It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was warm and bright and the trees were in full color, magnificent, explosive, like permanent fireworks—reds and yellows, oranges, some so brilliant that Crayola never put them in crayons for fear the children would color outside the lines. Maple trees the color of illicit romance, blazing red sumac and oaks and aspen, such color that you weren’t sure you were in this world but perhaps had stepped through a seam in the tapestry and walked into a magical wood. But the only trail through there is a cowpath, so you have to watch where you step.
Florian and Myrtle Krebsbach went driving Tuesday to look at the beautiful trees, which neither of them enjoys, but they go because they’ve done it for years. Myrtle gets carsick more easily now since she bumped her head on the cupboard. The bright colors only made her dizziness more vivid. Florian was grumpy because he hates to see the odometer roll on his ’66 Chev (like new, only forty-seven thousand miles on her). Low mileage is a form of youth to Florian, it means plenty of mileage to come. He drove slowly toward Millet and back and Myrtle hung on to the strap. She said, of the fall colors, “Well, if this don’t prove to them there’s an Almighty, I don’t know what in hell will.” They drove 6.2 miles at twenty-five mph and returned to home base, where he wiped the engine clean with a rag soaked in gasoline. The smell of gas makes Florian perk up.
The leaves reached their peak about Thursday and then, in late afternoon, seemed to dim. Friday morning we woke up and could see that we had passed our apex and were heading for the nadir.
It was still warm, though, so when Ranger Steve came to the third grade with a boxful of snakes, they were pretty lively. Snakes are our friends, not slimy, not evil, but really very beautiful and nothing to be afraid of, he said. “I’m sure Mrs. Hughes isn’t afraid of snakes—look,” he said, and draped a black one on her shoulder as her body shrank and then stiffened. “See? Snakes aren’t slimy at all. Actually their skin is rather dry—right, Mrs. Hughes? This is called a bridle snake; it bites, but only if you bother it.”
Ranger Steve smiled. “It’s all right, there’s nothing to worry about,” he said to Mrs. Hughes, whose eyes were shut, and took the snake in his big manly hand, and set it on his broad shoulder. Instantly the harmless reptile dove into the V of his collar and disappeared. Ranger Steve said, “Oh God,” and grabbed at it. He was wearing a green jump suit, with no belt for a roadblock, and he turned his back to the children and bent over and tried to grab the bridle snake in the jump suit. It was warm under there and the snake was excited, and the children heard a cry, and Steve staggered and the snake came out his left pants leg. They all helped catch it. Steve talked more about snakes but his smile had slipped to the side and gone out of focus. The passage of the bridle snake through the jump suit had worn him out, the exertion of being cool and hysterical at the same time.
Afterward, some of the boys did an imitation of Ranger Steve with the snake in his pants, and Mrs. Hughes said, “I don’t consider that one bit funny,” even though it was hilarious.
That’s what wears out a grown-up person: the contradictions.
After school, a girl from the third grade jumped on her old blue coaster bike and tore off toward the woods to find snakes and put them on her brothers. Then, coasting down Branch Street, she saw her little brother standing looking at their dog Fatso lying by the tree, covering him up with leaves. She swerved and headed straight for the innocent little child and yelled, “I can’t stop! No brakes! I can’t stop,” but he stood there like a stone so she stopped. She said, “You could a been killed. Why’ntcha move? That was a close call, y’know.” Fatso stood up and tottered around back of the tree but the little boy was too scared to move. “You’re dumb, you know that? You’re as dumb as a dog.” Fatso blinked. The little boy’s eyes filled with tears to hear his sweet sister talk to him like that, two pools of pale-blue tears in his blue eyes, and then he made a decision that certainly changed his life: he took one step toward her with his left foot and with his right he kicked the big jerk in her ankle as hard as he could. He held back nothing. A swift hard kick.
More happened then: she chased him, caught him, threw him down, pounded him. But it wasn’t important. He had done something. (The wrong thing—it’s wrong to kick your sister—but sometimes the wrong thing is exactly the right thing to do.) His mother ran out and hauled her off him. “What is going on out here?”
“He kicked me—here,” said Amy, and to show how much it hurt, her big brown eyes filled up with tears.
“What did you do to him?”
“Nothing. I was riding my bike.”
“Paul! How could you do a thing like that?”
He looked up at his mother. He wasn’t sure.
“Just for that, you come inside.”
