Evelyn, a little giddy from exhaustion, sang:
On top of spaghetti,
all covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball,
when somebody sneezed …
And then a big pigeon
Flew over my soup.
Then suddenly turned
And flew back to the coop.
“She had a little brandy at the hotel,” said Wally.
It was a miserable way to start a trip, Margie thought, but Daryl tried to make the best of it, ordered a Singapore Sling for himself and a Rusty Nail for Marilyn, a hamburger and a salad, and then, between the salad and the hamburger, he walked up to the front of the room to the pianist, whispered something, plopped a bill in the glass jar on the piano, and launched into song.
You are my inspiration
My sunshine too
We could start a whole new nation
Just me and you.
All my life I’d be smilin’,
Just two of us on a little island—
What you say? Let’s leave today.
Carl had a vodka fizz, thinking it might wake him up. She pointed out that alcohol is not a stimulant. “It works differently on different people,” he said. “Have a drink,” he said. She didn’t want one. She wanted to keep her mind clear.
“What’s wrong?” said Daryl. “Have some fun. That’s what we’re here for.” He was flying high on the thrill of having bested her. He said, “I’ll order you a Grey Goose vodka straight up on the ice. We’ll just set it right there. You drink it if you’d like. It’s up to you. No pressure. Okay?” She did not want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her down in the dumps, defeated. “This is a fabulous place, Daryl. You have excellent taste,” she said. “I’ll bet the hamburgers here are out of this world.” He looked at her, a little confused.
“You really think so?”
“It’s perfect. You chose right.”
Her approval confused him. He looked around at this dim little swamp and its mournful occupants and retreated into silence. The combination of jet lag and alcohol was a pitiful thing to observe. Even Father Wilmer, nursing a whiskey sour, had a sloppy way about him, his eyes full of vague feelings, murmuring inanities about a trip here in 1985 and someone named Harry or Larry, how remarkable it was to be back. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Just unbelievable.”
What’s unbelievable about it? We live on one planet, called Earth. The Wright brothers invented the airplane and it’s improved quite a bit since then. You get in and a couple of pilots fly you across the Atlantic. Which Lindbergh crossed in 1927. He was from Little Falls, Minnesota. He got up speed, pulled back on the stick, and up in the air he went. Same today. What’s the big deal?
And now Wally, feeling boosted by a Manhattan, started telling stories about drinking. How Mr. Berge, three sheets to the wind, had mistaken his wife for a waitress. How Ronnie Kreuger found an article that said nutrients found in beer can prevent affectional deficit disorder and he showed that clipping to people until the paper fell apart. How Barbara Peterson, high on Kahlúa and crème de cacao, had sent her mother’s body off to be cremated and deposited inside a green bowling ball … and those Lutheran ministers, twenty-four of them, schnockered on French champagne when they almost capsized Wally’s twenty-two-foot pontoon boat. “By George, they wrecked the steering on that boat and do you think those yahoos sent me money to repair it? No, I guess not.” Father Wilmer said it just goes to show there’s no such thing as collective guilt—conscience is an individual matter. Daryl said, no, it only showed that Lutherans are cheap.
Father Wilmer said he used to have an old lady parishioner, ninety-two and a shut-in until she found other shut-ins, one of whom could drive. She owned an Oldsmobile and her name was Dotty. She was only eighty-five. She couldn’t get her license renewed because her eyesight was so poor, so she stuck to the back roads. Which she happened to know very well, so poor eyesight wasn’t a detriment. You’d see them on Fridays or Sundays, four old ladies in a pink Olds, their heads barely visible above the dashboard, going eighty, eighty-five miles an hour on gravel roads. Dotty had a rule. Never go faster than your age.
Wally asked what this had to do with drinking.
