Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

by Lorna Landvik

  “It must have been all the dessert I ate,” she said to her husband later. “I had two of Velma’s seven-layer bars and a piece of Orpha’s gooseberry pie.”

  “Any of Beata’s fudge?” asked Jerry, who loved attending any gathering of his wife’s family because of the company and the food.

  Slip nodded. “But Ollie’s doughnuts were gone by the time I got to them.”

  “They were good,” said Jerry, remembering.

  He was as big as Slip was little, as tawny as she was freckled, as mild as she was fierce, but a more perfect match neither of them could imagine.

  Jerry McMahon was a research scientist in the meteorology department of the University of Minnesota, a man who found delight in dew points and barometric pressure as well as the really exciting weather that his native Minnesota brewed up—blizzards and severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

  He and Slip had met at the U—she was a scholarship student from New Jersey, and he was smitten as soon as he heard this tiny redheaded girl reproach a teaching assistant in an accent that sounded automatically pushy, “Sorry, bub, but you don’t know what you’re tawking about.”

  “I know what I’m talking about,” Jerry said, approaching her after class. “I know I’d like to take you out for coffee.”

  “I’m on my way to a lecture,” said Slip, “by a nuclear power proponent. Wanna come? We need more protesters.”

  Always a big believer in social change, Slip was already out of school and a mother by the time the Vietnam War made college protest practically a credit, but she returned to campus regularly to march in picket lines, to sit in sit-ins, to pass out flyers. She also volunteered two nights a week at the McCarthy for President headquarters, leaving Jerry in charge of the kids, a job he loved.

  “But don’t they drive you nuts?” Paul Forrest asked at the neighborhood Christmas party. “I mean, I love my kids, but that doesn’t mean I want to baby-sit them.”

  Jerry was about to launch into the joys of child care—just the night before, Flannery, his precocious four-year-old daughter, had read him a bedtime story—but then Eric Iverson, who had ignored the rum punch in the crystal bowl in favor of the stronger offerings from the bar, stumbled toward them, demanding to know just what the hell the two men thought of these goddamned draft dodgers. Slip, who was helping the party’s hostess fill the peanut bowls, piped up, “I think they’re people with a conscience—at least the ones I met at the march on the university were.”

  “You were at that march?” croaked the young doctor, doing a very good Joseph McCarthy impersonation.

  “We both were,” said Jerry, putting his arm around his wife. “And we’ll be at the next one.”

  Eric Iverson stood hunched over, slack-jawed, staring at the couple as if they’d just stepped out of the pneumatic door of a flying saucer.

  “Commies,” he said finally, shaking his head. “We’ve got commies in the neighborhood!”

  This announcement he made while turning in a semicircle, a movement that apparently affected his equilibrium, because he fell down in a heap.

  Merit had rushed over to him, mumbling a continuous refrain of “I’m sorry,” oblivious to Slip’s cheerful reassurance that it was all right, she’d rather be called a commie than a hawk. Then, making more apologies, Merit half dragged and half pushed her cursing husband out the door.

  Under the arch that separated the living room from the small foyer, the commie-hater suddenly stopped and, braying the word “Mistletoe!” grabbed Merit, kissing her as if a kiss were food and he were starving.

  There had been a hush after the Iversons’ departure, and then the hostess put a Tony Bennett album on the hi-fi (Slip had brought the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, telling Kari to put it on when she wanted the party to “really rock”) and, holding out her arms, asked Jerry McMahon if he’d care to dance.

  That hostess, Kari Nelson, was the same woman who had accompanied Slip twice to Faith’s doorstep when they’d welcomed the newcomer to the neighborhood, the same woman Faith now watched walking up the shoveled sidewalk to where Slip stood decimating icicles.

  Faith watched the two women talk for a moment, vaporous plumes tumbling out of their mouths. Something funny must have been said, because both women tipped their heads back, laughing.

