6

STICKING AROUND

Several times I almost got in my car to drive back to Minneapolis and didn’t because I dreaded being alone. The Mister Pickett video from Harvard had cut deeply into my self-esteem. Especially the scene of me trying to get my underwear out of my crack—it looked like I was scratching my ass, not what you’d expect of a Phi Beta Kappa speaker, and the viewer comments were deadly: This is why we have bidets. And: It’s not there, sir, it’s on your shoulders, right in the middle.

My self-esteem had shrunk to a wisp of a shred. I needed love. My wife was on an opera tour in Japan and Indonesia, doing Der Rosenkavalier, playing viola in the orchestra, gone for a month. Our daughter was in school in New York, leading her own life. I had been looking forward to staying in Lake Wobegon with my cousin Betty, who was a psychology major and knows us relatives better than we know ourselves. She told me once, “Your problem is that you’re trying to live four lives at once and a person can only live two.” Another time, she said, “You’re a difficult man in a happy life and I am a happy woman in a difficult life.” I love these crisp analyses of hers and I needed her help in my current state of despond, but now she had flown off to Montana to see to a friend who’d stuck her head in the oven because her neck was wrinkly and ropy, and Betty had left me a key to her house under the doormat. So maybe there was no reason to stick around. And it hurt that Alice had given me the hairy eyeball and was in the Chatterbox warning Clarence and Wally and Dorothy not to talk to me unless they wanted to be made fools of. I saw her in there, gesturing, glaring at me through the window.

So I walked into the cafe. It was a brave move. I am not a brave man, but I decided not to accept being slandered in my hometown. I know about slander and there’s not a lot you can do about it. When you’ve written a best-selling book, people are overjoyed to find a video of you picking your nose. So let them enjoy it. A man doesn’t need to have thousands of admirers, a dozen true friends is enough. I walked into the Chatterbox, past the table where Alice stood, saying, “The chickens shouldn’t go to the fox’s church and sensible people do not make friends with a cruel satirist.” I walked past her, she watched me pass, and I headed for the end of the lunch counter and who should I see there but Julie Lyngdal, now Julie Christensen, who smiled at me and I smiled back and sat down next to her. It was just as simple as that. I reached for a menu and she said, “The meatloaf is good today.” So I ordered that. She was eating a piece of apple pie. “How are you?” she said. “Never better,” I said, and I meant it.

This is why I go back to Lake Wobegon. For all that’s changed, you can turn a corner and suddenly it’s 1957 again. We talked about mutual friends, our kids, the news, whatever whatsoever, and then she said, “I always meant to write and ask you for that poem you wrote for me.”

So she remembers. Good. A man would want the first girl he ever kissed and meant it to remember, and she does. It was in October. Our lockers were near each other. She told me after school one day that she liked the poem I’d written, that Miss Fleischman had me recite in English class, a poem that begins,

The leaves of wonder are falling

Under the old oak tree

And I wait for someone to come

and watch them fall with me

and I wonder who she shall be.

She asked if I made it up or if there was a real oak tree. I said, It’s in a little ravine out by Moonlight Bay, so we walked over that way after school, she was carrying her books and I wished I were American Government, which was the book pressed to her left breast, and indeed there was an oak and a pile of leaves under it and she said, “I love leaves,” and she sat in the pile and I sat next to her, and then we were lying in the leaves and the books were set aside and then we had our arms around each other. She asked what I would do when I grew up, and I said I would become a writer. She said, “Then I should give you something to write about,” and she kissed me. Lightly but with feeling. I kissed her back. We lay back, contemplating the gravity of the moment. We talked about other things and then we went home.

