America, first by revolution, then by organic farming. Or he couldn’t afford a barber.
Another detail I tried to decipher was that he wore sunglasses at night. He took them off and squinted at me. I must have squinted back. Brock explained that Joe had lost an eye in a BB gun mishap when he was a kid. “I see you’re not wearing your eye patch,” Brock added, jovial. Joe threw his hands in the air, his signature joke-delivery gesture, grinned at me, and said, “I save it for special occasions—weddings, funerals, whatnot.”
What I later learned to call social mores were in a state of flux. A line had once separated people who went to strip joints from the rest of us. Now, partly because of the U.S. president who’d resigned for being a crook, and new attitudes about poverty, sex, and money, outlaws seemed like truth-speakers and insiders like colluding frauds. “Every place has strippers and prostitutes,” a man with a spade-shaped beard said. “Strip clubs on Main Street are uh, uh, un . . . not hypocritical.” He’d had a stutter when he was young.
Also, if somebody wanted to have sex with me and I wasn’t inter-ested—this had happened with the tourist boy—he could say I had hang-ups, whereas in the past I could have acted virginal, offended. And if I’d known what social class is—and you don’t until you leave the class you’re in, and Spooner had clique gradations anyway, not class gradations, because there wasn’t wealth, not even post–civil rights economic segregation either, just all-white, rural sameness in which people paid attention to minute status markers like whether someone put paneling in their basement and made it into a den or left it full of cobwebbed junk, or how recently someone repainted their barn—I’d have seen that the just-arrived post-hippies were upper-middle-class and living with townies who’d grown up hardscrabble and preferred communes because now people with money helped do chores.
Joe had grown up hardscrabble. His mother died when he was young. Suicide.
She ate rat poison, Leila told me later.
One day Joe and I were sitting at the end of the bar, and the woman who’d gone to Vassar and wore feather earrings walked past; her husband had on a straw hat like a scarecrow’s. When they were out of earshot, Joe said: “People who have advantages and pretend they don’t are still phony.” Maybe educated people intimidated Joe. Maybe he intimidated them. “Alienation schmalienation,” he said. “Nobody likes work. Of course local yokels like a commune,” he added. “Less work, more food, interesting sex just down the hall.” I protested. “They have ideals. They want a life that’s . . .” I paused. “Egalitarian.”
On the other hand, the bar wasn’t egalitarian.
Once I played “Theme from A Summer Place” on the jukebox. One of the men with beards—this one had a beaky nose—objected, moving his barstool near mine until his thigh pressed against my thigh. He told me that the Percy Faith Orchestra was an ersatz copy of real orchestras playing real art, which never lulls its audience into complacency. Joe liked the J. Geils Band, which wasn’t on the jukebox. Joe probably didn’t like “Theme from A Summer Place” either. Yet he interrupted and said: “Okay, it’s not about peace, love, dove, and incense. But you can listen without losing your grip.”
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sp; So I mostly sat with Joe, who didn’t harp about what I didn’t know, because he didn’t know either. I told him that the woman with feather earrings had loaned me books. “Maybe I don’t understand them,” I said, “but they seem full of advice, correct thinking, and that gets old no matter how nice the word choice is.” The correct thinking was feminism, of course. I wasn’t a feminist, not yet, though in time experience would teach me to be. But even by then I’d never like poems that seemed more edifying than beautiful. So far I liked Keats—whose poems about love as the meaning of life until you get clued in that death trumps love—amazed me. And I’d found a book of Richard Brautigan’s poems at the Rexall Drug. They weren’t reliably interesting, but the slangy style was a good example because I hadn’t been anywhere besides Spooner. Did Joe like poetry?
He said, “If you do, Queenie.”
But he didn’t like Leila. She’d had her baby now and gazed at it tenderly as she yanked her dress aside for feedings. Joe had known her years. “She was about to be evicted with children,” he said. “Then she spotted Brock. Some guys will fall in love with their first lay. She’s been looking for a meal ticket since day one.” I argued that raising children was work, that she bartended. Joe pointed out that Leila went downstairs to be in the bar, not work. She didn’t cook or clean. It was true that the dirty dishes in the kitchen were glasses, cups. The trash overflowed with carry-out containers from the Topper Cafe. Joe stayed in the spare bedroom and cleaned the kitchen every day. Or I did.
