Love,
Gladys
MRS. RUTH LUGER TO MRS. JOANNE LIENENKRANZ
Dear Joanie,
This is being written Monday night outside of Bakersfield somewhere, a nice motel but right on the highway and the truck traffic sounds like the Russian army. Bob says to say hello. Tomorrow down to San Diego to Francine’s and Sunday we come home which I wouldn’t mind doing right now though I suppose we are having a pretty good time considering what has happened to us. We have spent practically the whole trip looking up Bob’s old buddies who he hasn’t seen for ten years and when we meet one of them I suddenly see why it’s been ten years but then it’s too late, we’re already there. Gruesome. His friends, they invite you to stay the night at their place and they just don’t stop to think that you might like a room with a door or a bed—they say, “We’ve got plenty of room, it’s no trouble,” and you don’t know what they mean until you get there and then all the trouble is yours. We were at his friend Dave’s in Rapid City and they (Dave and Sharon) gave us some cushions and two army blankets. Real South Dakota hospitality. Slept on the living-room floor and a clock ringing every hour and woke up at 6:00 and her two kids were sitting two inches away with messy pants watching the Flintstones on TV. They are her kids and Dave has some of his own somewhere and he and she aren’t married but I guess none of that bothers them. Dave says, “I’ve been meaning to go see my little girl for weeks now,” as if she was a movie he had read was supposed to be pretty good. I said to Bob, “I can’t stay two nights here,” but he said it had been ten years since he saw Dave and this was his only chance—Well, those are the ten years since we were married so it’s not like he’s been without company. But these are people I wouldn’t have around my house so I guess you got to travel if you want to see them.
We saw Bob’s cousins Denny and Donny, they live outside Las Vegas where they race cars on weekends at a racetrack and the rest of the time I think they drink beer and say, “Hey, all right.” We had to drive like crazy to get there Friday night in time for the race and then Bob went down in the pits and left me up in the bleachers with some people whose names I didn’t get, a fat lady in a white jacket that said “Bad Girls Get To Go Everywhere” and her boyfriend who weighed three hundred and had a big beard with food stuck in it and a sad wispy woman who smoked up a storm, and afterward we had dinner at a drive-in with Denny and Donny and these people and they talked two hours without saying a single sentence I was interested in and never asked how I was (or who, either)—women out here are supposed to just sit outside in the dark and wait to go home, I guess. Denny’s girlfriend Luanne sat and looked at him like he was the world’s most wonderful man which you didn’t have to know him very well to see that he isn’t. I was glad they lost the race. It’s a terrible thing to say but I hoped they’d crash and maybe knock some sense into themselves. They are almost forty and still in their teens and I doubt they will know much more until the day they die, though the day after that they may find out a lot of things.
After dinner it was midnight and Bob and I went to go look at Las Vegas which, just as they say, it never stops, and 4:00 A.M. is the same to them as 4:00 P.M. I know because we stayed up until 4:00 A.M. gambling at the San Remo. Farmers are milking cows now, I thought, and I am playing cards and winning money. In fact, I am getting more money than they earn in a week. Bob wanted to go see Lola Mazola or somebody, some dancer, I said go ahead enjoy yourself. I was hot. I played Blackjack which was the only game I knew how to play (they didn’t have Hearts or Rook, ha ha) and I went along pretty well, Bob hanging around and offering dumb advice, and then about 3:30 I had a great feeling and put everything on the table, a bucket of chips, and he almost got a heart attack right there. I won $4,864. Bob was out of the room at the time, sulking in the bar. I cashed in my chips and went and sat down in the booth with him and had a rum and Coke. He just about went crazy when I told him I won and he wanted to know how much. I wouldn’t say. A lot. Well, then he wanted some of that to play with and I said, no. I said I had promised that it was going to the church. He didn’t believe me but I was telling the truth, but he said it was his money to start with. He said, you don’t earn no salary. Those were his exact words, spoken to his wife who keeps his house clean and raises up his children. “You don’t earn no salary.” It was the wrong thing to say to me at that time of the morning. I sailed out through the lobby and down the street. He said he didn’t care if I left because he knew I’d come right back but he was walking along behind me as he said it. I walked six blocks in a cold fury with him trotting along behind. I got on a bus, he got on, too, and we rode to the end of the line, out in a regular neighborhood with churches and a school and ranch houses with green lawns and gardens. We walked all the way back as the sun came up and had breakfast at a nice place and slept all day and drove last night and here we are.
The money is in my makeup bag wrapped up in a scarf. Bob says, “That’d completely pay for this trip and leave us plenty for the next trip and then some. It’s good luck, we’re supposed to enjoy it, not give it away. It’s for us, it’s like a big wave that comes and lifts us up and off we go to bigger and better things. It could change our whole marriage. ” He says to me, “Did you promise to God that it’d all go to the church or did you only promise yourself?” To him there’s a big difference.
