Carl Lundberg eats alone, a hot beef sandwich plus a BLT plus apple pie. He’s feeling sour and a good lunch might cheer him up. None of the Lundbergs slept well last night. The heat makes them nervous and jumpy, even in their sleep. Lundbergs always were restless in bed, except Betty, but then she was an Olson before she married Carl. She’s the type who lies on her back, folds her hands, and wakes up eight hours later without a wrinkle, even in bed with Carl who swims in his sleep. He treads water in heavy seas, yelling to search planes overhead. So do Carl, Jr., Benny, Wilbur, and Donny, who sleep upstairs in the Lundbergs’ little house, four big boys in bunkbeds. In daytime, they’re placid enough, all big-boned, phlegmatic (“Those Lundbergs,” my grandma said, “they can sit with the best of them”), but at night they toss and turn and holler out and sometimes go for walks.
Something about hot sticky weather brings the Lundbergs out at night. When Gary and LeRoy make the midnight round in the cruiser, they’re never surprised to see a Lundberg lumbering down the street. Once Donny sleepwalked all the way to the ballpark and crouched behind the plate, calling for the fast one. They’ve climbed fences in their sleep, gotten into gardens, tramped on tomatoes, knocked over beanpoles. Wilbur woke up in a tree once. And in a town where nobody locks the doors or knows where the keys are, some people have been awakened by a Lundberg on the premises, coming up the stairs in his shorts.
Even restless and afoot, they’re sound sleepers. You have to shake a Lundberg and yell at him, and then when he wakes up, he’s never in a good mood. He’s apt to shake you back and yell, “What are you doing t’me? Getcha hands offa me!”
One hot night, four Lundbergs took a hike, aroused by thunder and lightning, aroused but not awakened. Their neighbor Mrs. Thorvaldson, widow of Senator K.’s brother Harry, called the constables. Carl, Jr., had pitched into her marigolds and the other three were moving around on her lawn. “They’re having dreams, and I don’t want to be part of it,” she said.
Gary and LeRoy hauled Carl, Jr., out of the flowers and herded the others to their own yard and, rather than wake them, tied clothesline to their ankles and tethered them to a tree. Of course, when Carl walked to the end of his rope, he fell like a load of bricks. He awoke then, mad about the rope, the light in his face—“This isn’t right,” he said, as LeRoy untied him. “You got no right tying up people in their sleep. We were asleep. You woke us up. You can’t do that.”
LeRoy said he was sorry. “Sorry!” Carl said. “Sorry isn’t good enough.” Next day, he had forgotten the whole thing. When Dorothy asked him how he was, he said, “I didn’t sleep too well last night. Somebody put sticks in my bed. I got scratches all up and down my legs. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder.”
In the booth across from Carl, Harold and Marlys Diener sit on one side, wedged in by Willard Diener, and across from them are Rollie Hochstetter and brother Walter. “If Harold don’t treat you right, you give me a call,” Willard says to Marlys with a friendly leer. You big dummy, she thinks. She is crushed between them and can hardly handle her fork and finish her lemon meringue pie. She just mentioned to Harold that she wants to go to St. Cloud and see a movie, she doesn’t care which one, they haven’t been to a movie for months without the kids along. They are slowly getting over a big argument of months before, March in fact. He got so mad he threw the Bible out the bedroom window right through the glass. She was showing him the verse where it says, Husbands love your wives, or words to that effect. He grabbed it and threw it. The argument started out to be about breakfast: he was going to make French toast and didn’t put oil in the frying pan, and she said, “Don’t you know how to do this?” and he said, “It’s not my job.” He talked about wives being obedient to husbands, so she wanted to show him the other side. He threw it out the window. It was cold out, so he had to spend an hour cleaning shards of glass out of the window and cutting a new pane and installing it, which didn’t improve his disposition, and that night after supper he said, “If you’d spend a little less time at your mother’s gabbing and a little more around here, this place’d be something a person could call home.”
