Pontoon (7 page)

E
velyn made annual trips to Las Vegas with Raoul with a couple years off on account of his 1996 heart bypass and subsequent argument over his cigar-smoking. He said he knew she hated cigars and she said no, she only hated cheap ones. He said, “Don’t baby me, I know you hate the smoke.” She said, “Some smoke I like.” He vowed he was going to give up smoking for her sake. She said, “Please don’t. Do it for yourself.” “There you go,” he said, “you want me to quit, you just don’t want to say so.” He said he would quit cigars before the next trip to Vegas, a month away, and when he couldn’t, he was so ashamed of himself—a guy with heart problems and he could not put nicotine aside even for the love of a good woman!—he headed out west to pull him self together and stopped in Bismarck to visit an old girlfriend but she wouldn’t see him, she had gained weight and was embarrassed, so he proceeded westward to Billings where his brother Marvin lived but he was gone, his wife said, hinting that she didn’t much care if he returned. “Where did he go?” asked Raoul. “You’d have to ask him,” she said. He went on to Bozeman to visit his buddy George Moses who had gotten him the job on TV,
and George was up north fishing, said Lucile. So he drove off in search of George, chain-smoking stogies, and stopped in Butte late that night for a piece of banana cream pie, and had eaten half of it when two idiots came bursting in with guns drawn and cleaned out the till and then, even though it made no sense, took Raoul hostage. “Why?” he cried. “For insurance,” they said. “Insurance against what?” But they grabbed him and stuck a pistol barrel in his ribs and shoved him out the door—“Cut it out! There’s no need to get rough! I’m seventy years old!”—but that didn’t matter to them. And then they saw a cop car parked in front of the bank and they decided to swipe it. “Are you nuts?” he yelled. They shoved him in the backseat behind the steel grate and sped north on gravel roads, both of them snorting white powder and passing a bottle back and forth. In no time, there were flashing blue lights on their tail and a chopper overhead. “I told you this made no sense,” said Raoul. They blew past a roadblock at the Canadian border, and raced over a plowed field at 100 m.p.h., Raoul bouncing off the ceiling, and through a farmyard, sideswiped a chicken coop, bounced off a propane tank, and struck a half-empty granary and were thrown from the car into a pool of winter wheat. Like so many desperadoes, they were not wearing seat belts. All three were badly banged up, and Raoul suffered broken ribs and a cracked vertebra. He lay in the V.A. hospital in Seattle for almost a month and came back to Minneapolis in a back brace and feeling deflated, and sent her a Thank You card. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “I am a cigar smoker, and you are the love of my life.” And she brought him a box of Muriel Slims, and stood at his door smoking one herself, and said, “These are good! Mild and tasty and long-lasting, just like me!”

Astonishing
, Barbara thought. To look at Evelyn, most people’d
never guess she had a Raoul in her life. She was a quilter. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, she and the six others in the Ladies Circle gathered in the Fellowship Room, cranking out quilts until she finally turned in her needles: she was 78 and her fingers hurt and besides, there was a quilt glut in town. “How can you?” said Florence. The Circle had been cutting and stitching since Jesus was in the third grade. The idle brain is the devil’s playground, said Flo. “Remember Mildred Anderson the cashier at the First State Bank who absconded to Buenos Aires with a pillowcase full of loot and is still there today for all we know? A perfectly nice woman, or so it appeared, but she never married and so she had time on her hands that she didn’t fill with hobbies (such as quilting), she just sat in her little bungalow and read books like you do, and that’s undoubtedly where she picked up the idea of improving her life at public expense. Quilting might have saved Mildred from plunging into a life of crime the way she did and the cloud of shame she brought on her family.” Mildred’s sister Myrtle was in the Circle, along with Helen, Lois, Arlene, Florence, Evelyn, and sometimes Muriel, and they had a merry old time, chortling about this and that and ragging on each other and savoring old gossip, chewing it over, ruminating, tearing it apart like scholars. That perfectly nice girl with the bouncy blond hair who went away to college to study elementary ed and fell in with a crowd of poets and came home blanched and harrowed. So then she married a fellow she had known for all of thirty-six hours, a forest ranger, Doug, who turned out to be married already—and then, in smoking ruins, she moved to Texas and at last word was selling costume jewelry at carnivals and living in the backseat of a Honda Civic. She had aged thirty years in just seven. All from keeping bad company. The story of her fall was a favorite topic,
along with the tippling of Clint Bunsen and his volatile marriage to Ilene, and the California success story of that tramp Debbie Detmer.

