We Are Still Married

by Garrison Keillor

  “You’re not going out toward Fennimore Parkway, are you?” I asked, taking a wild guess. “Sure,” she said, “hop in.”

  She drove a blue 1982 Mustang convertible, a graduation present from her folks. She headed south on Lake Avenue past the Lake-Hi Drive-in Theater and East High, where I had graduated in 1976, turned right on 44th, and down the Strip past the used-car lots and over the hill past the cemetery two miles and then onto Fennimore. I had been in that part of town only a couple of times in my life. It had curving streets lined with beautiful elms and white houses as big as schools. I picked out one and said, “Here.” She stopped and I got out. “What’s your number?” I said. She told me.

  I wonder if she would have told me if she had known I am an assistant herdsman at the zoo and live in a studio apartment. I wonder. Anyway, getting her phone number was worth the long bus ride back to Lake, where I transferred to the 16th Street bus that took me back to the beach, where I got in my car and drove home.

  I thought about calling her to make sure she got home all right, but didn’t because it was almost eleven o’clock, so I put a frozen macaroni dinner in the oven and watched the late movie and passed out on the couch and eventually woke up to smell smoke and see the girl in the movie alone on a deserted road being chased by bikers; then, after she ran into the woods and tripped and fell, there was a commercial, and I grabbed the phone and dialed her number. The phone rang about twenty times, then a man answered. “Hello, has Rhonda gotten home yet?” I asked. “Do you know what time it is?” he said. “She’s asleep. Who the hell is this?”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bother you. Good night.” I disguised my voice so he wouldn’t be mad if I met him later.

  I woke up at 9:00 A.M. thinking about her, though I was late for work, and wanted to call her up and wish her a pleasant good morning and ask if she felt the same longing I felt, but raced to the zoo, where I found three angry messages on my desk with “IMMEDIATELY” underlined on each one. I was in charge of three high-school kids who worked there that summer, and so I needed a desk to sit behind when I told them what to do, but my job was not a desk job—my crew and I picked up trash and chased animals. The zoo was built with the idea that animals would be seen in their natural habitat and not stuck in little cages, a good idea, but the taxpayers got angry if they went and just saw a lot of habitat—they expected to see animals and they bitched if the moose, for example, were back in the underbrush—so our job was going into the bushes and kicking the animals’ butts out of there and getting them into the open, especially the peacocks, flamingos, wolves, deer, beaver, moose, bears, and tigers. The bears and tigers we heaved corncobs at or flushed out with water hoses so they wouldn’t lie around in caves or behind rocks as they tended to do. It wasn’t a great job but it was what I was paid to do.

  I called her at lunchtime (she was gone to play tennis) and again at five o’clock (she was eating dinner and couldn’t come to the phone) and finally I reached her at 6:30. “Come on over!” she said. I knew by the address she gave that it was going to be hard to find, but I dressed up in my only good casual clothes and headed her way and in no time I was completely lost not too far from where I was sure she lived. I went around and around on little lanes and drives called Fernhill and Wooddale and Fernwood and Hilldale, where half the driveways are unmarked or say “Keep Out” and you go in to ask for directions and a minority woman in a white dress has no idea what you’re talking about and of course there aren’t any pay phones for miles, and it got dark and I was getting fed up—I broke out of the maze finally and hit an actual street with stores on it, and called her from a gas station. She said it was too late to come over, because Janelle was there and they were supposed to go to a play. I noticed that she didn’t invite me but I didn’t comment on it. I did convince her to meet me at Bingo’s (minus Janelle) three days later, the soonest she could work it into her schedule.

