We Are Still Married

by Garrison Keillor

  It’s a good piece of work for a middle-aged man who feels as depressed as I do sometimes. I keep my weight down, am constantly seeking more fiber, bang around on a racquetball court twice a week, and try to relax and enjoy life, but two days a week I feel lousy. Some day Reader’s Digest will print an article about the tiny gland below the kneecap called the hermer that produces a thin golden fluid that enables the brain to feel pleasure: if a person quits the bad habit of crossing his legs, his hermer can recover and life become wonderful. But so far all the Digest says is what I already know: drink plenty of liquids. I need to know something more miraculous than that, the secret of happiness. What, as a child, I thought Christmas would give or college or show business, and, as a youth, I thought that sex would give, now, as a man, I am still looking for. I thought I’d find it in my writing but writing is only work, like auto repair except more professional.

  I remember when I switched from Christmas to sex as the secret of happiness, it was when I saw a dirty magazine at Shinder’s newsstand, corner of Hennepin and Sixth in Minneapolis, down the street from the Rifle Sport pinball parlor, a rough block. Every alley smelled of piss. Tough guys lounged under the marquees of dirty theaters and yelled remarks at girls passing by, like “Hey, baby! Wanna come home wimmy?” Drunks sat collapsed in doorways. I had been at the public library up on Tenth, where dirty magazines were not offered, though I searched for days, and where all the cards in the card catalogue under “Sexual” were marked “Inquire at Desk.” I decided to wander down to Shinder’s and sidle inside and examine the merchandise. I picked up a copy of Life and tucked another magazine inside it, called Peek, with a photo of a woman with her shirt off, which, in 1958, excited me to the very core of my being, which suddenly I knew which part of my being that was, and I began to indulge a rich imaginative life that eventually settled on a lovely person whom I dreamed of marrying. Thoughts of her kept me awake at night, standing at the window and staring out across the snow, and when, after years of thinking those thoughts and courting her and getting engaged and the date of our marriage fast approaching when I would cross over the river into the land of bliss, the excitement was debilitating.

  Now, of course, young people cross over into the land of bliss pretty much whenever they want to. There are bridges, there are islands in the river, and the water is so low that most places you can wade across, but back then the river was wide and deep and fast and the church owned the boats. The church ferried you across to the land of bliss and you stayed there for the rest of your life with the one you went across with, or so we believed. Marriage was a fact, immense.

  One cold fall day, three days before we would walk up the aisle and into a motel room, my mind full of carnal thoughts, I took a walk along the Mississippi near where I lived, thinking the cold would clear my mind, but cold is an aphrodisiac, as we Minnesotans know, and I rehearsed once again in my mind exactly how I would go about making love, changing some details, tossing in a few improvements, and I practiced making ecstatic cries. I’d never made love before and had never cried out in an ecstatic way (except one Christmas when I got a Lionel train, but “Oh, boy, thanks, Mom and Dad” was wrong for sex) and I wanted to do it right. Spontaneously, freely, joyously, but also correctly. I stood at the edge of Riverside Park above the river, looking across toward the gray shapes of the University, and attempted to make outbursts of sexual passion. Loud ones like Tarzan, soft sighs, grunts, some growling. I tried yipping and wahooing, even something sort of like yodeling.

  Then it hit me: what if sex for her and me turned out to be nothing to yip and wahoo about, but a series of small and sort of interesting events like a checkers match in the course of which you’d just say, “Are you having a good time?” or “As long as I’m up, can I get you anything?” I was a Minnesota guy and we are no great lovers. Minnesotans make love once a month, on the 15th, and when it’s over and done with they don’t whoop and holler or smoke a cigarette and listen to Bach, they get up and brush their teeth. Then they go to bed. When a Minnesotan sleeps with someone, normally he sleeps. I knew this. Who did I think I was, a movie star?

