A monologue from 1985, inspired by a friend’s daughter’s confirmation into the Lutheran church. I remember the audience’s pleasure at suddenly hearing me pop up as a character in the story. I was pleased by it, too, and put a Gary Keillor into The Book of Guys and Pilgrims and Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny.
It has been raining off and on most of the week, long wet nights and rain in the mornings sometimes changing to snow, cold. The sky misty. The Bloodmobile came but after the long winter our blood was too salty and they went away. Said they’d come back in June. It was Confirmation Sunday. In olden times girls would dress in bright new spring hats and white dresses and white gloves and boys would wear suits and ties. Those days are gone, never to return. If the girl has a grandma who wields some influence (a grandma with property), the girl may wear a nice dress, but the hats and gloves are gone. I miss the white gloves, which was a way of saying This day is different from other days. Many confirmation kids come in jeans and sneakers, which is in line with the idea that God looks on the heart, not on one’s exterior, but is that a license to attend church in our underwear? It’s Sunday, after all. It’s not Tuesday. But the truth is that some Lutherans actually are Unitarians. Just as you have people at a basketball game who don’t care about the game, they go just to be sociable.
Church went long last Sunday. I drove by at twelve thirty and the parking lot was full. And then I remembered that I was supposed to be there for the confirmation of Lois Tollerud, my goddaughter, and I slowed down but couldn’t think of a good enough excuse for being two hours late and drove on.
A whole herd of deer came through town on Tuesday, ten of them, like a tour group, and Pastor Liz saw them on her morning walk, standing in the church parking lot. They lifted their heads, and stood perfectly still, ears perked up, and she stood still, thinking of things to tell them. Deer carry ticks that transmit Lyme disease, which has hit a few people in town, a couple of them disastrously. Stoicism can carry a terrible price. Pastor Liz ran into a deer once that leaped out of the ditch at dusk when she was heading back to town for confirmation. The animal was knocked across the road where it flopped around on the shoulder and expired and Liz drove to church and lit the candles in her office and led the confirmands in a review of the Nicene Creed and what it means. She didn’t mention the deer. She didn’t want death to trump the creed, but she couldn’t help thinking about how she had dragged the carcass by its hind legs off the road and what about deer ticks? She had hugged the children. Should she tell their parents? Well, yes, of course. Eight phone calls, varying degrees of consternation, dread. Ten minutes later, Val Tollefson called to anguish about liability and then his brother-in-law the retired attorney in Minneapolis called to offer advice. Grim.
• • •
Pastor Liz had been on her way to meet Cindy Hedlund at the Sidewinder in Millet, which is open for lunch these days. Drinking and dancing don’t pay the bills anymore, so they added lunch. A crisis of faith, Cindy said on the phone. She was crying. Connie the church secretary told Liz that Cindy has been looking at new cars at Krebsbach Chev. Whatever, said Liz, but of course it matters to people—Lutherans drive Fords bought at Bunsen Motors, Clint and Clarence being church members—likewise Catholics drive Chevies. Be true to your own.
A red hatchback, a Caprice. Donnie Krebsbach sidled over and asked if she wanted to drive it. “I shouldn’t even be here,” she said.
“Times change. I think you need to please yourself. I mean, Ford makes a good car, it’s not that, but a lot of people think they don’t handle all that well. This Caprice is a real good handler.” He jingled the keys. She bolted for the door—“Let me think about it.” And that night over supper Roger said he’d heard that she’d been looking at Chevys. “Up to you,” he said, “but Clint is an old friend.”
• • •
Arlene Bunsen returned from visiting her son Duane and his attractive (childless) wife, Denise, in their lovely two-bedroom condo outside Houston which is full of DVDs and exercise equipment and things people use to fill up their lives who do not have children. Duane and Denise were out kayaking and left a key at the desk for Arlene and she plunked down her grocery bag full of rhubarb and strawberries and flour and butter—to make a rhubarb pie for them—and could not find a bowl to mix dough in, or a knife to chop rhubarb with. Their kitchen appeared never to have been used. She knocked on a neighbor’s door, and it opened two inches, the length of the chain, and when Arlene asked for a knife, the door closed. She wound up mixing the dough in an ornamental Chinese bowl from the mantel and she found a knife in the box of nice silverware they’d gotten for their wedding which was in the closet, still in a plastic wrap. Arlene turned on the oven as she whomped up the dough and soon there was acrid smoke in the air and she opened the oven and it was full of melting DVDs.
