Uncle Sugar comes ambling up the walk in his white pants and a palm-frond sportshirt, trailing a cloud of cologne. He is carrying a black Underwood typewriter.
“What a beautiful lawn,” he says.
White shoes and pink socks.
In his youth, Sugar sang with the Eldon Miller Orchestra, and then he met Ruth and got saved. Booze had kept his wheels greased, and then Jesus straightened him out and brought him into the Sanctified Brethren. Thank you, Jesus. But he still dresses like a singer and has long singer-hair. It is swept back on the sides like fenders and some is swooped up over the top to cover the bald spot. Hairpins hold the swoop in place.
Sugar sets the typewriter gently on the floor and eases himself into a wicker rocker, a tight squeeze for a wide butt. “‘Maybe I ought to hire Gary to do our lawn. I sure can’t keep up with it,” he says.
I smile. I am looking at the typewriter.
“Have you heard about this boy who attacked his mother?” says Mother. Yes, he has. “Gary knew him in school.”
“I didn’t know him well,” I say.
“They were in class together,” says Mother.
“What sort of kid was he?” says Sugar.
I would rather not talk about Ricky Guppy, a person I knew briefly from rope climbing, nobody you could call a friend, but here is my uncle with an Underwood typewriter, and I don’t wish to offend him either.
“He was extremely quiet and pretty much kept to himself. Nobody knew him that well. He was a bus kid.”
Uncle Sugar nods. This all fits the pattern all right. The silent loner. “What I don’t understand is why he’d kidnap his girlfriend. Why get her mixed up in it?”
I would like to examine the Underwood closely and press on its keys, but it’s never wise to show too much eagerness around these people. They’re apt to yank the rug out from under you.
“I’m not sure he kidnapped her,” says Mother.
“Of course he did,” says Sugar. “Why would a girl want to drive off with a crazy person and get into all that trouble?”
“I wonder if she didn’t go of her own free will.”
“But why?”
Daddy hoists himself up from the daybed. He says it is not a fit subject to discuss in front of children.
“What is your secret of lawn care?” says Uncle Sugar, putting Ricky on the shelf. “You got some secret elixir you pump into it at night?”
Daddy mutters something about it being a good summer for lawns.
Mother offers Sugar a slice of rhubarb pie, but he is feeling a little gassy, so he’ll take a rain check, thank you.
“That’s a beautiful typewriter,” says Mother.
“Bought it a year ago, thinking I’d write a history of my family,” says Uncle Sugar, “and of course I didn’t have the time or the talent. Wrote two pages and that was it. Of course, with my family, nobody wanted a history anyway. Too many horse thieves in the closet.” He chuckles. “It’s just been gathering dust.” He turns to me, beaming. “So I thought Gary here might as well have it. Thought he’d put it to better use.”
I am stunned. I had no idea. God. A typewriter.
“Doesn’t Kate want it?” asks Mother.
“Kate has a typewriter already.”
“This is awfully generous of you,” says Mother. And to me: “What do you say?”
I murmur thank you. The enormity of this gift is truly staggering; it’s as if he gave me the keys to a new car. I promise myself that I will never think snotty things about Uncle Sugar’s hair and his balloon butt ever again. I have lusted for a typewriter for so long.
I kneel on the floor beside it. It is practically brand-new. An Underwood, jet black, with leafy gold lettering, a solid steel frame, the type bars nested in a semicircle, ready to be flung at the page. I press lightly on the round keys, flexing the bar. I rub the frame.
“You better oil that and keep it in good condition,” says Daddy. “And don’t be leaving it down the basement and letting it rust.”
Uncle Sugar says he’s sure I will take very good care of it.
“Well, that’ll be a first,” says Daddy.
Uncle Sugar beams at me. “I know you’ll make good use of it,” he says. I could almost walk over and hug him, but we’re not huggers in this family. I smile back at him my warmest and sincerest smile. He always was my favorite uncle and now he has locked up first place for many years to come.
“You don’t know the first thing about typing,” says Daddy.
