We Are Still Married

by Garrison Keillor

  Arrived in Venice. A pipe had burst at the hotel and we were sent to another not as good. Should you spend time arguing for a refund? Went to San Marco, on which the doges overspent. A cash register in the sanctuary: five hundred lire to see the gold altar. Now we understand the Reformation.

  On the train to Vienna, she, having composed the sentences carefully from old memory of intermediate German, asked the old couple if the train went to Vienna. “Ja, ja!” Did we need to change trains? “Nein.” Later she successfully ordered dinner and registered at the hotel. Mein wunder-companion.

  People take me for an American tourist and stare at me, maybe because I walk slow and stare at them, so today I walked like a bat out of hell along the Ringstrasse, past the Hofburg Palace to Stephans Platz and back, and if anyone stared, I didn’t notice. Didn’t see much of Vienna but felt much better.

  One week in a steady drizzle of German and now I am starting to lose my grip on English, I think. Don’t know what to write. How are you? Are the Twins going to be in the World Series?

  You get to Mozart’s apartment through the back door of a restaurant. Kitchen smells, yelling, like at Burger King. The room where he wrote Figaro is bare, as if he moved out this morning. It’s a nice apartment. His grave at the cemetery is not marked, its whereabouts being unknown. Mozart our brother.

  Copenhagen is raining and all the Danes seem unperturbed. A calm humorous people. Kids are the same as anywhere, wild, and nobody hits them. Men wear pastels, especially turquoise. Narrow streets, no cars, little shops, and in the old square a fruit stand and an old woman with flowers yelling, “WŌSA FOR TEW-VA!”

  Sunbathing yesterday. A fine woman took off her shirt, jeans, pants, nearby, and lay on her belly, then turned over. Often she sat up to apply oil. Today my back is burned bright red (as St. Paul warns) from my lying and looking at her so long but who could ignore such beauty and so generous.

  NINETEEN

  IT OCCURRED TO ME the other day that I could use a better typewriter, one with some memory capacity but not too much, so I walked down to 40th Street to an office-machine shop, and found a typewriter with memory and with a sheet of white paper in it on which a person or persons had typed: “fadksjdfjkdsjfkjkfjdkjfkjskdjfkaj-kdfklsjdk catcatacatcatdogdogsdogdogdogdoguiuwthethethethethethetheth the birdsthe cats the birds and cats and dogs and flowers sall day long we played int he field and had fun in the sun with our friends and relatives. WE went to the beach and the park and played ball and swam. IWe ate hot dogs and hambarugers aldjksjfjsadhfjsdjfkjsdkfwewewewewewewewe quququququququququququququ-ququmamamamamamamamamamamamamamama ususususususus 34343434343434343434”

  The line about “fun in the sun with our friends and relatives” struck me as exactly the experience I missed out on this summer. I didn’t play in the field or go to the beach, didn’t play ball or swim, didn’t eat many hot dogs or hambarugers either. For the most part I sat here in my office at The Fadksjdfjkdsjfkjkfjd and went ququ, and then I traveled for a couple weeks in Denmark and went a little ququ there, too. I don’t eat hambarugers in foreign countries, because I’m proud to be an unugly American who eats what the natives do, fried eel or calves’ brains, lambs’ eyeballs with rancid yak butter, whatever’s on the menu, and say thank you. I am a good citizen, just as my mamamamamamamamamama taught me to be. I speak softly and know how to apologize and express gratitude in many languages, especially Danish. Undskyld is to say “I’m sorry,” which Danes hardly ever say, but they say thank you incessantly, in a dozen variations, including: tak, mange tak, tusind tak, tak fordi du vil se os, tak for sidst, tak for mad, and tak for aften, which mean, respectively, “thanks,” “many thanks,” “a thousand thanks,” “thanks for seeing us,” “thanks for the last time,” “thanks for the meal,” and “thanks for the evening.” I use them often. I try to be a model American. I walk politely around Skagen, around Svendborg and Roskilde and through Copenhagen, dressed in muted colors, carrying no camera, wearing no Mets cap, admiring cathedrals and palaces, public gardens, ordinary Danish streets, Danish buses, billboards, plumbing, everything Danish, and when people walk up to me and say, “Aldjksjfjsadhfjsdjfkjsdkfwewewewewe,” I answer (in Danish), “I am sorry. I am an American. I do not understand you.” This becomes tiring after a while. After three weeks of good international citizenship as a bird in a world of cats and dogs, weakly chirping thethethethethethetheth, I am exhausted, done in, tuckered out, fed up, run down, and I long for that summer paradise described on the typewriter with memory. I’d like nothing better than to plop down on American sand with friends and relatives under the American sun that rhymes with “fun,” pop a cold one, play ball, get in the swim, and chow down on a big hambaruger with raw onion, bright-yellow American mustard, in a soft white bun, and holler, “How about those Mets?” to someone who’d answer, “Hey!” Time to come home.

