Lake Wobegon Days (46 page)

Over a block, on Lilac Street, Ella Anderson cleans out her flower beds, her first venture out of doors since before Thanksgiving. Her bad hip can’t navigate on ice, and now after four months cooped up, her arthritis is so bad, she is having to learn a new stand-up style of gardening.

Horrible to imagine: kneeling down, getting stuck, having to wait for someone to walk by, and calling out,
Help, help me.
Horrifying. If Henry were right there, she could say, “Oh, heavens, my legs went to sleep. Give us a hand up, dear,” and it’d be a little joke, but Henry’s inside and miles and years away. Calling for help from someone she barely knew would be an
emergency
, and Charlotte’d find out and call a family meeting. “This has gone on too long, Mother. It’s time we did something about you and Dad. I’m worried sick about you there by yourselves.” Ella doesn’t want a meeting, though she’d like to have more visitors. Just her and Henry in the house, and his mind comes and goes, not that he’s such bad company either way. When his mind goes is when hers gets sharper. At any moment, he’s apt to think he’s on the Burlington Zephyr from Chicago to St. Paul and ask, “Where are we now?” and she has to think fast and describe what’s going by the window. Not just “Oh, fields. The river. Looks like a town coming up”—he wants to know what crops, what town—he may be gone in the head but he knows the old Zephyr route, and if she skips a stop and says, “We’re coming into Pepin, dear,” he’ll say, “You mean you didn’t tell me when we went through Fountain City? You should have woke me up.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, dear.
This
is Fountain City.”

“Oh, yes. Well, I should have recognized it myself. Fountain City. Lovely town. I have a cousin lives here, I ought to look him up one of these days.”

The cousin died at St. Mihiel, south of Verdun, in General Pershing’s army. Henry never mentions him in the lucid moments, but during his spells, there’s Frank, twenty years old and selling shoes and exciting the women of Fountain City, and so Henry is eighteen, which means that she hasn’t met him yet, and the woman riding the train with him is someone else he calls “dear”—who is she? It takes presence of mind to keep things straight—and she looks out the window and says, “We’re passing a little farm, dear, a dairy farm it looks like, with Golden Guernseys, and now we’re catching up to a truck on the highway, with two boys and a collie riding in back, and now we’re coming into a narrow ravine and way up in the sky are two hawks, circling.”

Ella is the only one who can give Henry this train trip. If Charlotte were here and he asked what town were they going through, it would be an emergency. Charlotte would have a fit and call a doctor. To Ella, Charlotte’s faith in doctors is made of the same stuff as Henry’s trip on the train.

Charlotte is fifty-three and heavy, taking after the women on Henry’s side, who became dumplings by middle age, but Charlotte doesn’t feel like a dumpling, she’s worried sick about her health. She’ll drive a hundred miles to see a new specialist she’s heard about, practicing all the way her speech about her symptoms, which remain constant, like the route of the Zephyr. Ella knows them like she knows that Pepin comes after Fountain City: feeling tired all the time, dizzy, nauseated, gas pains, backache, headaches, cramps, constipation, white tongue, shortness of breath, poor circulation in the legs, what feels like a lump
here
and
here.
“If I knew everything that was wrong with me, I’d be dead by morning,” thinks Ella. Instead, in the morning, she gets up, using a new technique of sitting on the edge of the bed and falling forward and catching the dresser and pulling herself up. Sixty-some years ago she used to climb trees. This is more adventurous.

She wishes more people would come and talk to her and tell her things as she tells Henry what’s out the window. His window on 1918 is open, and hers on May 1984 is stuck half-shut and she needs a little help. So she has put out a sign, written on cardboard with big Magic Marker letters and tacked to a picket and stuck in the flower bed.
VISITORS WELCOME. FREE COFFEE. COME IN
.

When Charlotte heard about it from her friend Mrs. Magnusson, she had a fit. She called up her mother, in tears, and said, “I visit you. I come over there every chance I get. What more can I do? How can you embarrass me like this? You couldn’t have told me before you did it? Can’t you see how foolish it makes me look? It makes me look terrible! Now please take it down. Please.”

