Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  He flinches as if she were a snake. He sighs. “The answer to your question, Mother, is yes. These are my pajamas and I’m in them.”

  “Would you like a little lunch?”

  “No, I’m not hungry.”

  “I could fix you breakfast.”

  “I just said I’m not hungry.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He sighs. He’s cornered with her there behind him. He walks over to the brown cane chair by the porch swing and slouches down in it. It’s hard to get comfortable if you’re tall, you have to ease down until you balance on a particular vertebra a few notches above the coccyx. He finds the bone he wants, puts his feet up on the swing, sets his sad blue eyes on the Krebsbach house across the street, and wishes she would leave him alone. Why is it the people who follow you around asking what’s wrong are the ones who wouldn’t know if you told them?

  What’s wrong is this—and it isn’t this exactly, this is only one thing of many—it’s his mother’s plan that at two o’clock they pick up his grandma and Aunt Mary and his uncle Senator K. Thorvaldson, and the whole motley bunch drive to St. Cloud to see him register at St. Cloud State College for fall quarter.

  “It’s only registration! It’s like getting a driver’s license! It takes ten minutes! What’s the big deal?” he said to her three days ago when she announced this idea.

  “I thought you’d be pleased. They’re so proud of you. They want to be there.”

  How do you tell your mother that there’s something funny about your old relatives? They talk funny, and they look funny. It’s less noticeable in Lake Wobegon, but put them in a big city like St. Cloud and everybody sees it, like they have signs around their necks that say “Hick.” People in St. Cloud have some shine to them and look comfortable in their clothes as they stroll along St. Germaine, going about their business affairs, and if you asked one of them for directions to a good restaurant, they’d tell you that, but his old relatives dress up like scarecrows, Uncle Senator wears baggy black pants and an old white shirt buttoned up to the neck and no tie and hightop kangaroo shoes, and if you asked him for directions he’d give you the story of his life.

  For three days they’ve gone around and around.

  “Why don’t you and them go register? You don’t need me.”

  “Oh, Johnny, it’s such a little thing.”

  “If it’s so little, how come they have to go?”

  “I can’t tell them they can’t come now, they’d be so hurt.”

  “Well, you should’ve thought of that when you invited them.”

  His dad said, “If we’re not good enough to be seen with you in public, then maybe it’s time you started packing.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with the fact that I am perfectly capable of going to St. Cloud without taking my whole family along.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t see and I doubt if you ever will.”

  “I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

  Why couldn’t his family be more like the Flambeaus? Emile and Eileen Flambeau in the Flambeau Family mystery series he has read every one of which twice. Emile is a Nobel laureate microbiologist whose travels around the world in search of elusive viruses seem to put him time after time in the vicinity of violent crimes committed by rings of dope smugglers, whom Emile brings to justice with the use of superior intelligence, his own and that of his wife, the former screen star, and his teenage son, Tony Flambeau. The Flambeaus live in a spacious apartment at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel overlooking Central Park in Manhattan, where they relax and have fun after their strenuous adventures, and what impresses him is the way Emile and Eileen treat Tony as a mature person and also the way the Flambeaus do what they feel like doing—when they feel like doing it, not like in Lake Wobegon. There is no noon siren in Manhattan when everyone has to sit down immediately and eat a hot beef sandwich, no six o’clock siren when you dig into a tuna casserole made with cream of mushroom soup. The Flambeaus keep irregular hours. Once they went to Chinatown at three in the morning for shark fin soup, and another time they went for a long walk together down Fifth Avenue and dropped in at Xenon and danced and went to a movie and wound up sailing out through the Verrazano Strait in the Ginny B. as the sun rose over the Atlantic. It’s the little things that impress him about the Flambeaus, such as Tony’s sixteenth birthday, when Eileen said, “Tony, Emile and I would love it if you’d join us for a glass of wine on the balcony,” and Tony said, “Thanks, Eileen. Should I open the Pouilly-Fuissé?” To call your parents by their first names, to sit around drinking fine wine with them—this never happens in Lake Wobegon!

