“Well, we’re on some maps and not on others.”
“How far is it to drive there?”
“Two or three days, I suppose. Depending.”
“Oh.” The woman was disappointed. “I was hoping I could make it in a day. I have a flight back home on Wednesday.” Hard to imagine. An Italian woman disappointed that she couldn’t come visit Lake Wobegon in the dead of winter.
“Do you have family here?”
“I do. Or I did. Do you know a family named Norlander?”
“Yes. But I don’t think they live around here anymore.”
“I am trying to locate them.”
“So these are distant relatives?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Cousins?”
“No, my father. His name was August Norlander.”
August Norlander was famous in Lake Wobegon for his heroic death in the liberation of Rome. At the Memorial Day services at the cemetery, someone always told the story about the farm-boy who enlisted in the army after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and who went off to serve in North Africa under Eisenhower and then went ashore at Anzio. One of our own boys, only a few years removed from hoeing corn and playing football, and in the battle for Monte Cassino south of Rome, he met his end. And then someone read the official citation for the Medal of Honor:
Wearing a priest’s vestments for camouflage, and a red skullcap, Cpl. Norlander walked up the hill ahead of his platoon and called out to the German machine-gun emplacement, “ In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti” and then in German, “Frieden. Der Friede Gottes,” and then swung what appeared to be a censer on a chain but which in fact was an explosive device and hurled it toward them as he reached under his chasuble for his Browning automatic, firing 167 rounds and throwing eleven hand grenades in addition to the ED, killing fourteen Germans and wounding twenty-one, as his vestments turned crimson from his own wounds, but he continued firing, even as he fell to the ground, until at last he was killed by a barrage of bullets. Out of respect for his heroism, the Germans raised a white flag of truce and permitted medical corpsmen to come and remove the body.
It was part of the ritual, along with the Gettysburg Address and “In Flanders Field” and “My country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty”—the heroic sacrifice of August Norlander—and it posed certain questions to the inquiring mind: What is the morality of using religious garb for camouflage and calling out a benediction as one is preparing to blow up the very ones you are blessing? Is all fair in war? Young people pondered these things, but meanwhile August Norlander was a legendary figure, striding up a hill, prepared to die in the war against Naziism.
The football field was named for him. Norlander Field. A bronze plaque with his likeness was fastened to the gatepost next to the ticket booth. Wobegon players touched his nose as they trotted onto the field. Sometimes a coach would use August’s story as an example of putting yourself on the line for the sake of one’s teammates.
He had a daughter in Rome? This was not part of the August Norlander legend. The woman said, “I feel so sad that I have never seen my dad’s hometown. And now I’m sixty-four and who knows if I ever will? I came to New York with my sister. Half sister. My dad died before I was born. My mom married another guy, an old friend, but she never forgot my dad. She was in love with him always and she still is. My mom is ninety-three. Her mind is gone except for a few things that are real to her and one of them is my dad. She sits and talks to him all day. I wanted to bring her back something from Lake Wobegon.”
Snow was falling beyond the window. She could make out the steeple of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility in the white haze and the HOME-COOKED MEALS sign on the front of the Chatterbox and the red brake lights of cars. People leaned into the wind sweeping across the lake and lumbered past the skeletal trees and through the clouds of exhaust of cars warming up that never got warm and it just seemed miraculous to look out at winter and hear an Italian woman ask so warmly about Lake Wobegon, wanting to know more about you and where you live. An Italian woman sentimental about her Lake Wobegon roots. You don’t get that sort of thing every day. Doris thought it was a complete hoax.
“Nonsense,” she huffed, “tell her to peddle her papers elsewhere.” Daily contact with adolescents had given Doris a suspicious nature. She guessed the Italian woman was out to get money and this would be the first in a series of phone calls aimed at extorting a check.
To Margie, the phone call seemed like a gift. August Norlander had left, a boy of eighteen, and gone to war and fathered a child in Rome who now wanted to find out where she came from. (Had she noticed some odd quirks in herself that might be hereditary? A tendency toward gloomy solitude? A craving for fried herring?) A Roman woman half Minnesotan. A sort of mermaid. Living at the bottom of the sea but curious to come flip-flopping ashore and see what pedestrian life is like. Well, so was Margie curious to get out of her own watery world. Teaching in the same high school she’d graduated from thirty-five years ago. Just like it said in the school hymn—
Hail to thee, our Alma Mater,
Would that we might longer dwell
Here in thy hallowed hallways,
But we bid farewell.