  She never looked more beautiful—to me, at any rate. She was tan and glowing and wore a white dress that really set off her features, including her long neck and perfect collarbones, the perfect picture of the sort of girl I had always wanted to know. I wanted her to love me so bad, I had spent two nights studying up on the college she had said she was going to so that, if it came up again, I could say I had gone there myself. I knew names of courses, streets, buildings, dorms, deans, a ton of material, but the subject didn’t come up. Instead she asked if I sailed. She wanted her dad to buy her a sailboat.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, as if, to me, sailing was like crossing the street. “I used to sail,” I said, implying that I had gone on to pursue deeper interests, but wasn’t sure what they should be—things she’d be interested in, of course, but, on the other hand, not things she already knew a great deal about—philosophy maybe. I decided on Nileism, the theory that nothing matters, nothing matters at all except for this little moment we have together in this dark world. But we mostly talked about her and her summer. I kissed her goodnight and she promised to see me soon. I held her, a little too long, maybe, and then she got in her car and drove away.

  It was very hard, trying to be the person she thought I was, the guy who was with Sandra Singleton’s cousin that night and spilled a Coke. I needed to know more about him. So that night I called up a Singleton residence in Rhonda’s part of town and asked for Sandra. A girl came to the phone who was yelling at someone named Barb to keep an eye on the scallops. “Sandra, you probably don’t remember me, but I’m Paul Bryant and I met you last summer, I think at the 7-Hi Drive-in, and the reason I called is I’m trying to locate that guy who was with your cousin that night—remember? The guy who spilled the Coke?”

  “Gene. ”

  “Right. How could I get ahold of him? He wanted me to call him about a car, and I couldn’t remember his name.”

  “Parker. ”

  “Parker! Right! Where would I find him?”

  She said he went out west and she didn’t know where exactly or when he might come back. “Does he owe you money?” she said. “If he does, you might as well forget it. What a fruitfly!”

  “How do you mean that?” I said. She said that he was a pain in the rear and she had only been nice to him because of her cousin. I said I thought that Rhonda sort of liked him. “Ha!” she said. “Fat chance! Rhonda just likes to make Sam jealous!” Then she had to go and eat those scallops, although there was more I wanted to know. Who was Sam? for example.

  I figured that, if Rhonda didn’t know Gene was gone, I could go on being him for a while longer, but I should get another story ready in case of emergency (“What guy at the drive-in? A friend of Sandra who? Spilled what Coke? I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’m Ryan Tremaine, we met at the beach, remember?”) and I had better start developing Ryan as someone she would like to know more than the guy she was mistaking me for.

  I didn’t have much time to work on Ryan that week, due to problems at the zoo, where a big-shot doctor who donated two Chinese peacocks brought his friends to see them and naturally they were lounging around in the back forty and had to be fetched. I wasn’t around, having gone to see to the moose, so my boss had to do it and one of the peacocks attacked him. You always want to have a stick when you herd peacocks, but he was trying to play St. Francis in front of the donor, and he got scratched up. He was fried about it. He put me to work shoveling out the camel yard. Meanwhile, the moose were giving me fits. We have four, who live on a two-acre tract with manmade marsh, and when they choose to be invisible, they go into the tall grass at the back of the marsh, where they hunker down and sit all day. I don’t know why people want to look at a moose, but they do, so we put up a temporary fence to keep them up front, and then Peggy developed a scalp infection and looked hideous, so we put her behind the fence, and then Jack tried to climb over to her and scrambled around and punctured himself, so then the fence had to come down and the tall grass had to be cut. It was hell with the moose all week, not to mention the camels. I was going to switch Ryan from Nile
ism into some branch of theology, maybe Methodism, which I knew something about but not nearly enough, but I didn’t have time to go to the library.

  That Friday she said she’d go see The Beach of the Living Dead with me at the Lake-Hi, and I actually found her house with the help of very specific directions that she was surprised I needed. “It’s not that far from yours,” she said. I couldn’t remember where mine had been. Her house was a brick mansion like a foreign embassy, with a circular drive and a flagpole (American flag) and about ten acres of lawn. The man who answered the door looked at me like I had a hideous scalp infection.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I think maybe I’m a few minutes early.”

  He was her dad. I followed him into a dark room with dark wood walls and he sat in a leather chair and I sat in the middle of a leather couch. I should have picked the end, where I could have set my arm on the armrest. Instead I put my hands on the cushion. I was so sweaty, when I pulled them away it sounded like Velcro ripping. “So,” he said, “what are you up to this summer?”

