Lake Wobegon Days (39 page)

After a little elaborate politeness, thanking her for the nice socks and wonderful underwear, admiring my sister’s dollhouse, I slipped away to the basement and set up my laboratory on a card table next to the laundry tubs. The instruction book told how to make soap and other useful things I didn’t need, and omitted things I was interested in, such as gunpowder and aphrodisiacs, so I was on my own. I poured
some liquid into a peanut butter jar and dumped some white powder in it—it bubbled. I poured a little bit on the table as an experiment and it hissed and ate a hole in the leather, which made me think, if it had spilled on me it would have eaten my hands off down to the wrists. Would it eat the jar? Would it eat the drain pipe? Had the makers of Junior Scientist included chemicals so deadly they might destroy a house? Upstairs, everybody was enjoying Parcheesi, unaware of the danger. I got out a tube of thin metal strips that I thought must be solder, and lit a match to melt some onto a plastic cowboy to give him a coat of armor, but instead the strip burst into fierce white flame as bright as the sun—I dropped it on the floor and stomped it to bits. My cowboy’s face was gone, his head a blackened blob drooped down on his chest—what I would look like if I kept fooling around. I packed away the chemistry set and stuck it on the shelf behind the pickled beets. Eight dollars wasted. My poor father. Little Benny sold matches on the streets of London in bitter weather to buy medicine for his sick father, but I was a boy who played with fire and came close to killing everybody. Poor me, too. My big present was a big joke. What was Mother thinking of?

I went upstairs and moped around in the doorway so they could see me, but they were too busy having a good time. I went up to my room to mope around up there, maybe someone would come and find me and ask what was wrong, but time passed and nobody did. Mother called up the stairs to ask if I was hungry, but when I yelled that I wasn’t she didn’t come to find out why. I went to the stairs to yell down that maybe I’d just go to bed, and as I was about to yell, I looked in the door to my sister’s room and saw the dollhouse.

It was a two-story white house, two bedrooms upstairs, living room, dining room, and kitchen. I had helped her carry it to her bedroom and set it on the floor by her bed and arrange the furniture, and now the Peabodys were about to enjoy their Christmas dinner. Upstairs, their plastic beds were permanently made; downstairs, a perpetual fire glowed in the fireplace, their two tabby cats curled up on the floor.

Minutes later, the big olive-drab B-17 revved up its engines and roared off the flight deck and down the dark hallway. The poor helpless family, Phoebe and Pete Peabody and little Petey and Eloise, sat
in their elegant dining room, their movable arms placed politely on the table, their smiling little faces turned toward the turkey, as the hum of the deadly aircraft came closer and closer. Their great protector was miles away, engrossed in Parcheesi. They sat in pathetic dignity as the craft circled overhead and finally came in on its bombing run, dropping tons of deadly Lincoln logs. Pete was the last to die, sitting at the head of the table, a true hero, and then it was all over and Christmas lay in ruins with clouds of smoke rising from it, and the bomber returned to the carrier, its crew jabbering and laughing in Japanese. But little Petey wasn’t dead! He rose painfully from under a pile of furniture and limped out of the house. He was badly injured and would have to spend some time in a hospital until his burns healed, but somehow he would get over his frightful loss and grow up and be a normal, happy person.

After Christmas, time drifted awhile; beyond Christmas there was nothing to look forward to. The tree got dry and was finally hauled out half-naked of needles and I set it on fire. New Year’s Day was an imitation, Christmas without gifts, and New Year’s Eve passed without much notice, Mother and I trying for three years to stay awake by playing Parcheesi until one year we made it over the top to midnight. On the radio at eleven, Ben Grauer came on from Times Square to narrate the amazing descending ball of light that marked the New York New Year, and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played from the Waldorf, which was exciting to imagine—the elegant Ben in a tuxedo standing on the rooftop watching the meteor fall, the handsome Guy and his band in their scarlet tunics like Sergeant Preston’s, playing saxophones on horseback, their faithful huskies lying nearby—but it would have been more exciting to watch it on television, which we didn’t have. At midnight our time, nothing happened. Mother and I hoisted a glass of grape Kool-Aid. I said, “Here’s mud in your eye,” and tossed it back, screwed up my face, and said, “Ha!” “Where’d you get that?” she said. On television, of course. She reminded me that watching television was as bad as going to the movies. The next morning she went next door to the Holmbergs’ to borrow sugar and visited awhile and watched some of the Tournament of Roses.