We went back to the oak tree every afternoon, three in a row, and we lay in the leaves, arms around each other, and kissed, and I put my hand over her breast. And the third day she said, “Why are you so sad?” And I didn’t have an answer for that. I didn’t know I was sad, or “so sad,” but if Julie Lyngdal said I was, then I must be. And the next day she couldn’t come to the oak tree because she had cheerleading practice. I felt rejected, but I wrote her a poem. I just kissed a lady named Julie in a pile of leaves fallen newly and that kiss shall remain through sun, snow, and rain, a treasure clearly and truly. She read the poem and thanked me and kissed me. I don’t recall what happened later. But she is still a beautiful thought in my mind. I didn’t need to talk about it and we didn’t. She said, “It’s nice of you to come help with the Sister Arvonne campaign. A couple of old nuns are excited about it and it gives them something to do. And if you find that poem you wrote, send me a copy.”

So I stuck around. I went to Betty’s, slept on her couch, hung around town, and after a couple days, people accepted that I was there, no comment necessary. I became part of the landscape, a piece of furniture.

I was sitting quietly in the Sidetrack when Mr. Berge told a tale, obviously untrue, about trying to catch a giant walleye he calls Gloria with his new Amazon rod and reel and he cast the line and she took the hook and yanked the rod out of his hand and she dove and he yelled, “Alexa! Where’s she hidin’, Gloria” and Alexa played a Haydn Mass, the Gloria. It was Berge’s usual fish fable, but it inspired Barb Diener to tell about the time she left her husband, Leroy the town constable, and upped and drove off to Minot, North Dakota, and registered at the Minotaur Spa on the banks of the Souris River, and Leroy found the letter she’d left for him saying she would file for divorce on grounds of emotional desertion because he was so uncommunicative—he’d spoken 14 sentences in two and one-half months, she had counted—and he’d gone fishing on their 25th anniversary and gotten drunk and slept in his car and come home at 6 a.m.—no apology—and asked her to make him waffles with blueberries. Leroy drove to Minot and went to her room and was about to knock when he heard a man cough and Barb say, “Are you okay, honey?” and it broke Leroy’s heart, cop though he was, to think she’d already found someone else, so he went back to his car to shoot himself. He put the .38 to his forehead, then thought, “No, I want to do this in front of the two of them so they’ll remember it” and went to her room and she opened the door and there was her dog Doug—it wasn’t a man’s cough, it was a dog’s—and he opened a beer and told her the entire story of his life from the orphanage to his adoption by Adolf and Trudie Diener and his service in the Navy and his season with the Whippets, batting .340 until the night game in St. Rosa where a whole bank of lights went dark in the top of the 7th and the ump said, “Let’s play ball,” and a ground ball was hit sharply to Leroy and took a bad hop and struck his forehead and ever since he’d had a hard time forming predicates and he prayed for the disability to go away and it did the moment he read her note about the divorce. He talked all the way from Minot to Minnesota about his love for her. He redid their bathroom and put in a steamroom. He took dozens of portraits of her nude and hung them in the dining room which her family didn’t know what to say about and kept their eyes on the food, not glancing up. She told the whole story as she ate her mac and cheese. Astonishing.

Clarence and Arlene sat and listened to her—what choice did they have, sitting six feet away? He’d ordered a cheeseburger with raw onion, which brought tears to his eyes. They are a happy pair. They were high school classmates and acted the lead parts in the senior class play, “Romeo and Juliet,” which she remembers and he doesn’t. Their biggest argument is about leaves. He burns them, and she mulches. He prunes his lilacs in the fall, and she composts hers. Hers look better, but they don’t talk about it. He loves chicken liver, she considers it loathsome: why not eat the pancreas and gall bladder too? He avoids yik-yakkers, she likes talkative people. She is very big on birthdays, he isn’t. He turned 80 in January and sensed preparations being made, and he tried to leave town that morning but she’d taken the distributor out of the engine and put a potato in the tailpipe, and then the guests arrived and blocked the driveway, all the jowly geezers he’d gone to high school with, and they sang “Happy Birthday” in their horrible ruined voices and Arlene served a beef roast with a fresh but experienced Cabernet and old-timers woofed about how busy they are in retirement and gave him dumb birthday cards (“Welcome to the Incontinence Hotline … Can you hold, please?”) and a cake blazed up like the Hindenburg and people told him how youthful he looks, which they never said back when he was reasonably good-looking. Hours later, after the guests left, she asked if he’d enjoyed it, and he said, It was like being thrown in a swamp to be attacked by badgers. She cried and slept in the guest room that night, and in the morning he apologized sincerely and thanked her. She forgave him. She fixed him steak, medium rare, and fried eggs over easy for breakfast and she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his bald head and said:

Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

And that was the end of it, no more was mentioned.

It was pleasant to be there, unnoticed, paying attention, a shadowy figure in the corner. I turned my hearing aids up so I could pick up distant conversations. Nobody bothered me except Alice, and she gradually came to accept my being there. I like not being fussed over. In Lake Wobegon, people know as much as they care to about me and don’t necessarily care to know more. I’m sure that, in my obituary in the Herald Star, somewhere in the third or fourth paragraph, it’ll mention something about my having written books, but there won’t be reference to accusations of an indiscretion, meaning Donna Bunsen the urinator. And if there is, so be it. A life without indiscretions is hardly worth the trouble.

Lenny doesn’t know about my bad reputation, she is 20 years younger than I, she never listened to my radio show, she’s only read my limerick book and is lukewarm about it, and it felt good to talk with her and know I was in the clear, no expectations. She was worried about her mother, who is showing signs of losing it mentally, and Lenny feels she should sit down and make peace with Ingrid and apologize for old misunderstandings and bad feelings. “I don’t want to be angry at a crazy person,” she said.

I told her to talk to my cousin Betty. Betty has the answers.

“Do you have unfinished business like that?” she said.

“I know people who are angry at me, but now they’re losing memory capacity and the anger is still there but rather amorphous since they can’t remember my name.”

“So you have no unfinished business to take care of up here?”

I don’t know what made me tell her what I told her then—it had little relevance to anything, but it was on my mind, and she asked, otherwise I never would’ve volunteered it. It was about my trip back home in 1969 when I dropped out of grad school, a story I’ve never told before because I’m not clear on one crucial detail—whether the woman’s hair was red or black—and I want to be definite about that. Let’s say it was red.

It was September, 1969, I was enrolled in a Melville seminar and I started reading Moby Dick and hated it. Call me Ignorant but it was dull as dishwater, so I got a radio job at KSJR in Avon, east of Lake Wobegon, and headed up there. I was driving a red 1967 Mustang, and 10 miles south of Avon I saw a hitchhiker with a hand-painted sign that said, Lake Wobegon. I didn’t recognize him, but I stopped and he got in. He wore a stocking cap and a heavy black coat and his face was turned away. He said he had come back after a long absence to find his family. He directed me toward the woods on the east side of the lake. “It was a happy home,” he said, “with picnics and card games and the family singing around the piano, but something bad happened and my father left home and we were generally ostracized by others and so I ran away. It’s a long story.” He said, “You wouldn’t happen to be a Keillor, would you?” I nodded yes. “The one who went away to be a writer?” “Yes,” I said. He directed me down the road around the east side of the lake, to a narrow two-rut track into the woods, with bushes growing in it, and I drove along, slowly, feeling the underbrush scrape against the undercarriage. I’d never gone that way before. When I was a kid, riding my bike around the countryside, we avoided that road because there was a story about a man who’d come out of that house and gone downtown to the Chatterbox and asked for codfish and Dorothy said, “We haven’t served codfish since I’ve been around, sorry,” and he walked away and left a paper sack and in it was a pearl-handled double-barrel derringer and a copy of the St. Paul Dispatch with a front-page story about a suicide. The paper was from June 1928. The ink was fresh.