Debbie had broken her mother’s heart and driven her father into the stony depths of depression. It was as simple as that. Her poor dad was a broken vessel, sitting glued to the Golf Channel, his wife obsessively vacuuming, vacuuming, fixing daily lunches of lima bean soup and baloney sandwiches and grieving for the beautiful only child who had turned into something else, a werewolf perhaps. She had been Luther League state treasurer, Girls’ Nation vice president, winner of numerous music trophies (she played clarinet), Homecoming attendant, the list goes on and on, and one cold January day she walked away from her sophomore year at Concordia to head for San Francisco with her boyfriend Craig “trying to figure out where I’m going.” Nonsense. She was cold, that’s all; Fargo-Moorhead can be brutal in January. The wind sweeps down from Canada and the sky lowers and you get depressed and gain a hundred pounds and want to kill yourself. She had read Kierkegaard in philosophy class and it went to her head. Out in California she spent fifteen years bouncing from one man to another and writing jagged letters home saying that “I now realize that my entire life was a lie”—how can a girl say such a thing to her own parents? An only child? It’s not as if they had replacements.

The ladies clucked and bent to their work, turning scraps of cast-off clothing into warm quilts. (Which were bundled off to Lutheran World Services in Chicago. Where, after prayerful deliberation, they were sold for good money to a wholesale bedding house in Baltimore. The money went to buy vaccines for African
children. The quilts were sold in gift shops on the East Coast as authentic handmade Amish for hundreds of dollars.)

And all the while, Evelyn was stealing away now and then to visit her cousin in St. Paul who was
non compos mentis
in a nursing home, carrying on long conversations with dead relatives, a perfect cover for Evelyn to go two-stepping with Raoul at the Medina Ballroom to the strains of Vic D’Amore and His Chancellors of Dance. Who knew? Nobody. After Evelyn’s death and the whole story came out—the plane tickets, the souvenirs of the Ozarks and Branson and Reno and Daytona Beach, the matchbooks from resorts, the menus of Antoine’s and Bob’s Ribs and Le Coq—the ladies of the Circle wept for Evelyn and sorely missed her but they never discussed the secret life she led. That simply vanished into the Unspoken file. The subject was too painful. And that was the end of the Age of Interpretation. From then on, they discussed their grandchildren and their vacation plans. No more stories.

T
wo hours after Barbara found Evelyn dead in bed, Debbie Detmer drove into town in a blue Ford van and pulled into her parents’ driveway and started unloading her bags, expensive ones, blue leather, and noticed that Mother had not planted petunias in the big white-painted truck tire in the front yard. And the tire was gone and so were the plywood cutouts of fat people bending over. Instead, there stood a sign, with reflective letters on plywood:
JESUS CHRIST: THE SAME YESTERDAY, TODAY AND FOREVER
. She’d never seen it before. Wrong house? No. There was Daddy’s Ford Fairlane with the Bush-Cheney bumper sticker. She had come to town to get married on Saturday to Mr. Brent Greenwood, 39, of Sea Crest, California. The Detmers lived three blocks from Evelyn’s little bungalow but they hadn’t heard about her death yet. They had been out of the social whirl ever since January when Mr. Detmer slipped and banged his head. He was toweling off after his shower while watching the
Today
show on the tiny TV Betty gave him for Christmas, an interview with the oldest active pro ballplayer in America, a 62-year-old pitcher for the Salem Sailors named Bryce Brickel, who attributed his long career
to God’s Will and good nutrition. Mr. Detmer was 72, an age when a man is proud of being able to still put his clothes on standing up, and he was stepping into his underpants and caught his big toe on the elastic band. He hopped a few times, reluctant to give up on it, and fell and concussed himself against the side of the tub, and it had made him forgetful and also intensely devout and a daily reader of God’s Word. He started calling his wife “Mother” instead of Betty. He might walk up to you in Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery and say “I think we are in the last days,” or “I don’t think women in men’s clothing is right, do you?” and there is Mrs. Detmer in her jeans, and she smiles and nods as if nothing is wrong.