Christmas, years later. I got five dollars from Grandma, a big raise from the one dollar she gave to little kids, and bought a bottle of Jade East cologne with it, the kind Chip Ingqvist used, the name of which I found out by making fun of him for smelling like rotten fruit. “It’s Jade East,” he said, smiling his superior Ingqvist smile. “It’s what they wear at the U.” With a splash of it on my neck and wearing the new Christmas sweater, I headed for the skating rink after supper, feeling like I was cut out for romance. I was sixteen. Six feet, three inches tall, and I walked with a peculiar springing stride, like a pogo stick, which sometimes I looked behind me and saw a little kid imitating. The Jade East was supposed to take care of that, and also I tried to saunter.

The town was buried in three feet of snow. Downtown was dark except for the Sidetrack where a red sign flashed “BEE … BEE … BEE” inside the strips of orange and green neon around the front window. The lamp over the door made a cone of light, as if the step were a stage and Mr. Berge might emerge, sway back and forth, and say, “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”, but only Ronnie came out. He pulled his collar up and his stocking cap down and headed the other way. It was so cold, he got small as he walked, contracting his middle, like a turtle pulling himself in.

So still on a cold night. I could hear his boots crunch in the snow, could hear a car not quite starting a long way away, and then the door slamming when the guy got out and him hitting the hood with his fist. The volume of the world was turned up so the air molecules hummed a deep bass note. If the fire siren went off it would knock a person into the middle of next week. The moon rose over the frozen lake; the light seemed to come out of the snow. Buried in three feet of light. And colors jumped out, hundreds of lovely shades of shadows, browns and grays and blacks. If a woman with bright red lipstick appeared, a person would fall over backward.

On this cold night, the skating rink was a carnival. The music I could hear when I left my house, and now I saw the long V of colored lights hung out across the rink from the warming house. Its windows blazed white. Pairs of skaters flowed counterclockwise in a great loop
to “The Blue Skirt Waltz,” and little kids buzzed around the big slow wheel as it turned. I looked for the girl I loved, who I had met the night before.

She was older, eighteen or nineteen, and had worn bright lipstick and sat down beside me in the warming house and slowly unlaced her leather boots and took them off and then her socks. My face turned red. In the Age of Imagination, before the Age of Full Disclosure, the removal of any article of clothing was inspirational. She was a cousin of the Ingqvists, up from Minneapolis for Christmas break, and had a way about her that set her apart. Her hair, for example, was jet-black and cut short as a man’s. She wore a short skirt and tights, but unlike other girls whose tights were lumpy from long johns, hers were tight. She leaned against me and said, “Got a cigarette?” No girl asked me that before, because I didn’t smoke, but for her sake, I said, “Yeah,” thinking I
might
have one—it certainly was worth a look, and who would say no at a time like that?—then said, “Oh, I just remembered. I forgot mine at home.” She said, “Oh, well. I think I got two in my purse.” She offered one to me. I didn’t smoke, but then I was young, I’d been held back, it was time to get started on these things, so I said, “Thanks.” She gave me the book of matches. As I lit one and held it toward her mouth, she held my hand to steady it, and although I knew that you didn’t make babies this way, two hands together holding a match, I thought it must be similar. We took deep drags and blew out big clouds of smoke, then she leaned back and inhaled again, and I leaned forward and put my head between my knees. Not sick exactly, I was simply appreciating it more than most people do. I was sixteen, I experienced everything deeply.

This night she was there again, sitting on the bench against the wall, with my friend Jim who was not smoking but who was inhaling her smoke as deeply as he could. “Dorene’s from Minneapolis,” he told me. I ignored him. “I got to show you something,” I told her. “Whenever you’re done here.”