  I almost gagged, my summer activities being one part of the Ryan Tremaine story I hadn’t decided on. I had worked out the part about my family—my father and mother had died in 1978 in a plane crash in Bolivia, and I was just starting to get back on my feet emotionally after a pretty terrible period in my life—but what was I doing? I considered saying that I was studying wildlife management but it seemed too close for comfort, so I chose the ministry on the spot.

  “What church?” he said. I said Congregational. I was going to go for Methodist, but Congregational seemed the better choice, given the layout. He grunted. “Each to his own, I suppose, but to me it’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo. A lot of people pretending to be holier than everybody else.”

  I assured him that I did not feel holier than him, that in fact my call to the ministry was based on an awareness of my own shortcomings—“ It’s a big job, the ministry, the responsibility can be almost frightening sometimes”—upon which Rhonda strolled in, decked out in cutoffs and a rather bold jersey, cut as low as it could be and still be considered clothing. “Hi, Ryan,” she said, bending down to give me a peck on the neck. Ordinarily, I would have been thrilled, but the terrible lies had made me awfully tired. I was pretty quiet all the way to The Beach of the Living Dead. She asked me what was wrong. I said, “I’m thinking about us, that’s all.”

  She leaned her head on my shoulder, my arm around her, as zombies struggled out of their sandy graves on the tropical island, first their gruesome hands poking out and then the heads with bulging blank milky eyeballs and purplish rotting flesh hanging off, and they marched their stiff-legged zombie march, arms outstretched, toward the young couples necking on blankets under the Southern moon, and somehow this put Rhonda in a romantic mood. She kissed me a long wonderful kiss.

  I said, “I wish we knew each other better.” She said she thought she knew me better than I might think. “I doubt it,” I said. “There’s a lot you don’t know, that probably you wouldn’t want to know.” She said, “You talk like you shot your parents or something.”

  Well, she was right, in a way. Betty and Bob Wiscnek were probably watching TV at that moment, sitting on the plastic-covered sofa about two miles from us, but I was all ready to have them go down in a flaming airliner over Bolivia if the situation called for it. On the other hand, Ryan was a finer person, who was more worthy of her love, which, if I won her over, could someday turn me into the finer person I had to pretend to be in order to win her. This is complicated.

  I felt so bad, I had to tell her one true thing about myself. I said, “One thing you don’t know is that actually I work at the zoo.” She said, “Yeah? Well, that’s not so bad.”

  A moment later, she said, “I don’t go to zoos. They’re so depressing.” I said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

  She said, “What gives us the right to lock up animals in little cages so we can go stare at them? How would you feel if you were in a cage?”

  I said animals are treated real well in zoos. She disagreed with that. I said, “This sure is a dumb thing to argue about.” She said, “You were the one who brought it up.”

  We talked about zoo animals a little more, then the hero and his girlfriend escaped from the island, having killed a couple dozen zombies by knocking their heads off, and then I told Rhonda how much I loved her. I said, “I really need to know that you care about me.” She wanted to go home right away, and I thought we should go to Bingo’s. She wasn’t hungry. I knew that if I took her home I’d never see her again, and I got a little desperate, and I drove to Bingo’s despite her saying, “Turn around right now, or else I’m going to jump out.” So I drove around the block twice and then drove her home. It was a long drive. After a while she said that maybe I’d enjoy spending a few years in prison if I thought zoos were so wonderful. I said, “There’s more than one way of looking at something. You don’t necessarily have a monopoly on the truth, you know.” Maybe not, she said, but she knew what she thought. I had told her, by way of explaining that our zoo didn’t have cages, that part of my job was making animals come out of the underbrush, which was a mistake. She thought that was inhuman. She said, “You act like you’re proud of it.” I said it was my job. She said, “Some people will do anything.” I pulled up in front of her house, she got out of the car, and I knew we’d never meet again.