Denise and Duane appeared to be subsisting on take-out. Like take-out spaghetti from a pizza place, with garlic bread and wine in a carton. For breakfast the next morning, they took Arlene to a pancake house. Denise is slender and goes to a gym four times a week. She is tan and beautiful in a modelish way and Duane is crazy about her and they travel a lot. They both work. Good jobs. Plenty of money. They’ve been in counseling for the entire ten years of their marriage. “Is there a problem?” Arlene said. “No,” he said, “that’s to catch problems before they come up.”
• • •
Well, there it was. A preventative lifestyle. You steer away from trouble. Children are trouble. Everyone knows this. Arlene loves Duane but couldn’t imagine flying down to Houston again—what for? To watch DVDs? Not her style. Anyway, she came back in a good mood and went to the church council meeting and when someone brought up the subject of Ernie Rasmussen she volunteered to go visit him. He’s been coming drunk to church and leaving unsigned checks for $100 in the collection plate and evidently Lottie has left him and gone to her sister’s in Bemidji but who knows. So Arlene went right up to his house, which people refer to as the Peterson house—Pete Peterson and his family lived there for years, until they found a python living in the crawl space under the kitchen. An aluminum patch covers the hole. The snake was 16 feet long and weighed 240 pounds, and lived under there for about sixteen years, during which the Petersons lost six Chihuahuas and numerous cats. Their youngest girl, Julie, discovered the snake when she crawled into the hole to hide during Starlight Moonlight and saw pale yellow eyes in the dark, and was paralyzed with fear but luckily she had just eaten peanut butter and pythons are repelled by the smell of peanuts and she ran and told her mother. Mrs. Peterson went to look. She stuck her head in and there were the yellow eyes. Like Julie, she was paralyzed with fear but the little girl had the good sense to grab her mother by the ankles and pull her to safety. The Volunteer Fire Department was called and the firemen were about to blast the creature with a fire hose and then someone remembered that warm cheese will make a snake drowsy so Mrs. Peterson heated up some leftover macaroni and cheese and pushed it in toward the snake and sure enough the yellow eyes closed. It took six men to haul it to the truck and they drove it to the zoo in Duluth but around McGregor the snake woke up and fell off the truck and slithered away and nobody cared to give chase. The Petersons moved to Napa Valley soon after and opened an inn called Paradise Inn that caters to couples taking their first vacation without children—their kids have grown up or the parents have decided to stop worrying about them—and they go to Napa Valley to see if they still like each other and have anything to talk about. Thirty-five years of marriage and a lot of puke and snot and disease and squalor and bad companions and suspicious odors and big attitudes and eye-rolling and ingratitude and the man and woman who procreated the brood open a bottle of Pinot Noir and look at each other and try to remember what it was they were thinking of back when their flesh was united.
Arlene walked up to the Peterson house, knocked, and there was no answer, so she stepped into the kitchen, and heard sounds of groaning and sighing upstairs. “Oh God,” a woman said. “Oh my God.” It was a video. She yelled, “Ernie??? It’s Arlene Bunsen. From church. You forgot to sign your checks.” And the groaning stopped. And he hollered from the top of the stairs, “Well, leave ’em there on the table and I’ll get to ’em as soon as I can.” Arlene looked around at the piles of dirty dishes, clothes on the floor, garbage overflowing, flotsam, wreckage of a misspent life. “Is Lottie here?” she yelled. She heard rustling and creaking under the floor where the python had lived.
