Coop

by Michael Perry

  When you grow up following a religion called the Truth, surrounded by the friends, and guided by the workers, some austerity is a given. At the top of the list, our church forbade the possession of televisions, which were condemned as the leaky end of Satan’s sewer pipe. Prodigal though I am, I largely retain the sentiment, although honesty compels me to admit this has not stopped me from participating in the medium at both ends of said pipe, and compared with high-speed Internet, the boob tube has all the turpitude of worn-out View-Masters. Despite leaving the church in my twenties, I went for years without a television. When I got married there was backsliding, as my wife’s dowry included a combination VCR/TV unit with rabbit ears that pull in four fuzzy channels. I justify its presence by citing PBS, but given half an hour, the snowy Seinfeld rerun triumphs every time. We go through fits of self-revulsion during which we banish the set to the closet and pull it out only to let Amy watch The Magic School Bus or a Lightnin’ Hopkins documentary on DVD (“Mom!” she said when Anneliese walked in the room, “Lightnin’ is dead!”), but then Anneliese has another couple of sleepless pregnant nights or I am feeling sorry for myself over some deadline or other, and whammo, it’s Scrubs at midnight. By the time you read this the new digital format will be in play and our set will be worthless. We have sworn a solemn vow not to purchase a converter box and can use your prayers in this regard. The flesh is weak, particularly that mushy area directly behind the eyeballs. Church precepts were fuzzier regarding use of the radio, but Dad drew a firm line against it. One of our Volkswagen buses came equipped with an AM radio and I recall sneaking out for a listen, but in the process of trying to improve reception I reached beneath the dash and wiggled some wires, whereupon there was a blue flash, a whiff of scorched electronics, and the radio was forever rendered mute.

  Perhaps allowing the devil a toenail in the doorjamb, Mom kept a phonograph in the house, and with her permission we were allowed to play it. The cabinet contained albums by Pete Seeger and the gospel singer Evie, a Reader’s Digest Presents 50 Beloved Songs of Faith collection, and five or six mariachi albums from her time in Mexico, which would explain why someone passing through rural Chippewa County in the early 1970s might have heard the sounds of a guitarra and our preadolescent Scandihoovian voices yodeling, “Ai-yi-yi-yiii!” These were the only words we knew, although my brother Jud, whose mental disabilities were leavened with certain savantisms, including the ability to memorize entire record albums after just one or two listens, sang along in phonetically serviceable Spanish. When we put on Stan and Doug albums, Jud switched effortlessly to a Scandinavian accent and recited the goofball tunes word for word. We had a smattering of 45s—I remember distinctly “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis and “Green, Green,” by the New Christy Minstrels. Many of these were leftovers from the day my teenage Aunt Sal brought her shotgun to the farm and practiced skeet shooting, using a stack of her “old” 45s in place of clay pigeons. I know there was more Elvis and plenty of Beatles in that stack, and shudder to think that somewhere in the subsoil out behind Dad’s barn are the irretrievable shards of an eBay bonanza sufficient to finance Amy’s pending orthodontia.

  We also had six albums by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. They were easily my favorites. My father still had the trumpet he played in the Eau Claire Memorial High School band; I would pull it from the case and blow air-trumpet in sync with “A Taste of Honey” and “Bittersweet Samba.” I have those albums now, and sometimes I load them on the old console stereo I keep in my office just for the pleasurable rush of memory the vinyl gives—“Green Peppers” puts me back in the old farmhouse, the brass notes echoing from the cool plaster walls, as the barnyard lies still beneath the noonday sun. I note that all three of the songs I cite are from the album Whipped Cream & Other Delights, which featured on its cover a lady wearing nothing but confection. The album was released in 1965, and millions of young boys have yet to recover. It was quite a deal to be riffling past the original cast Sesame Street Book & Record album and Mitch Miller’s Sing Along with Mitch only to come face-to-face with such dairy-based profundity. If you held the cardboard sleeve at an angle you could make out just the hint of the curve of one of her mysterious naughty bits, and the naked implications blew my youthful fuse. I’m surprised Mom didn’t cover the woman in duct tape, because when she discovered that the version of “Bill Grogan’s Goat” included on an anthology of train songs featured a mild expletive, she took a stick pin and cut a groove from the beginning of the song to the end so when the needle hit that track, it skidded right past with a scratchy rumble. If you were to confront my mother and accuse her of censorship, she would reply, “Exactly.”