  Faith felt a pang as real as a pinch, jealous of the women’s merriment. How long had it been since she’d shared a laugh like that with a friend? She watched as both women began pushing what looked more to Faith like a stalactite than an icicle. It was monstrously big, and when they had dislodged it from its perch, they jumped out of the way like two lumberjacks trying to dodge a falling spruce. They laughed again, and Faith had a deep urge to grab her coat and run out and join them. But then Beau began to cry (even when they were newborns, she’d been able to differentiate the twins’ cries), and the urge crumbled under the call to duty.

  KARI NELSON, meanwhile, took a rain check on Slip’s invitation to come in for a cup of coffee.

  “But just a short rain check,” she assured her friend. “Say around one o’clock? I told myself I couldn’t have any fun until I finished my niece’s coat.”

  Kari’s sewing talents were much admired and much employed—if she wasn’t sewing a pair of bell-bottoms for one niece, she was making slipcovers for another. She had four nieces, and even though two had moved out of state, it still didn’t stop their requests (her three nephews had no desire to wear hand-sewn shirts or pants; they were more inclined to solicit care packages of chocolate chip or almond crescent cookies). Kari really didn’t mind; her nieces were always so grateful and sent thank-you notes, occasionally accompanied by chocolates or, when they were really flush, her favorite gift: books.

  Up in her small, sunny (when the sun wasn’t in winter hibernation) sewing room, Kari pinned a sleeve to a cuff made out of fake acrylic fur, which was all the rage but certainly not a fabric she would choose to work with. Kari was a snob when it came to her material—she loved fine worsted wools and soft silks and Egyptian cottons. Even though she had just celebrated her fortieth birthday, she felt the generation gap everyone was talking about was more a crack than a chasm, and one she felt she easily skipped across, although for the life of her she couldn’t understand or appreciate the fashions of the day.

  A paisley jacket with green Day-Glo fake fur cuffs? This particular abomination was for Mary Jo, her niece who last fall had left for Berkeley a demure college coed wearing pleats and Peter Pan collars and come back at Christmas break a full-fledged hippie. Kari didn’t think they were going to have any luck fabric shopping (Mary Jo opined that the tartan wool was “too Tricia Nixon” and the wheat-colored linen was “something a sorority sister would wear”), but when Mary Jo spotted the fake fur and the wild paisley, it earned a rapturous “Far out.”

  Not that Kari, like much of her generation, dismissed the whole peace/hippie movement out of hand; no, she had been shaped as a liberal thinker by her Norwegian immigrant parents, North Dakota farmers, who had been instrumental in organizing the Democratic Farmer/Labor Party.

  She agreed with the hippies’ antiwar stance but not with their drugs—hated hearing those awful stories about LSD takers jumping out of windows and bright and responsible students all of a sudden dropping out of college to go smoke dope in “crash pads.”

  “You’re not smoking marijuana, are you?” she asked Mary Jo as they had pie and coffee after their fabric search.

  The long dangly earrings her niece wore jingled as she laughed.

  “Well, of course I am,” said Mary Jo, who was honest with her aunt in a way she wasn’t with her own mother. “Not heavily—but yeah, I like a good toke now and then.”

  Unconsciously, Kari shook her head in small, rapid movements. She was often torn when her nieces confided in her—should she tell their parents or, like an attorney, consider their confessions privileged information? It was times like these when she yearned for the wise counsel of her dear husband, Bjorn, dead now for five unbe
lievably long years. It wasn’t just she who considered his counsel wise; he had been, after all, a district judge, and a more reasoned man she had never met. The only problem that Bjorn Nelson could never solve was why he and Kari could not have children.

  Both sets of plumbing, as one doctor had put it, were in fine working order, but after years of trying (trying had been fun and exciting the first couple of years, but when they realized conception might be more of a problem than they thought, their trying took on a sense of game team spirit, then melancholy, and finally desperation) they came to the sad and puzzled conclusion that they were not going to bear children. Then God threw them a reminder that we never know what we think we know, and there was a pregnancy. But it survived only the first two months, and as blood poured out of Kari, she thought all chances of a life with meaning were pouring out too. She was certain of this when, six months later, she suffered another miscarriage.