“Sometimes I think Mother’s is my home,” she replied.
“Well, anytime you decide, you just let me know.”
“Well, maybe I’m in the process of deciding.”
They had gone to the bedroom so the children wouldn’t hear. They were in there for fifteen or twenty minutes, then Dawn came in. “Daddy, Todd broke the biffy,” she said.
The little boy had dropped his Brussels sprouts in the toilet and covered them up with a couple pounds of toilet paper, and then flushed, and flushed again, flooding the bathroom floor. Harold got a clothes hanger and fished the glop out of the bowl, and Marlys mopped. He said, “This always happens. If you’d just pay attention to the kids once in a while, maybe they’d learn something about discipline.”
“I can’t do everything myself!” she said. She slammed the door shut and yelled some more things at him—she forgot what she said, but something connected, something she had been saving up for a long time, and when he heard it, he said, “That’s it. I don’t have to take this anymore.”
He marched straight to the front door and threw it open. A blast of cold air hit him. She was right behind him, saying, “Go ahead! Walk out! Leave us! I don’t care!” Behind her, peeking around her, were the kids. They never heard this sort of talk, they weren’t allowed to go to movies that featured this sort of dialogue—only to family movies.
Harold turned and marched past them to the bedroom. He felt ridiculous. He had been about to utter his exit line, “You don’t need to tell me you don’t care, I know you don’t care,” when he remembered it was March and he was barefooted. He was going to say the line and slam the door. Instead, he had to go back for socks. He yanked clothes out of the drawer and threw them on the floor, looking for his long wool socks, meanwhile he kept repeating himself:
“I’ve had it. A man can only take so much.”
“There’s a limit to how much a man can take.”
“I’ve come to the end of my rope.”
“A man can take just so much and no more.”
The children drifted away. Marlys went to make coffee. The moment was lost for him. He wandered into the kitchen to ask if she had seen his wool socks, and she said no, would he like a cup of coffee? He said okay. “To go?” she whispered. He didn’t hear her. After a while, he said, “Sometimes I don’t know what keeps us together.”
“If it wasn’t for winter, I think I’d be a divorced woman,” she told her mother the next day. Her mother said, “You keep your house so cold. You oughta turn up the heat so you can wear your good nightie.”
That wasn’t the problem.
Crushed between Harold and Willard, their elbows in her side, Willard breathing on her, she felt like that was something she deserved a little vacation from. Even the night he came so close to leaving, Harold had that on his mind about ten minutes later. She went to bed with her back turned to him and wouldn’t roll over, but the bed had a trough down the middle (from that), and when she was half asleep and her grip on the mattress loosened, she fell into the trough and there he was, waiting.
“What movie you going to see?” Willard said. “Maybe I’ll come and keep you company.”
“Anything that doesn’t have naked people in it,” Harold said. “Marlys sees naked people and it makes her sick.”
“Depends on the person,” she said. Willard thought that was the funniest thing he ever heard in his life.
Fr. Emil comes in for lunch. Harold: “Shhhh. Father hear us talk, we’ll be here till Tuesday.” With Father is Father Willetz, visiting from St. Cloud, a priest who wears a turtleneck. Father stands by the coatrack, pretending to read the auction notices and ballroom posters. Actually he is scouting the room for the right place to sit, a strategic problem for a priest who simply wants to eat lunch and not necessarily be asked what he thinks about those Benedictines who got hold of St. Mary’s in Finseth.
St. Mary’s was a gorgeous church until the Benedictines came through and told people they ought to clean out the statuary and the high altar, which the people did, and do you know what they used for an altar? A lunch table! From the cafeteria! Set right out on the floor where everybody could see it—why? Why tear the church apart so you can see the priest say Mass?
