Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

by Garrison Keillor

  I could no more stand up and sing in front of other people than I could flap my arms and fly. My one venture into the realm of entertainment was seventh-grade choir, when we traipsed around to nursing homes singing Christmas carols to slack-jawed people who were no longer mobile and had no choice about their entertainment and were liable to pee in their pants. When you stand and sing “Silent night, holy night, / All is calm, all is bright,” and see a big pool of urine spreading on the floor around the wheelchairs, and hear an old lady cry “Go get the ponies!” it does not inspire a person to want to perform again.

  Kate knew sophisticated songs. She read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. She smoked. When she was in the mood, she spoke in a Hepburn glissando, cool and thrilling—she’d say, “Darling, what a day I have had, I’m in an absolute state, the things I put up with, don’t ask me about it”—definitely not a Lake Wobegon way of talking, and she’d reach into her coat pocket and pull out her Herbert Tareytons and plant a cigarette between her lips and say, “Darling, I have been dying for this since noon,” and light it and let the smoke trickle out her mouth and draw it up her nose. She learned to smoke at Bible camp, from some unsaved kids the Brethren brought in for conversion, and she also learned from them how to swear and dance the shimmy. “Sweet pea,” she said, “it is awfully hard to be in absolute top form when you’re surrounded by Lutherans.”

  That spring, her poem “soliloquy” was rejected by Miss Lewis for The Literary Leaf—death is easy like taking a bath

  with an electric fan and waving hello to god

  you could die like walking in front of a bus

  or jumping into the big blue air

  or into the lake

  or doing almost anything

  you could die by living in minnesota

  and forgetting your scarf

  or remembering your scarf

  and it catches on the axle and strangles you

  god is love but

  he doesn’t necessarily drop

  everything and go save you

  does he

  Miss Lewis was horrified. She told Kate she was a very sick girl. She sent the poem home to my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Sugar, and it scared them silly. How could Kate say such crazy things? And putting an electric fan in the bath? Where did she come up with something so grisly? And why wasn’t god capitalized?

  “It’s only a poem,” said Kate. She pointed out that a soliloquy is a speech to one’s self and that it wasn’t her talking, it was the person in the poem. Nonetheless, Sugar hustled around and locked up all the knives and razor blades and small electric appliances, and hid the rope and the garden hose.

  She kept Ruth and Sugar in a constant uproar, wondering what she would do next. She announced that she planned to attend Athena College in Melisma, Iowa, where, on May Day every year, the students run naked as jaybirds across the quad and through the fountain and into the arboretum (Prof Doffs Duds at May Day Do, was the headline in the Minneapolis Star). Uncle Sugar said he would rather eat a can of Dutch cleanser than have her attend a school like Athena. But Kate just laughed. “Darling,” she said to me, “I don’t intend to spend my life baking cookies and waxing the kitchen floor. These poor women! They think that, if they’re very quiet and smiley and keep their floors clean, everybody will like them. I am not a scrubwoman. I am an artist, my darling. So are you. Artists are put here to paint big strokes of color in a dull, gray world—and if some people prefer the dull, gray world, too bad for them. Don’t be a bump on a log. Wake up and die right.”

  A few days after the “soliloquy” scandal, Kate waltzed into school in a blue angora sweater unbuttoned three buttons from the top, a dramatic slutty touch. She seemed even more coltish and Oh darling-ish than usual, flying around the halls, crying out Woohoo and blowing kisses and striking a come-hither pose and hugging people. It was the day of the spring talent show. The whole student body packed into the auditorium, and the lights dimmed, and the spotlight focused on the microphone in front of the blue and gold L.W.H.S. curtain. I ached to walk out on that stage in a shiny white suit and a Stetson, twanging on a guitar, singing a Doo Dads song like “I’m Weird,” but it wasn’t in me, not with my nursing-home background.