Leila had to come upstairs every three hours to breastfeed. One night, I held the baby until she slept, then put her in her basket. The girls, who’d moved the TV into their bedroom, dropped off. Then Joe leaned over and kissed me: slow, luxurious. I thought the sex would be luxurious too. But Joe didn’t know—not in the way that Rodney V. Meadow had known—what I liked. I reminded myself that Rodney V. Meadow and I had learned to do for each other over time. How long had it taken? I couldn’t remember. I’d been so sure of Rodney I used to tell him exactly this, that. My time with Rodney had been like marriage, I realized—doctor’s appointments, shared holidays. But I couldn’t go back.
When Joe was done, he lay next to me. In nearby rooms, the children breathed softly. Jukebox thumps rose though the floor. Neon light from a bar across the street blinked against the windows. Joe said, “This is as close as two people get.” Of course he knew that people who weren’t close had sex, but this was the poetry he had. When Leila came upstairs, we were dressed but holding hands. “God,” she said. “I blame myself.”
One day, Joe and I were taking the children to the town playground. I’d packed a lunch—sandwiches, chips, cans of root beer. I put the baby in a backpack carrier. Joe toted the picnic and a brocade bag with diapers and bottles of the formula Leila had begun using because, between months of pregnancy and nursing, she was tired of not drinking.
We left the apartment and headed down Main Street, past bars, past the dime store, past the Palace Movie Theater, and a woman my mother knew drove by. Her steering turned erratic as she craned her neck to see me carrying a baby, walking with a man who looked not only too old but, by her measure, like a drug addict or low-class hobo, not to mention the school-age children prancing. She simplified this tableau when she called my mother, pretending to chat about altar flowers, then saying, “Debbie had a baby?”
My mother recounted this conversation that night. She’d said I hadn’t had a baby, no. I was clerking at the clothing store and babysitting too. “But whose baby is it?” she asked me.
“My classmate’s brother’s,” I said. “His wife already had the other children.”
“You babysit for fun, not pay?” I nodded. “Then why were you alone with the father?”
“That’s their friend,” I said. “He lives with them.”
“In a commune?”
If I said yes, I could imply there was an etiquette she didn’t understand—shared activities, outings. Or I could tell the truth and say Joe was staying there until he found a job. But this would let her know Joe was my boyfriend and she’d ask to meet him. I was raised to be a farmer’s wife, a shopkeeper’s wife, a telephone man’s wife. Joe would seem all wrong, past thirty with no regular job. Shiftless, she’d think—lacking resources to shift for himself and me. I said, “A small commune, yes.”
But before I fielded her questions, Joe and I got to the park. I held Leila’s baby. The girls ran—happy, shrieking—to the seesaw. Then I noticed Joe had his face in his hands. I thought he felt sick. He sat up, took a bandanna out of his pocket and wiped his forehead, then his one eye. Let me emphasize that a missing eye isn’t symbolic. I’d once had a kind teacher who lost an eye to cancer, no connection to Joe, who lost his in an accident. Having loved two people with missing eyes isn’t the key to my character as I proceeded in life, a competition in which the object is the most progress with the least misery.
Joe cleared his throat. He had a daughter named Josie, he said. When he was at work one day, his wife moved back in with her parents. Joe never saw Josie again, except in a restaurant with his wife’s father watching. “He was kind of a nabob locally—glad to get rid of me. I’d have needed money for a better lawyer than his.” Joe went to Kokomo to look for work. Then a friend from Colorado called about a factory with good wages. Joe paid child support on time for three years. Then the factory laid off, rehired, laid off. Last year his cousin had called and said there was a warrant for his arrest in Indiana.
“I can’t go back there,” Joe said, unconsciously quoting the song.
In Brock’s inebriated moments he’d sometimes do the end of the song, when police say: “You’re surrounded. Give yourself up.” I asked Joe if he hated Brock’s singing. Joe said, “He’s just keeping it light—he understands I made miscalculations that snowballed.”
