by Tricia Dower
Thurs, Mar 3/66
Surprise, surprise, surprise, as Gomer Pyle would say. The Pioneer Bride likes having a routine, likes telling folks at church she’s busy. They expect her at everything, don’t seem to get that she might have to study or want to be w/her husband.
So what keeps the Pioneer Bride so busy?
Monday, Wednesday and Friday after early morning prayers, Ron warms up the car. Some days the air is cold enough to burn their lungs. He drops her off at Holland Hall for Experimental Psych then heads out for shut-in and hospital calls, clerical shirt and collar under his Nanook of the North parka. He picks her up at the bottom of the library steps after her Essentials of Biblical Studies class. She went on calls with him once—there are enough lonely aging, sick and poor in Rice County, he says, to make up for the dearth of dark skins. While in class she imagines him gently patting some old guy’s ropy-veined hand, listening to his glory-day memories and digestive complaints, sharing with him how much he misses his own dad, creating an intimacy that seems as easy to him as slipping into a warm bath.
It’s enough to give her a complex.
Afternoons they retreat into separate offices, he to prepare for this or that, she to study. She found a crazy-colored rag rug in the basement for her little nest of an office. Like the one she napped on in kindergarten only bigger and just slightly mouse-chewed. On her desk, next to a framed picture from their wedding, she keeps pencils in an empty freeze-dried coffee jar, inspired by a Tribune cartoon that proclaimed Minnesota “home of the freeze-dried skin.”
She drives herself every Tuesday to the “historic” (they’re rabidly proud of that) Ole Store Café for prayer breakfast where more chatter than prayer rises up to the pressed tin ceiling. As many as twenty women can show up, risking a run on the caramel and nut rolls that stick in Lin’s teeth. Grace rarely misses. She’s close enough to walk but Lin says nothing doing. She could slip on an icy patch. She’d swap her own mother for Grace in a New York minute. Having her at Ole’s gives Lin the courage to pray out loud, an ordeal akin to appearing naked in public but expected of her. She sticks a load of wash in before she picks Grace up, dries it outside when she gets home, letting the sheets go stiff as starched crinoline, defrosting them over the radiator so they fill the house with the smell of spring rain.
Wednesday evenings she scurries like a mole through the dark, chilly breezeway to choir rehearsals. Most other evenings she and Ron watch Walter Cronkite after dinner, shaking their heads at the escalation of the war, the surge in troops on the ground.
Thursday, after ironing, she lays in provisions, aka “growshrees” in these parts. She’s a whiz with the food budget. It helps that they fast for two meals on Wednesday (a little harmless self-denial per Ron, a bigger deal to always ravenous her) and have dinner at Grace’s on Friday.
One Thursday morning a month finds her in Congregational Hall, making octopus ornaments out of tiny white beads—already!—for the Crafty Gals annual Christmas Bazaar.
Saturdays she cleans house, bakes bread and makes some sort of stew, throwing in a few wayward beans or a shriveled slice of bacon from earlier in the week. Ron’s surprised she’s so “domesticated.” She hasn’t told him she took over when Mother was too sick (or whatever) to get out of bed, that she pretended the house and Daddy were hers. They phone every Saturday evening the minute the rates drop, get on separate extensions, Mother in the bedroom, Daddy the kitchen, and step on each other’s lines. It drives her bananas but at least she doesn’t have to speak to Daddy alone.
Sundays are crazy, what with Bible Class, the service, shaking hands after like a politician, hanging around like Lucy with her Doctor Is In sign in case anyone needs her counseling. So far nobody has. Ron says she should try being easier to talk to, that she often appears preoccupied, remote. Does she? Sometimes it feels like she’s bleeding all over the pews trying to be friendly.
Sunday nights are for relations, Ron especially enthusiastic if his sermon’s a hit.
Traitor Beware
14
Tues, Mar 8/66
Yesterday in class, a visiting psychiatrist said one characteristic of an emotionally infantile person is the inability to surrender to a spouse. I asked him what surrendering to a spouse meant exactly, could feel my face get red—I’m the only married student in Psych. He said it’s like losing yourself in a beautiful piece of music.
