by Tricia Dower
He squeezes her arm.
Mother catches her at the dessert table. “You seem to have made quite the impression.”
May have to stomp grapes for Communion.
2
She holds the steering wheel so tensely her wedding ring bites into her skin. She’s made it past their mailbox at the end of the gravel road without turning back, made it past the crumbling mill by the river and all the way down St. Olaf Avenue without pausing for one last look at the venerable stone building, so like a castle, that reminds her of their honeymoon hotel.
The car is on County Road 23 now where gravity’s pull is weaker. She’s running away from her life again. Taking four-year-old Tavis with her this time, the two of them like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, whooshing off into the great Who Knows, she in a spacesuit stitched with guilt, her hands on the wheel of their rocket ship, Tavis gripping the toy steering wheel Ron installed on the passenger dash so he could help drive Mommy to her Big Adventure. The tiny horn’s wheeze is a small toll to pay for his complicity. She glances over at him in his red T-shirt and jaunty plaid pants. He has Ron’s dark hair and heart-shaped face, her green eyes and the linebacker shoulders she inherited from Daddy. Unthinkable he would stay in Prairie Fire without her although Ron threatened at first to not let him go. She needs more time to sever the umbilical cord, has dreams of floating with Tavis in the vast, dark womb of space, the cord keeping them both alive.
The drive will take an hour on this September Saturday. Sunlight stretches like smeared butter across the fertile landscape of corn and hay fields peppered with farmhouses, barns, silos, the occasional feedlot, apple orchard and huddle of oaks. If she rolls down the window, the smell of hay might yet change her mind.
“Look, Tavis, cows!” He loves their swinging tails.
He extends his little neck like a turtle. A booster seat would help but they’re dangerous with lap belts. “Will the moving men bring the little farm?”
“Yessiree, it’s on the van, safe and sound.”
That toy farm with the door that goes moo-oo is too babyish for him. He’s regressed lately, sucking his thumb and twirling his hair, wetting the bed, birthing an imaginary friend named Johnson, who’s napping in the back seat right now. Understandable, considering what she’s putting him through. She has to believe it’s for the best. Countless books and articles suggest one false move and your kid’s a mental case. She blames Mother and Daddy for her emotional immaturity. Their notion of love crippled her, plain and simple. Dr. Spock says a mother who’s afraid to admit she feels antagonistic to her child is more likely to imagine awful things happening to him. Lin isn’t the least bit antagonistic toward Tavis but she was well on her way to crippling him nevertheless: obsessing over news reports about pajamas catching on fire, toddlers scalded, strangled by venetian blind cords or falling from windows, an inner voice warning whatever she did might not be enough, might be wrong. One magazine article said intelligent women are especially in danger of pouring neurotic fears of failure and competitive drives into mothering. She’s convinced placing Tavis in daycare while she works will liberate him as much as it will her, despite Ron saying she’s engaging in self-serving rationalization.
A car in the rear-view mirror throws her off. A long black Ford that’s come from nowhere, its grill an evil silver-toothed grin. A car like the one FBI agents arrived in at the parsonage a year and a half ago. For a moment the road seems to shimmer and she fears she’s lost control of the spaceship. Looming ahead might be a sharp twist in the Milky Way where they won’t be able to control their steering wheels, will have to hang on until the spaceship crashes. She thrusts out her right arm to shield Tavis.
His eyes widen in fright. “Mommy?”
The black car turns down a side road. She pulls her arm back, clenches the wheel with both hands. “It’s okay, sweetheart. Mommy’s just being silly.”
And paranoid…selfish…insane.
She envies the women in the farmhouses with tire swings and wash dancing on the line. They endure, somehow, don’t indulge in existential crises. She’s agreed to return in a year but, honestly, what will change between now and then?
She’s ridden this route often, including to protests of the war people have lost interest in. They’d rather watch Hollywood Squares than a screaming child running in terror from her own napalm-blistered body. She and Ron drove it last to find her an apartment. He wanted a say in where his son would live, fair enough. Good thing as it turned out. With no credit history she needed him to sign the lease, one more humiliating moment.
