Pontoon (6 page)

She wasn’t sure why she said these terrible lies, but she found it satisfying. Flo shuddered as if stabbed with a fork. “That can’t be true,” she whispered. All the starch was out of her now.
Serves
you right
, thought Barbara.

“Drive me home, please,” said Aunt Flo. Her voice was faint. She held up her car keys. “I’m in no shape to drive.”

Barbara drove Aunt Flo home—slowly, focusing on the street,
making sure not to drive across a lawn and into a flower bed—and led her inside and helped her into bed. She seemed very old and frail, not the mover and shaker of yore. “This would have killed my mother,” she said faintly. “This would have done her in. I do believe that we are in the Last Days and that the world is coming to an end. I never thought so before but I do now. My own little sister—I tell you, Satan is at work among us. Pray for me.” And then she grabbed Barbara by the arms, hard, and pulled her down close. “Quit your boozing,” she said. “Stop it now. Shape up. For your mother’s sake. For Kyle.”

“Mother was never judgmental about other people having a good time,” Barbara said, all cool and collected. “Mother liked to imbibe now and then herself. And she went dancing. With Raoul. Mother adored him. He made her happy in her last years. She found a happiness that you and all the people like you will never know. You spent your whole damn life bossing other people around and barging in and taking mixing bowls out of people’s hands. Mother found love. I’m proud of her. And I’m going to scatter her ashes exactly as she wished, and I don’t care if you come or not.”

She strode out of Aunt Flo’s bedroom and closed the door with a bang and was on her way to the front door and then stopped in the living room and felt bad for having said all of that. What a terrible thing to do. So she turned and marched back to the bedroom door and opened it. Flo was sobbing, her face in the pillow, her white hair a big tangle. “I’m sorry for saying what I said,” said Barbara, and closed the door. She was a bad person, very bad, but she had her reasons.

Out on the sidewalk three little girls were playing jump rope, two twirling and one in the middle jumping, and the two were chanting:

And the jumper kept hopping as the two girls twirled faster and faster up to twenty-three and finally caught her.
Oh the misery
that we have brought them into
, she thought.
They will lose their
mothers and then what will become of them, poor lambies?
And she thought of poor Muffy and that old sadness came over her and she was momentarily drenched in thirty-one-year-old grief.
Oh
dear God, I have got to join a group or something
. They had groups for everything now. Stress Management and Men Coming To Terms With Their Bodies and AA and a new group she’d read about that helps you deal with your issues with people who happen to be dead now. Mediums of Mercy. And another, MOCK, Mothers of Challenged Kids. It meets, as they all do, on a Tuesday night in a church basement—not in Lake Wobegon, God knows, but somewhere, Minneapolis, you could sit in a circle with other moms and cry for your lambie, your babykins, your pookster, your Little Miss Muffin.

W
hen Kyle hung up the phone, having just promised to drop his grandma’s ashes in a bowling ball from a parasail, his friend Sarah was standing behind him, slipping her arms around Kyle’s waist. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. You must have been really really close to her. I remember when my grandma died. I was sixteen and it really tore me to pieces. She died in Tampa and I rode a bus all night and all day to get down there and my parents got really mad at me but I couldn’t help it, I had to be there. Her name was Hermione. She collected seashells. She played the piano.”

Kyle unclasped her arms from his waist and headed for the kitchen. She followed, reminiscing about the death of her grandma. Sarah was like that. Anything that happened to you reminded her of something in her own life, however remote the connection. If he had mentioned Raoul, she would’ve remembered a Raoul, or maybe a Ramon, or a Newell, or maybe the Sun God Ra, and she could yak about it for as long as you’d let her. You were never at a loss for conversation with Sarah. She could talk for both of you. That was the nice part about having sex with her—she mostly shut up and you had a little peace and quiet.

He poured himself a cup of cold coffee and put it in the microwave and lit a cigarette. She hated cigarette smoke. It made her sick. He blew a little her way.

“That is just so incredibly sad,” she was saying. “Have you ever thought about what it would be like to die? I mean, actually? I just can’t even comprehend it. It must be terrible.” She was trying to put her arms around him again and he slid between a chair and the refrigerator to block her and then crouched down and pretended to look for something in a low cupboard.

“Was she alone when she died?”

He nodded. “I think that she was ready to die,” he said. “I think she was actually looking forward to it. People come to that point where they’ve lived long enough and everything around them starts to seem weird and they go, like, Okay, I’m done now, get me out of here.”

It was bullshit, but he liked to b.s. her, it kept her off balance.

