We Are Still Married

by Garrison Keillor

  There was some good slugging on TV that night. James Garner pasted a guy in a men’s toilet and tied his ankles with his belt and hung him upside down from a stanchion. Two welterweights went the distance at the Sands, standing toe to toe and banging the sweat off each other. Even Michael Landon connected on “Little House on the Prairie,” an evil teamster who kidnapped Laura from the drygoods store. Dan Rather didn’t, but he looked like he could go a couple rounds. Leonie called at 10:00. The operation was a success. Six hours. “I wish I could come home,” she said, on the verge of tears. Ed wanted to tell her: Your husband could be in jail tomorrow, or the hospital, maybe a cold marble slab, you may be talking to your Ed for the last time. Later, he gave himself a good pep talk in bed. “Your whole life is dedicated to stepping out of people’s way! You’re so good at it, you don’t even know that you’re doing it! You’ve got to get out there and hit! Smash ’em! Knock ’em down! Otherwise, something worse is going to happen. You turn into a shadow. A pale polite presence, a slight coolness that moves from room to room.” He lay in the dark and it seemed to him that hitting somebody was a deeply moral undertaking: horrible deeds had come of men exactly like him being afraid to duke it out who were slowly crazed by cowardice until some psychopathic official policy let them ease the strain by commanding insane acts of violence at a safe distance: tons of bombs dumped on remote villages by order of pleasant men who, if someone had shoved them on the street, would’ve been aghast; Indian tribes wiped out by guys afraid of Indians, who despised themselves for it and avenged this fear through brutal and dishonest documents. Paperwork! Paper that worked vicious cruelty a thousand miles away while the authors went home, kissed their wives, and bounced their babies.

  Tuesday, instead of his old 6A, he took the 11A bus, which would drop him at Hell’s Corners, leaving a hike of eight blocks along West 4th. It was a section of downtown known for heavy street action, a no-man’s-land, people he knew told him that if you had a flat tire you should sit and wait for the cops and don’t get out of your car and walk. But what those folks were afraid of was exactly what he was looking for. Little bands of minority persons lounging on the hoods of cars and yelling things at whites, insults that nice people didn’t know about and couldn’t always recognize. Even cabdrivers stayed away from there. He carried his Swiss army knife in his suit-coat pocket and put his medical-insurance card in his shirt pocket, where an ambulance crew could find it.

  The driver of 11A was a bald little man who looked locked in position, hunched down over his big wheel, his eyes straight ahead, and when Ed asked if 11A went to West 4th, the man whispered, “Please. Not now. Please. I’m going through something now, I can’t deal with this. Please.” The bus was packed full; the passengers weren’t like the old 6A crowd, who sang “Happy Birthday” for the old regulars and the driver, Fred Thompson, sometimes bringing a cake. These people looked beaten down, scared, and they stared sadly into space. One man was weeping. Ed sat next to a woman in a lime-green pants suit who kept wringing her hands and humming a mournful tune. “I need to talk to someone,” she said softly after a few blocks. It was about her hair. Doctors said she was going to lose her hair. She was distraught. Ed said, “Your hair looks fine,” but in fact it did look dull and lifeless. Hell’s Corners was deserted. With its cheap liquor stores, porno shops, burned-out shells of buildings boarded up, vacant lots full of trash, it looked like a street Charles Bronson would walk in his campaign against crime, but the only people Ed saw were panhandlers. Old men with the shakes saw him coming and stepped into his path and made their pitch. “I played with Bix Beiderbecke.” “I am a World War II veteran. I was wounded in North Africa.” “I’m Skeeter from the Little Rascals movies. You remember. Spanky’s friend.” Ed had seen the Rascals on TV and the man actually did resemble Skeeter. Ed pressed a ten-dollar bill into his hand.