  A girls’ sextet sang “Green Cathedral” and a boy in a red-striped suit lip-synched to a Spike Jones song and a sweaty girl in a pink formal played “Deep Purple” at the piano in a studious way. Leonard Larsen recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Painful. The boy took himself quite seriously. The sextet returned and sang “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Kate hated them because they wouldn’t let her join, even though she sang better than any of them. They rejected her because she wasn’t cute and perky enough. They sang a third song about wanting to be loved by you, boop-boop-a-doop, in which Cathy Tollerud did a stutter-step rag-doll dance that showed flashes of white panties, and boys around me whooped and whistled, and right after that came Kate, determined to show them up. She danced to the Doo Dads’ recording of “Dance Me”—Baby, baby, I’m your man.

  Kiss me, squeeze me, hold my hand.

  Kiss me sweet and kiss me strong.

  And dance me, dance me, all night long.

  As she danced, she pulled her sweater down so you could see her bare shoulders. Then she turned her back and showed off more of her shoulders. She didn’t seem to be wearing anything underneath. She stood with her hands on the sweater as if she might take the whole thing off, and boys whistled and yelled, “Yes! Yes! Do it!” and Mr. Halvorson sidled toward the stage and she smiled at him and winked and flounced off to whoops and yells, and came back for a deep bow that revealed a little more. After the show, Daryl Magendanz saw her in the hall and grabbed for her bra strap and didn’t find one and threw back his big flat head and hollered, “She ain’t wearin no UN-der-wear!”

  Kate was sent to the school nurse, Mrs. Dahlberg, for inspection. Kate refused to cooperate. She told Mrs. Dahlberg to sit on it and spin. The nurse lunged at Kate and threw her up against the wall and was about to put her hand up Kate’s sweater when Kate squirmed loose and raced out the door and down the hall past the English classrooms and came pedaling for dear life around the corner by home economics as I was opening the door to the boys’ can.

  I had gotten out of Miss Lewis’s class to go to the library and look up the Globe Theatre in the encyclopedia so I could make a model of it out of balsa wood.

  Kate yelped at me and slid into the can ahead of me and we hustled into the far stall and latched the door and I sat on the throne and she sat on my lap with her legs braced against the door.

  “I don’t know as this is a good idea,” I said, but actually it was a lovely idea, her sitting on my lap. She put one hand on the toilet-paper roll and lay back against me, her legs slightly bent, her brown shoes on the green door, and then she said, “You better pull down your pants so it looks like you’re taking a dump.” She hoisted herself up an inch and I slid my trousers and underpants down, and she sat on my naked lap. She told me what happened in the nurse’s office. I put my arms around her. I could feel her ribcage, breathing, her back against me. I put my face in her hair. She was a little heavy but it didn’t matter.

  A door slammed open and the nurse yelled, “Who’s in here?”

  I jumped and felt my innards clench and there were two little splashes in the toilet. Kate bent over to keep from laughing. She clapped both hands over her mouth.

  “I said, who’s in here?”

  “Me,” I said. Kate snorted.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did a girl come in here?”

  “No, of course not, Mrs. Dahlberg.”

  “Come out here and let’s have a look at you.”

  Kate shook from the effort of not laughing out loud. She scootched up and I slid out from under and opened the stall door and looked out and there was Mrs. Dahlberg breathing fire. Her hair had come loose and she was grinding her teeth. “Step out of there, young man,” she said. She was so ticked o
ff she didn’t even recognize me as Kate’s cousin. I stepped out, Mr. Tree Toad, pants around my ankles, shirttails out, my hand over my pecker, and she looked at me with pure loathing. “What do you think you’re doing out of class? You came in here to smoke, didn’t you.”

  “I had to go to the toilet.”

  She snorted. “Let’s see your hall pass.”

  I dug the pass out of my pants pocket, which entailed letting go of my pecker, which dangled free. “Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said. She looked at the pass. “This says you’re supposed to be in the library.”

  “It was an emergency. I had to go real bad.”

  She shook her head. “If I don’t see you in the library in five minutes, young man, there better be a reason why.” She wheeled around and out the door and lit out down the hall.