  She truly thought she was living a hell on earth, but in retrospect, she’d take hell any day over what followed.

  Passing the adoptive-parents tests a year later, she and Bjorn were given a beautiful week-old baby girl and had her for two blissful days (Kari had known motherhood would be wonderful, but this bliss was hard to imagine) before the hand-wringing woman from the adoption service showed up at the Nelsons’ front door, accompanied by a lawyer, telling them she was awfully sorry, nothing like this had ever happened before, but they had evidence the mother had been coerced into signing the release papers, making them invalid. They had come to take the baby back.

  A noise began in Kari’s head, a great roaring, as if she were holding giant conch shells up to her ears, and she entered a zone that was devoid of all feeling; she was sucked into a gray fuzzy hole of nothingness.

  Of course they hired a lawyer, but there were two nurses who had overheard the birth mother’s boyfriend threaten her life if she didn’t give up the baby, and even Kari knew that the rightful place for Bettina (named after Kari’s mother) was with her seventeen-year-old mother, who had never wanted to give her up.

  In anguish, Kari pleaded with God to let her know what she had done so terribly wrong to have such terribly wrong things happen to her.

  “Maybe he knows something about me that even I don’t know,” she cried. “Maybe he’s taking these babies away from me because he knows I’d be a bad mother.”

  “Then He would be a God I couldn’t believe in,” said Bjorn, “because He wouldn’t know anything.”

  Bjorn was the reason Kari was able to keep her faith; who but God could have given her a blessing of such magnitude?

  But then, just as Kari was thinking she was strong enough to go through the adoption process again, Bjorn died in his sleep at the age of forty-five. She lost her life then too—except people made the mistake of thinking she was still alive. They kept coming over with food, kept coming over to sit with her, to hold her hand, to take her on walks during which she wondered why they didn’t hear the wind whistling right through her. Grief strangled her heart as surely as a blocked artery strangled Bjorn’s, but grief didn’t have the grace to finish off the job.

  Her family truly became her life support. Her sister Wanda from Grand Forks came down and stayed with her for the first two months, followed by her sister Anna from Bismarck. Her brother, Anders, and his wife, Sally, who lived in Minneapolis with their three children, were over constantly. They helped her keep alive what was still alive and coax back to life what was dead. This was achieved because of their vigilant care and kindness, and in no small part because of their children, whom they brought with them.

  Kari had always been a favorite of her nieces and nephews, and they crawled on her lap, placing their little hands on her face and asking her things the adults were too adult to ask.

  “Do you hate God for taking Uncle Bjorn away?”

  “Did Uncle Bjorn die because he did something wrong?”

  “I heard people turn blue when they die. How blue was Uncle Bjorn?”

  “Do you think if maybe we both wished really really really really hard that Uncle Bjorn would come back, he would?”

  These questions were a tonic for Kari because, in effect, she was answering questions she herself asked. And because she was a teacher by nature as well as by profession, she demanded that her answers be carefully thought out. Trying to explain to a child things that were unexplainable was like being thrown a life preserver—a leaky one, but one that would keep her afloat for at least a moment.

  About a year and a half after Bjorn’s death, she still lived in grief’s house, but the walls weren’t so pressing and the ceiling wasn’t so low and she felt strong enough to resume some of her old aunt duties, hosting her nieces and nephews for long weekends and rainy afternoons occasionally when the parents took adults-only vacations.

  Her sister Wanda and her husband, Butch, took a Caribbean cruise, leaving their two battling boys and fussy daughter with Kari, and came back to find their sons the best of friends and their daughter happily eating meat loaf and broccoli.

  “You’re a miracle worker,” Wanda had told Kari, who turned the compliment around, saying, “Well, then they’re the miracles I got to work with.”