  No point in thinking about Flambeaus now. He’s squashed in the front seat between his mother and Grandma, who reeks of face powder and lilac water. Aunt Mary and Senator K. are spread out in back. The windows are rolled up tight because Grandma can’t stand drafts. She leans forward, her jaw set, gripping the shiny black purse as if someone would snatch it from her, the thick specs magnifying her eyes so she looks like a lizard. A lizard with a mustache. Aunt Mary is Grandma’s younger sister who never married, and it’s not hard to see why men looked at her and thought they could make it through life without her by their side. Aunt Mary talks the way other people chew gum. His dad can stand her for about five minutes, then he goes out and starts up the lawn mower. Wraps the cord around her neck and gives it a yank. In the car, she narrates the trip. Up ahead is a house moving down the road on a flatbed truck—“Look. A house on the road! Ain’t that something.” Look at those sheep. Boy, there are lots of them, aren’t there. Boy, that’s a big building. Sure is warm today, isn’t it.

  Aunt Mary reads billboards out loud. Petters’ Furs & Fabrics, All You Need To Sew, See Us About Winter Coat Storage. O’Connell’s Midnight Club, Cocktails and Dancing, Appearing Nightly The Duke Bryan Combo. Don’t Drive So Fast Among the Pines, Aunt Mary Likes to Read Our Signs—Burma-Shave.

  And Uncle Senator K. Thorvaldson—who else has a great-uncle named Senator? How do you explain to people that he was named that because his mother liked the sound of it? If he was normal, it might be okay, but he’s even battier than the others. At least Aunt Mary talks about what’s there but Uncle Senator drifts in and out of the present; anything in the world can remind him of anything else going back to boyhood where in fact he hangs out most of the time; so the sights of the modern world are pretty amazing to him, such as motor vehicles (“We useta go to St. Cloud, it took us all day and Mama packed us a dinner and we slept at the Uelands’. Can you believe that, Johnny? Now look at us”) or ballpoint pens (“Did you ever see how these work, Johnny? Boy, the guy what thought it up sure was a smart one, don’t you think”), or even good weather surprises him. Aunt Mary reads signs into your left ear and Uncle Senator leans forward and yammers into your right. “Oh Johnny, you’ll remember this day as long as you live. What a day! Look at that sky! Oh, God is good, isn’t he. Ah, it’s a good day.”

  Now, as they come down Division Street and turn onto the campus of St. Cloud State College, he slouches deeper into the front seat, ducks his head, puts his hand up to his face. He wants to become somebody at this school. He wants to write for the literary magazine Cumulus, but what if when he brings in his poems and stories, the editor looks up and says, “Oh yeah, I remember you—you were driving around in a beat-up car with a bunch of funny-looking people”?

  And people are staring at them. Groups of girls turn and look, and a couple of guys with tennis racquets, distinguished underclassmen carrying briefcases, everyone turns and takes a gander at the yokels—of course! “Ma!” he cries. “Ma! You’re going the wrong way! This is a one-way street!”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake. This is so confusing. I’m doing the best I can.”

  A car honks. Another car honks. A garbage truck swerves and lets out a long blast.

  “Pull in the parking lot!” he hisses. “Turn! Here! Turn!”r />
  Aunt Mary and Senator don’t notice this, they’re too busy noticing the size of buildings, but Grandma takes his hand in hers—she is trembling. God knows why. She thinks something terrible is just about to happen, God knows what. The idea of one-way traffic is as foreign to Grandma as outer space. For all she knows, the car is about to blow up in flames. She pulls out a hanky and wipes her eyes. This unnerves his mother, who is already shaken.

  “Mother,” she says, “don’t you start in or I’m going to go right to pieces!”

  Grandma weeps. They sit in the car in the middle of an empty parking lot. His mother is weeping. Senator says, “Where do we go, Johnny? Where is your school building? Boy, I never seen the likes—it looks like a hundred schools!” Aunt Mary thinks she will stay in the car, she can see everything just fine from here.