She’s on her knees disinfecting the toilet when the doorbell rings. Isn’t that always the case? Willard Spates with his pick-up, she guesses. He’s taken it upon himself to keep his new pastor in firewood and venison, is unfailingly gallant with her, bowing and doffing his John Deere cap before coming in. She scrambles to her feet, steps into the hallway and yells upstairs to where Ron is ministering to a leaky radiator valve. “Can you get that? I look a sight.”
“Be right there,” he shouts.
She flushes the toilet.
He rumbles down the stairs and thuds across the creaking floor, opens the front door to a deep “Hey, man” and a throaty but higher “Dickens of a time finding you.”
“And I’m so glad you did.” Ron’s voice gushes with welcome. “Come in, come in.” Louder, “Sweetheart, look who’s here.”
She hates surprise visitors, something he says she absolutely has to get over. The place doesn’t have to be perfect, he says. It’s our home, not a museum. She tears off her rubber gloves, finger-combs her hair and swipes at her mouth with a lipstick called Pink Elephant she keeps in the medicine chest, whacks a ghostly cobweb haunting the dining room ceiling on her way to the front door where Ron says, “You remember Carl Berglund, our best man.”
“Of course I remember Carl.” For heaven’s sake it’s only five months since the wedding. Hard to forget Carl’s tough jaw, his probing blue eyes. He looks more at home today in dungarees and a black down vest than he did in a rented pinstripe suit. “Hello again,” she says.
“And here’s Helen,” Ron says. The white, puffed pastry of a coat he’s hanging up in the cramped entryway must be hers. She’s even shorter than Lin and compact. Springy black hair gives her a startled appearance. She’s rubbing her hands up and down the arms of her red plaid flannel shirt so vigorously it’s a wonder she doesn’t generate sparks. Lin turns to her and says, “Helen, at last!” In mere months, she’s adopted a glib, socially adept speaking style for Ron’s sake. “Come away from the door. You look cold.”
Helen’s good-natured grin reveals a gap between her upper front teeth. “The heater in the van froze up. A smack on the dash usually gets it going but not this time.”
Ron says, “I’ll make a fire” and leads them into the living room.
“Nice place,” Carl says.
“Comes with the job,” Ron says. “Part of my compensation. Our compensation.”
Lin says, “I’m the cleaning lady,” hoping it explains away her faded dungarees and Ron’s cast-off U of M sweatshirt. Carl smiles, thank goodness. Helen lets out a loud, endearing cackle.
“In the middle of nowhere, aren’t you?” Carl says.
Helen swats his arm. “Oh for geez. It’s sensational out here. Your snow looks like icing sugar. All we’ve got left are dirty gobs along the curbs.”
“I’d say we don’t get any Sunday drivers,” Ron says, “but that’s our busiest day. How about some coffee, Lin?”
“Right away.” He could have waited. She was going to offer.
“I’ll come with,” Helen says.
In the kitchen Lin furtively brushes crumbs from the counter into her hand and drops them into the sink. She fills the percolator. “Got one like that there at work,” Helen says, leaning against the fridge as if she hangs out in this kitchen every day.
“Where’s that?” Lin tries to reconcile this dumpy woman with the one whose beauty was supposed to have broken Carl’s heart. Not a speck of makeup on her face.
“At a gr
oup home for preggy teens in Bloomington. I’m a social worker. Cups?”
Social worker. Lin opens a cupboard for her. “Where’d you study? What do you do there?” And where’d Lin get the idea makeup is essential to beauty? Helen’s skin is clear, her eyelashes long and dark.
“I have a bachelor’s in social work from Augsburg. It lets me do generalist stuff. I take the little moms for doctor visits, hook them up with adoption agencies, listen to their heartaches, hold them when they cry.” She lifts up a mug. “These or the cups with the little violets?”
Lin likes the light feel of the china cups, their thin rims against her lips, but she can’t picture Carl’s meaty hands around violets, tries not to imagine them on Helen. “Mugs,” she says and pulls a tray from another cupboard, all the while kicking herself for not having gone for an undergrad degree like Helen’s. But Douglass, the only college Mother and Daddy would let her attend, didn’t offer it. St. Olaf doesn’t either. The percolator belches out a sharp smell.