  Word of this gift traveled on ahead, evidently. Perhaps, as Ed continued along West 4th, Skeeter waved his arms in a signal known to all panhandlers. Ed saw people on the next block turn and look, and men stepped out of doorways, rose up from the weeds, emerged from the back seats of hulks of cars to greet him. An old woman ran across the street. “I’m dying of cancer,” she said. On the block beyond this one, ragged people stood in clumps. “I haven’t eaten in three days.” “My kids are sick.” “I’m out of work. I was a teacher. I used to live in Golden Valley.” The man’s front teeth were brown, rotten. “I was on the radio. I was Singin’ Slim of the Bunkhouse Buddies. I have emphysema.” A man sitting against a trash barrel waved weakly and Ed leaned down. “Remember me?” the man whispered in a horrible pained voice. “Remember? You said you’d come and take me back to Fargo.”

  Eight blocks, and it cost him everything in his billfold, about eighty-seven dollars. Nobody challenged him. Everyone looked like they had been banged around enough already. The fight was out of him; he knew it; he didn’t try to argue with himself. That night on the “Six O’Clock Eyewitness News,” Todd Withrow led off with three harrowing stories: foster children killed in Texas when a bus skidded off the road in the rain en route to a picnic; a weak, dying child held up to the camera as her parents pleaded for a liver donor; a screaming mother held back by firemen as smoke and flames billowed up from the tiny house—Todd’s voice broke, and when Melanie came on with the weather, tears ran down her tan cheeks. “Sometimes the weather doesn’t seem very important,” she whispered.

  It was a week later, the Tuesday after his Wednesday deadline, when, unbelievably, he hit a man. In the men’s room at a restaurant. Dinner with Leonie, home at last, Ethel and Mel having left for a week with Judy, and he ordered snails to impress her. He’d never eaten snails before. They were probably okay but he thought too much about them during the meal and retired to a cubicle for a break. Its gray steel walls were scratched with dozens of ancient messages. One said: “You Too?” Someone came in the room and sat in the next cubicle. The man blew his nose and cleared his throat. “Can I come in there with you?” he whispered.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I need to be with someone right now,” the man said. “I feel—God, I can’t tell you—I’ve got a wife and three kids. I love them an awful lot. Oh, Jesus—” He started to cry. “Nobody knows what this is like. Do you have any idea? No, you don’t. My God.” “I’m leaving now,” said Ed.

  “Please, try to understand this. Just for one minute. Look at this.” A hairy hand passed a snapshot under the partition. Ed saw that he had a wife and three kids all right. The wife looked tired and kind and the children, in their teens, well dressed, at a confirmation perhaps. Two tall girls wore white shoes. “You’re looking at one hell of a family, mister,” the man said. “So you tell me—” Ed handed the picture back. “You must love them very much to feel so guilty about being attracted to other men,” he said. The man pounded on the steel wall and screamed, “What am I doing talking to you about it? You faggot!” He jumped up and yanked the door to Ed’s cubicle off the hook. He was a big bald guy in a suit. Ed shoved him and the man stepped back. He swatted a rolled-up newspaper at Ed and the edge of a page scratched his left eye. A razorlike pain, tears flooding his eyes, without a single thought his right hand hauled off and slugged the man hard just above his ear. He staggered and Ed reached out to grab him, but when Ed tried to open his fist, the pain made him settle right down to his knees like a balloon descending, he knelt on the wet floor, bent over, holding the fist with his left hand. “You didn’t hurt me! Just grazed me!” the man said, his speech slurred. Ed’s hand was numb, getting fat. The man sat down on the sink. He said, “Gotcha pretty good, didn’ I.”

  Leonie paid the bill. She was amused. “Boxing? In the bathroom? Oh my.” She drove him to St. Joseph’s and sat with him on the bench in the hall outside Emergency. His hand was swollen up as big as a breadloaf. “The world is full of jerks,” he said, “and ever so often you have to deal with one so the word gets around to the others and they settle down for a while.” He wasn’t so sure abou
t this, actually, but the deed was done. That part of his life was over for good and now something else could happen. He hoped the man was all right. He hoped the doctor would prescribe something strong, with codeine in it. He wished he were home in the dark.