“Dotty didn’t drink, but the other three did. To calm themselves down. They went tearing around for a couple of years and then they all died. It was Christmas Eve and they were at Dotty’s house for eggnog and planning to go to eleven o’clock Mass. Dotty started the car to warm it up, but she forgot to open the garage door. I guess she was a little tipsy. They were sitting in her apartment, which was in the basement of her daughter’s house. She was off at a party at her former husband’s. She came home around 1:00 A.M. and found four dead old ladies in the basement, next to the garage. A choir was singing on the TV and the bubble lights were bubbling on the tree and it was quite peaceful. Agnes—she was the one who came to my church—she didn’t want to be a burden to anybody, and in the end, she wasn’t. We just picked her up and put her in the ground and pushed the dirt over her and that was that.”
Daryl raised his glass. “Here’s to Agnes,” he said. “And all she stands for.”
“They went as fast as they could for as long as they could, and they died sitting still,” said Father Wilmer, wiping a speck from his eye.
Irene said she couldn’t understand why men are so fascinated by stories about drinking and couldn’t we please change the subject? “To what?” said Daryl. She didn’t care. “Anything,” she said. “It isn’t possible to talk about anything,” he said. “Only about something. Drinking is something.”
Clint remembered when the Lake Wobegon Lutheran softball team played a bunch of drunken heathens from St. Ann’s Episcopal Church who kept a case of Chardonnay chilled in the dugout and whose pitcher wore a martini shaker in a holster on his belt. By the fifth inning, they were staggering around cross-eyed and slurring their words, and yet the game was close. The Episcopalians lunged and flailed at the ball and hit doubles and triples, and the Lutherans took nice level swings and hit easy pop-ups to the third baseman. It was 9–9 in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, St. Ann’s had two men on base, and their pitcher, blind drunk and talking to himself, stroked a long fly ball to Pastor Ingqvist in right field. The good man stood, crouching, glove at the ready, in perfect position, and the ball bounced off the heel of his glove, and the winning run came lurching home and the heathen shrieked and hugged and poured gin on each other and raised their shirts and bumped bellies as the Lutherans packed up their stuff and headed for the parking lots. The pitcher said to Pastor Ingqvist, “Good game,” and Pastor Ingqvist told him to go fuck himself. People couldn’t believe they had heard him say it, so nobody said anything, but Clint heard him. And that’s what he said. Pastor quit the team at that point and never played again.
Carl said, “Reminds me of the tornado that smashed up the Ingebretsons’ farm and their beautiful lawn and garden and flat tened the house they’d just fixed up, and the old bachelor farmer across the road who sits drinking brandy all day, his dump wasn’t touched, not a beer bottle was broken.”
“I used to find broken beer bottles in my driveway,” said Eloise. “Fred. He was an angry drunk. Angry at himself but he turned it on me. Anger was what made him hook up with a piece of trash. There’s a lot of anger in love sometimes. Oh gosh, life is complicated. Have you ever been in love, Father?”
Father Wilmer looked startled.
“I remember that poor man from Millet who was so grieved at his father’s death that he chained himself to the iron ring on the lid of the old tomb next to his dad’s grave,” said Father. “They had to bring in a special acetylene torch from St. Cloud to burn through the chain, which was some unusual alloy, and meanwhile the constables Gary and LeRoy had to sit and converse with the man. His name was Bill, he was drunk, delusional, but all in all, not a bad person, and as they waited for the welder to come, they asked him what his dad did for a living. ‘Dad is dead,’ he said. ‘I kn
ow but what did he do before he died?’ said Gary. ‘Right before he died, he clutched at his chest and said he wished he hadn’t given up whiskey six years before, if he’d known he was going to die anyway, he’d’ve kept right on, and he fell over dead.’”
“Could we talk about something else?” said Margie.
