Pontoon

by Garrison Keillor

  In his pants. In the gymnasium in front of the entire student body. A wave of shock swept the crowd, amid some tittering and whistling from the boys. Kirk dropped the flowers, mortified. Mrs. Hoglund sent Debbie to Mr. Halvorson’s office. Mary Ellen burst into tears, her big moment destroyed. Mr. Johnson the band director struck up the band and they played “I’ll See You In My Dreams” and the ceremony was all over. Mr. H. told Debbie that he didn’t know what to do with her and suspended her from school for a week. She didn’t care. She didn’t care!

  At the prom, she wore her bra outside her dress and carried a pint of vodka in her little silver lamé purse and she was sent home, but she caroused in the parking lot with some boys who nobody had seen before and danced around singing “Roll me over in the clover, roll me over, lay me down and do it again.” Her father had to come get her and she said something to him that made him put his head in his hands and weep. Typical.

  At graduation (people said) she was buck naked under her blue gown, and when she left for Concordia College in August, people thought that now maybe she’d settle down. She got into choir, which was bound to be a good influence, and her roommate was a nice Christian girl from Bemidji, so Mr. and Mrs. Detmer were hoping for a turnaround. Mrs. Detmer was a saint. She was ready to forgive. She felt that Debbie was only immature and needed to impress other girls with her wild ways but now she would realize her innate gifts and become a teacher. Mrs. Detmer asked the Ladies Prayer Circle to uphold Debbie in prayer, and they did, and her second semester Debbie took a philosophy course and read Kierkegaard who fired up her jets and convinced her that she was not the person other people thought she was, she was a pilgrim and an artist and a free spirit and she headed for California. Mr. Detmer braced himself for a call from the Coast saying she’d been found dead in an alley.

  She drove west with Craig who thought she loved him but he was only her ride. She dumped him three days after arriving in San Francisco. She took a room at the Sam Wong Hotel off Broadway and hung out at City Lights bookstore and worked in a topless bar. A good Lutheran girl and now she served drinks to old men who ogled her tits. But she loved the city. Men could wear cheery pastels there and people seemed not to brood over things that happened in the past and the climate was gentle and misty. And a pretty girl can make friends easily. A month later, tired of old men and their needs, she hitchhiked north to Bolinas, a last outpost of hippiedom, home of a Lutheran ashram run by a guru from Fargo, the Rama Lama Rasmussen, which met in a large yurt, and the Sunday sermon was about mercy, and the service was celebratory, with dancing—also it was clothing optional—Scripture said, “Think not what ye shall wear” and the Bolinas Lutherans didn’t think about it at all—some dressed in shorts and T-shirts, some simply wore palm fronds loosely around the waist, some were buck naked. It was fun for a while and then she got herpes and that took some of the shine off it. She joined an alternative dance collective called the Day Star Tribe and she became Solar Lily Daystar in a self-affirmation ritual at dawn on the beach, members of the tribe running and leaping lightly and rolling and whanging on little drums and playing their rain sticks. She lived with a man who believed in multi-headed deities, and also that dyslexic children could be helped by having them read aloud to cats. Then she got into meridians. She studied with a medium named Hadley and was in love with her for six months and then the meridians changed and she went up the coast to Eureka College to be a dorm mother, though the dorms were wide open, no restrictions, and some students kept snakes for pets, and cooked in their rooms, and held witchcraft ceremonies; filled their rooms with bizarre artifacts, boulders, neon signs, stuffed raccoons, and it was all good. Eureka banned the study of colonialist literature—all fiction and poetry by authors living in countries that exploited other peoples—and every May Day they all ran nude through the campus, and that was where Debbie met Dawn. They were naked and running and stopped to chat about yoga and it turned out that Dawn was a veterinary aromatherapist—she owned All Creatures Wellness Center in a strip mall in Petaluma—and Debbie, who was tired of listening to rich kids pour out their troubles, asked Dawn to teach her the business of treating puppydogs and kitty-cats with eucalyptus and peppermint and chamomile.