  END OF AN ERA

  WHEN LARRY ROSE DIED suddenly while cleaning out his garage one sunny day, his death came as a big shock to some people around Market Falls, Vermont, who knew him fairly well and who visited the house that evening to comfort Sarah, Larry’s friend, and bring her food, including homemade rye bread, home-smoked whitefish, garbanzo salad, and a meatless lasagna—one of Larry’s favorites, though he wasn’t a vegetarian (he had been one for a while but then he quit). They spread the dishes on a table he had made from an immense wooden spool, which stood on his new sundeck between the little yellow house and the garage, and they sat around it and talked in low voices about the man they had known, who, a few hours before, had pitched forward and fallen on the concrete floor he was sweeping. They also noticed that his table was tippy.

  They agreed that death must have come as a big shock to Larry, too, since he was only forty-three and looked not so bad—if, that is, he had been aware of himself dying, which Sarah’s sister Star hoped that he had been. She felt that a moment of awareness, a clear split second, would enable a dying man, even while falling forward, to make his peace with the world. Star, whose real name was Starflower, said, “The brain has these almost incomprehensible powers when it is focused and I think that in one incredible flash it could give up this life and reach for the next one, and I feel Larry would have wanted that as a matter of dignity, like knowing your address or something.” Some others hoped he had gone instantly, without knowing, because he was so committed to life.

  “When I go, I want to go bang,” said Stan, Larry’s best friend, or so he told Sarah—she didn’t know Stan; she and Larry had only been together a few weeks. She was wrapped in a white chenille robe, a gift from Larry, and though her eyes were red, she looked serene and lovely. Larry’s children, Angelina and Andrew, were with his ex-wife, Jessica, in Boston, and Sarah was meaning to call them with the sad news the next morning. “I think it’s better to hear about something like this in the morning, when you have a stronger sense of life,” she said. “Of course, I’m a morning person.”

  His friends didn’t stay long, because Sarah was beat and also it was sort of depressing around there. To die while cleaning out your garage, Stan thought—to die in a heap of rusty tools, bike parts, stuff to be recycled, some sad little plastic toys, some rotten pumpkins from last fall, and four or five of your unfinished projects, including a busted rocker and the workbench you started to build three years before. It was also depressing to sit on Larry’s sundeck, which, frankly, was an eyesore, built of three-quarter-inch plywood that sagged under their weight. Why couldn’t he have learned about joists, Stan wondered.

  Still, everyone planned to give him a good sendoff, of course. Star and Sarah sat down the next morning to call up all the numbers Larry had written on the wall by the telephone in the kitchen and invite those people to his funeral. “I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this,” Star said to one of the people who answered. The man on the other end was quiet after she gave him the bad news. Then he said, “Larry... Larry. Larry? Was he the little guy in the red cowboy boots who slept in the Chevy?”

  After he divorced Jessica in 1972, Larry moved around quite a bit for about a decade, doing a variety of things, including joining the Sky Family, a communal operation in the mountains, where people came and went freely. Now, a few years later, not many of the Skys remembered exactly who Larry was, perhaps because there had been an emphasis on seeking new identities at the time. The Family believed in renaming yourself every day as a way of recognizing the new possibilities of life, and this ritual sometimes occupied most of a morning: meditating under a tree or in a car or up in a tree, seeking to know one’s true name for that day, trying to free oneself from preconceptions such as Larry or Janice or Stanley, and to find the one word that most perfectly expressed your aspirations, such as Radiance or Bear or Venus, and then going around and introducing yourself to the others, some of whom wanted to know why: Why did you decide to be California? Or Peaches. Or Brillo.

  So the name of Larry Rose didn’t ring a universal bell. “No,” said Sarah to a woman who thought Larry was a guy she remembered from a trip to Mexico, “he wasn’t like that at all. You must be thinking of someone else. Larry is a very nice person, very gentle, very caring. I mean he was—he’s dead now, of course.” She hadn’t been in the Sky Family—that was long before her time; she was only a kid then—so she looked through Larry’s stuff for an old picture so she could describe him to his old friends, and while rummaging through a cardboard box of his papers she found his will, typed on three pages of yellow paper, single-spaced.