  The door slammed and Kate almost split a gut. “Boy, she scared the poop right out of you.” Then she saw I was blushing and she hoisted herself up and I slid under her, on the throne. “Good you had your pants down.”

  I asked her what we should do now.

  She said, “Sit tight, darling, and wait for the coast to clear.”

  I sat, half naked, with my arms around her middle and my pecker getting hard, and I poked it down and closed my legs over it. I could feel the tip touch the cold porcelain. It was big. I was scared to think she might be aware of this. Also, I was wondering what to do if, when I pulled my pants up, it stuck out in front like a porch. How could I conceal this? I had no books to hold in front of me.

  She said, “You know, they just might kick me out of school for pushing Mrs. Dahlberg.” She chuckled. “Oh well. If they kick me out, I’ll run away from home. Two can play that game.” She said she’d go up to Roger’s dad’s hunting shack in the woods near Bemidji and stay there for a while.

  “Roger Guppy?” I said. She nodded. I had seen her with Roger at various times lately and chose to believe it was mere coincidence. Roger Guppy was two years older than she and nobody you’d ever expect her to be interested in. He was not an artist. He dug septic tanks with his dad. He had a big hank of blond hair that he slicked back in a ducktail. He was a ballplayer. He hung out with the ballplayer crowd. He was somebody who had probably never heard of The New Yorker.

  “I could come visit you up in the woods,” I said. She said that’d be nice.

  That’d be nice. Her exact words.

  “I wouldn’t want you to be alone up there,” I said.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, sweet pea.”

  I assumed that her That’d be nice meant that Roger Guppy would not be at the hunting shack with her.

  Two boys came in and unzipped and a moment later two powerful streams hit the steel urinal like horses pissing. I sat and imagined living with Kate in a shack in the woods. Swimming in the Mississippi. Talking late into the night. Talking about everything. Lying around writing stories for The New Yorker and reading them to her. Pure heaven.

  When the boys left, she said she had to go straight home and put on a bra.

  I said, “You don’t have a bra on?”

  And she took my hands and put them over her sweater, over her breasts, small and soft and unholstered, the soft nipples. I didn’t squeeze or stroke, just let my hands rest there. It was sweet that she trusted me. A tender moment.

  “Why didn’t you wear one?”

  “I didn’t feel like it.”

  Grandpa was looking down and saying, “I don’t believe it.” Jesus saying, “Yeah, there’s more and more of this sort of thing going on nowadays.” I took a deep breath and Kate stood up. “I’ll see if the coast is clear,” she said. I stuffed my pecker down one trouser leg. It hung there like a garden implement. She pretended not to notice. We went skittering down the back stairs and out the door by the metalworking shops—a boy in welding mask glanced up as we passed—and then we were on McKinley Street and heading downtown. Fugitives.

  I was scared of what Mr. Halvorson might do to us, but Kate was cool as a cucumber. “May as well enjoy your freedom once you got it,” she said. It was a poetic spring day. Two cats lay on the sidewalk, soaking up the sun; meadow larks sang in a vacant lot. The steeple of the Lutheran church rose up before us. Inside a soprano was practicing. Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation.

  We went down the hill and across Main Street, which was almost deserted, and headed toward the trees by the swimming beach.

  I was scared somebody would see us and call up the school, but she just laughed—“Don’t be such a gloomy Gus,” she said. She sat down and leaned against a pair of birch trees. I sat next to her.

  “This is what I call a good day,” she said. “You ever worry that you might turn out to have a really really boring life? I do. I worry about it all the time. I look at my mother, ironing sheets, putting her spice rack in order; I think I could end up like that.”

  I said I doubted that very much.

  She said, “Only way to avoid it is to move away, darling. A person needs stimulation. It’s the oxygen of the spirit. Here, you’re practically dead by the time you’re thirty.”

  I said I was worried I’d wind up going to hell.