  Still: Whipped Cream & Other Delights. When I learned some thirty years later that the whipped cream was actually shaving cream, it did absolutely nothing to cool my jets.

  Dad didn’t care for the music, and when we heard the porch door open we turned it off, but he did sit at the upright piano sometimes after milking to plunk out hymns and then send us up the stairs with a remarkably groovy interpretation of “On Top of Old Smoky.” For several years I rode my bike two miles for piano lessons over on Highway F with Mrs. North. My parents hoped I might one day be good enough to play hymns at gospel meeting, but I peaked with a workmanlike version of “Let There Be Peace on Earth” at the elementary Christmas concert, and when I discovered football the piano lessons petered out. To this day, however, thanks to Mrs. North I can read the treble clef just well enough to help Amy with her piano lessons.

  My mother taught me to read when I was four years old. Mom is a compulsive reader. She reads for pleasure, she reads to edify herself, but more often than not, she reads because she can’t help it. I understand. The minute I find myself sitting still, I start rummaging around for printed material. Pretty much anything will do—a book or magazine, sure. But also cereal boxes, the weekly shopper, the underside of the Kleenex box, or the back of the toothpaste tube. (I can recite by heart: “Crest has been shown to be an effective decay preventive dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.”)

  As a toddler, whenever I saw Mom reading, I bugged her to read to me. And she did. Every day. One day as I pestered her with my copy of Winnie-the-Pooh while she was settled with a book of her own, Mom set down a rule: She would read one chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh aloud (this was the original text-heavy version, not the picture-book version), but then I had to sit there quietly holding my book while Mom read a chapter of her book to herself. It worked, and became standard procedure. It took me years to recognize the power of this gift: Mom taught me to love the idea of sitting quietly with a book long before I could make out the words on the page.

  In time I began to recognize letters and make attempts at small words, so Mom sent away to a Chicago newspaper for a phonics book. When it arrived, she started at the beginning and worked through page by page (sample lesson for C and K: “This cat has a bone caught in his throat and he is trying to cough it up, so he says K-K-K as in Cat and Kitty”). Soon I could read on my own, although not infallibly. Dad tells the story of me pointing at the tailgate of the neighbor’s pickup and saying, “F-O-R-D…TRUCK!”

  During that same tumultuous third-grade stretch when I was getting religion with the help of Hazel Felleman’s poetry collection, Mom was sorting through a box of secondhand clothing when a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front tumbled out. I took it to the porch, settled into a chair, and dove in. I’d love to say reading Erich Maria Remarque at the age of nine stood as evidence of a precocious literary bent, but I’m afraid it had more to do with a young boy’s fascination for all things war. Whenever Mom took us on our regular trips to the Chetek Public Library, my brother John and I headed straight for the aviation section, raiding the stacks for everything we could get our hands on about the Red Baron, the French-American hero Raoul Lufbery, and our Ace of Aces, Eddie Rickenbacker of the Hat-in-the-Ring squadron. We put together glue
-splotched and imprecisely decaled plastic models of Sopwith Camel biplanes and Fokker triplanes and strung them from our bedroom ceilings using black thread from Mom’s sewing box. We entertained visions of ourselves running across the green grass of a sun-soaked British airfield, prepared to buzz into the fluffy white clouds where war seemed to be a romantic romp in the clouds, with a tip of the hat to the hail-fellow-well-met set to shoot you down.