God must’ve set this trip up so I could learn something. He sure didn’t intend it to be fun because it isn’t. I found out that I love my husband but I don’t really like him very much right now but I’m sticking with him. You look at Sharon and Luanne and you see what happens to people whose word doesn’t matter, their lives are a mess. I don’t like Bob because he’s so weak I think he’d even steal money out of my makeup kit so when he goes to sleep tonight I’ll sew it into my dress, forty crisp new hundred-dollar bills, and carry it home and slip it into the collection plate. That’ll be nice. Tomorrow we see the zoo and visit one last long-lost friend and then back home to our own house. I hope the kids are behaving themselves.
Love,
your sister Ruth.
CLARENCE BUNSEN TO HIS WIFE, ARLENE
My darling Arlene,
You were right, it is nuts to come to Saskatchewan to go ice fishing. Forty-six below zero today (minus a zillion windchill), and when you spit on the ground, it sounds like you dropped your car keys. But we aren’t alone so there must be a reason for being here. Four in our party, plus four optometrists from Kansas City, and believe it or not, two California guys. Plus the Canadians. Twenty-seven fish houses all told here on the ice on Moose Tail Lake, like a regular little village, and for all I know they could issue bonds for long-term street improvements, it’s that cold.
Fishing is lousy but then it wasn’t good last year either so it’s not a big surprise. It’s nice to sit in a warm fish house and think. A person could probably do this in his living room, sit and hold the end of a string, but then you couldn’t spit. I’m trying out a plug of Day’s Work which makes me lightheaded as perhaps you can ascertain. Cully is talking a blue streak, all about himself and the war and the price of gas and whatnot, says he lost twenty pounds by only eating things he doesn’t like. Still drinks a pint of whiskey a day. I asked him why and he said: my wife is angry at me no matter what and why would I want to listen to her sober? He has turned in for the night, he’s had enough for this trip. He’s a fly fisherman at heart and it goes against his nature to sit, back to the wall, and watch a drop line in a hole in the floor. It eliminates the skill and judgment and only leaves the religious aspect of fishing, but that is enough for me. A man needs to contemplate his sins and decide which ones to repent of and which to be more patient with and see if they might not cure themselves. Women don’t need this because women are better than men.
It’s midnight now and toasty warm in here and I can smell Bernie’s bait, which he is secretive about but I believe it involves rancidized chicken parts, anyway it reminds me of when all the kids had stomach flu. Remember you called
me at the garage and said Quote Come home, the kids are throwing up Unquote. Well, I didn’t drive as fast as I could’ve.
That’s one sin I want to get off my chest, and another is that Christmas about 1971 when the squirrel got in the bird-feeder. The one I made with a system of counterweights so if a squirrel got aboard it’d collapse under his weight, like the dropleaves on a dining-room table, which took me two weeks to design and the squirrel figured out in 8.2 seconds. And it was such a jerk squirrel, a real loudmouth.
This was Christmas Eve day. I got out the nozzle and garden hose and rigged it up on a two-by-four frame by the garage, aimed dead at the feeder, and I sat by the damn faucet in the laundry room and waited for a half-hour and finally nailed the bugger. A laser beam of ice water right smack beneath the tail, and he exploded into mid-air ... flew across the snow, leaving a trail of turds ... and sure enough, came back an hour later and I got him again! The second time you could see that squirrel yell “Oh shit!” and took off with his wheels spinning and tore up a tree and sat and wept for the plight of the Irish people. I had a glass of whiskey and sat and felt pretty smug and after a while Barbara Ann came in, tears running down her cheeks, saying that something was wrong with Chuckie, he was hurt. Well, you know who Chuckie turned out to be. Her favorite squirrel. (I’d thought of him as Nick, but never mind.) He was in the yard under her bedroom window, limping around on the crusted snow. A fake limp, meant to win sympathy from a child. A cynical squirrel. “He’s hurt,” she said. “Can’t we bring him in? It’s cold, Daddy.” My little girl. I explained why it’d be bad for Chuckie to remove him from his natural habitat. Big tears in her little brown eyes, pools of tears with Christmas lights reflected in them. I carried her up to our bed and tucked her in and told her a story, “The Squirrel Family’s Christmas,” which was pretty listless because as I began it I noticed, on your bedside table, a Christmas card that you’d stuck halfway into a book. I wondered why hadn’t you put it on the mantel with the others so I looked at it (still telling about Mr. and Mrs. Bushy Tail and their kids) and it was postmarked San Francisco, and when I saw a letter inside the card and saw David Danielson’s name, I felt sick inside. My stomach turned to stone. I felt betrayed. But she lay there, all awake, smiling, and Sammy and Sylvester and Sandy Squirrel all were waiting for Santa Squirrel to come shinnying down their old hickory tree with some walnuts and candy for Christmas, so the story droned on, and with one hand I held the letter down below bed level and quietly unfolded it. Jealousy!