  More than half her nieces and nephews were no longer children—in fact, Randy was getting married in the fall and Cynthia was expecting her first baby (Kari had already crocheted a yellow blanket and would have started sewing baby clothes if she’d only known the sex)—but Kari enjoyed them just as much as when they were little and felt a sense of pride in their accomplishments, a pride that was deserved, as her steadfast love and good humor had influenced them all.

  But marijuana! she thought now, trying to ease the pesky sleeve to fit the cuff. Would that lead to stronger stuff like LSD or, heaven forbid, morphine? Or was it heroin? She’s ask Slip, she decided, trimming the seam. Slip was much younger and knew about these sorts of things.

  SLIP WOULD HAVE BEEN HAPPY to offer what minimal knowledge she had on the subject of drugs (she and Jerry had tried marijuana at a Pete Seeger concert, accepting the passed joint like old hands, but Slip’s inexperience was evident after her first inhale, when she coughed so hard she thought her brain might hemorrhage). It certainly would have been a far lighter conversation than the long-distance one she was having now with her younger brother.

  “Fred, you can’t enlist—that’s insane! You can get a college deferment! Remember how happy you were to get into Penn State? Come on, Fred, finish college, and if the war’s still going on, then you can think of enlisting.”

  She heard her younger brother’s easy laughter and then a thunk.

  “Sorry, Slip, I’m making a sandwich and I dropped the phone. What were you saying?”

  “You know what I was saying,” said Slip. She tugged at the towel she had wrapped herself in when the phone rang, interrupting her shower. “You cannot be so stupid as to want to enlist in the army.”

  “Who said anything about the army? I’m thinking about the marines.”

  “Oh, Fred,” breathed Slip with relief. “I don’t find that funny at all.”

  “You shouldn’t. It’s not a joke.”

  In the thick, staticky silence that followed, Slip realized it wasn’t.

  “Fred, please. It’s a stupid war. It’s not worth it.”

  “It’s worth it to Miles Coons and Todd Hagstrom, my two best friends in the world.”

  “But Fred, you said Todd and Miles were drafted! They wouldn’t have gone unless they were forced!”

  “So I shouldn’t go just because I don’t have to?”

  “Exactly!”

  Fred sighed. “Slip, not everyone’s a big liberal peacemonger like you.”

  “Peacemonger? Fred, are you on something? Tell me you’re having a bad trip or something, please.”

  “I feel the need to serve my country,” said Fred crisply.

  “Well, serve it! Join the Peace Corps or VISTA or—”

  “Talk to you later, Slip.”

  H
earing a click and dial tone, Slip hung up, trembling. He couldn’t be serious. She looked up and startled, saw her reflection in the dresser mirror. Inside, Slip McMahon was a big, bold woman, an Amazon who rumbled through life like a Sherman tank. So who was this freckled little thing with carrot-colored hair and a twelve-year-old’s body, shivering under the terry-cloth sarong of a damp towel? As she often did, when seeing her mirrored self, she stuck out her tongue.

  THE TEMPERATURE HAD LIFTED SLIGHTLY that afternoon, but then it began to do what everyone, by late March, was thoroughly sick of: it began to snow. And snow and snow and snow.

  Faith, making the twins’ supper, was in the mood to mash more than her children’s potatoes and carrots. Watching the swirling snow through the kitchen window, she thought how nothing would give her more pleasure than pulverizing her husband’s face. What was he thinking, taking her to this twilight zone where winters never ended? She banged the spoon against the saucepan, startling Beau, who yelped, and delighting Bonnie, who banged her own spoon against the metal tray of her high chair, shouting, “Yang, yang, yang!”

  It didn’t take Beau long to get over his fright, and soon he was joining his sister in creating an earsplitting, erratic percussion that put the h in headache, as far as Faith was concerned. She tried to distract them, humor them, and, stupidly, to reason with them, but they were as wild and frenzied as tribal drummers announcing war.