  *

  “Smell is a primary sense for animals. Pets are forced to live in an alien olfactory environment of powerful chemical odors and the result is illness and suffering. Eighty-five percent of dogs suffer from depression caused by the psychological stress of alien odors triggering the flight reflex in animals imprisoned indoors, and what we’ve developed is a whole schematic of cleansing natural aromas put into a mister and the animal lies on a bed or on our lap and inhales the aroma and we cure animal depression. You can see the difference. It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. Making happy animals is good karma. Tail wagging doesn’t mean happiness, just neediness. A dog who sleeps all day is depressed—cats overeat because of depression. We make a difference.”

  Dawn was the daughter of an Army colonel. She became a cat wrangler for movies, training professional cats, keeping them calm, which was how she discovered the power of aroma. Vicks VapoRub spread on the inside of the elbow: it was magic. So Debbie moved in with her in Petaluma. Got a job at Spice ’N Everything Nice. A fabulous shop where there wasn’t just one of everything like back home but twenty different kinds of oregano, Mexican, Turkish, Egyptian, Moroccan—for cinnamon, there was Samoan, Sri Lankan, Slovenian. Tired of boneless breast of chicken? Put some Mexican oregano on it, some Slovenian cinnamon, why not?

  *

  She cooked for Dawn and boned up on chemistry and animal psychology. Dawn was a true idealist, but she also experienced big mood swings. Lavender made her moody. Mimosa made her lose all sense of personal boundaries. Too much of it and she’d sit on the laps of strangers on buses or in cafés. She’d go to the library and snuggle up next to men she’d never met. She was a compulsive hugger. And a strong one. She’d walk down the street and grab hold of strangers and squeeze them so tight they panicked and started flailing at her and then she hugged harder. She hugged milkmen, clerks in stores, panhandlers. She always had a bad cold. She always was late to things. People avoided her when possible. And her arms ached. Once she drove through a grove of eucalyptus and into the ditch, got out, took her clothes off, and when the highway patrol found her, she could not tell them the day of the week or the name of the President. She was ticketed for Driving While Dazed.

  Eucalyptus also affected her depth perception. Six months after Debbie joined All Creatures as a therapist, Dawn swerved to avoid hitting a deer and her car plunged off Highway 1 and over the cliff into the Pacific two hundred feet below and she was killed instantly. Debbie took over All Creatures in Dawn’s memory and grew the practice, as people who’d been put off by the hugging returned. She was a professional in white smock and pale green slacks, no longer the anguished pilgrim. She was earning money and enjoying it. She loved her Wednesday massage with Lala and she loved shopping for Julianne O’Connell clothes and Lauren Thavis shoes. She loved her Lexus with the three-thousand-dollar sound system. Business boomed. And then one day Tom Cruise dropped in with a big fat furball of a cat in his hands—Tom was on the verge of panic, weeping, panting—he confessed he had sat on the cat during a very intense phone conversation—and Debbie took Mumbles into the back room and gave her a dish of water and blew in her ear and the cat was fine. She sent Tom home with a chamomile-scented chew toy. But after the story appeared in People with a picture of Debbie in her white outfit and a grinning Tom Cruise (“There are little miracles in life that validate and center us, when suddenly we see over the edge and into the heart of things”), business boomed; she opened a branch in Westwood and another in Mountain View. She was besieged with clients. Bentleys and BMWs double-parked out front and the personal assistants of VIPs sat in the waiting room, with dogs and cats huddled in luxurious carrying cases, and others flying in from Dallas, Palm Beach and the Berkshires. In certain circles, if you were not aromati
zing your dog or cat, your friends would give you a pamphlet, “Pet Stewards, Not Owners,” and expect you to do the right thing.