Poor Charlotte, she takes everything so personal. She lives in a trailer park near St. Cloud. (“It’s not a
trailer
park, Mother. They’re mobile
homes.
You should try it, you’d like it.”) She and her husband, Roy. Charlotte suffered a miscarriage in 1956 and they have no children. Roy fell off a scaffold ten years ago and hasn’t worked since. Charlotte is a secretary at a clinic. They don’t respect her there, they treat her like dirt and have for almost twenty-five years. Some days, when Ella’s phone rings at five-thirty, she lets it ring until it stops, knowing Charlotte is calling with news of outrageous things they did to her at work, especially the office manager, Bernetta Grinnell, who is thirty-one, stacked, dumb as dirt, and has been out to get Charlotte for years. Bernetta is sleeping with one of the doctors. Charlotte knows the score and Bernetta knows that she knows, so there you are. Bernetta dumps everything on Charlotte’s desk, then takes credit for the work. She gets away with murder. She takes two hours at lunch, and she steals from petty cash. She lies about Charlotte to the doctors, so Charlotte hasn’t gotten a decent raise for years. It’s terrible.

“You should quit, dear,” Ella has told her a couple hundred times. “Oh, sure. Quit. That’s easy for you to say,” Charlotte says. “Can’t you see? That’s exactly what she wants me to do. I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.”

Everything happens to Charlotte. Boys throw toilet paper on her little yard. Why would they do it? Neighbors’ dogs pester her. The manager of the trailer park refuses to do anything. He’s a stupid good-for-nothing who sits in his office and drinks beer all day. She’s afraid of him. He has threatened her. Then there’s Clifford, her hairdresser. She’s gone to him for fifteen years, and he’s terrible. She tells him how she wants it, and then he goes and does it exactly opposite. She looks a fright. She hates to look in a mirror afterward, for fear she’ll have a stroke. She suffers from high blood pressure anyway, and almost any one of these things, the neighbors or Clifford or Bernetta, could
finish her off any day. She has talked about her problems to her minister, but he’s no use at all. Sits around with his nose in a book, acts like he’s better than everyone else, and when she tells him things, he sits there and smirks at her. Smirks! He’s supposed to help her and comfort her! Instead he sits and
smirks!
One of these days, she is going to slap his face.

“I’m getting old,” she told Ella on the phone. “I’m so old, and what have I done with my life? Nothing.” When she was seventeen, Charlotte won the American Legion Auxiliary District Essay Contest with five hundred words on the topic, “America the Beautiful,” and got $15. Now, many years later, that success comes back to haunt her. “I should have been a writer,” she says. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I wish I had gotten more encouragement.” Charlotte reads two or three novels a week and is sure she could write better ones if she had the time. She has good ideas, but ideas aren’t enough. You need an in. She knows that. She wasn’t born yesterday.

One night she sat at Ella’s kitchen table, cutting up cucumbers, and suddenly dropped the knife and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do when you’re gone,” and cried bitterly, and Ella tried to comfort her. “Don’t worry, I feel just fine,” she said. Ella doesn’t think about death much herself. Not as much as she did thirty years ago. She thinks about visitors. Loneliness is too dramatic. It makes troubles seem tragic, and hers are quite ordinary old-lady troubles, she thinks, and would seem more ordinary if she had some ordinary visitors. Not like Charlotte. Charlotte is an event.