  She gave me a pitying look. “Either you’re going or you’re not, and God knows which it is, so there’s not much to be done about it, is there?”

  I knew her reasoning was faulty, and yet it appealed to me, in a way.

  I walked her home, and there in the front hall was Aunt Ruth, her eyes red from weeping. She had been watching for us out the window. The school nurse had called. Ruth sat on the couch and took a deep breath and asked Kate if she honestly felt that pulling your sweater half off your body was the sort of behavior that glorified the name of Jesus Christ. And how in the world could you go around without underwear? What must people be thinking?

  “My bra broke,” said Kate. “So I took it off.”

  “As Christians we are to glorify the Lord in everything we do. How does this glorify Him, to do a striptease?”

  “It was only for fun,” said Kate.

  “Fun!!”

  “Yes, darling Mother. Fun. And it was loads of fun!” And she flounced up the stairs to her room.

  My aunt gave me a haunted look. What could a person do with such a girl?

  That night, the sky turned dark after suppertime. Black thunderheads floated in from the west like a range of mountains; the streetlights came on. People emerged from their homes to stand out on the sidewalk and watch the storm’s approach, admire the purplish light, the stillness, and then the bolts of lightning ripping the sky, thunder booming. I sat on the porch, the older sister sitting next to Daddy on the daybed, Mother pouring him a glass of iced tea, and I expected one of those bolts to come straight into my chest. My toasted black body crumpled on the porch swing, and Mother weeping over me and Kate running in and blurting out the terrible truth: We were in the boys’ toilet together and he took his pants down and touched my breasts.

  And they carry my body away to finish the job of cremation, and an angel descends, holding a flaming sword, and speaks in a loud voice to the people gathered in the street:

  He took his pants down and touched her breasts. And the Lord God dealt with him. Let it be a lesson unto the children of Lake Wobegon. Lo, saith the Lord God, keep thy hearts pure and thy minds centered on that which is edifying and let not thy pants be taken down except that thou washeth thyself and changeth to other garments or emptieth thy bowels thereof.

  The missing bra, the dance, the disobedience in school—these things did not escape the eye of our watchful family. Mother heard about them. Sugar and Ruth were horrified. Aunt Flo knew all about it. She knew everything. Once Kate and I ran into Aunt Flo downtown and Kate quickly hid her cigarette behind her back and said, “Hi, Aunt Flo,” and when Flo passed, Kate smiled at me and exhaled smoke, cool as could be. But Aunt Flo knew. She didn’t miss a trick.

  11

  Underwood

  The lawn is a thing of beauty. Anytime I’m out working on i
t, I get compliments. People stop and say, “What’d you do to get that lawn so nice!” Mr. Stenstrom came over once and said I should go into the lawn business. No comment from the Andersons: the line of demarcation between their property and ours is quite clear, like the Iron Curtain.

  I lie on the big porch swing, looking at Look magazine. Mother is perusing the Star and Daddy lies on the daybed, eyes closed, mouth open, snoring. Directly beneath Daddy, a man and a blonde babe embrace, and under the picture it says: He pulled the lacy black bra from her twin mounds and pushed hard against her, his manhood hard as a judge’s gavel. She shivered as his tongue caressed her hot mouth.

  It’s tucked inside Look, next to an article entitled “The World in the Year 2000,” with a picture of the Family of Tomorrow in their bubble-top home, their rocket-backpacks stacked by the airlock door, talking over a picturephone as they eat their little food capsules. The man is bending to kiss the blonde babe’s breasts. God knows I am staring at this. God knows if tonight the sky over Lake Wobegon will be filled with angels singing and Jesus will descend to call up to heaven all of the Sanctified Brethren except the ones looking at dirty pictures.

  Mother is reading the latest about Ricky and Dede. They abandoned the station wagon in Billings and stole another car and evaded a sheriff’s blockade near Missoula and fled west. Authorities believe they are stealing money from newspaper boxes. Ricky wrote a poem and sent it to the Star, which has turned it over to the FBI.