Through life’s dangerous lonely passages
Along the coasts of grief and fear,
In our hearts we’ll e’er remember
How you loved and taught us here.
Well, she had skipped the voyage along the coasts and stayed in the hallowed hallways. Same scarred oak tables, same sweet polish on the maple floors, marble bust of Minerva in the niche by the library, and traces of lipstick from the annual St. Valentine’s Day prank. THE REWARD OF A THING WELL DONE IS TO HAVE DONE IT. EMERSON in gold lettering by the gym—the place hadn’t changed much except for the computers. Same bitter smell of disinfectant in the science lab where she memorized the planets in order—Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto (My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas)—and here she was, thirty-five years later, two doors down, teaching the past perfect subjunctive. If only I had done, if only we had gone, if only they had come. She’d gone precisely nowhere. The inmate had become a warden. Kids she went to high school with now had ropy necks and liver spots and were planning their hip replacements, but she was stuck in her teen-hood. She still trotted down to the Chatterbox Café for the chili and grilled cheese and noted the same dumb signs on the cash register, DANGER: DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE and DON’T ASK ME HOW I AM—I MIGHT TELL YOU and TIPS ARE GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED—CASH ONLY, NO IOU’S. The same faded prints of Mount Rushmore, the North Coast Limited, the Split Rock Lighthouse. The same smells of coffee, bacon, toast, chocolate malt, burnt beef. The dusty breadth of Main Street, the faded FOR RENT signs in the empty storefronts that once purveyed shoes, jewelry, and menswear. The old, fading small-town blues. And her old pal Darlene, forty pounds heavier, still waitressing after all these years, still saying Oh for gosh sakes! and Who needs it? and What kinda deal is that? or That’s a bad deal you got goin’ there. Or What’s the deal with him?
Embarrassing to live in this time warp. Studies show: early praise promotes personal growth, it makes a big difference if your mother fussed over you. It gives you an expectation of success. But if she didn’t, then defeat rises up at every turn. And Mother did not fuss over Marjorie, she looked at her and shook her head. You pay a big price for that, but nobody uses the term “poor self-esteem” because it’s what everyone has. Calling people depressed is like calling them Causasian. Yes, and so what else is new? Trot into Skoglund’s Five & Dime with its ancient aroma of paper and mucilage and Arnie Skoglund standing waxen-faced behind the glass case with the fountain pens nobody uses anymore and here is Mr. Faust your old history teacher who used to tell you you’re gifted and here is your choir director Miss Falconer still crisp and pert as if about to lead the Girl’s Sextet in “O Holy Night.”
Embarrassing to be plodding along the same well-worn path as her parents, throug
h the backyards of the lawn chairs, birdbaths, feeders, the old clothes poles, the old neighbors clinking the iced tea on the porches and missing the children who ran away from this dreamy life—the life of clunky antiques and photographs in gold frames. What a backwater it is. You can be within ten miles of here and ask people where Lake Wobegon is and they never heard of it. A clannish tribe that does not care to be interesting. In the Cities, people walk around with flashing lights in their hair, tattoos of snakes on their necks, wearing shirts made of poppies: for them, uniqueness is a full-time occupation. Fine. Whatever you want. And to the west is North Dakota where people go and are never seen again. (It is bigger than it appears on the map.) They drive west and I-94 peters out into gravel roads and then trackless open space occupied by nomadic tribes of Deer People. And here we are between the bright lights to the south and the vast emptiness to the west, a way station, where she had settled (it seemed) permanently. Married Carl, had three kids, and now she was right smack where she started, little Margie Schoppenhorst, Class of 1973. Class Poet.
And now the phone call from Miss Gennaro brought back to her the memory of her ardor for Audrey Hepburn on that Vespa behind Gregory Peck, buzzing through the ancient streets and around the stone-paved piazzas and the beautiful word bellissimo that stuck in her mind—she thought of it now and then in odd perfect moments, the morning after a snowstorm, when the rack of lamb came out of the oven perfecto, when she glimpsed weeping at a basketball game or a big snort of pleasure or an appreciative belch or a smart-ass retort. Bellissimo. The love of life. La dolce vita. Buoyant personalities, high-wattage conversations with big gestures, the spirit of carnival and dancing in the streets and the frank enjoyment of the flesh and adoration of the bambino but also respectful of geezers, and grinning at the incoming platter of spaghetti. And the land of lovers.