They settled on an apartment complex that has the best daycare they can afford. It’s in Hopkins, west of Minneapolis, population thirteen thousand. Proud home of Miss America 1948, last year’s Aquatennial Queen and a Honeywell munitions plant they leafleted a few years ago. Together they scouted the neighborhood, Ron marking up a map with the nearest hospital, gas station, grocery store, library, post office, police station and fire department. It costs a bomb to park in the city so she’ll bus it to work. They timed the trip on a trial run. Bouncing along, Ron pointing out sights like a hyped-up tourist, she was struck with panic over being responsible for her decision, so close to saying, “Let’s forget this and go home.”
She and Tavis skirt Lakeville, Apple Valley and Rosemount, approach the Minnesota River where it passes between Bloomington and Eagan. She checks to be sure the black car hasn’t reappeared behind them. Tavis goes quivery when their tires bounce on the creaky wood plank trestle bridge, brightens on firmer ground. When she says, “Blue Fury’s galloping onto Excelsior Avenue,” he thrusts an arm in the air and shouts, “King Arthur!”
“I believe you’re thinking of his sword Excalibur.” Their metallic dark blue Plymouth Fury often transmogrifies into a knight’s horse. She’s not averse to indulging harmless fantasy play like that as opposed to the massive conspiracy surrounding Santa Claus.
They stop at the Red Owl on Ron’s map for enough to tide them over until she can shop alone. Tavis gets bored and sneaks items in the cart when she isn’t looking, six bags of walnuts last time. When she opens his door he balks, points to the owl on the sign and goes huh-huh-huh, pretending to hyperventilate. Although the bird isn’t the friendliest looking, Tavis never acted scared at Prairie Fire’s Red Owl. She suspects his teary eyes and lifted arms are a sham, too, but she carries him into the store, his forty pounds hard on her bony hip. She’s lost weight over the past year, finds it a challenge to stay above a hundred.
She wrestles him into a cart and dashes around grabbing stuff, deliberates before dropping in a can of tuna. It doesn’t resemble its original self too much and Tavis needs his protein. On the heels of a flagging appetite came an unexpected revulsion to animal flesh. It started with a Wild Kingdom episode, she wondering why cows and pigs, chickens and fish couldn’t be as free as lions and hyenas. Why their liberty had to be heartlessly stolen and packaged in plastic “body bags” for the convenience of barbarians like her. The We’re the Meat People button on the checkout girl’s scarlet vest makes her want to retch.
She stows the groceries in the trunk beside jumper cables and the emergency kit Ron has refreshed with candles and matches, drinking water, chocolate bars, blankets and a white SOS flag. On a pay phone outside the store she lets him know they’ve arrived, can barely hear his husky “I miss you” over slamming car doors and rattling shopping carts.
3
“You don’t have to go through with this,” Daddy says as if she’s signed up for skydiving or snake handling. It’s warm for October. He adjusts the stiff white collar under his rented gray pinstripe and swabs his forehead with a folded-up handkerchief. She’s a mess. The only white satin shoes she could find in time are a half size too small. Her breasts are on fire from the Pill, a rash has erupted under her lace sleeves and the mother-of-pearl lipstick supposed to suggest Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago makes her mouth look frostbitten.
Seven weeks ago, when she accepted Ron’s proposal, Daddy questioned how she could be so sure of a man with a prison record and most likely an FBI file. How to explain Ron happened to her like a meteor shower, a phantom sun, St. Elmo’s fire. Mother urged her to wait for graduation. “You’ll have nothing to fall back on if he loses his health or you want to do more than keep house. I would’ve given my eye teeth to go to college.” Angela at the home for delinquent boys said, “Don’t sell yourself short. If he loves you he’ll wait.”
Linda doesn’t want to wait. She wants to do something now. She’s read about the “plight” of the “trapped” American housewife. Hyperbole. Especially for a minister’s wife, who no less than her husband, Ron said, is called to higher service. Imagine what they’ll be able to accomplish together. Take the six bulletins they conspired over while kissing each other dizzy in the cramped, airless church office, listing the names of local men overseas, citing rising troop numbers, urging the congregation in capital letters to petition Congress to STOP BOMBING THE NORTH, END THE WAR, Linda stoked with outrage after watching Marines set fire to the thatched roofs of huts in a Vietnamese village, the images from across the world invading her safe little living room. Daddy said the enemy must’ve been hiding in the village. Linda said what if they weren’t, what were those people supposed to do without homes? She couldn’t imagine the young Marines on the TV torching the huts on their own. Who gave them the lighters? Who could command such a thing? Ron says war and racial discrimination are symptoms of the “moral rot” destroying the country, conjuring up something dark and rancid, staggering in its wickedness.