Helen sets mugs on the tray. “Hey, forgot to say congrats. I wanted to be at your wedding but I couldn’t get the time off.”
“That’s okay. Carl was there for both of you.” Linda Wise wasn’t one for making people feel better but Lin Brunson has learned to be. She pours milk into a pitcher, checks that the sugar bowl is full, gets out spoons and white cotton napkins. It’s cheaper to launder them than buy paper ones. “Where are these pregnant teens from?”
“The Dakotas, mostly. After their parents toss them out they hop a bus to Minneapolis. We try to get to them before the pimps do.”
Lin listens with half a brain, the other half fretting about whether Ron will invite Helen and Carl to dinner. What she thawed from Willard’s November Bambi slaughter won’t make enough stew for four. Ron won’t think it’s a big deal, won’t consider how it reflects on her. Coffee in mugs, she lifts the tray and channels her mother-in-law: “Shall we?” Helen follows like a duckling, out the kitchen, through the dining room and back into the living room where the fire whooshes up the flue, scenting the room with pine. Carl and Ron stand by it, grunting, “Hooh aah! Hooh aah!” then convulsing in laughter. Ron is red with hilarity.
“A Parchman hangover,” he says when he’s able to talk. “Chain Gang.”
Lin sets the tray on the coffee table. “You were on a chain gang?” She thought she’d heard all the stories by now, after her multitudinous questions and his spontaneous recollections.
“Nah,” Carl says. “We asked to be. We were dying for exercise and fresh air but the sheep dips didn’t want us stirring up shit with other prisoners. Especially the colored guys.”
“When a guard walked by, we’d sing and pretend to swing pickaxes,” Ron says. He demonstrates as Carl does a passable Sam Cooke. Ron cracks up again. Lin has never seen him so free. And poker-faced Carl’s eyes are watering.
“Sorry,” he says. “As I told your old man, I meant to contact you after the wedding but life got complicated.”
“He means he burns up his days fighting the war by himself,” Helen says. She hands out the mugs. Carl takes a loud slurp from his, sets it back on the tray and lowers his big frame to the couch in a surprisingly graceful motion.
“True enough. If I can’t stop that brute I can at least kick sand in its face, slow it down. Actually, that’s why we’re here.” He rubs the back of his neck, looks up sheepishly. “To get you behind a Vietnam protest in Minneapolis two weeks from today.”
March twenty-sixth. Lin’s pulse takes off. She stands beside Ron at the fireplace, sets her mug on the mantel with an excited thump. Protesting something, anything, is what she imagined they’d be doing before now. Helen plunks down beside Carl on the saggy couch, making their shoulders collide.
“We’re assembling at the main post office,” Carl says. “Can you get your church there? Religious types hate war, right?”
Ron bends, heaves a log on the fire. Sparks rise like stirred-up lightning bugs. When he straightens, his face has turned serious. “Some do.”
“The march should roust the media. Jerry Rubin’s committee is behind it, getting the word out to the usual peaceniks.”
Lin asks who Jerry Rubin is. Helen winks, says he’s Carl’s hero. He gives her shoulder a friendly jab. “A hippie with balls. Met him in Chicago. He heads up a committee that does antiwar events. They’re calling this one the ‘Second International Days of Protest.’ A hundred thousand turned out for the first in October. You two had other fish to fry.”
“We did,” Ron says. His grin gives her a nearly erotic thrill. “What’s this one about?”
“The usual. Get the hell out. Quit bombing the crap out of the North. It starts at eleven, goes till four or five. A few short hours from somebody’s life.”
“You could talk it up tomorrow, honey,” Lin says, touching his hand.
His eyes constrict with warning. She pulls her hand away. “I haven’t had a single conversation with anyone in this church about Vietnam,” he says. “Folks around here are no LBJ fans but I suspect they back the war.”
“Aren’t you supposed to enlighten them about it?” Carl cracks his knuckles. “Or do they come to church to get their ears tickled?”