Kyle wasn’t set on Sarah. Not at all. They had hooked up at a Super Bowl party, in somebody’s apartment. She was cleaning up during halftime and he pitched in and washed dishes and when he said, “God, football is boring,” it endeared him to her, and the dishwashing too, and the bridge to couplehood appeared. She invited him home and they snuggled together and did stuff that felt good and the bridge to couplehood was crossed. It was a convenience, it saved time looking for a date, and then they moved in together to save on rent. An economy move. He was happy trying out the idea of couplehood so long as she didn’t take it as the first step to the Big M, which of course she did. Probing questions: “How do you feel about me?” she would murmur over the cornflakes. “Tell me the truth.” Or “Where do you think we’ll be two years from now?” Or “What do you think is the best age to start a family?”

“Well,” he said, “unless you adopt, you have to start them at zero and let them grow up from there.”

Big looping hypotheticals to which he could only shrug and make up an answer.

Still, it was better than the panicky groping in high school, in some parents’ basement, the girl scared and yet egging you on, saying no no and yes yes at the same time and wanting to be violated and also to keep her innocence, pulling, pushing, pleading, protesting. Sarah was all for it. She said, “I want you.” She still did. Pulled him into bed and got the show on the road.

“When is the funeral?” said Sarah. “Not a funeral. A memorial service. And it’s on Saturday.” He had to test his parasail. The shroud lines needed refitting. Last time he flew, it tended to drift sideways. And he wanted to paint eyes on it. He built it from a kit with money Grandma gave him a year ago to go to Europe. “Go see the world while you’re young,” she said. “I always kicked myself that I didn’t. Got married at nineteen and had a baby at twenty and that was it, the doors closed. No reason for you to make the same mistake. I didn’t even see New York City until I was seventy-two years old. What a comment!” They were driving back to Lake Wobegon from Fisher’s Supper Club in Avon where she’d taken him for the deep-fried walleye. She’d had a whiskey sour and a glass of champagne. She was feeling gay. She handed him the check. “Do what you want but don’t use it to pay your bills, for heaven’s sake. Have some fun.”

Sarah was opposed to the parasail, afraid he’d crash to his death. So many stories about homemade aircraft crashing. Famous people, rich, accomplished, going up in the air in some flimsy contraption and a gust of wind comes up and they spiral down and splatter on the rocks. “Think about me,” she said. “Think
how I’d feel.” He’d taken it up on a test flight over Lake Minnetonka in June and it was glorious, the best cheap thrill he could imagine, better than a roller coaster.

His friend Duane Dober had an 18-foot speedboat with a 75-horsepower outboard. Duane wore pop-bottle glasses and lived in dread that a ray of sun might catch a lens and burn a hole into his brain and leave him a helpless cripple who makes ashtrays from beer cans so he wore long-billed caps and stayed out of the sun as much as possible but he loved to race around in his boat with the prow up in the air and smoke dope and listen to the Steel Heads. When Kyle called and said, “I need you to tow my parasail so I can deposit my grandma’s ashes in the lake,” Duane saw it as a chance to thumb his nose at the fishing community. They gave him a hard time about his wake. Well, he’d show them. He imagined he might race around at top speed towing Kyle and rock the fishing boats in his wake and they’d yell and shake their fists and then a cloud of ashes would descend on them. “I’ll be there,” he said.

Kyle remembered what convinced him to buy the parasail—it was a letter from Grandma, along with a check for $500—her beautiful handwriting on little sheets of pale blue paper—

P.S. Here’s some money I saved by not going to Florida. Spend it on something you always wanted.

B
arbara found a poem Mother wrote on the back of a recipe for ginger cake—

And that reminded her to call Raoul in Minneapolis. She found his return address on letters stashed in a Scotch shortbread tin in Mother’s closet. Raoul Olson, Aldrich Avenue, Minneapolis. There was a snapshot of him on a beach, grinning, flexing his biceps, an old man in crimson swim trunks, old flesh on his bones, a big head of hair dyed black black black. Mother’s boyfriend. She had suspected his existence. Oh yes, many times.

There was the poem Mother wrote and recited for the Sweethearts’ Dinner at church one Valentine’s Day, and got choked up on the lines—

Well, you knew darned well it wasn’t a poem about Jack Peterson.

And then there was the call from Mr. Becker at the bank. “I shouldn’t say this but I’m worried about your mother,” he said. “She’s been spending a lot of money lately in Las Vegas and Reno and San Francisco and hither and yon, and it’s her money, and I’m not saying she’s overdrawn, she’s not, not even close, but I just wonder what is going on here.”