Right now she and Daddy are in the vestibule, waiting for Angela Brohm and Libby Wise to reach the altar. Daddy’s black leather wingtips shine like glass. They creak as he shifts from one foot to the other. “You look snappy in that suit,” she says and blinks back tears because he really does and, after today, who knows when she’ll see him again?
He blows his nose, his usual ploy to mask emotions, and glances into the sanctuary. “Full house, Miss Hepburn.” She peeks through her puffy short veil. Angela and Aunt Libby are taking their time, walking in measured steps to “Trumpet Voluntary.” Twenty minutes ago they installed the seed pearl tiara and veil on her lacquered French twist with a solemnity befitting a coronation. They’re really something in the black knit and pumpkin sateen dresses Aunt Libby got with her buyer discount. Like blood sisters with their dark-as-molasses hair, Aunt Libby’s in a cheery flip, Angela’s straight down her back.
Mother was appalled Linda wanted Daddy’s forty-eight-year-old sister as maid of honor. Her antipathy to Libby goes back to when she married Daddy and felt his family dismissed her as a Kansas hick. “She’s hardly a maid. Can’t you ask someone else?”
“Do you ever see me with anyone?” Linda said. “Do I go out at night?”
Even asking Angela to be an attendant was pushing it. Their relationship at the home has been warm but professional. Suggesting she take on the gravitas of maid of honor was out of the question. Besides, Aunt Libby is striking, with luminous brown eyes set wide apart, dimples on either side of an all’s-right-with-the-world grin, an only slightly saggy neck, Daddy’s dark coloring but a slimmer shape and thick, wild Iron Curtain eyebrows.
“Libby has landed,” Daddy says.
Mrs. Horne on the organ shifts to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Ron’s gloomy choice.
The lining under Linda’s full-length gown swooshes as Daddy’s long strides drag her along. The memory of a policeman escorting her down a courtroom aisle crazily traverses her mind and she nearly stumbles. Then behold: a glorious blaze of color! Cascading red carnations, orange mums and sunflowers drape the altar and the ends of the pews. Stephanotis sweetens the air. The sanctuary has never looked so jubilant or the curved backs of the dark pine pews so burnished, the surprise of it all like Christmas morning. She left most arrangements to Mother, unlike some brides hasn’t been planning her wedding since she was twelve.
Ron, on the other hand, has anticipated this day many times, he told her, since sharing a prison farm cell with thirty-three-year-old Carl Berglund, his best man, a sandy-haired bear hug of a guy with arctic blue eyes and a slow smile she’s sure masks some tragic sorrow. He looks uneasy in his rented suit, likely has only one dress shirt he wears as little as possible, working outdoors as he does in construction. It nearly killed him, Ron said, stuck in a cell so long. Both Minnesotans, they didn’t meet until the Freedom Ride. With little to fill over eight hundred caged hours, they turned themselves into stories. Carl relived his wedding so many times Ron imagined he was the one nervously waiting at the altar for Helen whose beauty would break his heart that day. He left Parchman convinced “salvation for a man is as surely linked to the enduring love of a woman as it is to the love of God.” The way he puts words together bowls her over. Tucked into her bouquet of white dahlias is the palm-sized New Testament the Salvation Army gave prisoners, the only book Parchman allowed, the pages thin as grass and dog-eared.
They glide past Ron’s mother. She’s in a cream-colored wool suit, her hat of yellow and white fabric rose petals like another floral arrangement. Linda met fifty-seven-year-old Grace Brunson yesterday and felt an immediate connection, as if they’d caught hold of each other years ago in a dream. Mother sits beside eighty-two-year-old Grandma Keynes whose back is so straight she could have a metal rod in her corset. That Grandma would come all the way from Kansas swells Linda’s heart to the size of the world. The woman has fifteen other grandchildren, for goodness sake, how can she even remember Linda’s name? Mother looks done up for the Waldorf Astoria in a lemony-yellow silk dress and a feathery wisp of a hat, doesn’t need the empire waist of Linda’s gown to camouflage her tummy. “People should think about genes before they mate,” she’s said more than once. Her side of the family is unfailingly slender.