That was fine with him. He preferred inside.
These are Florian and Myrtle Krebsbach’s grandchildren and their daughter Eloise, who lives around the corner from Carl. She’s got three kids, these two plus a tall lonesome boy named Charlie, one in a long tradition of tall skinny lonesome boys who grew up there. Eloise’s name is Best. She married Chuck Best out of high school, a handsome friendly boy, and three years ago he decided he’d been married long enough to her. He came home to pack his bags.
Eloise cried and then, when he went to the garage for his golf clubs, she locked him out of the house without so much as a warm jacket. She told him she was going to give all his clothes to the church clothing drive. When he asked for his car keys she laughed at him through the letter slot. “You want to start over, then start over,” she said. “Don’t be such a drip. This isn’t a halfway house, mister, this is my home. You want to go away, go ahead, but don’t ask me to give you a ride.”
This took place on Greener Avenue South in Minneapolis one bright summer day in 1983. The neighbors were out working on their yards, and when they noticed the Bests’ conversation—the shouts from the slot, the man in the blue blazer and tan slacks saying, “Please. Ellie. Try to control yourself”—the neighbors shut off their mowers and got busy doing quiet things. They studied trees for signs of drought, snipped at a hedge with silent little snips, quietly pulled crabgrass.
“Ellie, please. Let’s discuss this. Let me in and let’s talk.”
“I am talking!” she said and called him a bunch of words that moms don’t use. “All right,” he said. “That’s it. That’s all I’m going to take from you.” And he walked gravely and respectably down the walk. He stood at the end of his walk, glancing left and right, then turned left as she opened the door and yelled, “You…are a…lousy lover!” Her voice echoed off the frame and brick houses—“lousylousylousylousyloverlousyloverloverlover”—far up the pleasant street where they’d had a sweet comfortable ten years, and he heard the lawn sprinklers whisper, “It’s true, it’s true, it’s true, it’s true.”
More happened then. He came after her with excellent legal talent and pounded her pretty hard in court, and she wound up in a two-bedroom tumble-down stucco house in Lake Wobegon, where, well—to be a single woman with three children, you might as well paint the house chartreuse and convert to Islam and make it complete.
Her mother, Myrtle, says, “Eloise, you’re the first one in this family ever to collect a welfare check, it’s a disgrace. People talk about us. Do you know that? They never useta, and now you can hear em all over town.”
She said, “Mother, don’t get too ashamed now, because I’ve got a long way to go.”
“I don’t see why you can’t get yourself a job.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
So last Thursday her little ad appeared in the HeraldStar. Harold himself called her Sunday and asked, “Is this legit?” So there it was: “Dancing Taught in My Home or Yours. Individual lessons. Polka, Waltz, Foxtrot, or Lindy. Eloise Krebsbach Best.”
Ella Anderson called her Thursday night. “Ellie,” she said, “I didn’t know you could dance.”
“Well, Ella, you never asked me.”
“I wonder if this wouldn’t help my bad hip.”
Ella is old and has a hard life taking care of herself and Henry. People don’t visit them, because they’re embarrassed to see him, a man once important in our town, now old and sleepy. Suddenly he’ll sit up and talk about your horse and somebody named David and where did the girls go? The girls went away and became middle-aged a long time ago. Ella is lonely. Her daughter Charlotte called one night and suddenly said, “Well? Mother? Do you want to or not?” And Ella couldn’t remember the question. Charlotte said, “Just say yes or no,” and Ella said, “Yes.” And now she wonders what she said yes to.
“What’s it like to be old?” Ellie asked her.
“Old age is like birds in the winter. It’s hard to keep going. But you still have your good days, and one good day makes you want to keep on. I used to get so upset if any little thing went wrong. Now everything goes wrong and it doesn’t bother me, and some little thing is so wonderful—if my son writes me a letter, that’s wonderful. And if he puts in a picture of my grandchildren, then that’s just about everything.”
Ellie rolled up the old rag rug and pushed back the coffee table and chairs. “What’ll it be, a waltz?” she said. A waltz it was, the “Blue Skirt Waltz,” and if you walked by on Thursday night and saw in the window two women dancing, one with white hair and the other with red, smiling, turning, would you have thought it was strange? Would you have stopped? Or would you have walked on, taking the sweetness of it to heart on a fall night turning cold, the bright colors, magnificence and glory all around us everywhere in the air.