Fr. Emil has been asked about St. Mary’s often enough, by sitting near the wrong people who feel obliged to make conversation on holy things. He says a prayer, asking God to grant him a secular lunch. He reads the wall—
Bill Larson and his Stearns County Cavaliers are playing the St. Anna Coliseum. Johnny (Mr. Sway) Swendson (formerly of “Let’s Get Together!” on WCCO) coming in August. A thank-you note from the Bloodmobile.* A wedding dance at the Avon Ballroom on July 22nd for Mary Paterek and Virgil Loucks (imagine, a youth named Virgil, he must be the youngest Virgil in Minnesota, maybe the last of the Virgil line). An auction of household goods July 14 (and some farm machinery and misc.) at the Albert Diener farm, lunch on the grounds, three o’clock sharp. Albert is seventy-two. He never thought this would happen to him, his legs getting weak.
“Father?” says Father Willetz.
“Sorry.” There’s an empty booth across the floor from the jukebox. Father Emil knows that with him sitting there, nobody will play music.
For three weeks of agony last February, Dorothy was gone on vacation to Tucson, and her cousin Flo from Burnsville, who is too nervous to run around at noon with a dozen orders in her head, filled in. “I don’t know how you do it,” she told Dorothy, arid she was right, she didn’t. Flo has her own way, a daily menu like a hot-lunch program—you plunk down your $2.50 and get Luau Pork Chops with pineapple and marshmallow dainties and cherry-cola Jell-O salad, or, if it’s Tuesday, Tuna Mandalay with Broccoli Hollywood, End of the Trail Bean Salad, and Yum Yum Bars or Ting-A-Lings (your choice). Liver casserole au gratin appeared once, and Chicken Surprise and potato-chip cookies. Flo herself did not eat lunch, or drink coffee. Her coffee had an oil slick on top.
Good old Norwegian cooking: you don’t read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality. At Art’s Bait & Night O’Rest Motel, guests find the cabins are small, the chairs are hard, and the floors are studded with exposed nails. For decoration, an exciting wildlife picture, and for relaxation, you get two cast-iron lawn chairs with a scallop shell that makes a twenty-four-hour impression on your back, even through a shirt. In Cabin One is a hand-lettered sign tacked to the wall beside the door. “Close the damn Door,” it says. In Cabin Two, you will read, “Don’t clean Fish on the Picnic tables. How many Times do I have to Repeat myself? Use the table by the Botehouse. That’s What it’s there for. Anyone caught Cleaning Fish on Picnic Tables gets thrown out bag + baggage. This means You. For Pete Sake, use your goddamn Head.” Underneath that gruff exterior is a man who means every word he says. Every summer you will see at least one car hightailing it out of Art’s with a red-faced man at the wheel and the back seat full of scared children. The man is livid. If Bambi walked out of the woods, he might not swerve to miss her. At the end of Art’s long dirt road, he turns east on the gravel, skidding half sideways, the back wheels spinning, stones flying like they were shot from guns, and he stomps it and hits eighty on the quarter-mile straightaway to Hansens’, hits the brake, and takes that long deceptive turn around Sunfish Bay sliding up into the left lane, his wife saying, “Stop. Stop right here and let us all out.” What has burned his bacon is the utter shame of it. The humiliation. He caught the sunnies about a hundred yards off the dock, one, two, three, four, big ones, and rowed back to show them off. He was so excited, he cleaned them right away for breakfast, on the picnic table, intending to wash it off afterward. Then a skinny, sawed-off sonuvabitch with a face like a bloodhound’s came up from behind, grabbed the knife away from him, and said, “Get the hell out of here. You got five minutes and then I get the shotgun.” He waved the knife at him. The man was berserk, one of those psycho-rural types you see in movies, unshaven, drooling brown spit, who take in city-folk for the night so they can murder them in their beds. A vacation is ruined. He had to run around the cabin throwing stuff into suitcases, hustling sleepy kids into the car, grabbing up wet swimsuits and towels, while his wife said, “Can’t you just talk to him?” and the maniac stood outside the door saying, “If you can’t read a simple goddam sign and follow one simple goddam instruction, then you can just get your fat butt the hell out of here.” Right in front of the children. And he wouldn’t give back the knife. Careening along the dirt road, the dad’s gorge begins to rise for good, and down the straightaway, he completely rethinks his position on gun control. The speedway turns are to compensate for his not decking the man on the spot and cutting his scrawny throat. Oscar Hansen has seen a lot of cars almost spin out on the long turn and come up through his barbed wire. He’s thought about putting up a sign:
CALM DOWN.