  “Excuse me, please,” he says, and his mother climbs out, and he climbs out and turns to her. “You almost killed us,” he says. “Why don’t you stay in the car, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, and then I’ll drive us home.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. He turns and walks away, fast. She says something else to him but he doesn’t stop. He walks across the lawn and around the front of Meister Hall and as soon as he’s out of sight, he sits down on the steps, pulls a cigarette out of his pocket—one he has saved for this very moment—and lights it expertly, cupping his hand, and exhales. Looking across the street, he imagines that he is Tony Flambeau. Emile and Eileen sent him out on the plane—“You don’t need us along, we’d only get in your way,” Eileen said, even though he begged them both to come, knowing how much fun it would be. What great parents! Actually, they’re his best friends. But she was right: it is time for him to strike out on his own. Here at St. Cloud he will have the freedom to develop more as an individual. Which is exactly what they want for him. How lucky to have such wonderful parents! He will miss Manhattan, but he’ll soon make new friends here, and of course they’ll all know about the famous Flambeaus and ask him about his adventures, but he’ll be able to tell the phonies from the true friends, and his true friends he’ll invite to New York for Christmas break—Eileen is great about welcoming Tony’s pals to their spacious apartment. Feeling terribly lucky, Tony Flambeau snuffs out the smoke, and ambles toward the registration office, his hands stuck in his pockets, a guy without a care in the world, a guy who shows every sign of becoming a very big success.

  Byron Tollefson didn’t accompany them to St. Cloud because he was busy at the Co-op Elevator, trying to iron out a misunderstanding with a man in Minneapolis who felt that the elevator owed $1564 for sunflower seeds. Byron knew the seeds had never arrived, but the voice on the phone had an invoice in front of him and couldn’t be made to understand that a piece of paper is one thing, a shipment of seeds is another.

  To Byron, the boys in Minneapolis were a lot like his son: didn’t know anything, thought they knew everything, talked in that smart voice and so damn persistent until you lost patience and wanted to smack them.

  Byron valued patience. Nothing worthwhile comes easy. Life is full of disappointments. You learn this growing up on a farm. Forty acres of corn burns up in July or is flooded out or beaten to a pulp by hail. You learn to look at it and say, “Well—.” And after you’ve looked at disaster, disappointment falls into place in the natural order of things. The lack of a car to drive to a dance, the lack of a good shirt to go in, the lack of time to go at all—these aren’t disasters, not like to his son.

  The world had changed. Father Emil spoke about this to the Commercial Club a few weeks before. Byron was Lutheran, but he gave Father Emil a lot of credit. Father Emil had spoken the week before Father’s Day and said that agnostic liberals had cut fatherhood off at the knees. These liberals aimed to destroy authority and stability, and so had undermined the Father. Look at television, Father had said—Dad is shown as a dummy who stumbles around and breaks things and gets into trouble, usually to be rescued by a small child or a pet. Children watch hours of this junk every week. Their fathers allow them to watch it because fathers want to be pals, not meanies. But children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

  Father Emil thought that fatherhood could be restored, but Byron thought maybe things had gone too far. Guys who hung around the elevator often talked about their boys and things the boys did that they the fathers would never have dared to do. Guy Peterson the other day had mentioned his boy, Guy, Jr. The boy had refused to do chores. Said he didn’t feel like it. “You sick?” Guy asked him. No, the boy said, he felt depressed. Guy was baffled by that. He didn’t know what depression had to do with the fact there were forty Holsteins that had to be milked and the stalls cleaned and the feed put down. He didn’t see how depression entered into the picture at all. “If I had ever said that to my dad, he woulda walloped me one upside the head, given me something to be depressed about.” That was in the old days when it was different.

  My dad was of the old regime. He dispensed discipline, some Bible instruction, and a good example of industry and manly conduct, but he didn’t hang out with us. Once he made a boomerang from a scrap of plywood, cut it on the jigsaw, shaped it on the belt sander, gave it two coats of lacquer and presented it to me for my birthday, but he no more would’ve taken me out and showed me how to throw it than he would’ve climbed up in our treehouse and read comics. He drew the line at fatherhood.

