It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon and it’s a great pleasure to be here at the Minnesota State Fair. I’ve come every year since I was five, and that’s more than twenty years. Every August my mother said, “Well, I don’t know if I care to go to the Fair this year or not.” Nobody had so much as mentioned the Fair, we were too busy canning vegetables and perishing of the heat and the steam from the pressure cooker—a burning hot day and us stripping skins off tomatoes, slaving to put up a hundred or so quarts of a vegetable we were rapidly losing our appetite for. She said, “There’s too much work to do and we can’t afford it, it’s too crowded, and anyway it’s the same as last year. I don’t see how we can do it. I’m sorry.”
It was her way of lending drama to the trip. So we’d come to the Fair, the roar of engines and the smell of grease, and Mother marched around the Home Activities building looking at competitive cakes and jams. One year we shook hands with Senator Ed Thye, and another time we won a roll of linoleum by guessing the number of agates in a toilet bowl. One year we wandered into the Education building and saw a demonstration of television, an interesting invention: people stood in a crowd and looked at a picture of themselves on a screen. When they moved the picture moved—interesting. Hard to see why you’d want one if you had a mirror, but it was entertaining for a few minutes.
I came with Mother and Dad, and because we were Christians we gave a wide berth to the Midway, where ladies danced and did other things at the Persian Palms and Harlem Revue tent shows. We avoided sin, but it was exciting for me to be so close to it and see flashing pink lights and hear barkers say, in a voice like a talking dog’s, “See Miss Roxanne just inside the gate, just beyond that tent flap, she’s waiting in there for you, she wants to show you a good time,” and I tried to see beyond the flap, not wanting Miss Roxanne to be disappointed by my lack of interest in her. It was exciting to hear bands playing slow raunchy dance tunes and to walk past the freak show with the two-headed boy, where the gypsy ticket-seller looked at me with a haughty look that said, I know things you’ll never know, what I’ve seen you’d never understand.
I loved the Fair, the good and the bad. It was good to get out of our quiet town into a loud place with bad food and stink, music and sex blaring—listen—it’s gorgeous. Dad gave me three dollars and I walked around not spending it, just gaping at the sights. Once I saw a sad midget stand and smoke a cigarette, holding his dog’s leash, a big dog. Once I saw a man necking with a fat lady behind the Tilt-A-Whirl. He was running the ride. People were getting tossed around like eggs in a blender, and he was putting his hands up her shirt. Once I saw the newspaper columnist Olson Younger sitting in a booth under the sign MEET OLSON YOUNGER. He was puffier than his picture in the paper and more dejected. He sat drinking coffee after coffee and scrawling his autograph on free paper visors. He led a fairy-tale life in his column, meeting stars of stage and screen, eating meals with them, and even dancing once with Rita Hayworth, and he shared these wonderful moments with us through “The Olson Younger Column.” The bad part was that I had to wear fundamentalist clothes to the Fair, white rayon shirt, black pants, black shoes, narrow tie, because we had to sing in the evening at the Harbor Light gospel tent near the Midway gate. We sang “Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me,” and fifty feet away a man said, “Yes, she is absolutely naked as the day she was born, and she’s inside, twenty-five cents, two bits, the fourth part of a dollar.” I held the hymnbook high so nobody would see me. I wanted to be cool and wear a T-shirt. In the pioneer days before polyester, a rayon shirt was like wearing waxed paper.
When the service was over, we got one ride on the ferris wheel, rising up over the bright lights into the dark night toward the stars, and falling back into our real lives. On the long ride home I slept, and when I woke up I was in a classroom that smelled of floor wax; Mrs. Mortenson was asking me to explain the Smoot-Hawley Act.
In 1955 my uncle Earl saw an ad for the $2,000 Minnesota State Fair Cake Baking Sweepstakes, sponsored by Peter Pan Flour, and he entered my aunt Myrna. He didn’t mention this to her because he didn’t want to upset her. She was a nervous person, easily startled by a sudden hello, and he was right, she made the greatest chocolate angelfood cake on the face of the earth. (To call it devil’s food would give Satan encouragement so we didn’t.) She also kept the cleanest kitchen in the Christian world. I liked to walk in, say hello, and when she recovered, she sat me down and fed me chocolate angel-food cake. As I ate it, she hovered overhead and apologized for it.
“Oh,” she sighed. “I don’t know. I ought to throw this out for the dog. It’s not very good. I don’t know where my mind was—I lost track of how many eggs I put in, and I was all out of the kind of brown sugar I always use.” I looked up at her in a trance, confused by the pure transcendent beauty of it, and she cut me a second, larger piece. “My mother was the one who could make a chocolate cake,” she said, and then she allowed herself one taste of cake. And frowned. “It’s gummy,” she said. “It’s like pudding.”
“No,” I said. “It’s the best chocolate cake I ever tasted.”
“Oh,” she said, “your mother makes cake just as good as that.”
Once my mother heard that and smiled at me, hopefully, but all my life I’ve tried to tell the truth, and I replied honestly, “Sometimes she does, but not often.”
Aunt Myrna was one of the few truly slender women in town. She set an impossible standard for the others. “She’s small-boned,” they said, but the truth is that she was so critical of her cooking, which was head and shoulders above everyone else’s, that food didn’t satisfy her. She was supernatural that way, like an angel. Angels who visit earth don’t feed on corn dogs and pizza. Heavenly creatures have low metabolism, a little bite of something perfect is more than enough. Like her cake. An angel visiting Minnesota to do research on sweet corn could go for a week on one thin sliver of Aunt Myrna’s chocolate cake.