Amore.
That’s what she wanted. Truly. Not to be like Darlene.
Darlene, aching for love and angry at men, and sliding toward her extremely late forties, despising her ex-husband, Arlen, and still missing him fifteen years later.
After Arlen decamped, Darlene had been very close to her dog, a border collie named Sonny, and people noticed that she was wearing a wig made from the dog’s hair. It was an odd color for a woman, grayish blond, and nobody wanted to ask and eventually she told Margie that Sonny had been seeing a therapist for adoption anxiety—she’d gotten him when he was already a year old—and the wig was to help him bond to her. Sonny died in his sleep, in the driveway, run over by a garbage truck. Darlene took to her bed for two weeks. Nobody mentioned that, either.
“Oh for crying out loud, that’s just unbelievable,” Doris said after Margie said good-bye to the Gennaro woman. “You bought that, hook, line, and sinker. What’s the deal with that anyway? Somebody better fill you in on the birds and the bees, kiddo.”
So Margie looked up August Norlander’s old obituary in the Lake Wobegon Herald Star (“LOCAL BOY LOST IN ITALIAN ACTION”) and Googled his brother Norbert Norlander, an oilman in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The call from Maria Gennaro led to Norbert in Tulsa and also sort of led to a trip to St. Cloud to buy an English-Italian dictionary and a Michelin Guide to Rome, and on her way home there were police cars and flashing blue lights on Highway 10 and in the southbound lane, a blue Toyota, its rear end smashed in brutally. And a yellow tarp spread on the shoulder. Margie pulled over to the shoulder. Eight men stood around the yellow tarp and lifted it and held it over the body of a woman in a bright red dress, face down on the ice and gravel, as a young man in a black jumpsuit bent over the body and snapped pictures. She lay with one leg twisted, neck bent. The eight men stood solemn, eyes on each other, not looking down. A light snow was falling. The young man touched the side of the woman’s neck. And then they put the yellow tarp back down and a man in an orange hazard vest approached pushing a gurney and Margie pulled away, a witness to the death of Mary McGarry of Little Falls—there was a brief story on the evening news—who died when she braked hard to avoid a deer and her car was rear-ended by another car. Fifty-five, the mother of three, on her way to accept an award at a banquet for having been a foster mother to twenty-one children, pronounced dead at the scene. Her own good works responsible in a way for her death—going to accept an award, killed en route. A victim of her own charity. One minute she’s driving and listening to the radio and then a beautiful animal leaps onto the road in a blind panic and the Foster Mother of the Year slams on her brakes, pure reflex, and is slammed from behind and her neck snaps and she is gone. In a burst of reflex and adrenaline, a terrified deer frozen in front of her speeding car, a whomp on the brakes, and then it’s all over, and now the troubled children will need to find another pair of arms to hold them, Mrs. McGarry has caught a train to a star. Death does have dominion after all. Margie thought she glimpsed the driver who crashed into the woman. A young man in a red plaid jacket leaning against a police car, smoking a cigarette, being interrogated. Long black hair, cowboy boots. A mother bites the dirt, James Dean lives on.
She came home and after supper (chili burgers and cole slaw and rhubarb pie, a sparse conversation about the children, the usual), while Carl read the St. Paul paper, she got out a green garbage bag and grabbed the centerpiece in front of him, the turtle shell Carl Jr. painted in Boy Scouts (“Slow and steady wins the race”) and threw it in the bag, and the plaster bison, mother and child. (“Bye, Mom.” “Bye, Son.”) He said nothing. She tossed Cheryl’s poetry, three poems, printed in a little magazine, Transcendent Upheavals. She pulled magnets off the refrigerator—tomatoes, pelicans, orange-crate labels—and the plaque over the table (GOD BLESS MY MESSY HOUSE) and the Minnesota loon salt and pepper shakers. Into the bag. He stirred but did not speak. The Scrabble board on the counter. The jar of chicory. The expensive copper skillet, a gift from Carla, seldom used.
When he heard the skillet clank, he looked up and asked what she was doing.
