Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  One night she sat at Ella’s kitchen table, cutting up cucumbers, and suddenly dropped the knife and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do when you’re gone,” and cried bitterly, and Ella tried to comfort her. “Don’t worry, I feel just fine,” she said. Ella doesn’t think about death much herself. Not as much as she did thirty years ago. She thinks about visitors. Loneliness is too dramatic. It makes troubles seem tragic, and hers are quite ordinary old-lady troubles, she thinks, and would seem more ordinary if she had some ordinary visitors. Not like Charlotte. Charlotte is an event.

  Spring. I’m twelve and am getting a little tired of Jim’s rules playing guns—he gets to be whoever he wants to be and we have to be Custer or FBI or Russians and have to count slow to fifty when we’re shot, whereas he gets to say “You just winged me!” and we’re supposed to believe it—so I take a walk. Carl Krebsbach and his friends hang out by his garage in the alley down from the school. I sit on a swing and look down the alley and see them, six guys watching Carl sand the rust spots off the fender skirt of his terrific red ’48 Chev. It would be nice if they saw me and yelled “C’mere!” but of course they don’t, being older, they have their own rules, so I go over there. Sneak down the alley to the garbage cans and listen in—Harold Diener is saying, “That asshole!” and they laugh. I say it to myself a few times, to get the hang of it, and then slowly edge around the corner and slip into the garage and stand by the rear bumper as if I’ve been there for hours. Trying to blend in and be unnoticeable like a tree or a dog, but Harold sees me. “What do you want?” he says. I say that I just came to see what they were doing. “So now you saw. Beat it.” Actually, I would like to hang around for a while. I say to Carl, “Can I help?” and, miraculously, he hands me a scrap of sandpaper. “You scratch the paint, he’ll break your arm,” says Harold. I work away at the tiny brown spot, and the spectators go back to what they were talking about, which was a teacher who gave Junior an F on a book report he had copied from the book jacket, which reminds them of all the money they’re going to earn when they get out of goddam school, and of Minneapolis, of this guy George knows in Minneapolis who works at the Ford plant and drives a Cadillac (“He don’t care what they think!”) that has a beer spigot on the dashboard and the front seat tilts all the way back to make a bed, electrically, when you press a switch, which is fascinating indeed but not to Harold. He keeps staring at me. I’m the fly in his ointment. I try to be invisible, a good little worker, but I feel his eyes boring into me. Then he says that he doesn’t know how they feel about it but he feels that you can’t have someone in the car club who hasn’t gone through initiation otherwise every jerk in town is going to be hanging around—he says to me, “You know what a tire run is, dontcha?” Actually, I don’t, and am not curious to find out, but he and Junior and George think it’s a great idea. They get a tire and Harold grabs my arm and we head over to school. I could yell for help and probably he’d let go, but I decide to show that I can take it, whatever it is, even when we climb up the toboggan hill behind school and I start to get the idea. And I am right. They hold the tire and I am supposed to sit curled up in it, bracing myself, and roll down the hill. I hate them all. I hate them so much that I say, “This isn’t anything. I’ve done this.” I actually make myself believe it, and get in the tire! One mighty push and I start to fall, spinning faster and faster—I close my eyes—I hear them yelling far away—it bounces off the ground, it thumps and the ground roars by and sky, I’m so dizzy I feel sick—now it’s on grass, hissing, and then it bounces so hard my guts hurt, off a tree, and I fall down and I get right out and sit on the grass as if nothing happened. Everything is a blur, but I look around as if I am admiring the lovely foliage this time of year. When my head clears so I can make out foliage, I get up and walk away from the tire, back to the garage where Carl is sanding away. He looks up. “Those assholes,” I say.

  Every spring when the car goes down, the Sons of Knute sing—

  Beat those rugs and clean the biffy.

  Now is the time to make it spiffy.

  —and go to work cleaning the Lodge, a sacred service in the ancient rite of Knutedom, but sacred more for the ritual than for the result. They start at noon with the Call to Order and the ceremonial Passing of the Pail, then the Installation of the Ancient Vacuum and the Removal of the Deceased Plants, and a symbolic swipe of the Fraternal Dustrag, and then it’s time for the Opening of the Amber Essence of the Blessed Hops. “It smells like somebody’s buried in there,” says my mother, who’s never been in there but has a sense for that sort of thing. Most Knutes smoke, and by April even they are noticing it—even Elmer who smokes three packs a day. Elmer once woke up in the night smelling smoke, and it turned out to be himself. That was when he cut down from four.