“Sure,” said Daryl. “Go right ahead.” And he launched into the story of Magendanz whose wife accused him of going ice fishing so he could drink whiskey—“Of course, she was right. That’s the problem with women. They’re always right”—and that’s what he was doing in his fish house, getting deep into his cups, and that was why he had the shotgun loaded and aimed at the hole in the ice, waiting for the old lunker walleye Pete who had run away with his favorite lure, a Lazy Ike. He had his finger on the trigger when a pickup backed into the ice house and catapulted him out the door and the shotgun blew a hole in the side of the Rasmussen fish house where Mr. Rasmussen at the moment was changing from his insulated pants into his jeans and a few pellets of buckshot burned his bare butt and he exploded out the door and in one swift instant (1) lost control of his sphincter and (2) stepped into a hole in the ice with his left leg up to his thigh. For some reason, he did not break his leg, but he was good and stuck and his family’s jewels were chilling on the ice with him there in an awkward position similar to a cheerleader doing the splits, except he is fifty-seven and the splits are no longer possible for him, nonetheless there he was. Until the fish bit his left big toe. And he came screaming out of there. “And doggone it if the fish wasn’t hanging on. A decent-size walleye.”
“What a lie that is,” said Margie.
“The plain and simple truth. Ask anybody.”
“You can’t ask anybody, you can only ask somebody. And I’m telling you that somebody told you a big fib.” She stood up and put on her jacket. “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I’ll see you all later.” Daryl looked at her and said, “You don’t like it here?” “It’s perfect,” she said, “but I’ve got to walk off some energy. Have a big time.” Eloise asked her where she was going. “When you’re in Italy, you want to see Italy,” she said. It was against the rule—you should stay with the group; she had told her children that a hundred times—but she had to get up and get out and when she passed the sad piano player and the suicidal woman and got out the door and felt the fresh damp air on her face, she felt 100 percent better. So happy to escape from Earl’s and breathe actual air.
She called up Norbert to tell him about how things were going in Rome. He said something about a cousin flying to San Francisco, and when she mentioned Gussie, he said, “How’d you know about that?”
“You told me. This is Margie. Remember?”
“Margie who?”
“Margie Krebsbach from Lake Wobegon.”
“We left there a long time ago. I was twenty-five. My folks went to Iowa and I kept going down to Texas. I’m in Tulsa now.”
“I know. And I am in Rome. I’m going to decorate Gussie’s grave.”
He growled. “Only Margie I know is my daughter Margie. She went to Rome a long time ago. She already took care of that. Mother wanted me to go but I couldn’t so she went. He was my brother, Gussie. He died in Rome. He was a good man.” And he hung up. Poor man had gone around the bend, Margie thought, but she’d call him back in the morning.
A woman was cleaning the gutter, sweeping the garbage along with a broom, dumping it into a sort of rickshaw she pulled along. Margie had been brought up to never, never, never, drop trash in the street, but others had not been, the world was their wastebasket, and some of them lived in Rome. The street cleaner wore a white shirt and black vest with orange safety stripes on it, black slacks. She made a great show of effort as she nudged the trash along, as if concentrating on each orange peel, each crumpled receipt, each plastic water bottle. Italians put on a good show of im portance and bustle, but when you looked closely, you could see that nobody was doing much. The city police hung around in twos and fours, chattering away in their smart blue serge uniforms—belts, brass buttons, epaulets, white patent-leather helmets—but they didn’t seem to be on the alert for wrongdoers whatsoever. Except for the storekeepers, nobody seemed to be doing much at all in Rome, just hanging out, enjoying the sunshine.
An old iron drinking fountain stood on the corner, water running. Four nuns and two priests stood next to it, all in full regalia, who appeared to be lost. They looked up one street and then down the other, muttering to each other in some raspy language. A plaque marked the home of Casanova. A black family nearby was speaking French, even the children. Impressive. Up the street, in the distance was (she guessed) the dome of St. Peter’s. She hiked toward it, moving through a cluster of old men in old blue suits, white shirts, tufts of chest hair, standing toe to toe shouting and waving their hands. Small cars buzzed past and gorgeous dark women on scooters. Lights blazed in tiny shops selling silver ornaments, women’s blouses, copiers. A vegetable stand, wooden crates piled high at either end. A lamp shop with a great confusion of lamps standing on the sidewalk, desk lamps, standing lamps, chandeliers.