  I took the boomerang myself to Tollerud’s cornfield and after thirty, forty throws like throwing an ordinary stick, got off a good one, sidearm, the gift skimming six feet above the ground for a couple hundred feet, then rising and rising and circling back and making an incredible perfect descent to my throwing hand. Incredible. I felt I had performed a miracle so impossible as to make me immortal, and, of course, I never threw the boomerang again. You only need to be immortal once.

  He wasn’t there to see it. That night while he washed up for supper, he asked if the boomerang worked, and I said yes. “Good,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him how perfectly it flew, what an amazing little piece of wood he had made, but my dad did not deal in compliments or engage in small talk with children. This sounds harsh, and yet the memory of that perfect flight is a finer memory, I think, for it being mine alone, without him leaning over me in the cornfield, placing my little fingers on the wood, demonstrating, crowding me out of the picture.

  Grownups were so immense, slow moving, carrying great burdens; they sank into chairs with a great sigh and remained there for long periods as we fetched a newspaper, got ice cream for them, rubbed their necks. “Rub my neck, wouldja,” one would say and so we did as the poor thing groaned. They had so many aches and pains, we never expected them to play with us. Aunt Flo did, sometimes, take her ups and give the ball a whack, but she only visited the game, she didn’t stay in it.

  They kept to the porch in the summer when they weren’t working, sunk into porch chairs. Their dogs barked. Their eyes burned. They had dust in their mouths, we got them Kool-Aid. “I don’t know when I’ve felt so exhausted before,” they said day after day, always beating their old record. Their weariness was honorable, even awesome. They had done everything they could do for us. We could ask no more.

  So: to tiptoe out on the porch on Sunday afternoon and find three old guys in suits, my uncles, giggling over a good one they had pulled twenty years before. Giggling.

  Our porch featured heavy white wicker chairs you could hide behind and listen. “Oh, no! Oh, no, don’t remind me!” Uncle Art bending over, having a coughing fit, spilling coffee on his good brown suit. Men who in dealing with me were paragons of prudence and thrift and maturity and knew the value of a dollar and giving an hour’s work for an hour’s pay and meeting your responsibilities, actually giggling as they remembered “the look on his face” when he saw his T-Model Ford on top of the chicken coop, or when he bit into his sandwich, or when he opened the door and found the pig in the bedroom.

  Grow up, my sister said after she took a b
ite of Grape-Nuts that she had shaken salt on, knowing I had put sugar in the shaker, but actually I had switched it back so it really was salt in the shaker. Grow up.

  My uncles were old, in their forties, but when one of them remembered it—that deal they pulled on him and then lay in the weeds, waiting for him to walk into it—they all remembered it as if it were happening right then. “Here he comes.” “Shhhhhh.” “What if he doesn’t—” “Don’t worry. He will.” And he did. Wham! The pail fell! Cowflop all over! He slipped and sat down in it!

  Tipping the privy with their cousin Phil inside. He had arrived from Minneapolis in a linen suit and had a bad case of the trots. He was visiting the privy every fifteen minutes. The fourth visit, he was just getting comfortable when his world overturned. The privy fell forward, landing door-down. Phil thought it was the result of something he had done, so he didn’t yell. They heard him say, “Oh, dear. Oh, dear,” as he picked himself up, and saw his guilt-stricken face peering out one of the seats.

  Hanging bells on the bedsprings on Art and Millie’s wedding night. Art had an idea they were going to, but in his great passion he forgot and jumped in bed like Christmas morning. Then he tried not to move too much, but it still tinkled, and finally he had to climb out of the rack and unfasten them, all sixty-seven. The wire was wound tight, the boys had spent all morning on the project.

  Days of fear and trembling until it blew over. And then years of reminiscence.

  In fact, wrassling that hog up the stairs, they already were thinking what a wonderful story it would be—boy, they’re not going to believe this one. Boy, we’re going to be talking about this one for a long time to come.

  Got the pig up on the bed. Fed him corn until he quieted down. He went to sleep. They tiptoed downstairs. They waited.