“But I do. We had two weeks of it in Miss Lewis’s English class.” I fetch a sheet of paper from the kitchen and place it in the roller and crank the carriage return and type on the field of white, whap-whap-whap—For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. The action is stiff, and I like that; you have to strike with force and give the key a snap with your finger and bang bang bang at the page.
I take out the page and pass it around. “An excellent job,” says Sugar. “Not a single mistake.”
Daddy examines it. A perfect job of typing John 3:16 but he can’t bring himself to say so. Daddy doesn’t believe in compliments. Earlier this evening he was rumbling around woofing about who left the lights on in the bathroom and what do you think we are, movie stars? It’s all I can do to pay the bills around here. If you kids don’t wise up, we’re going to wind up in the poor-house, and don’t think I’m kidding. Do you know what a foster home is? Do you?—maintaining his drumbeat of disapproval to keep us on our toes. The older sister was the one who left the lights on, and she burst into tears and went to her room and hasn’t been seen since, poor thing.
I put the page back in and crank the carriage return a few more times and am strongly tempted to type Pecker. Dong. Horseshit. And pass that to Daddy and see how he likes it. But I type, The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. Fast and accurate. As Miss Lewis taught us.
“I don’t want to see that thing kicking around on the floor, or I’ll take it away from you,” says Daddy, sternly. “If you can’t take care of it, then you don’t deserve to have it.”
“He’ll take care of it,” says Mother.
“Sure, and how many times have I heard that before?” he sighs and lies back on the daybed. He has fought the good fight for conservation of electricity, for regular maintenance and economy, sensible living, hard work, all the Republican virtues, and nobody listens to a word he says, it goes in one ear and out the other.
“Let me show you a little trick,” says Sugar. He kneels down beside me and taps a t and then backspaces and taps an f over it. The superimposed letters make the symbol for the English pound. “Somebody showed me that once,” he says. He smiles at me. “So what do you say? You going to write a book?” He gives me one of those fake chuckles. “If you do, don’t put me in it!” He chortles. “I’ve got enough trouble as it is!”
The fake chuckling of grown-ups is embarrassing. Why laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at?
“Have you been seeing much of Kate this summer?” asks Uncle Sugar.
I say, No, not much, she’s been busy.
He gets back in his chair. He leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “You know this boy named Roger Guppy?”
Not really. He’s quite a bit older. Graduated last year.
“I hear he’s a little wild.”
I wouldn’t know about that. He pitches for the Whippets, that’s all I know.
“He’s the brother of the kid who attacked his mother and stole her car,” says Daddy. “And I believe another brother is that rock-and-roll singer named Jim Dandy. His group got kicked off the radio for singing dirty songs.”
“That’s what has us worried,” says Sugar. “I wish Kate wouldn’t run around with that crowd.”
“And the other brother is in prison,” says Daddy. “And the dad is a heavy drinker, from what I hear.” This is acc
ording to Aunt Flo, who gets her news at the Bon Marché Beauty Salon every Saturday morning and is in the know. Luanne at the Bon Marché knows where the bodies are buried. “Someone told me Kate goes to beer parties with this Roger Guppy person,” says Sugar, looking at me.
I shrug my shoulders. I wouldn’t know the first thing about beer parties.
“Somebody buys a trunkload of beer and they drive off to a rock quarry or some deserted cornfield and stand around and drink and smoke and kids go off in the bushes and neck and goodness knows what,” he says. “I’m worried about her.”
Mother makes a reassuring sound but he shakes his head. “We spoiled her rotten. Gave her everything. Took her on trips. Bought her clothes, a phonograph. She has no idea what it’s like to work for something. And then she goes and does a striptease in school and writes poems about suicide and runs around with this ballplayer from a family of criminals.”
Poor Uncle Sugar’s voice is quavering. He chokes back his tears. “She’s my little girl,” he says to me. “If you knew something bad was happening, you’d tell, wouldn’t you?”
I nod. I have no idea what I’m agreeing to, but I nod because I don’t want him to cry and I want the Underwood typewriter. Clearly it is a token of goodwill, given in hopes that I will keep my eyes open and report back to Uncle Sugar whether Kate is running around to beer parties with Roger Guppy.