  My first hot dogs of the summer, in fact, were two I ate with my son on Saturday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, in Flushing Meadows Park at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, across the IRT tracks from Shea Stadium, where the Mets were entertaining the Dodgers. Big-league tennis is dominated these days by Czechs, Swedes, and Germans (in two of whose languages I can say “Thank you” and “Excuse me”), and we sat in the sun, in the cheap seats at the top of the stadium, and watched Steffi Graf, the nineteen-year-old West German phenom, dispose of a Frenchwoman in two fast sets, 6-0, 6-1. My son is nineteen, too, an aspiring rock-’n-roll guitarist. He writes songs and records them and mixes them and intends to become a fine artist. When I was nineteen or so, I used to put on a Buddy Holly record and pick up a tennis racket and pretend it was a guitar and I was him.

  Graf was so much fun to watch, later we waited in line at Court 16 and crammed into the tiny grandstand there and sat through two men’s matches so we could watch her doubles match (with partner Gabriela Sabatini of Argentina) and, when a tall horse-faced man announced that it had been switched to the stadium (and a thousand of us Grafites groaned), we raced over there and snuck down past an usher into a box seat for a close look. Graf is a big broad-shouldered long-legged girl with a long blond ponytail who had won the Australian and French Opens and Wimbledon earlier that year and, a few days later, would win the Open to complete a Grand Slam, a feat accomplished only four times before, but you didn’t need to know that to see what a happy, ferocious athlete she is. She and her ponytail bounce around the baseline, then she hops a little three-step as she receives service and takes an open stance and whacks the ball so hard that her follow-through takes her right off her feet. She leaves the ground when she serves and on most of her forehand shots and her overhead smashes. When she cocked her arm for a smash, the look on her face was homicidal, and she went a foot in the air as she put the ball away.

  Losers drag their feet and stand flat on their heels like ordinary people. They stand and perspire and wait for misery and pain to finish with them. In the stadium, the sun shining down on her, Graf makes you feel what the age of nineteen is like on its best days, the pleasure, the heat, the spring in your legs, the murder in your eyes. My son’s songs on a tape he had played for me the night before had that sort of snap and sting to them. A powerful age. To be a world-beater is exactly what a healthy nineteen-year-old would want, I guess. Be a winner. Beat the pants off older players, cream Chris Evert, pulverize Martina, and play killer guitar. In between the singles and doubles match, I had my hot dogs, two excellent wieners, with sauerkraut and mustard, chased with a cold beer. I ate them in the sun, wearing a bright-red shirt and white jeans and a pair of shades, thinking: Only athletes and musicians get so good so young and travel easily across borders, playing and winning as they go. We ordinary cats just have to clunk along with our old forgetful typewriters. Our language hems us in, our hangup with language defeats us, and after a few weeks on foreign turf our feet start to drag. Ddkjfksdjfkjqoueourweiuriuw. Farewell to summer. Time to come home, clean house, write some letters, and elect a decent president.

  PATMOS

 
; THIS TRIP GOT PLANNED back before I knew how wrapped up in the presidential election I’d get, and it was painful, like dropping out of school, to pull out and leave the Times and its daily spread of campaign news. People are dead wrong: this election is the most riveting in twenty years. I took a plane to Copenhagen and read my last Times and slept the rest of the way; the flight felt like a short hop. Arrived at 8:00 A.M. under a dim impression that I was in Chicago. But then caught a snatch of the Olympics on TV in the airport. No commercials. You could actually watch the games.