Years ago a famous wild-game hunter named Lyle Bradley was brought in to look for snakes, a man in leather boots and a pith helmet and jodhpurs, and he spent two days and found nothing but garter snakes and black snakes and said he thought the python must’ve escaped from a circus sideshow and simply adapted to cold weather. He said we’d never see another one. “Of course,” he said, “you never know.”
Ernie came lumbering down the stairs, supporting himself against the walls. She was glad to see that he had put his pants on and zipped them up. “Do you have twenty bucks I can borrow until Tuesday?” he said. She peeled two twenties out of her billfold. “I just need a little help until I can get on my feet,” he said.
His brothers, Tom and Jack, went away to college though they weren’t that smart, and did well for themselves, or so you hear, and Ernie had his own septic tank business with plenty of work, but he and Lottie never got along. The house is cursed, Arlene thinks. The Petersons got divorced after they opened Paradise Inn.
She wrote up a report on Ernie for the Pastoral Care committee, saying that he’ll need some support, and she wrote to Tom and Jack and asked if they could contribute $100 each per month. No word yet from them.
• • •
Cindy Hedlund’s story went like this: she was awakened by Roger snoring and came downstairs, turned on the radio, found a jumble of talk shows but there was a good jazz show from Grand Rapids and she listened to it and revisited an elaborate fantasy she’s had for years, in which she’s in New York City, in a restaurant on the forty-seventh floor, a jazz trio is playing, she sits at a table looking downtown toward the Empire State Building in the mists, the lights of the city twinkling. In the fantasy, she’s dressed in black, her fingernails bright red, and she pulls a cigarette out of her purse and two slender hands with fine black hair on the backs reach over and light her cigarette, and she looks up through the smoke and there is a very handsome man, sort of Italian. Sometimes it’s a gay man, sometimes it’s an old friend from high school who lives in the city, who always told her, “When you’re in town, look me up.” But last night, in the fantasy, she was a widow and the man asked her to dance. He danced beautifully. Jazz isn’t about getting old and raising kids and earning a living, it’s about youth and freedom, she told Liz. “I know,” said Liz.
“I found an old classmate in a chat room online,” Cindy told her. About six months ago. My first big love. Jimmy. He’s a Lutheran pastor in California now, very miserable, wrong line of work, wrong wife, wrong place, his kids are strangers to him, and he wants to get together with me. He says he’d been thinking about me for years. He says he always thought of me as a kindred spirit and maybe a person only gets one of those in a lifetime and I’m his.” The Sidewinder serves half-pound cheeseburgers and the fries are really good. The place is dark and smells of smoke and beer and the furniture looks like it’s been thrown around. The bartender stared at Liz. A guy with blond streaks in his hair, who was a little too aware of his own prettiness. Was he pursing his lips or was he puckering in her direction? Hard to tell. She was wearing her clerical collar. Jesus. Contain yourself, wouldja? Cindy said she thought she was falling in love with Jimmy and that she wished she could find a way to meet him for a weekend in San Francisco. She was in a chat room with him last night for an hour and he said he wanted to quit the church and take a job waiting on tables in Seattle and go to acting school. “What should I do?” she said. Liz was right there. Take responsibility for your own actions. When you meet him online, you are choosing to go deeper into the woods. If you met him in San Francisco, you’d cross the river. This is a choice, it isn’t happenstance. But whatever you choose to do, it’ll be better if you do it with a whole heart. The whole heart is a cheerful heart, not divided against itself. One thing at a time. One day at a time. Whatever you do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men. Liz took Cindy’s hand and said a prayer for gratitude. Give us gratitude, Lord. Fill our hearts with gratitude. Cindy was weeping. That was a good thing. But Pastor Jimmy is a shithead to be preying on an old friend online. The Internet is a swamp where mischievous people can cause all sorts of pain and misery. Liz paid the bill. “No, no, let me pay,” said Cindy, after Liz had already put a twenty down and the smirky bartender had come over to pick it up. “How was everything?” he said. “Stupendous,” said Liz.
“You from around here?” he said. She shook her head. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “In your dreams, sir.” That shut him up.