I crawl back onto the swing and pick up the copy of Look.
“You like Kate, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to see her get into trouble like that girl Dede, would you?”
He pulls out a hanky and honks into it. Daddy sits in mute agony, looking out toward the streetlights, wishing he were hoofing it toward the Chatterbox Café.
“Kate thinks she knows it all, but she doesn’t. She’s just a small-town girl. It’s so easy to put your trust in some big shot and run off with him and get married—I don’t know what I’d do if she ran off with him. Or died in a car crash because he was drunk. You think about these things when you have a daughter. You think about having to go to the county morgue and identify her body. I don’t see how I could go on living if that happened. I really don’t.”
And now his shoulders shake and he bows his head and sobs and Daddy almost levitates from the daybed. “I’ll go see if the coffee’s ready,” he says, though nobody said a word about wanting coffee. He scoots toward the kitchen. Mother puts a hand on Sugar’s shoulder. “We’re praying for Kate,” she says.
Uncle Sugar is crying for all he’s worth, he sounds like an old badger moaning for its dead. “Let me explain about fractions, Melanie,” said Mr. Britton, reaching for the workbook on the desk in front of her, brushing against her luscious young breasts.—“It’s a terrible thing to fail your own child,” Sugar says. “Where did we go wrong?”—Melanie offered no resistance as he unbuttoned her blouse.—Mother tells me to go see where Daddy went to and bring Sugar a cup of coffee. “Just a minute,” I say. “Go. Now,” she says. “Okay. I’m going.” She was hot as a furnace, moaning, as his manhood pressed against her.—“Go see about the coffee,” says Mother. “I’m okay,” says Sugar. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just being a big baby. It’s time I should be heading home.”—She pulled him into the closet and began to thrust against him violently.—“What are you reading?” says Mother. “Nothing,” I say.—She cried, “Oh, Mr. Britton! Oh my gosh!” as waves of pleasure rolled over her young body.—“Well, it must be something,” she says. “What is it? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”—“Oh God!” she screamed, as the first of several orgasms struck her.—“It’s only a story,” I say. I close Look over the naked algebra student and go into the kitchen. The coffee is boiling on the stove. Daddy is nowhere to be seen. I pour a cup and take it out to the porch, and Sugar says, “I should be going,” but he doesn’t move. Mother sits still. I sit on the swing, with Look. The neighborhood is peaceful. The Stenstroms’ is dark, they’re in Duluth at a Lutheran Ushers’ Convention. Somewhere nearby a car rolls over gravel and stops and the motor shuts off and a door opens. Even the Andersons are at peace in their little house. Perhaps they all killed each other.
And now the piano plays the old theme and the Trojan Troubadour speaks to us of hybrid seed corn and sings—Let’s go dancing in Lansing,
Let’s have a ball in St. Paul.
Love is torrid in Fargo-Moorhead,
There’s euphoria and joy in Peoria, Illinois.
Whenever you ask a girl from Nebraska,
You know she’ll always say yes.
Forget Paris and Rome, let’s just stay home
And find love in the Midwest.
Out there in the dark, Kate sits in a car with Roger Guppy, perhaps on his lap, his face buried in her hair, his hands fiddling with her breasts. Daddy is hiding upstairs. “Good night,” says Uncle Sugar, still distraught, and gets up and heads home. The sprinkler goes around and around and there is the smell of fresh-boiled coffee in the air. Nothing moves on Green Street once Sugar’s footsteps die out around the corner. Mother and her tree-toad boy sitting on the porch, and above us, Grandpa looking out the window of heaven, and Jesus standing beside him.
Grandpa says, “Jesus, why did you give an Underwood typewriter to a boy who thinks dirty thoughts all the time? All he’s going to do is create filth.”
Jesus says, “Well, we’ll see what he does with it.”
“We brought him up right and he’s no different from those Guppy boys.”
“Yeah, that sort of thing happens sometimes.”