“Cleaning out stuff we don’t use anymore. Life is too short to accumulate junk. Who gave us this chicory anyway?”
He didn’t know. “That’s a pretty expensive skillet to just throw away.”
“It’s going to the Goodwill.”
“Oh. Okay.”
And then he said, “Who is Norbert Norlander?”
“What about him?”
“Saw his name written on a slip of paper on the counter.”
Bingo. Now there is a way to get a man’s attention. Let him sniff another man in the vicinity. Jealousy, the oldest aphrodisiac in the book. She took her sweet time answering. Poured a cup of coffee. “Norlander,” she said. “Oh. Right. Him. Somebody called the school, looking for him.”
“Where is he?”
“Tulsa.”
“Oh,” he said. “Friend of yours?”
“Not yet. We’ll see what develops.” And then she made a perfect exit. Flashed him an Audrey smile and sashayed on out through the door and into the snow and put the garbage bag in the backseat of her car. Snow falling and the air antiseptic clean, the boomboomboom of ice cracking in the cold, a clear sky and the constellations in place, Orion and the Dippers and the Great Antelope, Jupiter and Venus snuggled up next to the moon, light shining from the high bell tower of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. God grant you eternal rest, Foster Mother. God give you unending joy in His Holy Presence and the Presence of All His Saints, she thought, though she had no clear idea that this would actually happen. It was only a thought.
That night she lay in bed, seeing herself lying on the cold roadside under a yellow tarp. A motorist stopped and asked a cop who it was and he said, “Some woman from Lake Wobegon.”
“From where?”
“Little town not far from here.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, you’re not missing much.”
“What happened?”
“Deer.”
“Oh.” And he rolled up his window and drove on. Suicidal deer lurking in the ditches, exacting a
terrible revenge for hunting season, waiting for good women to come along, women who have eaten venison sausage. You’re listening to Mozart on the radio and suddenly antlers explode into your face and sharp hooves do a death dance on your torso.
Death is not far away. So why not travel to Rome and bring a rhubarb pie to a daughter of Lake Wobegon? Bring her a scrapbook of pictures of Main Street at Christmas, the grain elevator, the Catholic church. A bumper sticker (LAKE WOBEGON, GATEWAY TO CENTRAL MINNESOTA). A copy of the school hymn. (“Wobegon, I remember O so well how peacefully among the woods and fields you lie./ Wobegon, I close my eyes and I can see you just as clearly as in days gone by.”
Life is short. Why wait for spring? Why lie cooped up in the nest, sick with cabin fever and four months of winter yet to go. Men sat in the Sidetrack Tap, lost in the mists of whiskey dreams, but not Margie. She wanted to go somewhere, see something different. Do it now. Soon she’d have to rescue her elderly parents in Tampa. Mother hated Florida. The heat, the vicious insects, the clamminess of air-conditioning, the snakes, the danger of gator attacks. She kept her equilibrium because every day, Monday through Friday, she tuned in to Bright Horizons on the Mutual Radio Network, the story of Broadway star Brenda Stanford and her search for fulfillment as a wife and mother in the sleepy village of Littleton, sponsored by Rainbow Motor Oil. Brenda had suffered extensively—unfaithful men, ungrateful children, greedy relatives, fatigue, boils, temporary blindness, and so forth—but her sunny resolve had never faltered. “Somehow I believe that this will all work out for the good eventually,” she said, and indeed it did. Mother shared this belief although Daddy was pissing his pants and she suffered panic attacks that rendered her pale and breathless for hours. If the mailman rang the buzzer, Mom went to pieces. Meanwhile, Dad was wearing a button—ASK ME HOW I FEEL ABOUT OBAMA and below it, another button—TREASON. In their little cul-de-sac in Holiday Gardens, surrounded by retired Jewish schoolteachers from New Jersey, Mom and Dad were the only wingnuts on the block, and now they’d gotten a big black dog named Rush that Dad couldn’t handle—he’d fallen twice and been dragged down the driveway. The dog went ballistic whenever he spotted a UPS man or anyone in uniform, and Mom, who was terrified of dogs, spent hours in her locked bedroom saying the rosary, and so Margie would have to fly down there, have a Come-to-Jesus talk, lay down the law, throw away old medications, put Rush up for adoption. A miserable, thankless job. But first, Rome. Pleasure before duty.
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