  And Debbie learned something you can’t learn in Lake Wobegon. Some people have much too much money and if you charge them an outrageous amount for something, say two hundred dollars for a whiff of persimmon for Pookie—heck, three-hundred bucks—this confirms their wealth and makes them extremely happy! Yes! Thank you for challenging my generosity, they think as they thrust the Visa card at you. I am a person who is not concerned about money! Not at all! I pay ten dollars for a bran muffin made from hand-rolled bran and premium raisins and baked by a French woman with a doctorate from the Sorbonne! So I am delighted to pay $2,362.50 for the well being of Meow Tse-Tung and F. Cat Fitzgerald. Other people would have conniptions at the thought, but I am beyond petty materialistic concerns! Here is your money and let me add on 25% for a tip! She had no training, was inventing the science of aromatherapy as she went along, used inexpensive materials, and yet the animals seemed to thrive on the attention. The owners thought so. And the higher the price, the greater the benefit.

  Growing up among nickel-pinchers, she had a hard time accepting this. She felt apologetic about taking money for what was after all her sacred duty to care for life. But Dawn had drilled into her that Our fee is a way for our clients to know how much they love their animals. And All Creatures grew and opened new branches and Debbie trained new therapists and took on partners and finally sold the business for ten point two million dollars and took a year off to regroup and to enjoy her home in Santa Cruz and that’s where she met Brent. He was the only heterosexual male in her yoga group, and he offered to teach her to surf. He sold shared-time on executive jets. He had been a grad student in philosophy at Berkeley, working on a paper deconstructing the work of Sartre, whose subtext, he discovered, was all about a fear of dogs, and then his father, an exec at Hewlett-Packard, took him on a business trip to Morocco, the two of them aboard a 12-passenger Gulfstream, eating prime rib and knocking back some smoky thirty-year-old Scotch, served by a uniformed steward who then made up the chairs into beds with fine cotton sheets and they slept their way over the Atlantic—he thought, I have spent enough time in libraries. Jean-Paul Sartre is meaningless. So a big dog jumped on him when he was small—so what? Who cares? He was made Hewlett-Packard’s coordinator of executive air service. And a year later, he started up a company, Shoo Fly, helping business leaders recognize the cost-effectiveness of luxury travel in private jets.

  Debbie was happy at last. She was rich and in love. She made peace with her parents. She flew them to Santa Cruz, though they were terrified of flying and she took them to the Café de Mare and waved to Harrison Ford whose cat she had treated and hugged him and introduced him to her parents. Mrs. D. ate linguini with clams and got ferocious diarrhea, so they spent that whole week at Debbie’s house, close to a flush toilet. Mr. D. looked at her new kitchen and asked how much the Mexican ceramic tile cost and when she told him, he was staggered and never recovered from the shock. Everything he looked at, he priced by multiplying its worth times thirty. It wore him out. She was a different Debbie, nicer in a way and they liked her red hair. She didn’t yell at them about their politics—both Detmers thought the sun rose and set on Ronald Reagan—and she told them she loved them. Over and over. She hugged them numerous times. She held hands with them and invited them to meditate with her. It was odd. How did she earn all that money? But certainly it was better than her dying in the alley from a heroin overdose.

  They hoped to meet Brent but he was away on business. She showed them his picture. He looked nice enough, but why didn’t he take off the sunglasses. “Bright light is bad for him,” she said, “it can trigger a manic episode. Once he got very manic and tried to tell the crew of a United flight to Chicago that he absolutely had to fly to Costa Rica and right now, and the way he stood with one hand in his pocket, it was a problem. A big problem. He was put on a No Fly list. Thank goodness he had Shoo Fly.”