  Hung around the apartment, washed clothes, and took the overnight train to Rome. (A fast smooth ride, by the way, on a classy train that glided into the station exactly two minutes early. And those were democracies it ran through on time.) Along the way, being Timesless began to sink in. Somewhere, fresh polls were emerging, movement was being detected, new negatives were developing, stories were being spun, and the spinners were spinning each other, and I was out of the loop, un-Timesed. Switzerland swept by, the Alps above, the tidy villages below, and awakened in me a long-lost fondness for East Los Angeles. In the Basel rail station, USA Today was on sale, but I passed. Why eat popcorn when it’s pork roast that you want? A newshead requires daily bulk of the sort the Times provides: whole paragraphs of direct quotes, your champ wielding his bright sword, the other bum flopping around in the sawdust.

  In Rome, at the hotel near the Spanish Steps, more Olympics. The Italians won a gold medal in rowing, and the announcer doing the stroke-by-stroke was crazed with joy. Then divers, then fencers. No commercials. No announcers on camera, flaying us with expertise, no visual odes to the Stars and Stripes, just athletes winging around and Italian bubbling along underneath.

  In the hotel lobby, saw a Wall Street Journal on a marble buffet and snatched it up. Not much about the election (except a shithead editorial), but a disquieting list of the world’s largest banks, showing that nine of the top ten are Japanese. Of the hundred largest public companies, fifty-three for them, thirty-four for us. This score lent some sharper poignancy to a walk that afternoon around the shell of the Colosseum and the ruins of the Forum. When foreign tourists arrive in Washington someday to walk the Mall and see the shattered buildings of old Federal America—the ruins of the Capitol, with its West Front fallen in heaps, and its domeless Rotunda, where dead presidents once lay in state—will our descendants be able to make a decent living by selling them pop and candy and driving the tour buses? American candy and pop, cigarettes and movies are all over Europe, but not many American cars, and no Times.

  To Athens. Some Dukakis bumper stickers outside the airport. Taxis on strike, so rode with a guy with a Dukakis sticker. Two thousand drachmas, about fifteen bucks. With the Acropolis visible out the hotel window, lay down and checked out the Olympics. Earl Bell, the pole vaulter, looked a lot like George Bush. Women’s fencing, tennis. No beer on the screen, no pop, no cigarettes. Just sports. The unfairness struck me. Why should Americans have to sit for hours of brain-dead commercials, thereby subsidizing the games for Greeks, who get off scot-free? A Times editorial there, maybe a campaign issue? Without advertising, the games become a whole religious drama, with athletes waiting, pacing, tensing, getting psyched up, then the moment of repose before they burst off the mark. Why clutter this sacred ritual with Budweiser horses? On the other hand, I was thirsty. No room service, so hiked down to the Marriott’s Polynesian restaurant. A long photo mural of Bora Bora. Greek waiters in Hawaiian shirts serving mai tais and platters of pupu.

  That night, watched the news, which looked a lot like anybody else’s news. Not a sound bite could I understand, not one—there was only calm, scholarly, incomprehensible Greek along with the pictures. A handsome black-haired man in a dark-blue suit read the stories off a script on his desk, glancing up on every other phrase, in front of a large screen that showed:

  London. Prime Minister Papandreou in a blue suit, standing next to a fat man with a cleft chin.

  A Greek Orthodox bishop arriving on a ferryboat to inspect two rows of troops.

  A speaker at the UN.

  Melina Mercouri.

  A parade of taxis in downtown Athens, people waving signs.

  Gorbachev, posing in a row of blue suits that included a frail Andrei Gromyko, then inking a treaty.

  A woman weeping behind a barred gate.

  A map of Albania.

  Scenes of Florida, a Florida license plate, men climbing out of a limo.

  Weather report, in centigrade. Lows of 13-20. Highs, 28-31.

  A Greek flag as the Greek national anthem was playing.