  I was drawing a lot of ornate battle scenes at the time, often at the elbow of another recently acquired pal of mine, Eric Jakobs. Yin to Hardy Biesterveld’s yang, Eric was the well-behaved son of the local Lutheran pastor. He arrived partway through third grade and moved away not long after when his father was called to another parish, but for a stretch there we were best friends to the point that we created our own hieroglyphic secret code, the key to which we sketched out and buried in a tuna can near the culvert just up the road one evening when Eric was visiting. I hid it good, because when I returned on a decoding mission a week later, I couldn’t find it. The culvert has long since been replaced, so who knows where the can wound up. Perhaps one day it will surface to baffle interstellar archaeologists.

  Eric was a talented draftsman. In fact, his arrival knocked me from my position in the class as “best draw’er.” I clearly remember looking at his stuff and feeling a seeping twinge of envy, but also thinking, Wow, he’s better than me. Our works were sweeping panoramics in which the skies were clogged with ball-turreted B-29s, Luftwaffe dive-bombers (the Stuka was a favorite—we loved the aggressive geometry of the inverted gull wings, plus we thought it funny that a warplane might be branded a “Junkers”), P-51 Mustangs (consistently sporting shark teeth), and P-38 Lightnings. We scrambled a lot of those P-38s strictly because we fancied the exotic twin-booms look. On the ground, Panzers squared off with Shermans, and the guys in green sniped, machine-gunned, and lobbed grenades at guys in gray or black. We perfected our rendering of the German helmet with its visor and dropped rim (we secretly found it sharper-looking than the standard American GI soup pot) and carefully labeled every piece of enemy equipment with a swastika—an emblem we memorized with creepy assiduousness so as not to have the arms bent in the wrong direction. Every visible muzzle—on the planes, on the tanks, at the end of each rifle—spouted jagged flame. On an optimistic note, if a plane was smoking toward the earth, its pilot would be visible in the sky, parachuting safely to the ground. Perhaps an accidental archivist will one day prove me wrong, but as I recall there were few if any dead soldiers, and none of them wore green. War poured from our colored pencils not as hell, but as a circus plus fireworks where at worst the good guys suffered nonterminal flesh wounds. It was in this mind-set that I first read All Quiet on the Western Front. I still have the actual book. It’s a 1930 hardcover edition and the gray fabric is splotched with some unidentifiable spill. From the first page, I cherished the characters. I loved the rough Tjaden and his lice-popping oven. I hated Himmelstoss. I couldn’t wait to see what the witty scavenger, Kat, scrounged next. But I especially cared for the narrator, Paul Baumer. He seemed calm, thoughtful, and strong. I read him as just another steady Louis L’Amour cowboy. Then I got to chapter 9, and Paul stabbed an enemy soldier to death. He said the soldier was French. This did not compute. I backed up and reread the passage. From reading all those air ace books I knew the French were on our side. And were thus the good guys. But I had been operating under the assumption that the narrator was the good guy. He seemed like the good guy. He was a good guy. I puzzled over the section, rereading it several times to see if I had missed something in the chronology. And then it slowly dawned on me. Paul Baumer was one of the bad guys.

  From an adult standpoint, my misread seems ludicrous. After all, three paragraphs into the book Baumer speaks of the “English heavies” hitting his company with high explosives; there are all the German names and surnames; and there are battle scenes with the French earlier in the book. I remember some of this niggling me at the time, but I was reading full speed ahead and pushed it aside, figuring I had missed some twist of history. But when I got to the scene in the shell hole, I could no longer get around it: Paul Baumer was a German soldier. He had killed one of the good guys. What did that make Baumer?

  I don’t keep a chart or anything, but to the best of my recollection I have read All Quiet on the Western Front seven times. As a boy raised on Bible passages, I can’t say that it is the most important book in my life. But the impact of Paul Baumer’s story was profound, if subtle. When I opened the book, I possessed the vocabulary necessary to read the book, but until that section in the shell hole I lacked the insight required to see it as anything but a good yarn. I began the book a third-grader believing all the good guys played for the right team. Now I was faced with the knowledge that a good guy might wind up on the wrong team.

  I’m glad I had a friend like Eric Jakobs. He taught me a nice lesson in humility. He was a better draw’er than me. Period. He taught me what it’s like to realize you aren’t the best at something, and no amount of positive thinking or self-esteem building will change that fact, and you better figure out a way to live in light of that fact because other instances are pending.