  Minnesota was a repressive place to grow up in and there’s a lot I’d change, even as I think about sunny bygone days in Lake Wobegon. The fear of being different paralyzed every kid I knew, and there was so little room for affection, so much space for cruelty. People didn’t have enough fun. Above all, we learned to repress the urge to achieve and be recognized, because the punishment for being different was so heavy. It might be postponed for a while, but when it fell on you, it fell hard, as when I wrote a book about Minnesota, called Lake Wobegon Days, and the local newspaper put me in my place but good. They marked my front yard with orange rinds and nailed a dead cat to the porch. I started to nourish the thought of leaving for someplace like Australia, the farthest away you can go and still speak English, and wondered if, in the long flight, I’d sleep and wake up as the finer person I longed to be, a sweet-tempered marsupial man who’d hang by his tail and cry out ecstatically whenever he felt like it, to hell with the newspaper.

  Hey

  St. Paul was a beautiful city until it got so small, a shame, but life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty. A summer night in St. Paul is so beautiful it makes you sad, to walk along Goodrich Avenue in the dark and hear the water sprinklers whisper across the grass and hit the bushes. You smell raw grass and sweet water, and hear voices whispering from the front porches, behind the dark screens. Lights in upstairs bedrooms and a child momentarily framed in a window, and porch lights on in one big old frame manse after another, they must be waiting for someone. Waiting for you perhaps, and whispering about you, too: “My friend will be here soon, I can’t wait, I’m so excited.” The great lover out for a walk, the lover of his own good town. A radio is on in this low bungalow, low seductive voices there, and a cat has stretched out its loins on the cool cement. You sidestep her and stroll into a spray of water leaking from a hose that wets your pants, and then enter an aroma of hamburgers and charcoal smoke, drifting from behind a fence. The life we all know, God bless it, like it says in the hymn: Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above.

  Whenever I felt lucky and happy this street was like a watercolor, St. Paul, Summer Night, but when I was scared it seemed real and I imagined if I threw myself on the bosom of St. Paul, it would catch me. We share our mutual woes, our mutual burdens bear, and often for each other flows the sympathizing tear. Before our Father’s throne, we pour our mutual prayers; our fears, our hopes, our aims are one, our comforts and our cares. Love has the power to rescue us and not let go, otherwise it isn’t love.

  I was scared because I had to sing songs and talk on the radio, a deep hole that lay waiting in a theater downtown, but it’s no worse than anyone else’s problems. To stand up in a black tux and sing in a trio, “Only a boy from Anoka who loved to dance the polka, but Oh Oh Oh” and “It’s all right to get your appetite walking ’round town, just as long as you eat supper at home” is not one inch closer to death than having to give a book report or play centerfield, it’s just that it was happening to me. I’d walk around the block trying to remember the lyrics to a new song we had to do on the show that night, like “In a little Spanish town I walked around and searched for you, my love. The stars above seem to say, She went away. I don’t know where—Oh, don’t you care for me? In my revery, I love you, I love you, I love you. I’ll say it once again: in a little Spanish town, our hacienda home, I love you, I love you, my own.”

  I was scared, I thought: “How come we didn’t rehearse this? I woulda rehearsed if somebody had just called me.” But we hardly rehearsed even the songs we already knew, let alone new ones. We just sang them once and said, “Oh, sure. That’s easy.” We were so cool.

  “This is terrible,” I thought. “They’re all going to laugh. They’ll write about it in the newspaper, what a big joke it was. We can�
�t do this song.”

  St. Paul was a place where I believed that if I knocked on the nearest door a woman would open it and when I said, “I feel bad. Can I talk to you?” she’d say, Sure, come on in.

  I felt that I was theirs, that Minnesota people were people you could hurl yourself bodily from the stage at and they would catch you and not let you go, but the sad truth is that they only catch you if you fail; if you do well, then you’re on your own. It’s that way everywhere. The prodigal son’s brother knew that: it’s failure and disgrace that win the parent’s love. You blow the song and people will be nice to you; you make it a big hit and the newspaper will walk up to your house and pee on your roses. And if you feel bad, too bad. Who are you to complain? You got what you wanted, didn’t you?