The phrase “deadbeat dad” didn’t exist yet. So I didn’t have an automatic way to say it was wrong Joe’s daughter didn’t know her father. Or that, to get by, Joe’s ex-wife had to live off her father. But if Joe was telling the truth, he’d need money to float like a miracle from the sky, also one of those kindly judges from an old-time movie who’d see that Joe had been railroaded out and needed a way back. Joe hadn’t known his father—not even a name. Here he was, helping with Leila’s baby, not his, who must be as old as the girls now. They ran to the swings; I called for them to be careful. I tried to see Joe’s story in a skeptical light. Was this why he’d objected to Leila? He felt like a meal ticket?
Joe said, “I just want to make it right.”
I pictured his return—getting out of a car at sunrise, a determined look on his face.
“When I do,” he said, “I’ll take you with me.”
So there’d be a stepdaughter I’d learn to love. I pictured myself in an airport somewhere, pushing a stroller. Would this be my baby? It couldn’t be Leila’s. I’d wear a filmy dress, silver earrings; Joe would look better too. I’d buy him new T-shirts. I wondered if I’d like him to wear the eye patch. I would, I thought, if we were far from Spooner.
This was my playground daydream.
I left for college in two weeks.
Once renowned for twenty-two sawmills, Eau Claire had a little university, a tire factory, a brewery that made bad beer, and a toilet paper factory that pumped gray dross into a sludgy peak. Most students came from Milwaukee suburbs, I gathered, and bought their school clothes at department stores. Some had received new cars for high school graduation gifts. I met kids from small towns too, yet I didn’t get to know them because they didn’t talk in class. I got Bs and Cs on my assignments. I had a bad moment in Intro to Philosophy when we discussed collective moral standards, and I raised my hand to ask how it’s possible to know morality from immorality in a purely theoretical context, though I didn’t have the right words to ask my question like that. The professor turned scathing.
I walked off campus, exploring the tiny city. Every few blocks, I found a new business district with a one-room grocery, tailor,
florist, shoe repair, and tavern. One corner had four houses with cupolas and stained glass windows, built in the 1920s—each a wedding present from a lumber baron to one of his four daughters, the historical marker said.
Temperatures dropped.
I stopped wearing my dresses with moccasins and wore jeans, flannel shirts, and Red Wing work boots. One day, as rain turned to sleet, I realized that if I continued using the Hunting & Fishing Supply as my shoe store, I’d need felt-lined rubber boots next. Then I headed back to the dorm, where girls played Peter Frampton and hot-rolled their hair.
One night I put a fan in my window facing out, lit a joint, and blew the smoke outside. In the morning, I found a note on my door with shapely Magic Marker letters: “Stop being a DOPE.” Now I truly didn’t fit. A pretty girl one day asked me—a small troupe of her friends listening—why I never spent weekends at the dorm. Instead of giving her a complete answer, I said: “I visit my boyfriend.” She asked where he went to college.
He’s thirty-two,” I said. “He doesn’t think about college.”
In fact, I went north every weekend because my mother and father had arranged trips—my mom’s a guided tour with my taskmaster grandmother, my dad’s a fishing trip to Alaska—but neither had told the other before the nonrefundable down payments got made.
I couldn’t keep straight who’d been rude first and who’d retaliated. My dad’s trip preceded my mother’s, but he wouldn’t have taken his if she hadn’t been greedy and set up hers, but before that he’d ignored their silver wedding anniversary. So I came home to cheer up my mother. Then she left, and I came to clean for my dad and brother. I’d see Joe at night. He had a job at the boat factory in Shell Lake. He’d drive over to see me in a car he’d traded his motorcycle for. We babysat for Brock and Leila, who weren’t getting along either.
I should have tried to make friends at school. But one day, as I looked for rides to Spooner on a bulletin board called the ride board, I found a steady ride to Shell Lake. A guy who stayed on someone’s couch on weekdays, then went to Shell Lake on weekends, picked me up on Friday and took me back on Sunday. Joe had told me about his place. A woman cleaned the bathroom every day. This confused me. Why just the bathroom? What did “place” mean? Was this an idiomatic tic like saying “soda” instead of “pop,” or calling me Queenie, which I’d heard only for dogs, not girlfriends? When I got there, I understood. He lived in a room above a bar and shared a bathroom with people down the hall.