I go inside and turn the sprinkler off, and when I come back, Mother asks if I remember when we lived on the farm and she went away to New York to see Daddy. Of course I do.
—Did you ever feel I abandoned you?
—No.
—Aunt Eva took good care of you, didn’t she.
—Yes.
—She was always wonderful to you.
—She was.
—I was jealous of her. All the things she was good at. Baking and gardening and doing fieldwork and butchering chickens and carpentry and the whole shootin match. She and Grandma were awfully nice to us, taking us in like that. And I was so glad to get into our own house. It just doesn’t work, living with relatives.
I wait for some further revelations. It feels like Mother is on the verge of blurting out something more about Eva. I can feel information in the air, the barometric pressure rising, a rock about to drop in the pond, a brain tumor, an unrequited love, a fall from a horse—and then Mother thinks better of it.
“I remember how crowded New York was that time I went. You walked down the street and you were always in a big crowd. Threading your way through the mob. People on the street at all hours. Standing around and eating pretzels and hot dogs and smoking. Women smoking cigarettes. That shocked me. I’d seen it in movies but not right out in the open like that.”
Mother has now confessed that she once attended movies. Wonderful. Amazing. I’d like to hear more things like this. (Who did she go to movies with?)
“And people bumping into you and not saying, I’m sorry. That was really something. But I suppose if you did you’d be apologizing all day. We went to Chinatown and saw a butcher shop with live chickens and ducks in the window and piles of fish on ice. Crab and octopus. Daddy and I had the chow mein. The restaurant was full of Chinese people speaking Chinese. It was ten o’clock at night but it was too hot to sleep so we went to Coney Island and rode the roller coaster—it was scary—we sat behind six girls who were screaming their heads off and standing up waving their arms in the air. I remember their hair was in curlers. They wanted Daddy to take their picture when the car was going down the steep drop, but by the time he understood what they wanted, the ride was over. So we went on it again and we took their picture and they took ours. We went on the carousel and stood in line for the parachute drop and we ran into an Army buddy of his, Don, and his girlfriend. They were trying to cool off, too. We rode the subway which was like a steambath so we walked around Bro
oklyn with them. Walked for miles. It was after midnight but it was too hot to sleep, so we kept walking.”
Mother stops, flushed from the memory of that hot night long ago. She left behind her three little kids on the farm with Grandma and Eva and rode the train to New York City and stayed out until all hours walking around on the streets. She who had gone to a movie, too. This is not a story you’d stand up and tell on Sunday morning to Sanctified Brethren.
“What did you see in Brooklyn?”
“There was a candy store open on the corner and people buying ice-cream sodas, so we got sodas and we sat on the curb, and across the street there was a park and thousands of people lying on blankets spread out on the grass. Thousands of them. Some men sitting on park benches smoking, and some women sitting and talking on the grass, and all the others lay sleeping, whole families, men and women and little kids, on blankets they spread out on the grass. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but just the sound of voices, like birds, it made me think of the children of Israel in the desert. God watching over them and not slumbering. All those people.”
I don’t know where this story is going—if she’s about to tell me that Daddy pulled out a Lucky Strike and lit up? And they ducked into a corner tavern and ordered highballs? No, probably not, but it is almost as amazing to think of them out on the town, taking it easy, Daddy not grouching about how crowded and hot it is and how expensive the sodas are. It is after midnight but there he is with Mother, enjoying himself and hang the expense. Hard to believe.
“What did you do then?”
“We sat there on the curb and drank our sodas and then we said good night to Don and his girlfriend because she had to go home to the Bronx and get up and go to work in the morning. We took the subway back to Manhattan, to our hotel on Broadway, the Broad-moor, and a man was selling flowers from a pushcart and Daddy bought me a bouquet of violets, and we went up in the elevator and it was hot in the room, so Daddy took the mattress off the bed and we slept outdoors, on the fire escape. On an open grate, nineteen stories in the air. You could look right over the edge and see people walking on the sidewalks below. But we went right to sleep and didn’t wake up until eight in the morning, and it was raining.”
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Page 10