  Long ago, the Knutes formed a secret service organization called the Nogebow Ekal, whose aim was to perform good deeds secretly for the pure pleasure of helping others and accepting no thanks or recognition,* a principle that all incoming Knutes were secretly sworn to uphold. “Believe me, if they’d ever done anything, we’d have heard about it,” says Mother. Her skepticism is shared by others. The secret of Nogebow Ekal, like the secret of the Knutes’ pressed coffee, is one that not many care to know.

  The Lodge is square, squat, brick with sandstone sills and cornerstone (1907). Under the rear, southwest corner is a jack. The foundation cracked under that corner and was removed in 1948 so a new one could be put in. The jack is there temporarily until the Knutes decide exactly how they want to go about that.

  Storm windows come off in April, screens go on—on a certain day that is not known until it arrives, the first Saturday when people feel they are about to suffocate. The fear of drafts dies hard, and then the massive storms are pried off and the windows opened and a little fresh air blows in which shows a person how dismal and stale the old air was and awakens a person to the dank Carpet, the mildew, the dead winter dust on everything, the general corruption of indoors after so much cold weather, like what grows on meat in a closed jar after six months in the fridge, which leads directly to spring cleaning.

  One fine Saturday morning, Diane opened her eyes and smelled something bad from under the blanket. Ed had been doing that a lot lately. She threw off the blanket, releasing it into the room like a black cloud, and then saw how grimy the windows were and that it was almost nine o’clock. Nine o’clock! She heard children downstairs rooting around for breakfast. One said, “You little jerk!” Then the smack of a hand, a box of cornflakes fell on the floor, and she smelled hot dogs and something like burning marshmallows.

  Never known for her housekeeping, Diane nonetheless was struck by the feeling that things had gone too far and if they went one inch farther, her family would slip right over the edge and live in a plywood container at the town dump, sleep on old mattresses, and eat out of large plastic bags.

  Ordinarily a bather, she showered, out of urgency, and pulled on her jeans and sweatshirt (“One Tough Mother”), yanked the covers off Ed—“Out of the sack,” she said; he said, “Huh?”—and hit the kitchen at a fast walk. It was marshmallows all right. Little Eddie was frying them with two wieners. Beth started to explain that it wasn’t her fault and that Paul had said mean things to her. Diane stuck a finger in the girl’s face. “Upstairs. Sheets off the beds, rugs off the floor, curtains off the windows. Bring it down here, everything. Five minutes. Go.” She snatched Paul on his way out the door. “Get a broom, a bucket and the sponge mop. I’m going to show you how to wash floors. Go. Now.” The little boy at the stove looked at his wieners; his lower lip curled, and a tear ran down his cheek. She put on water for coffee. She put bread in the toaster. She pried the wieners from the pan, scraped burnt marshmallow off, and made him a wiener sandwich with ketchup and fresh marshmallow, his favorite. “Finish that and then get your butt down to Grandma’s,” she said. “We got work to do here.”

  When Ed appeared, she had washed and dried the dishes, put a load of curtains in the was
her, and swept the kitchen floor. She poured him a cup of coffee and put a list in front of him, including Storm Windows, Take Out Mattresses & Carpets, Basement & Garage, Rake Lawn—“What’s the big rush all of a sudden?” he said.

  She was more than ready to tell him. She had a good sharp speech on the subject of Being Tired of Living in a Pig Sty. She was way ahead of him. Racing around the kitchen, slamming stuff into cupboards, scrubbing the floor with short hard declarative strokes, she had been talking to him long before he showed up. She had worked up a head of steam.

  —“I’m sick of looking at this mess.” Bang. “You drop your stuff all over—socks, towels, the paper, dirty dishes, all over the house.” Slam. “I’m sick of it. I’m not your mother, you know.” Bam.

  —“I’m sick of being ashamed to have péople stop in. Not everybody lives like pigs, you know. Not everybody wallows in dirt! Swoosh. “This place isn’t fit to live in!”

  —“I am through with trying to do it all by myself.” Swoosh. “Being an unpaid servant around here.” Swoosh.

  —“We’re going to clean today! We’re going to start living like decent human beings for a change!” Squeeze. Bang! “Otherwise you can find someone else to keep house for you.” Bam.