“We don’t do the bulletins here,” Lin says, irked at Carl’s sarcastic, thinly veiled criticism of Ron. “Our lay leader doesn’t trust anyone else with them. In Stony River, Ron made sure each one said something against the war.”
He sends a curt wave her way. “You don’t need to make excuses for me.”
“I’m not. I was just explaining.”
“You don’t need to do that either.”
She blinks, stung, can’t recall Ron reproaching her before in front of others, as if they’ve never been intimate, as if he doesn’t know her. She turns her head toward the window, stares in a cold fog at a wilderness of snow, wondering what she said that was so wrong.
Carl clears his throat, trying to cover the moment, perhaps. Ron pokes at the fire. Helen stands. “We’ll shove off and let you think about it. Take our number, okay? If you decide to go, give us a jingle and we’ll pick a place to meet.”
When Ron doesn’t urge them to finish their coffee, Lin excuses herself to get her address book, grateful for the chance to recover. She writes down their number, gets Helen’s coat. “Ring me,” Helen whispers, a sudden ally. Does she think Lin needs one? She and Carl sputter away in a faded red VW van rusted from road salt. Lin waits in the door until they pass the snow-burdened trees, returns to the living room where Ron slouches on the couch.
“Sorry if I put you on the spot,” she says, expecting an apology in return.
He looks up with chiding eyes. “I’m a probationary conference member for two-and-a-half more years. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” Some bureaucratic Methodist thing.
“If the congregation complains enough about me, the conference could appoint me far away from Mom. Or dismiss me.” His hands dangle between his knees.
“Isn’t speaking out against the war worth some risk? You were ready to die on that bus to Mississippi.”
“I didn’t know you then. And Dad was alive. I was twenty-two and wanted adventure, wanted to make him proud, too. I wouldn’t get on that bus today. What I do affects you and Mom too much now.”
So that’s it. She kneels on the floor in front of him, pastes on a happy face. “Hey, I’m not worried. The world’s your parish, you said. We can join the circus, become chimney sweeps, crocodile wranglers. Grace can come with us.” She takes his hand. He eases it away.
“From the time I was ten I’ve wanted only to serve the Lord.”
“Ten!” She sits back on her heels. “I didn’t want to be anything more ambitious than a switchboard operator when I was ten.”
He gives her a grudging smile.
“I even had a toy switchboard.”
He
laughs. “I can see you at it, Miss Efficiency.”
She pushes herself off the floor and sits beside him. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t as spiritual as you. But I’m wondering why speaking out against the war doesn’t qualify as serving the Lord. If others in church hate this war, they might appreciate knowing you do too.”
He leans back against the couch, looks up at the ceiling. “Pastor Judge told Mom some parishioners threatened to quit over my so-called obsession with the war. Remember?”
“Yeah, the usual whiners. I’ll bet nobody did.”
“If not, because I’d already gone.”
Lin doesn’t want to lose members either but the man she married wasn’t afraid to take a stand. “That first Sunday, you said you wanted to speak God’s truth on behalf of the powerless, right?”
“Yes.” His voice sounds wary. “I still do. Why?”
“People at the wrong end of a bomb seem pretty powerless.”
He rises and walks to the window, stands with his back to her. The defeated slump of his shoulders tugs at the sleeves of her heart. A few moments later he slowly turns and says she’s right to call him on his cowardice. Is that what she’s doing? It sounds too harsh. He looks so alone, so defenseless in sweatpants and a shirt ready for the ragbag. When she asks about the church’s stance on the war, his posture rallies. “Great question. I’ll talk it over with Superintendent Foote this week. I still have the following Sunday to mention the protest.”
Any romantic image of marching beside him fades. If he’s a beautiful piece of music, she can’t hear it right now. What she can hear is Grace asking if she’s going to let him give up on himself so quickly. She stands. “Sure, do that. Just so you know, I’ll be at the protest with or without you. Right now, I have to make stew.” She’s breathing hard as she walks away, surprised at her own daring. She’ll have to follow through if he refuses to go to the protest. What if he doesn’t let her take the car? What if there’s no bus?