  Hey

  I left St. Paul in the summer, a sad season for a happy man because summer is so short. When I was young and miserable, all change was for the better, but when you’re forty-five, almost nothing can be better, so you grieve for every leaf that falls. June sails in on a warm starry night when a band is playing and you stand on a veranda with your hand around Amanda’s pajamas and then summer is gone in a minute, it’s fall, a reminder that we, too, are temporary and can be replaced. The beat goes on but I can’t dance to it anymore. Of course, I never could dance at all, having grown up in a fundamentalist home, which you can tell by the way I move. We believed that any rhythmic physical movement would awaken our carnal desires, as surely as aspirin dissolves in a bottle of Coke, so we kids had to sit in study hall when they taught dancing in phys ed, couldn’t go to dances, not even square ones, couldn’t even join marching band. I wanted to dance. Wanted girls to know that what I lacked in aptitude I made up for in sheer avid interest. Couldn’t dance because it would awaken carnal desire, which in my case was not only awake, it was dressed and down on the corner waiting for the bus. Those Sanctified Brethren are good people but they do leave a mark on a boy, and even today, when I sweep into a room holding a glass of Pouilly-Fuisse, people see me sweep and say, “I didn’t know you were Baptist.” I wasn’t. We considered Baptists loose.

  I also can’t dance because I am a shy person on account of my family lived out in the sticks at the end of the schoolbus route and when I climbed aboard all the seats were full. Nobody would move over, but Wendell the bus driver yelled at me to siddown! State law! so I picked out the seat with the tiniest girls in it and hurled myself at the outside one and forced her in, and rode twelve miles to school with one foot braced against the opposite seat so they couldn’t dump me in the aisle. This was my initial physical contact with the opposite sex. Girls trying to push me away, saying, “Ish, oh, you’re disgusting, you make me sick.”

  A shy person would like to walk away from people and have them call gently to him, “Come back—oh, come back, please please please,” and so, to have to hurl yourself at them and hang on, it ruined me as a dancing partner.

  One spring day I stood on the gravel road in my new spring shirt from Wards, a light jacket and chino pants and a brand-new pair of penny loafers, listening to the meadowlarks, feeling that finally life was summoning me, that the bus’d come, I’d climb up, and Wendell’d smile and Dede’d pat the empty spot beside her, her strawberry lips forming the words “Here, sit here, next to me.” The bus came over the hill, orange, like the sun rising, and stopped, and the door opened. The odor of hair oil and bologna sandwiches rolled out. Wendell looked like the side view on a wanted poster. Everyone was silent, nobody would look at me, they were gripping the seats until their knuckles were white. “That’s all right, I’ll just stand,” I said.

  “Siddown. ”

  “Chuckie? Could I sit here with you and Barb?”

  “No. I got my lunchbox on the seat, can’t you see? Whatddaya expect me to do? Sit with them.”

  “Bill? Bob? Could I?”

  “Huh? What? Are you kidding??? Get outta here.”

  “Dede?”

  She turned away in disgust, as if my presence had ruined the rest of her life and having looked at me she could never be happy again.

  “Siddown,” he said, “or else get off, whatsamatter witcha anyway.” So I got off. Walked to school and was two hours late, took a shortcut across a field where there was a lake of melted snow but I ran through it in faith I’d walk on top and got the new loafers wet. I knew they were ruined, they flapped like slippers. I snuck into Miss Ellefson’s eighth-grade English class and slid into my desk just as she looked up and smiled and said, “Today is the day for our five-minute speeches about a personal experience—Gary, let’s start with you.”

  This is that speech, thirty years overdue. Miss Ellefson is dead now, sitting in the teachers’ lounge in heaven, enjoying a smoke, and I’m talking about painful matters that would be better forgotten.

  Hey

  One day while I still lived in St. Paul, I got a bad toothache from biting on peanut brittle and endured it until two o’clock in the afternoon, afraid to look for a new dentist. My old one was a Lutheran who went to India to fix teeth in rural areas, and I was afraid I’d get a real St. Paul Catholic dentist, impervious to pain, one who believed that St. Paul in his epistle to the Anesthesians says that agony can be offered up for God’s glory, but instead I found a young woman dentist who gave me Novocain and gas and relaxed me so deeply I almost drowned from the spray on the drill, but it was painless. It put me right in a hopeful mood to get a haircut. Ordinarily I’d have gone to Walt’s barbershop on Como and said, The usual, and gotten an earful of wisdom about fishing, but he got out of barbering in 1967. Since then I had wandered from shop to shop, looking, hoping. I drove up Grand Avenue and saw a shop called “Hair One Day and Gone the Next—Persona! Hair Stylists,” and walked in. It was all done in black and white: tile floor, chairs, white walls, black ceiling. The magazines were all about expressing the True Woman Inside You, even the men’s magazines were about that. A young woman came around the corner. Yeah? she said. I said, “Uh, you’re probably booked up, you wouldn’t be able to get me in right away, would you,” turning away. Her hair was pink; it looked like she wasn’t getting all her vitamins, or was getting some she shouldn’t.