Dear God in Heaven, she thought, please make it right between Carl and me, but if it can’t be right, let me know. I don’t want to spend the next six years torturing ourselves over it. I know that promises were made. I know that. He promised he would love me always and I don’t know that that’s the case anymore. Sometimes these things can’t be helped. You can’t get blood from a turnip. So I’m just saying what I mean, which, if you are omniscient, which I hope you are, you already know, and I’m only saying that I know it, too. Amen.
The four nuns turned on their heels, and the priests followed them. Viva Italia! Just like in the movies! Somewhere there was Audrey Hepburn on the back of the Vespa, her arms around the newspaper reporter, flying around Rome.
ROMAN HOLIDAY
She’d seen Roman Holiday twice, once at the Paramount in St. Cloud with her high school boyfriend Larry and then years later on TV with Carl, who fell asleep midway through, but years later he gave her the DVD for her birthday. It startled her, the sheer rightness of it. How did he know? A lucky guess? Had she called him Gregory in her sleep? Audrey is a real princess who wants to break out of the cordon of security and protocol around her and experience Real Life, and Gregory Peck takes her for a ride on his Vespa, intending to betray her confidence by writing an exposé for his newspaper. His sidekick Eddie Albert follows at a distance, snapping pictures. But Gregory falls in love, and how could he not? She is Audrey Hepburn, after all. He falls hard and she falls in love with him. And when he returns her to her life of privilege, they say a brokenhearted farewell. And the next day he proceeds through the official receiving line, bows, kisses her hand, and presents her with the story he wrote, which will never see the light of day. He gives her back her privacy, her right to be an individual. The true token of love.
That was the part that impressed Margie every time she saw it. Had Gregory asked her to marry him and had she abdicated her crown and followed him to Chicago or Dallas and borne his babies and ironed his shirts and made his meat loaf while he wrote editorials at the Gazette—wrong ending! The sign of his love was to give her the freedom to be herself, a princess, and not pretend that True Love is going to make up for everything.
Larry thought Audrey Hepburn seemed “stuck-up” and that the movie wasn’t realistic at all, and that was the end of Larry. He had been a boyfriend of convenience and now he became baggage. Afterward, in the car, when he slipped his hand up her blouse, she took his hand out and said, “I don’t feel like it tonight.”
“What’s wrong?” he cried. He’d been really counting on holding her bare breast in his hand. He had caressed the brassiere itself a week before and this was the logical next step.
“Maybe I’m stuck-up,” she said. “I just don’t feel like it. I don’t think you and I are meant to be—”
He begged her to please, please let him show her his love. He breathed Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit on her
as he explained that for so long he’d been selfish and unable to express love, and then she had shown him what love means, and now he simply wanted to share that love with her because love that is shared with another will grow and grow and eliminate war and bigotry and oppression, and this is how we can change this world—through love, love, love.
“You just want to grab my boobs and you want me to stick my hand in your pants.” She said this as nicely as possible as she placed her hand on the door handle.
“Just one. Just for five seconds.”
“No, Larry.”
He was stunned. Tears ran down his acne-scarred cheeks and he wiped his eyes and mumbled something about what if he died in a car crash tomorrow and she had to live for the rest of her life with the knowledge of having denied him the chance to show his love for her.
“Better drive carefully.”
He moaned, he groaned, he banged his head on the steering wheel. “This is not the last time a woman is going to say no to you, Larry, so you’d better get used to it,” she said. Oh that was cruel. And yet it excited her to let him have it. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I like you as a friend but I don’t love you. And besides, you want to settle down here and I don’t. I want to see the world.” She opened the car door. “I want to see the world with you,” he whispered. Tears glittered in his eyes and he took a swipe at his nose. She could never love a boy who cried like that when he didn’t get his way. After she got out of the car and said good-bye and walked into the house, Larry waited for her to change her mind—sat there for an hour before he drove away.
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