  A woman recommended by our midwife has come to the house to give us birthing instructions. It is a cold day, but the sun is shining warmly through the window and spotlighting the carpet of the living room floor, where we are pretending to have a baby. The instructor has been very thorough, and it is neat to receive instruction right here in our home. At one point she puts Anneliese on all fours in a stance intended to relieve lower back pain during labor. Then she rotates me around back in a massage position, and Anneliese and I get the giggles because, without putting too fine a point on it, the maneuvering reminds us of how we wound up in this situation in the first place. When the instructor leaves, I fear she may be upset with us over our lack of seriousness, but what she may not realize is that this hour on the carpet has been the best date Anneliese and I have had for months. It has been too long since we had a conspiratorial giggle. Last month I bought a card with a line drawing of a beautiful lady in a red backless gown. Today I took colored pencils and put a round red belly on the lady, then two valentine hearts—one hovering above the lady’s chest and one tinier one above the curve of her belly.

  When we married, I was a bachelor of some thirty-nine years. Anneliese was a single mom raising a three-year-old while teaching Spanish at the university. We met in a public library when I was seated at a table selling books. I carry an abiding image of Amy’s pale blue eyes looking up at me and her mother’s matching pair just above. For our first official date we met in a coffee shop, talked forever, and then took a long walk that is currently approaching its fifth year. While I took some ribbing about the evaporation of my singletude and gave up my New Auburn address, it is Anneliese who is bearing the brunt of change: leaving her teaching position, carrying the baby, homeschooling Amy, and tending our new place the many days I am away or sequestered in the office. I love my wife for her willingness to take these leaps, her strengths where I am weak, the way when she smiles it is utterly without reserve, and yes, her clear blue eyes, as startling this morning as when I saw them in the library that first day.

  She has been caught off guard by the difficulty of this pregnancy. When she was carrying Amy she spent a month hiking in Central America—at one point climbing a volcano. She experienced none of the persistent weariness, or the spates of contractions that come and go. Her belly is big now, and she walks with her shoulders back to counter the weight. I watch her sometimes when she doesn’t know, and just like when I sit down to write her a card, the close study precipitates a sense of pleasant wonder that I have a wife and this is her. Last night we went out to eat with friends, and it was good to see Anneliese laughing in conversation. While we were waiting for the food to arrive, Anneliese and I held hands beneath the table, and at one point she gave my wedding ring a little wiggle just like when we were first married and couldn’t quite beli
eve it. When we left the restaurant we held hands again and she leaned her head against my shoulder as we walked to the car and I opened the door for her like any good boy on a first date would.

  The big farmhouse in Chippewa County is mostly empty now. Mom and Dad still provide respite care for profoundly disabled children, and they have full-time responsibility for Tagg, a boy who was two months old when his drunken uncle shook him violently. Tagg’s injuries were devastating—he cannot dress, feed, or care for himself, he cannot speak, and he is prone to outbursts of hitting and biting. The county asked my parents to provide temporary care until the court case was resolved—eleven years later he remains in their home.

  The last kids to leave the old-fashioned way—by graduating from high school—were my sisters Kathleen and Migena. Kathleen joined the family when she was three months old (I remember her foster parents handing her through the door of our Volkswagen bus in a basket). Migena’s route was far more circuitous. When her brother Donard arrived in New Auburn as part of a foreign exchange program, well-meaning citizens bunked him with another Albanian exchange student, not realizing they were from opposing factions in Albania’s rapidly escalating civil war. To preserve the peace, Donard moved in with Mom and Dad, after which they discovered his paperwork had been forged as a means of moving him safely out of the country. One night after Don had settled into school and become a familiar face at the table, Mom and Dad’s phone rang. It was Migena, in tears and calling from Michigan. She had made it to the United States with another student exchange program, only to discover upon arrival that the Michigan program would not provide her with graduation credits, and thus no opportunity to continue her education in the United States. Mom and Dad drove to Michigan and brought her home.