And now I saw the house, which we knew as the Spangler house, a brick manse with a copper roof and high pointed peaks, a wrought-iron fence around it, all rusted and falling apart, and the front door hung loose on the hinges. In the downstairs hall hung a half-rotted painting of a beautiful woman with dark eyes and long red hair. The hitchhiker said, “My aunt Martha. The man who painted it was her husband, a fine artist who supported himself by bootlegging in the ’20s. He ran a fleet of fast cars carrying whiskey down from Winnipeg. He hired beautiful women to be his drivers, beautiful women who could play poker and shoot straight. His wife stayed in Chicago, but one day she came up here to surprise him on his birthday and found him in his birthday suit in bed with a beautiful girl and his wife shot the two of them and herself and the bodies were buried in the cellar and the sheriff never came out because nobody reported the crime.” The hitchhiker said this in a whispery voice that gave me the creeps. The place was heaped with trash, covered with dust and leaves. He headed up the stairs and I followed. He stopped halfway up. He said, “Sorry the place is such a mess, but when she found out he lied to her, it destroyed her spirit. He was a painter and she supported him and stood by him in his time of need and it broke her heart that he took up with loose women.” On the landing, the hitchhiker put his hand on a doorknob for a long moment and I desperately wanted to run and not follow him in but couldn’t think of what to say by way of an excuse. (“I’m sorry, I forgot I left my codfish on the stove.”) He opened the door to a bedroom full of heavy, dust-encrusted spiderwebs, where the carcasses of deceased bats hung who’d been partially devoured by spiders, and there were two black spiders the size of sparrows with bright green eyes sitting on a wreck of a bed, half-rotten and collapsed, a blanket with a map of Minnesota on it, “Lake Wobegon” marked in silver. I looked beyond the bed to a mirror on the wall, and there was my reflection and not the hitchhiker’s. I turned to see him behind me as he reached up and took his stocking cap off, and long red hair fell out. He was a she. She said: “I’m sure you don’t remember—why would you—but today is the day I died in this room. I shot her and then him and put the gun to my head and swore an oath that when I was dead, I would roam the world avenging myself on all who have been unfaithful. You can protest your innocence—I’m sure you have stories to justify your sins, but I can see through every single one of them, just as you can see through me. So don’t waste time in explanation. You’re guilty as hell, and hell is what you’re about to see up close. Your privileged life is over. Prepare to meet your judgment! God have mercy on your soul.” She reached behind the door and pulled out a long wooden scythe with a curved wooden handle, and I dashed toward the window, running through the forest of dusty webs and the bodies of bats, thrashing my way through the filth and decay, and dove through the window onto the porch roof and rolled off and onto the ground and hit the ground running, covered with dusty webs and bat bodies, and even though my ankle was broken, I ran all the way back to town in a crazed panic. I didn’t stop to try to find the car keys. (I found them in my jacket pocket an hour later.) I walked into my parents’ house. Nobody was home. I stripped off my clothes and threw them in a paper sack. I took a long hot bath. I burned the bag of clothes. I got a ride to Avon and went into radio. Now, 50 years later, I wonder if my car is still parked there, with my college textbooks in the front seat and my knapsack and my journal. I need to find the 1967 Mustang because after all these years, I’ve come to doubt the story myself, and there’s only one way to prove it. So whenever I get up the courage, I’ve got to look for that car.”

Lenny looked at me in silence for a long moment and said, “I want to come with you when you look for it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She said, “I didn’t believe you at first—the hitchhiker and all—but when you got up to the bedroom, I thought to myself, This man is a professional writer and if he were lying, he would’ve invented a better story without so many clichés in it. Yes, I want to come with you.”

First, she said, she had to figure out about the cheese. She needed to straighten things out with her mom, but once she’d taken care of business, she said she’d come with me to the old Spangler house. I felt good about that. When you venture into the spirit world, it’s good to have a scientist with you. I was also astonished that I’d told that whole story to Lenny. It made me wonder what kind of cheese I’d been eating.