HE’S LIKE THAT TO EVERYBODY.
Other residents come to mind as people who if you were showing a friend from college around town and you saw them you would grab his arm and make a hard U-turn, such as Mr. Berge, not because he might be drunk but because whether drunk or sober he might blow his nose with his index finger the old farmer way. Farmers still do this in the field, though most of them know that town is a different situation, but not Mr. Berge and his friends, the Norwegian bachelor farmers. Their only concession to town is a slight duck of the head for modesty’s sake. To them, the one-hand blow is in the same league with spitting, which they also do, and scratching in the private regions. They never learned the trick of reaching down deep in your pocket and feeling around for a dime until you solve the problem. When ill at ease, such as when meeting your friend, they are apt to do all three in quick succession, spit, blow, and scratch—p-thoo, snarf, ahhhhh—no more self-conscious than a dog.
“It’s better to apologize than to ask permission,” says Clarence, arguing for greater boldness in life. The bachelor farmers, however, do neither. On a warm day, six of them may roost on the plank bench in front of Ralph’s, in peaceful defiance of Lutheranism, chewing, sipping, snarfling, and p-thooing, until he chases them away to the Sidetrack Tap (they’re bad advertising for a grocery store, the heftiness of them seems to recommend a light diet) and then they may not go. Mr. Munch may just spit on the sidewalk, study it, and say, “I don’t see no sign says No Sitting.” “You get up, I’ll paint one for you,” says Ralph. They may wait a good long time before they go.
“Tellwiddem,” says Mr. Fjerde.
“Tellwid all uvem,” says Mr. Munch.
The Norwegian bachelor’s password. Tellwitcha.
We are all crazy in their eyes. All the trouble we go to for nothing: ridiculous. Louie emerging from his job at the bank, white shirt and blue bow tie, shiny brown shoes, delicately stepping across the street for lunch: dumb bastard. Byron Tollefson bending over grass, pulling the odd stuff out: stoopid. Your college chum, gesturing at the cornices of brick facades and saying, “Marvelous!”: talks like a goddam woman.
In time, you learn not to die of shame, as you did at sixteen and eighteen and twenty-one, when you meet one while in the company of a fine friend—you learn to let the friend figure things out for himself, you don’t yank him into Skoglund’s to look at postcards until the coast is clear. Which is odd, considering that it’s true, as Clarence once said: in their hearts, the bachelor farmers are all sixteen years old. Painfully shy, perpetually disgruntled, elderly teenagers leaning against a wall, watching the parade through the eyes of the last honest men in America: ridiculous. Clarence mentioned this when I was eighteen and complaining about my father’s lawn compulsions—grass is meant to get long, it’s part of nature, nature is growth. “You should talk to the Norwegian bachelors, you have a lot in common,” he said. I said to myself: ridiculous.
It’s noon of a July day, not a cloud in sight; and a long stone’s throw from the Box, a long beanpole of a kid with hair the color of wet s
traw stands in the front door of the big green house and holds a cup of coffee. In his pajamas, still, at noon. The Tollefson house, the green one with two cast-iron deer peacefully grazing in front of the dark screened porch, a rusted Monkey Wards swing set in back. The Tollefson boy who has been up until two in the morning for weeks reading books, still basking in the glow of graduation and getting the Sons of Knute Shining Star Award (a $200 scholarship). His mother, Frances, is still basking, too, and that’s why, when she comes up behind him, she touches him lightly on the shoulder and says gently, “Still in your pajamas, Johnny?”
Lake Wobegon Days Page 18