  She drove them all morning like a dog drives sheep. He hauled the storms to the garage, washed windows, hosed down the screens, put them up, the two children hauled carpets out and hung them on the clothesline, swept floors, dusted, she washed floors and walls, and when she detected lack of motion in their sectors, she was there, in two seconds, to bark at their heels and turn them in the right direction. She clapped her hands like a coach. “Come on! Let’s go! Move it!” She fixed peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. They ate standing up. The children looked at her as if she was crazy.

  The washer chugged along all day, and the dryer. She did all the scatter rugs, the curtains, living room drapes, dresser scarves, antimacassars, couch coverlet and pillow cases, the lace tablecloth, the sheets and bedspreads, plus regular wash, and between loads, she waxed the floors and cleaned the bathroom. She put Beth to work with furniture polish and sent Paul outdoors to help his father, but the children were starting to slow down, lose orbit, wander off—she caught Beth reading a book, she sent Paul to the basement for a paint scraper and when she noticed he was missing and went down to find him, he leaped up from behind the furnace—he had been lying on a plastic lounge chair, evidently trying to locate the scraper telepathically. “What’s the matter with you?” she yelled. The boy looked at her, confused, tired, at the point of tears. “I don’t know where it is,” he pleaded. “Why are you so mad at me? You yell at me all the time. I don’t know how to clean floors!”

  “Help me beat rugs,” she said. He slumped along behind her upstairs and out to the backyard where Ed had dumped the carpets in a heap. They hung them over the clotheslines, and she got a strip of molding out of the garage, snapped it in two across her knee, and handed him one. “Beat,” she said.

  He gave the carpet two light taps and little puffs of dust came out. “No, like this,” she said, and she started to whack it hard. Dust flew. He watched in amazement. Diane is small but she laid into the carpet as if it was the cause of all her trouble. In the carpet was not only filth and squalor but also ignorance, sloth, corruption, lack of ambition, everything that is dull and lifeless and corrosive to the spirit. She beat it senseless and moved on to the next, beating in the name of Christ and the apostles, in memory of generations of women who devoted themselves to scrubbing and scouring and purifying the world—heroic women who took up arms against filth and stagnation and against that dull, slack-jawed, slug-footed, limp-wristed, shiftless, listless, leisurely, lazy, lead-butt, slow-leak attitude of loungers and loafers and laggards and lumps and lie-abouts who were all too ready to accept filth as a way of life—she walloped the carpets with all her might, clobbered them up one side and then the other, and the boy gradually caught on. He swung from the heels, hard—“Hit flat! Not with the tip! Flat!” she hollered—getting a good thwack on every swing, amazed at how much dust was in them, carpets that had been faithfully vacuumed and yet ten, twenty, thirty thwacks and still more dust, it was endless, almost.

  “There,” she said. “Good work. You’re a good rugbeater.” She caught her breath, then they hauled the rugs into the house.

  Inside, it smelled of rich lemony polish and floorwax, the top layer of odor, and beneath was the smell of outdoor air, faint blossom and green, and beneath that was another aroma, so plain but so sweet, the smell of clean. Not soap or detergent, simply clean.

  The smell took Diane by surprise, her nostrils full of dust. She stood in the middle of the living room and took deep breaths. Ed was finishing up the raking on the side lawn, which had released the green smell. She called out the window, “Come in and smell the house.”

  Spring, Mrs. Hoglund opens the windows of her little green house, and you hear how her fall crop of piano students is doing these days. She works them hard through the early painful EGBDF-FACE phase and on to the Bach two-part inventions and “To a Wild Rose” and “Gypsy Song” by Ostroushko, which is supposed to evoke the dancing of Romany maidens as they return to the village with their load of kindling. Hard to imagine, dancing with a bundle of firewood on your shoulders, and not easy to play either, with so many quarter-notes in the left hand. “Not so draggy, Curtis. Pick it up. It’s meant to be happy. Don’t just play notes. Play music. Now, one, two, three—four, five, six.” And Curtis’s music follows you a little way down the street.