And then there was the urgency with which Mother packed up and left the house for a few days—“Who are you going to see?” Barbara’d ask. “You meeting a boyfriend?” Mother snorted. Well, here was her snort: an old sporting gentleman named Raoul Olson. A postcard with the Foshay Tower on it and tiny handwriting: “Dear Rosebud”—that’s what he called her, Rosebud—“Youre a peach and thats for sure, kid, you deserve nothing but the best. Speaking of which didnt we have some laughs in Reno. Id say so. The motel was deluxe and so was the company in my opinion. We need not mention the clams. Never again. Those folks by the pool will not be the same since they got to see us two cavorting on the slide like a couple of kids, you could hear them thinking were do those two get off having all the fun and us sitting
here like two prunes. And I sure do agree with you about the importance of ‘Naps.’ Two great minds are one on that particular subject. Nuff said.”

She googled him and he popped right up.

Yonny Yonson. She and her brothers watched him daily for years. The man who told jokes to his dog and honked a horn and showed Little Rascals cartoons and danced with a floor mop to “On The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” and at the end of every
show took two steps toward the camera and said, “You kids are driving me to drink!” and grabbed a bottle of Coco-Pop soda, his sponsor, and poured it over his head. And sometimes he did it upside down, while performing a handstand, one-handed.

And now she could remember Mother watching him from the ktchen door and smiling.

And she never said a word. “I used to know him.” Nothing like that.

Raoul Olson. Aldrich Avenue, Minneapolis. Barbara didn’t think anybody who meant that much to Mother should get the news by phone, so she got in the car and drove to Minneapolis to tell him. She needed a drive anyway. She took the back way, down through Holdingford and Avon to the Interstate and then instead of taking it she stayed on the back roads. Cold Spring, Watkins (“Birthplace of Eugene J. McCarthy”), Kimball, Dassel. She once dated a basketball player from Dassel who took her out to an abandoned farmplace and she sat on the front step of the house, which had collapsed into the cellar, and he sat on the front bumper of his old black Ford ragtop, guitar in hand, and sang her all the blues songs he knew, which were quite a few. Pankake was his name. He was a forward with a deadly jump shot from deep in the corner and scored twenty-six points for Dassel against Lake Wobegon and she, a cheerleader, had talked to him in the parking lot after the game and given him her phone number. She had gone over to the opposition. He told her he had lost interest in basketball after reading
Moby-Dick
. He had a nice voice. He packed up his guitar and drove her home. It was 1:30 a.m.

Dassel was due west of the city on Highway 12, which suddenly became a big vacuum of a freeway sucking her in toward the towers
of downtown and everybody driving as if they were on their way to shoot someone, enormous SUVs looming up in her rearview mirror, hanging on her bumper, then swerving around her though she was driving the speed limit—
what’re you doing on my
highway, lady? Move over!
—and she got off on Lyndale and drove north and found his address, a little blue rambler, the front door open, music emanating from within. One of the big bands playing a ballad and a girl singer spooling out the words, about a lover gone, perhaps for good—she peered in through the screen. Dark inside and a big round mirror facing the door and there she was in the mirror, hand shading her eyes. The girl singer sang, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when—” She rang the bell. And a sleepy voice said, “Yeah?”

“It’s Evelyn Peterson’s daughter. Barbara.”

He rose from the sofa where he’d been sleeping and opened the door. He was a husky old coot in a ribbed undershirt, tufts of gray hair sprouting under it, black stubble on his face, black silk shorts, flip-flops, a dead cigar in his paw. “What’s going on?” he said. He looked alarmed. “Is she okay?”

“Sorry to burst in like this. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“What’s wrong?” He opened the door. She wanted to tell him that Mother was okay. Waiting in the car in her beach dress, ready to fly off to Cancun and go snorkeling.

“Mother died last night.”

All the air just went out of him whoosh and his face went blank like he’d been shot in the back or hit with a telephone pole.

“She died in her sleep reading a book. I found her this morning. She didn’t suffer or anything. She must’ve just slipped away in the night.”

“I tried calling her just last night—”

“I know. I listened to it on the answering machine.”

He stepped out and shut the door. An elderly tabby cat looked out through the screen and made a faint scratchy meow.

“Do you think she listened to it?”

“You mean, before she died?”
Well that’s a pretty stupid question
, Barbara thought. He nodded. “Did she get my message?”

“Yes, she did. It had been saved. She listened to it and then she saved it.”
Lie, lie, lie
.

Big tears in his eyes. She put her arms around him and he clung to her and they sort of waltzed backward into the living room. The place was soaked in cigar smoke. Mother was death on secondary smoke. Couldn’t bear it. Had she ever set foot in this house? She must have. He turned off the record player. She noticed a recent photo of the two of them in a black frame, his arm around her. She was half a head taller and grinning as if she’d just won first prize in a three-legged race. He sat down on a hassock. The cat brushed against his bare leg and made a faint scratchy meow.

“She went out for dinner last night with Margaret and Gladys and she was fine when they dropped her off and this morning I found her. She must’ve listened to your message and went to sleep and didn’t’ wake up.”