  Sign-off at 11:30, the last image an outline of Greece, white against blue, the country resembling a sea horse with islands scattered near its tail, including Patmos, where I am now, on a shaded terrace of a house with thick stone walls plastered white, in a village of dazzling whitewashed stone houses bunched around a monastery on a mountain. The hills are brown, the sea is clear blue, and I hear chickens nearby, complaining. A train of four donkeys clops down our stone street, five feet wide in places, and a man calls his wares, fish and vegetables, on this street and, a moment later, on the next. The news here is all ancient: the friendliness of foreign people, the mysteries of the East. We eat fresh goat yogurt and thyme honey for breakfast, on a second terrace, walled, under an orange tree. The house is from the seventeenth century, like all the others. A quarter-mile down the road is the cave where John dreamed about the end of the world and wrote the Book of Revelation and told about the Lake of Everlasting Fire that so absorbed my entire youth. A few miles farther is a sandy beach where young German and Swedish and French women lie naked in the sun, which would have absorbed me even more then than it does now, which is, considerably. We ride to the beach, and then back up the mountain, on green Honda scooters. My mother never let me own one or ride on one, feeling that any motorized two-wheeled vehicle was a ticket to flaming death. The beauty of such a strict upbringing is to give a person a low threshold of excitement. When we cruise down the mountain and take the outside curve at 15 m.p.h. and look over the edge, I hear her voice say, “Be careful, Gary! Not so fast!”

  When we putt-putt up from the naked beach past John’s cave to the mountaintop, I hear his voice say, “Woe! Woe! Woe!” We will make this trip everyday for two more weeks and then go home.

  REAGAN

  IT’S NOT OFTEN that people care to celebrate the anniversary of a panic, so I gladly drove down to West Windsor Township, New Jersey, on Halloween weekend for a festival celebrating a night in 1938 when many citizens there and across America got scared by a radio play and ran around and did things they felt sheepish about later. West Windsor, just east of Princeton, includes the village of Grover’s Mill, which a scriptwriter happened to pick off a map and use as the site of the Martian invasion in the play The War of the Worlds, performed by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air and broadcast on the CBS network at 8:00 P.M., Eastern time, October 30, 1938. About twelve million persons tuned in, many of them too late to hear Welles’s introduction but in time to hear about “a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite,” crashing near Grover’s Mill. It turned out to be a metal cylinder ninety feet in diameter, according to Carl Phillips, the reporter in the play, and the folks at home could hear the crowd of curious onlookers at the crash site, an ominous humming sound, and a loud clank as the cylinder opened, and then Carl’s gasp. A thing with luminous eyes and gray tentacles wriggled out of the black hole, glistening, pulsating, dripping saliva, and a moment later Carl’s microphone thunked to the ground. Dead air. Then an announcer came on with a news bulletin: “At least forty people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover’s Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition.”

  The play bounced along in this news-documentary style: to Washington for an emergency message from the Secretary of the Interior; back to the studio for news bulletins as the invaders advanced toward New York City in giant walking t
ripods and zapped Army bombers out of the sky with deadly heat rays; then hysterical warnings (“Poisonous black smoke pouring in from Jersey marshes. Reaches South Street. Gas masks useless. . . . Automobiles, use Routes 7, 23, 24”). Here and there, listeners panicked—perhaps a million, according to a 1947 study by the Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril, which quoted some of them:

  Newark: “We listened, getting more and more excited. We all felt the world was coming to an end. Then we heard ‘Get gas masks!’ That was the part that got me. I thought I was going crazy.”

  New England: “I kept shivering and shaking. I pulled out suitcases and put them back, started to pack, but didn’t know what to take.”

  Illinois: “We ran to the doctor’s to see if he could help us get away. Everybody was out in the street, and somebody told my husband it was just a play.”

  New York: “One of the first things I did was to try to phone my girl, in Poughkeepsie, but the lines were all busy, so that just confirmed my impression that the thing was true.... We had heard that . . . gas was spreading over New Jersey and fire, so I figured there wasn’t anything to do—we figured our friends and families were all dead. I made the forty-five miles in thirty-five minutes and didn’t even realize it. I drove right through Newburgh and never even knew I went through it.”

  The epicenter of the panic, which was a township of truck farms fifty years ago, is a suburb of New York now, near the Princeton Junction stop on the Metroliner route. Its potato fields are filling up with three-hundred-thousand-dollar two-story frame or brick houses (advertised on billboards as “estate” or “manor” homes) in tract developments with names that use the suffixes -dale, -shire, -ford, -brook, and -crest a lot. Next to the millpond, where Carl Phillips was killed by the invaders’ heat rays, is a small park with a few picnic tables, swings, a shelter, a bike stand, and a monument to the broadcast, dedicated this year.