The last organ chord wavers in the air as Daddy drops Linda off at the altar and sits beside Mother. Ron is biting his lower lip and his chest is heaving. They will not follow that awful “who gives this woman” as if she’s been traded for three goats and a yak. She and Ron will be equals. She gives Aunt Libby her bouquet, places her hand in his and kneels for the white-robed Pastor Judge’s blessing, starts sniffling at “Dearly beloved” and doesn’t stop until her corset fasteners set one stocking free.
The reception is a dreamlike haze. In the receiving line she stands at Ron’s left, his hand claiming her waist, his bony hip hard against her. People pronounce her beautiful and Ron a lucky man, as though, by the mere circumstance of marriage, she’s become someone else.
For those who joke about the Frigid North, Ron has the same rejoinder: “Minnesota has only nine fewer sunny days than New Jersey and the sun off the snow is remarkably bright.” Archie Sloan reports that where they’re headed has seen tornados, floods and a blizzard already this year. “An unusual year,” Ron assures him. And her.
Old Charlie Dunbar says, “For auld lang syne” and puts a dime in her hand.
Mr. Merlo says, “Don’t pull the JTT routine on him, okay?”
“What’s that?”
“You know, Just Too Tired.”
She doesn’t know.
Ron introduces her to fellow grads from Drew Seminary in nearby Madison, some who’ve found churches in New Jersey. With new haircuts and eager smiles they look too green to be spiritual advisors. Ron on the other hand has a presence—she believes that’s the word—that transcends chronological age and leaves her in awe.
Mother heads up the receiving line, beaming when folks say how lovely it all is. Her transformation of Fellowship Hall is magical. Arches of white crepe paper streamers form a second, lower ceiling, as they must have at the high school gym for the prom Linda didn’t attend. They crisscross the room and join hands in the center under a giant dangling honeycomb paper bell. A harpist plays music Ron selected, nothing as prom-like as “Put Yo
ur Head On My Shoulder” but swell just the same. Sprinkled around the room are little round tables dressed in white linen. A candle flickers on each although it’s only three in the afternoon. A long draped table holds pickles and olives, tiny sandwiches missing their crusts, Mother’s famous Ice Cream and 7-Up Punch, white mints and a three-tiered cake topped with a bride and a groom. The toy groom is in a long-tailed tux, not Ron’s gray pinstriped suit, black clerical shirt and white collar.
Pastor Judge says fill your punch cups, the best man will offer a toast. This appears to come as a surprise to Carl but he gamely lifts his cup and says, “They’re drafting thirty-three thousand a month now. Skål.” Somebody coughs. Ron laughs and says, “Jail, no bail. I love you, bud.” Grandma says, “To love, not war” and Grace Brunson, “Hear, hear.” The harpist resumes.
Grace hosted last night’s dinner for family and the bridal party at a restaurant in a converted nineteenth-century home around the corner from the old fish market. They sat on spiffy high-backed upholstered chairs before a fireplace. During dessert Carl said it was fitting in such an intimate, romantic setting to “make love, not war.” He handed out buttons saying just that. He’d gotten them at a Chicago peace march. When Mother’s eyebrows shot up, Linda worried Grandma would be offended too. But Pauline Keynes has shown up today in black lace-ups, a one-layer cake of a hat on frizzy gray hair and Carl’s button on the collar of her lilac and white flowered shirtwaist. She still dresses like a farm wife although Linda’s ailing grandfather hasn’t farmed in decades. In the stillness of the bedroom Linda shared with her last night, she said, “I was seventeen when I married Dad Keynes in 1900. Our first home was a sod house on a farm with no trees and an angry sun. Dad planted grain for the man who owned the farm. We had a blizzard one year and the snow sifted in during the night. When we got up in the morning we put our feet down in it. You’re not going to live in a sod house are you, Linda Marie?”