  “No, I can take you now. My name’s Candy.”

  She was chewing gum. She looked about seventeen. We went to a black cubicle and she sat me in a little black chair. There were stuffed pandas and kangaroos. She put a red silky cloth around me and ruffled my hair and said, “Uhhh, howdja like it?” I almost said, The usual, but to look at Candy there didn’t seem to be a usual. I said, “Oh, just a trim around the edges and not too short.” I tried to sound like it wasn’t important. I was brought up to believe beauty is not worth thinking about, what’s important is your soul, your mind—you don’t want to be a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head. But I was feeling hopeful.

  She started to cut. She wore a couple dozen plastic bracelets on her hands that clattered in my ear like an old John Deere combine. She didn’t talk except once, to ask, “Do you live around here?” I said no. She seemed satisfied to know that and said no more until she unpinned the smock and handed me my glasses. I put them on and saw in the mirror an old old clown. She hadn’t painted big blobby lips or a red nose on me but the hair was right. All I needed was a pair of exploding pants.

  “How’s that?” she said. “That’s fine,” I said. I was ashamed to complain, which would imply that I had imagined she could make me look nice. “That’s sixteen dollars,”. she said. I gave her a twenty. “Keep the change,” I said. A twenty-five-percent tip. Just because a man looks ridiculous doesn’t mean he can’t pay extra for the privilege. I bought a Twins cap at the drugstore. “Care for some hair cream?” the woman said. Drove home, and walked in the door, steaming mad just like all of us Wobegonians get mad, about twenty minutes after the fact, angry retorts coming to mind too late to be retorted. My wife took one look at me as I took off the cap and she said, “You have the most beautiful green eyes, do you know that?”

  Hey

/>   One spring, when my son was little, we got a cat named Mrs. Gray who we decided to allow to have babies so that he could observe at first hand the wonder of life. She was married, obviously, so it was all right. One day she went into heat, put on her lipstick, and lay on her back out on the front lawn, rolling and moaning and smoking cigarettes by the carton, and the gentlemen cats of the neighborhood stood around and watched. They had had operations in their youth, and didn’t know what was wrong. They stood around in their yards and discussed mutual funds as she moaned and sang to them, and finally a ringer came by and said, “Hi, doll,” and they screamed at each other all afternoon, made love, and she raked him with her claws and drove him away. We explained to the boy that the wonderful part would come later, but when it came time for Mrs. Gray to have her babies, she felt extremely bad. When the first little wet sack of kitten emerged, she looked back at it with horror and tried to run away with the umbilicus still attached. She needed a lot of help. It was a mess. Maternal things didn’t seem to be instinctive with her. When I came down to the kitchen to check on her later that night, she climbed out of the box where her little family lay, blind, squeaking, and she ambled over to the back door and scratched on it. She wanted out of the deal. She gave me a baleful look when I locked the door. She said, “That’s okay, I can wait. Tomorrow, next week, one of these days that door’ll open and I’m gone outa here. I’m gonna leave the wonder of life sitting there in its box for you to take care of, Mister. I got a life of my own to lead.”

  It was a cool sweet spring night. Sex hadn’t worked out for her and neither had Christmas. She was restless, she wanted to go to Los Angeles. I know the feeling. I left Minnesota and since then have known one problem after another but restlessness hasn’t been one of them. Ever since I left home and came to New York, I’ve known exactly who I am. Ich bin ein Minnesotan. In Minnesota, it’s never really clear what that means, but living in Manhattan, I know exactly what Minnesotaness means—it means moi—and I plan to stay right here and enjoy it.