  It was a dumb way for a romance to break up that could have been so wonderful. I am still kicking myself for it. I can see now all the mistakes I made. I think there was a moment there where she would have fallen in love and married me, and if she had, I believe that things would have worked out as she got to know me better, and we would be very happy right now. Instead I feel terrible. To come so close—I keep wanting to call her and explain. The phone is on the dresser. I imagine she’s sitting beside a swimming pool, by a phone. All I need to do is think of the right words to say.

  WHAT DID WE DO WRONG?

  THE FIRST WOMAN TO REACH the big leagues said she wanted to be treated like any other rookie, but she didn’t have to worry about that. The Sparrows nicknamed her Chesty and then Big Numbers the first week of spring training, and loaded her bed at the Ramada with butterscotch pudding. Only the writers made a big thing about her being the First Woman. The Sparrows treated her like dirt.

  Annie Szemanski arrived in camp fresh from the Federales League of Bolivia, the fourth second baseman on the Sparrows roster, and when Drayton stepped in a hole and broke his ankle Hemmie put her in the lineup, hoping she would break hers. “This was the front office’s bright idea,” he told the writers. “Off the record, I think it stinks.” But when she got in she looked so good that by the third week of March she was a foregone conclusion. Even Hemmie had to admit it. A .346 average tells no lies. He disliked her purely because she was a woman—there was nothing personal about it. Because she was a woman, she was given the manager’s dressing room, and Hemmie had to dress with the team. He was sixty-one, a heavyweight, and he had a possum tattooed on his belly alongside the name “Georgene,” so he was shy about taking his shirt off in front of people. He hated her for making it necessary. Other than that, he thought she was a tremendous addition to the team.

  Asked how she felt being the first woman to make a major-league team, she said, “Like a pig in mud,” or words to that effect, and then turned and released a squirt of tobacco juice from the wad of rum-soaked plug in her right cheek. She chewed a rare brand of plug called Stuff It, which she learned to chew when she was playing Nicaraguan summer ball. She told the writers, “They were so mean to me down there you couldn’t write it in your newspaper. I took a gun everywhere I went, even to bed. Especially to bed. Guys were after me like you can’t believe. That’s when I discovered that life is essentially without meaning. That’s when I started chewing tobacco—because, no matter how bad anybody treats you, it’s not as bad as this. This is the worst chew in the world. After this, everyt
hing else is peaches and cream.” The writers elected Gentleman Jim, the Sparrows’ PR guy, to bite off a chunk and tell them how it tasted, and as he sat and chewed it tears ran down his old sunburned cheeks and he couldn’t talk for a while. Then he whispered, “You’ve been chewing this for two years? I had no idea it was so hard to be a woman.”

  When thirty-two thousand fans came to Cold Spring Stadium on April 4 for Opening Day and saw the scrappy little freckle-faced woman with tousled black hair who they’d been reading about for almost two months, they were dizzy with devotion. They chanted her name and waved Annie flags and Annie caps ($8.95 and $4.95) and held up hand-painted bedsheets (“EVERY DAY IS LADIES’ DAY,” “A WOMAN’S PLACE—AT SECOND BASE,” “ERA & RBI,” “THE GAME AIN’T OVER TILL THE BIG LADY BATS”), but when they saw No. 18 trot out to second with a load of chew as big as if she had mumps it was a surprise. Then, bottom of the second, when she leaned over in the on-deck circle and dropped a stream of brown juice in the sod, the stadium experienced a moment of thoughtful silence.

  One man in Section 31 said, “Hey, what’s the beef? She can chew if she wants to. This is 1987. Grow up.”

  “I guess you’re right,” his next-seat neighbor said. “My first reaction was nausea, but I think you’re right.”

  “Absolutely. She’s a woman, but, more than that, she’s a person.”

  Other folks said, “I’m with you on that. A woman can carry a quarter-pound of chew in her cheek and spit in public, same as any man—why should there be any difference?”

  And yet. Nobody wanted to say this, but the plain truth was that No. 18 was not handling her chew well at all. Juice ran down her chin and dripped onto her shirt. She’s bit off more than she can chew, some people thought to themselves, but they didn’t want to say that.