As we walked up the hill toward Main Street, I wasn’t so sure what I could show her in Lake Wobegon that would be interesting, so I made up a story about a woman named Lydia Farrell who had lived here in love with the memory of a boy who had drowned. I picked out Florian Krebsbach’s house as the home where Lydia spent fifty years
in solitude, cherishing the few brief moments she spent with young Eddie before his boat overturned in a sudden storm. The moral was that we must seize our few bright moments and live deeply. It surprised me, how easily I did this and kept her interested. We walked up to the Ingqvists, both enjoying Lydia’s sweet sad life, and then she asked me if I skied. I said, “Sure.” I never had, but how would I know I couldn’t unless I tried? So the next afternoon, I was squeezed next to her in the back seat of the Ingqvists’ Lincoln, Chip driving, eight of us in the car, going goodness knows where.

Unbelievable to me, being in the same car with Ingqvists and that whole Ingqvist crowd, sharp dressers in those Norwegian ski sweaters you couldn’t find in town and who never had asked me before so much as to come in their house. But Dorene, who was even finer than they, had seen something in me. She was from Minneapolis but had spotted some personal quality of mine that other people had never seen, and I was determined not to let her down. I imagined her turning to me with a smoky Minneapolis look and saying, “Kiss me,” and so had practiced kissing, using my thumb and forefinger as practice lips. I had also gone to the library and skimmed through a book about skiing. I felt prepared to do either one.

A long drive during which they all talked about college and how much harder it was than high school. “You have to study six or seven hours a day,” Chip said. I said I didn’t think it was so hard. They laughed: “What do you know?” I said I’d read a lot of college books. “Like
what?
” A lot of different things, I said. Dorene held my hand. She said, “It isn’t hard for everybody. Some people have a harder time in high school, then they do real good in college.”

I was grateful for that, but by the time we got to where we were going, I was much less confident about everything. It was dark. A plywood Swiss chalet sat between two spruce at the end of the parking lot, and beyond it strings of lights ascended a hill much steeper than what seemed possible in Minnesota. (Maybe we were in Wisconsin.) They got their skis off the car carrier. I was going to say, “That’s all right, you go ahead, I feel like I’m coming down with something. I’ll just wait in the building. I’ll be okay. You go ahead”—and then she put a pair of skis and ski poles in my hands and said, Let’s go, so I went.

I put on the skis, which she refastened so they wouldn’t fall off, and
showed me where to stand, next to her, holding hands, and the big wheel groaned in the wheel house and the bench came up behind and scooped us up and we rose into the dark. “I can’t ski,” I said; she said, “I know.” We kissed. We slid off at the top and I staggered after her to the edge of the precipice where Chip Ingqvist stood, adjusting his binding. He grinned at me and flung himself off. She told me to relax, stay loose, bend my knees, and if I lost my balance to just sit down—and she jumped over the edge and I did too, and followed her down in a series of short rides. Skiing, sitting down, skiing. I lost momentum in the sittings so at the bottom where other skiers flashed across the flats to the chalet and plowed to a stop, I had to walk. She was gone when I got there. I sat in the chalet for an hour with some people from Minneapolis who hoped they could make it to Colorado in February, then she appeared, limping. She twisted her ankle while getting off the lift and had made the long trip down in pain. I examined it as if ankles were my specialty, a top ankle man called in from Minneapolis. “Can you walk on it?” I asked. She said, “I don’t want to sit in here with all these people feeling sorry for me,” so we went to the car, her arm around my neck, mine around her waist. We sat in the car for awhile. After awhile, I said, “I never did this before,” but she seemed to be aware of that.

January.
It was cold—got down to thirty-some below a couple nights, according to old guys who get up to pee—so that when Lyle turned the key in the ignition, his blue Impala gave a low moan, like Roland Park in
Blood on the Saddle
when he saved Don Decatur’s life by jumping between him and the outlaw ambush at the Little Crazy River and lay in the tumbleweeds and Don said, “Take it easy. Don’t try to talk. You’re going to be all right,” but you knew Roland was a goner when he let out that moan. Then he sagged in Don’s arms and went limp. So there was no getting around it: the car was dead.