  11. THE DECLINE OF MR. DETMER

  Before the naked Mr. Detmer lifted his right foot to put it into the leghole of his briefs and his big toe caught in the elastic band and he lost his balance and toppled over and whacked his shiny head on the bathtub and entered a period of religious apotheosis, he had been an amiable pillar of the community, a friendly eminence at civic occasions, a booster, a Rotarian, but now that he was convinced that the Last Judgment was at hand, nobody invited him to lunch anymore. He was the president emeritus of Mist County Co-op Power & Light, and still occupied the big sunny office on the top floor of the Central Building with a commanding view of the lake. He could look out and see men in boats angling for the wily sunfish, except now he listened to radio evangelists wail about liberals and avoiding the unclean thing. He used to be a benevolent man, handing out gifts. Everybody from the Girl Scouts to the Good Shepherd Home came pussyfooting into Mr. Detmer’s office and made their pitch and he smiled and wrote out a check. No more. One sharp blow to the head ended that.

  For years on the Fourth of July, on the steps of the Central Building, it was he who declaimed the Declaration of Independence at high noon, immediately preceding the Living Flag, and every year he got a lot of compliments on it, and then the July Fourth committee asked him to edit it and he said no. If you’re going to read the Declaration of Independence, you have to read the Declaration of Independence. So they shit-canned it. It was death by memo. “To: Mr. Detmer—The arrangements committee has instructed me to inquire as to the possibility of shortening your 4th of July presentation in the interest of economizing on time and making the occasion more fun for everyone, particularly families with small children.” Your presentation! This was a sacred document of our nation!! Presentation? A presentation is a home economist talking about table setting! This is the manifesto that declared us a nation!

  He’d been rooked. Royally screwed. “Daddy, just do the short version,” said Mrs. D. No, it was the principle of the thing.

  Small children, he felt, could profit from being made to sit quietly and listen to a man read the paper that made America America, but what offended him was getting a memo—not a phone call or a visit—but a memo. So he whipped one back. “To: Committee—I couldn’t agree more. To hell with the Declaration. It happened a long time ago and who cares? Let’s not force people to suffer through it, let’s have a pie-eating contest instead.” And so that’s what they did. A pie-eating contest, an egg toss, and a three-legged race. Unbelievable.

  And then the worst blow of all: nobody told him how much they missed hearing him read. Nobody. He waited for complaints to surface and none did. He thought of writing an anonymous letter to the Herald Star (“I was disappointed to hear that our community has turned its back on the Fourth of July, the birthday of freedom in our country,” etc. etc.) and sign it Disgusted, but he was not the devious type. Instead, he quietly disappeared from the Chamber of Commerce, the Boosters Club, Rotary, the church board, the Boy Scouts, and faded into the woodwork, thinking that surely someone would say, “Wally, what’s happened to you? Where’d you go?” And a couple of guys did, but without much real remorse.

  Unbeknownst to most, MCCPL had been absorbed in 1998 by the NorCom network and Mr. Detmer’s job had become ceremonial, which suited him fine. Minneapolis was running the show now and he was happy to step aside and let the big boys have the headaches. He sat in his swivel chair at the big oak desk and worked on an epic poem: Sunshine in the Night: A History of the Electrification of Lake Wobegon and Environs.

  The glimmering lights of the little town

  Shone like a beacon for miles around

  To many a farmhouse in the gloom

  And folks who sat in shadowy room

  And tried to read by kerosene lamp

  Like soldiers in some foreign camp

  Cast their eyes to Lake Wobegon

  And dreamed that the swift advancing dawn

  Of modern times would reach them soon

  And
turn their midnight into noon.

  A history of electrification in rhymed verse—men and women enjoying recreation and refreshment as efficient electric-powered machines performed the tasks that so burdened their ancestors—and he was halfway through it, on line 852—“The glory that was radio/Bringing opera and quiz show/With the turn of a dial/And comedians to make you smile”—and that was when he cracked his skull and suddenly electrification seemed insignificant. Man was in ever greater darkness than before. Immorality ran rampant.

  LOCAL MAN SUFFERS CONCUSSION

  The rescue squad was called to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Detmer on Saturday morning to investigate a fall. Someone in the home had slipped and struck his head on a bathroom appliance. It was determined that he had suffered a mild concussion and he is now resting comfortably at home and is expected to recover fully.