When, in early August, Uncle Earl got an invitation from the Peter Pan Flour people, none of us was surprised she was chosen, she was so good. She was mad at him when he broke the news; she said, “I can’t bake in front of a hundred people. Stand up and make a cake and have them stare at me like I was some kind of carnival freak. I won’t do it.”
He considered that for a minute. “I was thinking of it,” he said, “as an opportunity to witness for the Lord. If you win the bake-off, I’m certain that you get to make a speech. You could give that Scripture recipe, ‘Take four cups of 1 Corinthians 13 and three cups of Ephesians 4:32, four quarts of Hebrews 11.1….’”
“I don’t know if I would be up to it….”
“I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. Phillipians 4:13.”
She practiced for two weeks and baked about forty cakes, most of them barely edible. She was experimenting with strange ingredients, like maple syrup and peanut butter, marshmallows, cherry bits. “You can’t just stand up in front of a crowd and bake an ordinary chocolate cake,” she said, but we convinced her that hers was good enough. She baked two of them that Friday, both champs. On the big Saturday she packed her ingredients, cake pans, mixer, and utensils in a cardboard box and covered it with a cloth, and they drove to the Cities, stopping on account of car trouble in Anoka and transferring from the Dodge to the bus. The bake-off was at three o’clock.
They arrived at two-thirty. She had assumed the bake-off was in the Home Activities building and then she discovered it was here at the grandstand. Peter Pan Flour had gone all out. The bake-off was part of the afternoon grandstand program, which also included high-wire acts, a big band playing Glenn Miller tunes, and Siberian tigers jumping through hoops of fire. She and twelve other women would stand on stage and bake cakes, and while the cakes were in the oven, Joey Chitwood’s Thrill Show would perform daredevil stunts on the dirt track, and Olson Younger the newspaper columnist would judge the contest and award the prize. We helped Aunt Myrna to the stage. She was weak and moist. “Good luck,” we said.
I stand here and look up at the grandstand and can see how nervous she must’ve been. I remember sitting up there in the forty-ninth row, under the pavilion, looking down at my tiny aunt in the green dress to the left of the saxophones while Joey Chitwood’s Thrill Show drivers did flips and rolls, roaring around in white Fords. She stood at a long table whipping mix in a silver bowl, my aunt Myrna making a cake. She was mine, my relative, and I was so proud.
And then the cakes came out of the oven. The State Fair orchestra put down their newspapers and picked up their horns and played something from opera, and the radio-announcer emcee said that now the moment had come, and Olson Younger pranced around. He wore a green suit and orange tie and he waved to us with both hands. It was his moment of glory, and he sashayed from one entrant to the next, kissing her, rolling his eyes, and tasting her cake. When he tasted Myrna’s cake, she shrank back from his embrace. She said a few words to him and I knew she was saying, “I don’t know. I just can’t seem to make em as rich as I used to—this isn’t very good at all. It’s gummy.” It was the greatest chocolate cake in the world but he believed her. So she came in tenth.
A woman in white pedal pushers won because, Younger said, her cake was richer and moister. He had a hard time getting the words out. You could see the grease stains from her cake, beads of grease glittered in the sun. Uncle Earl said, “That’s not cake, that’s pudding he gave a prize to. This is a pudding contest he’s running. He wouldn’t know chocolate cake if it came up and ate him.” And he was right. When Younger waltzed over to give Aunt Myrna her prize, a bowl, you could see he didn’t know which way was north. It wasn’t fair. She was the best. We waited for her in front of the grandstand. We both felt bad.
But when we saw her coming, she was all smiles. She hugged us both. She hardly seemed like herself. She threw her head back and said, “Oh, I’m glad it’s over. But it was fun. I was so scared. And then I just forgot to be.”
“But it wasn’t fair,” I said. She said, “Oh, he was drunk. It was all whiskey cake to him. But it doesn’t matter. It was so much fun.” I never saw her so lighthearted and girlish.
That night an old man came forward at the Harbor Light gospel meeting. He was confused and may have been looking for the way out, but we latched onto him and prayed for him. When he left, he seemed relieved. He was our first convert and we were thrilled. A soul hanging in the balance, there in our tent. Heaven and hell his choice, and he chose heaven, with our help, and then Dad lent him busfare.
That night, I said to my mother, “This is the last time I wear a rayon shirt, I hate them.” She said,.“All right, that’s fine.” I said, “You’re not mad?” She said, “No, I thought you liked them, that’s all.”
I went up in the ferris wheel for a last ride before being thrown into seventh grade. It went up into the stars and fell back to earth and rose again, and I had a magnificent vision, or think I did, though it’s hard to remember if it was that year with the chocolate cake or the next one with the pigs getting loose. The ferris wheel is the same year after year. It’s like all one ride to me: we go up and I think of people I knew who are dead and I smell fall in the air, manure, corn dogs, and we drop down into blazing light and blaring music. Every summer I’m a little bigger, but riding the ferris wheel, I feel the same as ever, I feel eternal. The combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, diesel smoke, and sawdust, in a hot dark summer night, it never changes, not an inch. The wheel carries us up high, high, high, and stops, and we sit swaying, creaking, in the dark, on the verge of death. You can see death from here. The wind blows from the northwest, from the farm school in Saint Anthony Park, a chilly wind with traces of pigs and sheep in it. This is my vision: little kids holding on to their daddy’s hand, and he is me. He looks down on them with love and buys them another corn dog. They are worried they will lose him, they hang on to his leg with one hand, eat with the other. This vision is unbearably wonderful. Then the wheel brings me down to the ground. We get off and other people get on. Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.