  The will made it clear that Larry had thought a lot about his death. He wanted no funeral but, rather, a “Celebration of Life,” and as for his remains, he asked to be cremated and his ashes be divided up and put in manila envelopes and mailed to people he admired, such as writers, actors, teachers, healers, religious people, and rock stars—hundreds of them—as gifts. Those people also were to be invited to the Celebration of Life (and given a chance to perform or speak “if they want to, it’s entirely up to them, and nobody should bad-mouth them if they don’t, maybe they just want to sit and rest or be part of the crowd”), and so were Larry’s extended family of Sky people across America, everyone in Market Falls, and motorists on Highway 7. Friends of his were to stop cars on Celebration Day and hand out printed invitations that began, “Dear Traveler, Can you take just a moment to join us in a celebration of another human being?” Friends also were supposed to organize the Celebration, which would be “a free-form coming-together (nonsorrowing) of Survivors to share music, games, food, history, personhood—to exchange tokens, totems, lifelore, etc.” It was to take place in the country, in a grove of trees by a river. There was more about the friends’ duties (sharing memories of Larry and pledging themselves to carry on his life in their own lives and nurturing each other and being happy), but her mind had wandered off toward some practical questions. Who did she know who owned property in the country who would want to host a bunch of campers for a few days, some of them drunk, most of them with large dogs?

  About twenty people attended the funeral service at the Rothman Chapel two days later. It was sad, and some of them cried, but then the Methodist minister pronounced the deceased’s name Lawrence Rosé, like the wine, and that cracked everyone up, and then Stan stood up to give a personal tribute. Though Larry’s best friend, he was a stand-in for Sarah’s first choice, Star, who had decided that morning to go to Montreal instead, with a former ballplayer named Roy. “There is so much a person could say about Larry it is hard to know where to begin,” Stan said. “It’s hard to tell just one story and leave out all the hundreds of others. He was a good man, but, then, you know that already, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. I wish we had time for each one of you to share your personal memories of Larry, I know it’d be great. But perhaps we should just have a moment of silence and each of us remember him in our own way.”

  Sarah remembered the morning he went out to clean the garage. He’d had a cup of coffee and a bran muffin, smoked another Pall Mall, and said, “I’m getting tired of all this junk of mine. I keep saving all this stuff and I don’t know why.” Those were the last words she heard him say. It wasn’t an ignoble way to die, she thought—trying to get your life out from under the debris. Had he lived longer, he might have thrown away his stupid will. She felt a little guilty about not having the Celebration but not as guilty as she had expected to feel. The service was over in twenty minutes, and after a few hugs and handshakes on the sidewalk everyone went away. She took Angelina and Andrew to lunch, and then Jessica picked them up at the house. She honked; she didn’t come in. Sarah gave the kids some of his rings and a couple of old hats. The next day, the ga
rbageman came and emptied the garage of everything. Sarah put the house up for sale. A lawyer told her she was entitled to part of Larry’s estate, he thought, though the will was reticent on the subject of material things. The real-estate woman advised her to get rid of the sundeck, so the garbageman came and got that, too. It was surprisingly easy to remove. Underneath was a patch of bare dirt, and a few weeks later the place was thick with green grass and weeds.

  GLASNOST

  During four days of speeches, delegates broke one taboo after an-

  other, adding new zest to Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness.

  One delegate attacked Politburo members. Another touched off debate

  over whether the party should relinquish its monopoly over Soviet

  politics. Two others feuded publicly. By the time the meeting ended,

  the sense of openness had built up so strongly that Gorbachev declared

  glasnost a hero of the gathering.

  —Washington Post, July 3, 1988

  SOME GENIUS FROM MINSK with yogurt in the corners of the mouth making a stinky speech against the Politburo gospodin and you call this glasnost, my friend? Ha! And the “debate” about monopoly schmopoli—tovarishch, in my city, Kiev, we stuff that stuff in chickens but you call it glasnost? In Moscow, the intelligentsia belch and it’s called a debate. And then two sturgeon snappers in baggy blue suits and white polyestiya shirts and shlumpy ties with tractors stand up and trade three wimpnik insults and this is glasnost?