He started to say something about Mother and then excused himself and slipped around the corner and blew his nose. A longtime bachelor from the looks of things. Boxes of stuff on the sofa, the glass-top coffee table, the carpet, open boxes of old clothes, magazines, gewgaws, rummage, as if he’d started to straighten up the joint and gotten disoriented. A hubcap for an ashtray and a
Mona Lisa
picture puzzle, half assembled. A picture of a wolf on a snowbank on a moonlit night hung on one wall and a wrestling
poster on another—the Ayatollah Khomeanie vs. Jesse (The Body) Ventura, two gargantuans, one in a turban, one in a boa and pink glasses. And in small type: “refereed by Raoul Olson of Channel Four.” The TV was on, the sound off: a newscaster in a blue suit, the state capitol behind him …

Raoul came back, two glasses in one hand, a bottle of Jim Beam in the other.

“We found a letter with her last wishes and everything, and I guess she opted for cremation and a memorial service, not a church funeral, so we’re going to do that on Saturday. Down by the lake. I hope you will come.”

“Yeah, she didn’t have much use for the church. She told me that. They were too narrow-minded for her. Oh God. What are we going to do?” He choked up for a moment. “I sure was in love with her—“He dug in his pocket for a hanky and blew his nose again. He looked like he might’ve lifted weights at one time. A big chest and a headful of hair, newly dyed blue-black. A red splotch of broken veins on each cheek, a big nose with cavernous nostrils. He gestured with the whiskey bottle and Barbara shook her head and he poured some in a glass for himself and tossed it back and closed his eyes and shook his head hard and a long sound came out like quacking.

“Sorry,” he said. He gave Barbara a long look and thanked her for driving down to tell him in person. He looked shaken. Queasy.

“Your mother and I met in 1941. I came down from North Dakota and went into nurse’s training. I’d enlisted in the Marines and it turned out I had flat feet so they made me a medic and they sent six of us to Swedish Hospital and she was in my class. I was sitting on the front steps and she came walking up the walk and I
went for her right away. She was tall and rangy and swung her arms and laughed and she had a way of looking you over so if she liked you, it really meant something. Oh God, she was the love of my life and I knew it. Wham. Just like that. This was back when there was a lot of dancing. Dances almost every night, and we went to every one. We were good enough that we entered contests. We jitterbugged like crazy and when we were out of breath, we sat in the corner and necked. I asked her to marry me and she wanted to but then she got sick and almost died. Infected boil. It was on her butt, she couldn’t sit down. I said, Let me have a look at it, but she went and squeezed it and got a terrible infection. I took care of her for the first three days. I gave her sponge baths. I held her in my arms when she was having hallucinations, out of her head jabbering about her dad and crying and yelling at somebody to rescue the horses. I was with her around the clock. And then I took her to the hospital and I went home and slept a few hours and when I woke up her parents were there and I had orders to ship out to Chicago and then to Guadalcanal. I tried to write to her but I couldn’t remember the name of her home town, Lake Wobegon. The letters kept coming back. I was in the Dutch East Indies when I heard she married somebody from home. God, I cried for three days. I met Bing Crosby when he did a USO tour in the Pacific and he got a touch of malaria. He introduced me to people and I got into radio in San Francisco. Actually, Oakland. I did a show called
Bay Town Ballroom
and played records and on weekends I emceed dances at the Alhambra and Aragon ballrooms and the Club Seville, and I married a lady bass player named June and I was doing well except I had a problem with the happy powder so June thought maybe I’d do better in Minneapolis, get me away from temptation, and we came out, and I got the TV job doing
the weather and was earning good dough and we moved to Golden Valley and right then, when everything was good, my little boy got sick and died of leukemia. It happened so fast. It was like a load of rocks got dumped on me. I had a pity party for a few years. I got deep into the sauce and felt hopeless and nasty and June left and took our little girl, and that’s when I became Yonny Yonson on TV. It was a heartbreaker, seeing those kids, let me tell you. All the smiling kids and I thought, ‘Why couldn’t mine be here? Why did this happen to me?’ and one day I walked out on the bridge thinking I’d jump off it and end this nonsense, and I climbed over the rail and there was a string of barges going under that were full of wheat and soybeans and I thought how ridiculous to jump and break my neck on a pile of wheat and my body goes down to New Orleans and meanwhile I’ve ruined a whole load of wheat. So I crawled back over the rail and I went back to the TV studio and the secretary said, ‘There’s a lady in Lake Wobegon named Evelyn Peterson trying to track you down.’ We talked on the phone and then we met for drinks and it was like 1941 all over again. We were like two kids. Suddenly I had something to live for. I cleaned up my act and we started dating and every day was sunshine. We were talking about going to Europe. She’d never been there.” His voice broke. “I told her everything about what’d happened to me and how low I had fallen and she said she loved me.”