  In spring, the odometer of our good old Fairlane read 99999.2, the first car that Dad ever bought new so all those miles were ours, our history, including all the wonderful times he said, “Jump in. Let’s go for a ride.” It was the gadabout Pernell in him speaking. A Pernell great-uncle was among the first to get a car, and he was in such a hurry to go nowhere in particular that he ran it off the road and into the creek, hauling back on the wheel and yelling whoa! Dad loved to jump in and go for a ride, one of his few impractical traits. He’d start out, then think of a place to go, usually someone a ways away who we could visit. But we couldn’t stay long. “We got to go,” he’d say after one cup of coffee. On vacation trips, he’d pretend not to see a Reptile Garden or a Scenic Overlook even though we all pointed it out to him; he wanted to keep going. A vacation day when he didn’t put at least six hundred miles on the odometer was mostly wasted for him. So when he got home from the grocery store with the odometer teetering on the brink, about to turn a fresh chapter in our life, he said, “Jump in,” and we all jumped in and took off north around the lake, our eyes glued to the dial. A beautiful day, pretty as a postcard: a boat riding on the lake and someone standing up in it, hauling up anchor; two hawks lying on the wind, not moving their wings, two dark specks motionless against the clouds drifting east; and, amazing!—Mr. Hanson aboard his big Belgian, Scout—riding bareback, a deacon of the Lutheran church, digging his heels into Scout’s ribs to make him run a little, a horse so trained to the cultivator he is nervous about running and bucks a little—the deacon slips and falls forward, his face in the mane, and grabs onto Scout’s neck—Dad slowed down to a crawl for this show, and then (of course) we looked and the odometer read 00000.1 and we had missed what we came for. Dad said he could put the rear wheels up on blocks and run her in reverse until the odometer got back to zero and we could try again, but instead we ate supper. We opened the dining room window and the front door to let a breeze blow through. It was Saturday. The room smelled of grass and hamburgers and furniture polish.

  Another spring years later, a different Fairlane, same furniture polish (Johnson’s Glo-Coat), and similar burgers, the Saturday night of the Junior-Senior Prom, me in a white tuxedo. We believe that dancing is wrong—it leads only to carnal desire, that’s the whole purpose of it, to excite lust—but I don’t intend to dance, as I’ve told Mother fifty times, and looking at me, perhaps she can see that I don’t and am not likely to excite a girl to the point
where she’d want to, so I get the use of the car. I took a hot bath (until carnal desire came over me), inspected my face for horrible blemishes, and put on my clothes, everything new and wrapped in plastic, underwear, black socks, shirt, the rented suit, and stood in the dining room door to be inspected, feeling like the famous host of a panel show. My sister looked up and laughed. Dad glanced up, a little embarrassed by so much display of raw hope. Only Mother took a good look. She stood up and fixed a few stray hairs, adjusted the black bow tie, shot the cuffs, flexed the lapels, and walked around back and pinched off a loose thread. “You look very nice,” she said. She pulled out a hanky. “Do you need this?” she asked. I didn’t. I had two. An invisible microscopic speck of dust appeared on one shoulder, and she brushed it away with the hanky, and then, noticing something above my left eyebrow—unconsciously, out of habit, she spat a little ptui in the hanky and rubbed my forehead. Mother spit. Our holy water, the world’s most powerful cleansing agent.

  That spot burned all night. I kept rubbing it.

  I knew that the gymnasium was not going to look like the Donelson mansion in Last Dance at the Old Plantation, in which the family goes ahead with the spring cotillion although it is 1861 and the shades of war are settling on Charleston, but I liked that book for its debonaire style and could imagine myself in it. “Oh, Papa,” Emily said, her brown eyes glistening with tears, “don’t it seem almost criminal to dance while men are dying?” “Darling,” he replied softly, “we must go on with the cotillion so that gentlemen will have something to die for.” The gym was the gym, even with card-tables in it and sprays of lilac, and the watering trough in the middle of the floor, even though decorated to look like a fountain, was a watering trough. Still, the lights were low as they were that night at Swancroft. He pulled her to him, his handsome features slightly darkened by the cares of army life, and kissed her. “Oh Randolph,” she cried. “I didn’t know you cared!” “Miss Emily,” he said, softly, “another month may find me mortally wounded on some distant battlefield, and as I die, I shall have only this moment to remember.” I didn’t expect to find that depth of feeling at the Prom, but I could feel some sense of fading youth and impending tragedy and wished that Donna would too and know that this shining moment in life was passing quickly and we didn’t have much time in which to declare our passion for each other, of which she did not give even a hint, dancing with Roger Hedlund. I watched her from beside the punch bowl, a stainless steel kettle from the cafeteria with blue crepe paper wound around it, and held my Dixie cup high, in an interesting pose.