Debbie was lithe and lean, her hair red and spiky, she didn’t look like the old Debbie at all. That Debbie was a brunette and a little chunky. And also angry and impulsive. Fifteen years in Northern California had smoothed her out considerably. She had flown from San Francisco to Minneapolis, writing the vows for her wedding while listening to a semi-famous author next to her as he consumed four double Scotches and complained bitterly about the publishing business and how it chewed you up and spat you out. “There is no place for guys like me anymore,” he said. “All they want are novels by twenty-year-old girls with foreign names like Bhuktal Mukerji or something. About growing up alienated in L. A. and torn between cultures and anguishing about it and also there’s a lot of shopping and long lunches.” On his fourth drink, he asked for her cell phone number and she told him to get over himself, check into rehab, get cleaned up, join the real world, and find out where he fit in. She said it nicely. “You don’t have any time to waste,” she said. He broke down and said she was the first person in years who had dared to be honest with him, he needed a truth teller in his life. His breath was pungent, weaselish. “Have lunch with me,” he said.

“We just did. I had salad and you had Scotch.”

He was flying to Minneapolis to give a reading at the U. He hated making public appearances, but with a kid in college, he had to take work where he could find it. His last successful book was twenty years ago. His collection of stories got savaged in
The Times
by a guy he had voted against on a Guggenheim panel. He had a novel in the works but it was pretty rough. Notes, really. Sort of an idea of a novel. His editor kept telling him to take his time. But he was 58, for God’s sake. His wife was pushing him to take a teaching job, for the health insurance. A Lutheran college in South Dakota wanted him.
South Dakota
. He shuddered. He’d lived in Berkeley for twenty-six years. South Dakota. Why not the moon? Why not a nice case of prostate cancer? His wife wanted him to take the job. She kept telling him, “You’re not getting any younger.”

Debbie gave him a pep talk about living one day at a time, maintaining a positive outlook, and doing what you can to improve yourself, and as she talked, it dawned on her that this was what her mother had told her years ago, after her freshman year at college.

The paint was peeling on the side of the house. She’d have to call a painter. A roofer too. Some shingles had blown off. She lugged the bags onto the porch and walked into the living room. Silent, shades pulled, musty, the temperature around eighty.

“Mom? Dad?”

The ancient oatmeal-colored couch sat under the picture of a man driving oxen across a field of brown stubble. In the bookshelf, there were rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and stacks of Electric Co-op magazines. On the coffee table, a bowl of plastic fruit. The TV was on with the sound off, a perky woman
in a white apron frying up chicken in a pan and a smiley man with a headful of hair watching her. They seemed to be having the time of their lives. The strong smell of Lysol, and something else, urine perhaps.
Do they need live-in help? Do I need to step in and take
charge here?
she thought. And then she wondered,
Should I take
Brent to a hotel?
He could go nuts in this house. He was a little highstrung anyway. And without high-speed Internet access, he’d be lost. He’d have to use dial-up but maybe that wouldn’t work here. Could you get Google here? Cell phone coverage? If not, there was trouble. Then she thought:
Hey. Look at it as a
camping trip. Brent is a big boy. Let him figure it out
.

Brent was arriving on Thursday. She’d hoped he could come earlier and get to know people but he had meetings in Chicago. The wedding was set for Saturday at 1 p.m. although strictly speaking it wasn’t a wedding, it was a “Celebration of Commitment” and the time was approximate since aviation was involved, namely a hot-air balloon and a Flying Elvis.

“Hello? Hello!” She started up the stairs, slowly, heavily, trying to make noise lest she surprise somebody coming naked out of the bathroom. “It’s just me,” she cried. “It’s Debbie, home from the sea!”

Her father appeared at the top of the stairs, pants hitched up high, his hair wild, in stocking feet. He’d just arisen from a nap, apparently. “Hi, darling,” he said. “We’ve been praying for you.”

“I just walked in the door this minute, Daddy.” She reached the top of the stairs and put out her arms to hug him and he stepped back.

“I want you to be right with God,” he said. “God is moving the waters. He is bringing this dispensation to a close. We may not be here tomorrow. We’re waiting on Him.”

He retreated into the bedroom and closed the door. She could hear him talking in there. She crossed the hall to the other upstairs bedroom, her old bedroom, and there sat her mother, her back to the door, sorting through old photographs in shoe boxes. She had a pair of headphones on and was singing along softly to something that sounded like “Blue Moon.” Debbie’s old four-poster bed sat under the eaves and her white dresser and her desk. Stacks of papers and pictures covered everything, old books, catalogues, clothes piled up. “Mother?” She put her hands on her mother’s shoulders and the old lady let out a squeak and jumped up, as if attacked, and fell out of her chair.