Spring.
I’m twelve and am getting a little tired of Jim’s rules playing guns—he gets to be whoever he wants to be and we have to be Custer or FBI or Russians and have to count slow to fifty when we’re shot, whereas he gets to say “You just winged me!” and we’re supposed to believe it—so I take a walk. Carl Krebsbach and his friends hang out by his garage in the alley down from the school. I sit on a swing and look down the alley and see them, six guys watching Carl sand the rust spots off the fender skirt of his terrific red ’48 Chev. It would be nice if they saw me and yelled “C’mere!” but of course they don’t, being older, they have their own rules, so I go over there. Sneak down the alley to the garbage cans and listen in—Harold Diener is saying,
“That asshole!” and they laugh. I say it to myself a few times, to get the hang of it, and then
slowly
edge around the corner and slip into the garage and stand by the rear bumper as if I’ve been there for hours. Trying to blend in and be unnoticeable like a tree or a dog, but Harold sees me. “What do
you
want?” he says. I say that I just came to see what they were doing. “So now you saw. Beat it.” Actually, I would like to hang around for a while. I say to Carl, “Can I help?” and, miraculously, he hands me a scrap of sandpaper. “You scratch the paint, he’ll break your arm,” says Harold. I work away at the tiny brown spot, and the spectators go back to what they were talking about, which was a teacher who gave Junior an F on a book report he had copied from the book jacket, which reminds them of all the money they’re going to earn when they get out of goddam school, and of Minneapolis, of this guy George knows in Minneapolis who works at the Ford plant and drives a Cadillac (“He don’t care what they think!”) that has a beer spigot on the dashboard and the front seat tilts all the way back to make a bed, electrically, when you press a switch, which is fascinating indeed but not to Harold. He keeps staring at me. I’m the fly in his ointment. I try to be invisible, a good little worker, but I feel his eyes boring into me. Then he says that he doesn’t know how
they
feel about it but
he
feels that you can’t have someone in the car club who hasn’t gone through
initiation
otherwise every jerk in town is going to be hanging around—he says to me, “You know what a tire run is, dontcha?” Actually, I don’t, and am not curious to find out, but he and Junior and George think it’s a great idea. They get a tire and Harold grabs my arm and we head over to school. I could yell for help and probably he’d let go, but I decide to show that I can take it, whatever it is, even when we climb up the toboggan hill behind school and I start to get the idea. And I am right. They hold the tire and I am supposed to sit curled up in it, bracing myself, and roll down the hill. I hate them all. I hate them so much that I say, “This isn’t anything. I’ve done this.” I actually make myself believe it, and get in the tire! One mighty push and I start to fall, spinning faster and faster—I close my eyes—I hear them yelling far away—it
bounces
off the ground, it thumps and the ground roars by and sky, I’m so dizzy I feel sick—now it’s on grass, hissing, and then it
bounces
so hard my guts hurt, off a tree, and I fall down and
I get right out and sit on the grass
as if nothing happened.
Everything is a blur, but I look around as if I am admiring the lovely foliage this time of year. When my head clears so I can make out foliage, I get up and walk away from the tire, back to the garage where Carl is sanding away. He looks up. “Those assholes,” I say.

Every spring when the car goes down, the Sons of Knute sing—

—and go to work cleaning the Lodge, a sacred service in the ancient rite of Knutedom, but sacred more for the ritual than for the result. They start at noon with the Call to Order and the ceremonial Passing of the Pail, then the Installation of the Ancient Vacuum and the Removal of the Deceased Plants, and a symbolic swipe of the Fraternal Dustrag, and then it’s time for the Opening of the Amber Essence of the Blessed Hops. “It smells like somebody’s buried in there,” says my mother, who’s never been in there but has a sense for that sort of thing. Most Knutes smoke, and by April even they are noticing it—even Elmer who smokes three packs a day. Elmer once woke up in the night smelling smoke, and it turned out to be himself. That was when he cut down from four.

Long ago, the Knutes formed a secret service organization called the Nogebow Ekal, whose aim was to perform good deeds secretly for the pure pleasure of helping others and accepting no thanks or recognition,
^*
a principle that all incoming Knutes were secretly sworn to uphold. “Believe me, if they’d ever done anything, we’d have heard about it,” says Mother. Her skepticism is shared by others. The secret of Nogebow Ekal, like the secret of the Knutes’ pressed coffee, is one that not many care to know.

The Lodge is square, squat, brick with sandstone sills and cornerstone (1907). Under the rear, southwest corner is a jack. The foundation cracked under that corner and was removed in 1948 so a new one could be put in. The jack is there temporarily until the Knutes decide exactly how they want to go about that.

Storm windows come off in April, screens go on—on a certain day that is not known until it arrives, the first Saturday when people feel they are about to suffocate. The fear of drafts dies hard, and then the massive storms are pried off and the windows opened and a little fresh air blows in which shows a person how dismal and stale the old air was and awakens a person to the dank Carpet, the mildew, the dead winter dust on everything, the general corruption of indoors after so much cold weather, like what grows on meat in a closed jar after six months in the fridge, which leads directly to spring cleaning.