I felt bad about missing Lois’s confirmation so I dropped by their farm. Eight cars and two pickups parked in the yard. I snuck around to the front of the house. They were all gathered in the living room, Daryl and Marilyn and the kids and relatives I couldn’t identify and they were just about to cut the cake. Lois has grown four inches this year and now is five feet eight and one-half inches tall, a shy girl with long brown hair she has learned to tie in an elegant bun, and creamy skin that she keeps beautiful by frequent blushing. She happened to be in a sensitive mood that day, having gotten a six-page single-spaced letter from a boy in church telling her that he thinks God has written their names together in the Book of Love. The cake was on the coffee table in front of her, white with the Scripture verse in blue frosting: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” It was a large cake. Lois didn’t know how to tell everybody that she wasn’t sure that she believed in God. She was pretty sure that she might’ve lost her faith and though she was hoping to get it back, she didn’t know how. It happened Friday night when she was babysitting at the Christiansens’ and that boy came over and she let him in, though she wasn’t supposed to have guests, and they sat on the couch watching men in khaki uniforms beat people senseless with rifle butts, and she said, “Oh my God,” and the boy took her in his arms, to console her, but then started kissing her and unbuttoned her blouse, and told her how much she meant to him. She took his hand out of her shirt and she prayed that he would go away and heard something like an echo, as if the prayer had been dropped into a deep well. And suddenly it seemed to her that the world was in the control of dark powers, working senseless evil on the innocent, and this boy was capable of evil too, a potential rapist, and that prayer went up in the air like smoke.
When Marilyn cut the confirmation cake and served it with butter-brickle ice cream, Lois thought she ought to say something about her loss of faith, but couldn’t do it, she just couldn’t. She excused herself and went upstairs and put on jeans and a white jacket and walked out across the cornfield toward the road and the ravine to think about her faith on this cloudy day, and, walking west over a little rise, she saw, just beyond the ravine, a white car she’d never seen before, and a strange man in a trench coat standing beside it. She walked toward him, thinking of the parable of the Good Samaritan, thinking that perhaps God was calling her to go witness to him and thereby recover her faith. He stood and pitched stones up over the trees, and as she got closer, he turned and smiled, put out his hand, and came toward her. She saw her mistake. Something glittered in his mouth. She stopped. He was a killer come looking for someone, it didn’t matter to him who it was, anyone who came down the road would do. He walked toward her; she turned and fell down and said, “Oh please no, please God no.”
I hadn’t seen her for five years. I said, “Lois, Lois—it’s me.” I helped her up. How are you? It’s good to see you again. We shuffled along the rim of the ravine, looking for the path down, and she told me about her confirmation, which I have a godfatherly interest in and also because she was named for my favorite aunt, whose favorite nephew I was. She was my youngest aunt and loved to pretend and sometimes we played a game called Strangers, pretending we didn’t know each other. We’d sit and make up stories about ourselves and usually she was a missionary in Africa and I was a novelist. It was exciting for a while and then it was scary, Strangers.
Lois Tollerud asked me, “Why did you stop here?” I told her I was looking for a spot where our Boy Scout troop used to camp and where Einar Tingvold the scoutmaster got so mad at us once, he threw two dozen eggs one by one into the woods and when he ran out of eggs he reached for his binoculars and threw them. We scouts searched for them for a whole afternoon, thirty years ago.
“That’s not a true story, is it?” she said. “No, it’s not.”
I stopped there because, frankly, I’d had a lot of coffee, but I couldn’t tell her that. And she had appeared before I could pee, so when she invited me to the house, I said, Sure.
We walked in. I got a fairly warm hello, and was offered coffee. “In a minute,” I said. “Excuse me, may I use your toilet?” They cut me a slice of cake that said “Con but for,” a little triangle out of her verse.
Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed. Our lovely world has the power to make us brave. I was afraid to see the Tolleruds but needed to empty my bladder. I enjoy being someone else and then it isn’t enjoyable anymore and I need to be known and that’s when I come home. So my mind can be renewed by what is so familiar, the old hymns, God watching the sparrows, the gates of thanksgiving.