“Oh my goodness—” Mother moaned. She shut her eyes and tried to draw a breath.

Debbie knelt and took her hand. “I’m so sorry—”

“You surprised me,” said Mrs. Detmer. She was dazed. She dabbed at her nose.

“I thought you were expecting me.”

“Not until tomorrow.”

“
I told you Saturday
.”

“Is today Saturday?”

“Oh my God.” She helped her mother onto a chair and went for a wet washcloth and there was Daddy in the hall with a pool of fresh urine at his feet and spreading.

“The Lord has given us peace of mind,” he said. “I wish you could have it too.”

She pushed him into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She got him a change of clean clothes. Mother mopped the floor. “He’s fine,” she said. “He listens to evangelists all day on the radio and he has little accidents when he gets excited.”

“Where did all that junk come from? In the bedroom?”

“That’s Janet’s. And some of Kathy’s. I’m putting them in order.”

“Mother—”

As if she didn’t have enough junk of her own, she had acquired sister Janet’s (gone to the Good Shepherd Nursing Home) and sister Kathy’s (gone to the cemetery) and was “organizing” all of it, in the sense of looking at it, sorting it, moving the stacks around, and then re-sorting.

Mother went to supervise the shower and Debbie came down to the kitchen. The old silver-sparkle countertops and avocado appliances, the glass-fronted cabinets and everything in them just so, a big bouquet of silk flowers she had sent them several years ago, and a diamond-shaped clock on the wall, the hands stuck at five o’clock.

In the refrigerator she found some brown lettuce, a carton of wrinkled baby tomatoes, yogurt way past its expiration date, a tube of expired sausage, and miscellaneous chunks of cheese. The freezer section was packed with frozen dinners. She thought of calling Brent, canceling the ceremony, and booking herself on a return flight Monday morning. So much stuff to do this week!—arrange for the pontoon boat, find a place to store the food, talk to Craig about the hot-air balloon (Where should he park? Who would help him launch?), call up Randall and confirm the Flying Elvis, meet her minister Misty Naylor who was flying in on Friday, book the honeymoon suite at the Chateau Melis on the South Shore—and now she should take Daddy to a doctor and decide whether either parent had enough marbles to run a household. Too much! Way too much!!

She said it out loud: “It would be so easy to give up right now and turn around and go back home.” And then the thought,
You
are home. Be strong. Make it work
.

Her new mantra:
Make it work
. Forget about world peace and saving the polar bears. Just make it work.

She closed her eyes and hummed, a low hum from her solar plexus, feeling the warm vibrations in her pelvic enclosure. The centering harmonic, a healing force using the body’s own meridian powers to drive invasive toxins from the lymph system which collects every negative force around us, which can be a pool of poison, teeming with danger. The centering harmonic purifies and makes the system work. Daddy would be okay. Mother, too. The ceremony would be a beautiful gift to her hometown. People would see it and take the courage and strength to change their own lives. She sang to herself:

Growing up in Lake Wobegon Lutheran church, what she felt was dread of God’s judgment. God, all-righteous, his great hairy eyeball glaring down from the sky, reading your every thought and making black marks after your name. There is one way and you are not on it. Not even close. You might find it but don’t count on it, not the way you’re going. They said that God is love but nobody believed it for a minute. It was a culture of fussy
women and silent angry men and horrified children. Now, having escaped all that, she felt happy, upheld by love, even though she was alone in her mother’s kitchen. The Sisterhood of the Sacred Spirit was with her.

On the plane, trying to ignore the drunk author, she had written in her journal:
Life is partly what we choose to do and partly
who we choose to do it with. Time goes on and we must live in it
and on the other hand we must dwell in the realm of the timeless.
We are constantly growing and changing. Yesterday’s answers
don’t always work for today. But let us always contribute positive
energy to others. Put negativity aside and put forward our
most positive expectations
.

Lake Wobegon was a pool of negativity. People who believed in disappointment. Especially in marriage. You look forward to it and get all excited and then it turns into a long sad story. So, don’t get your hopes up. Wanting something causes frustration, desire drives the object away. The trick is to not want it that much. Want it less. When you get to where you don’t want it all, then you may get it. And if you don’t get it, you won’t care so much. The Lake Wobegon Credo. She was there to prove that something else is possible.