You knew him as a good-looking boy who squired you to dances and drove you around in his daddy’s Pontiac, but I knew him from football team, where he was the left halfback and I was a tackle. He was light and strong, built like a swimmer, graceful, the golden boy, and I was a squat little guy with stumpy legs, too small for the line really but they didn’t know where else to put me, so in I went. I got the stuffing knocked out of me, my hands walked on, my face scratched, just so Dave could lope around end and into the end zone without anyone touching him, while I lay in the mud spitting up turf. You dated him for most of our junior and senior years and then he went to Stanford and you went with me. We were sitting in my car one night, I asked you about him, my heart pounding, and you thought for a long time and said, “I liked talking to him. He was smart. He was good to talk to.” So for years, whenever you and I didn’t have much to say, I’d look at you and imagine that you were thinking about him. Maybe writing letters to him. All the times I felt I wasn’t much fun to be with, which was about half the time, Dave was there in the shadows, a handsome man who was good to talk to. I guess I wished you would say what a terrible person he was, which is crazy—why would I wish that a woman I love had spent all that time being miserable? but there you are.
I read the letter. It wasn’t about joy in our hearts at this joyous season. It was about feelings from the past becoming stronger with the passage of time and closeness between old friends getting deeper and richer even though far apart—a real California Christmas letter. I could imagine a guy with slim hips and big shoulders in a blue pinstripe suit and red bowtie, a very youthful forty-year-old, not like your old tackle. I put Barbara Ann in her bed. I went to bed. You came up after a while. We lay in the dark. I wished that I could extend my influence out into the joyous world and find David and kill him. I got up and prowled around and looked out and saw Chuckie ensconced on the feeder, feasting on sunflower seeds without a worry in the world. I felt like something was eating my heart. We went to church in the morning and I imagined that Dave Ingqvist was winking at you from the pulpit. Why was he talking so much about love?
I am sorry! It was a miserable Christmas and you kept asking what was wrong, I should’ve said. I know you could’ve straightened it all out so well as you’ve straightened out so many things, but I let it eat at me. We had been talking about taking a vacation trip to California in June and I announced over Christmas dinner that we couldn’t go, we’d spent too much money this year already. The look of pain on your faces, the blank uncomprehending pain.
It’s years later. I’m still jealous. I still worry that if he’d asked you maybe you’d have chosen him. I imagine that one day you walk out the front door and there he is parked in a blue Thunderbird in the driveway and you have a choice, to stick with me and be yourself or go with him and be seventeen and get to live your youth over again.
Well, that will be your choice, of course. I want you to choose me. Nothing makes me feel emptier than the thought of losing you. I would wish you were here right now except that it wouldn’t be nearly so wonderful as it will be when I come back to you tomorrow night.
Your loving husband,
Clarence
THE BABE
OUR LAKE WOBEGON TEAMS DID not do well in 1986, the Whippets with no pitching finishing dead last, the Leonards pitiful and helpless in the fall even with a 230-pounder to center the offensive line, and now it’s basketball season again and already the boys are getting accustomed to defeat. When they ran out on the floor for the opener versus Bowlus (who won 58—21), they looked pale and cold in their blue and gold silks, and Buddy had the custodian turn up the heat, but it was too late. These boys looked like they were on death row, they trembled as their names were announced.
It’s not defeat per se that hurts so much, we’re used to that; it’s the sense of doom and submission to fate that is awful. When the 230-pounder centered the ball and it stuck between his tremendous thighs and he toppled forward to be plundered by the Bisons, it was, I’m sure, with a terrible knowledge in his heart that he had this debacle coming to him and it was useless to resist. Two of the basketball players are sons of players on the fabled 1958 squad that was supposed to win the state championship and put our town on the map, but while we looked forward to that glorious weekend our team was eliminated in the first round by St. Klaus. None of us ever recovered from that disappointment. But do our children have to suffer from it, too?
As Harry (Can O’Corn) Knudsen wrote: “In the game of life we’re playing, people now are saying that the aim of it is friendship and trust. I wish that it were true but it seems, for me and you, that someone always loses and it’s us.”
Can O’s inspiration came from playing eleven years for the Whippets, a humbling experience for anyone. The team is getting trounced, pummeled, whipped, and Dutch says, “Come on, guys, you’re too tense out there, it’s a game, go out there and have fun,” and you think, This is fun? If this is fun, then sic your dogs on me, let them chew me for a while, that’d be pure pleasure. But out you trot to right field feeling heavyhearted and not even sure you’re trotting correctly so you adjust the trot and your left foot grabs your right, you trip on your own feet, and down you go like a sack of potatoes and the fans in the stands are doubled up gasping and choking, and you have dirt in your mouth that you’ll taste for years—is this experience good for a person?
Some fans have been led to wonder if maybe our Lake Wobegon athletes are suffering from a Christian upbringing that
stresses the unworthiness angle and is light on the aspect of grace. How else would boys of sixteen and seventeen get the feeling that they were born to lose, if not in Bible class? And the uneasiness our boys have felt about winning—a fan can recall dozens of nights when the locals had a good first half, opened a nice lead, began to feel the opponents’ pain, and sympathized and lightened up and wound up giving away their lunch. Does this come from misreading the Gospels?
We Are Still Married Page 10