Pilgrims Read online

  Rome. And she thought back to January, when the idea of the trip to Rome sprang into her mind.

  CELIBACY

  The night Carl stopped sleeping with her was a Sunday night, very cold, a pinkish purplish golden sunset, and she was on the phone with Mom in Tampa who was fussed-up about Dad. Next door, the slow grind of a frozen engine that did not want to start. Carl was watching Gophers basketball on TV, then switched to a documentary about the Inuit, then a show in which people yelled at each other and the audience laughed uproariously, meanwhile Mother said Daddy was losing his grip on reality. He was 86 and had bought a new Buick and gotten the extended warranty. He was entering sweepstakes and contests left and right. He complained whenever the temperature dropped to the fifties. And he had got his undies in a bunch over Barack Obama who would be inaugurated in a couple weeks and then would legalize gay marriage and tax the pants off people—Daddy, who had never been exercised about politics before, jumping up from reading the newspaper and yelling, “When are people in this country going to wake up?” “Is he taking his lithium?” said Margie. Carl switched to a silver-maned preacher prowling in front of a blue-robed choir with Bible in hand and then a woman deep-frying a turkey and Margie told Mom to fix supper earlier and get Daddy to take a walk in the evening and work some of that anger off. “He won’t listen to me,” said Mother. On the TV a boy with a serious overbite and dead fish eyes sang “Sweet Dreams, Baby” to recorded accompaniment a half-step flat. And Carl said, “Well—I guess I’ll cash in my chips,” and rose from the sofa, switched off the TV, padded into the kitchen, ran a glass of water and took his Mycidol, his Lucatran, hawked and spat in the sink, and rummaged around in the kitchen for something and then on the credenza in the dining room. “Where are my reading glasses?” he said. She said, “On the hutch.”

  “It isn’t a hutch,” he said. “It’s a buffet. Or a sideboard.”

  “Call it whatever you like, that’s where your reading glasses are.”

  She could hear him get his glasses off the hutch and then go upstairs and down the hall to what used to be Carla’s bedroom. She thought he’d gone in to check the radiator. She finished up with Mom, told her to hang in there, and let Boo and Mr. Mittens out to poop in the snow and turned on WLT for the forecast (overnight low of minus fourteen, partly cloudy tomorrow, chance of snow), then let the cats back in, turned out the lights, and went upstairs. Carl was in Carla’s bed, lights out. She stood in the doorway for a meaningful moment. And said, “It’s sort of cold in that bedroom, isn’t it?” and he murmured something about, no, it was fine. It was an odd thing for him to do and she thought of pointing this out to him, but oh well, whatever. Maybe he was upset about her referring to a buffet as a hutch. Maybe went in there so she’d ask him what was wrong and then he could say. “Oh, nothing” and she’d say, “Well, it must be something,” and then he’d tell her. Too much trouble. So she left him there in the four-poster bed with a white muslin canopy over it and a Martina Navratilova poster on the wall and girly things on the dresser (or credenza) and went to bed, dreamed she was in a boat, water lapping on the hull, men’s voices on deck, rigging, and someone playing a trombone. Woke at six. Showered. Breakfast with Carl. And nothing was said about the night before and the next night he went down the hall and the next and suddenly it was a week later and he seemed to be camped there for the duration—his Civil War books stacked on the bedside table, his reading glasses, his white-noise machine that made ocean surf.

  “Do you want me to clear Carla’s stuff out of her room?” she said. No, he said, it was fine.

  “Is something wrong?” He shook his head.

  “What’s on your mind these days?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem worried or upset or something.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. The mantra of Midwestern men. He could be fibrillating wildly and half-conscious, blood trickling down his chin, but if you asked him he’d say he was fine.

  So every night she said good night—sometimes he responded, sometimes not—and she went off to bed and propped herself up on four pillows and took up O Paradiso which her Book Club was reading, Evelyn, Eloise, Irene, Marilyn, Arlene, and Judy, a memoir by a Minnesota farmwife whose dairy farmer husband’s heart burst while shoveling manure. He had had a run-in with a cow who’d been switching him in the face with its tail, which it had freshly defecated on. Hit him, splort, and he just plain lost it. Pure barn rage. A 1,500-pound Holstein and he took a swing at her. Didn’t hurt the cow but it had a different attitude about milking after that and seemed to be sowing discord in the herd. It took a lot of the pleasure out of dairy farming, walking into the barn and feeling the resentment and those eyes following him as he walked down the narrow path between the rows of rumps and the tails lifting and great bursts of cowflop excreted his way. It gradually wore him down and one morning he collapsed. “I lifted up his head and held it on my lap as I called 911 on my cell phone and as I did, I was thinking, ‘Earl is gone and you’ve got to get out of here, Joanne, and find your life.’” Two weeks after the funeral, she sold the farm, moved to Italy, and found the meaning of life. “I never knew what unabashed happiness was until I got to Rome and learned to live with gusto and express joy and grief, to dance with my arms in the air, to throw my head back and laugh, to frankly explore my own passions and desires. The me who lived on the prairie was not the real me inside, she was a woman wrapped in cellophane, an unopened Christmas gift.”

  Joanne had raised three children, shoveled snow, vaccinated hogs, explained algebra to her offspring, made Christmas, baked cakes, and stuck her right arm into a cow’s hinder to straighten out her uterus. She had plowed and disked and cultivated, she had slaughtered chickens. Suddenly she’s on the Via Veneto drinking espresso at midnight and talking about reincarnation to Francesca, a woman she met in art class, sketching naked men in charcoal, telling her about Minnesotans and how locked-up they are. How they find it useful to be pessimistic, knowing that eventually they’ll be proven correct. How she, Joanne, has decided to live in the blessed present. Seize the moment. People back in Lundeen were scandalized that she had buried Earl and taken off like that. They expected her to mourn for a year at least, preferably two.

  The book club was sharply divided over O Paradiso. Margie and Marilyn and Eloise thought that it was Joanne’s life and good for her to show some spunk and go her own way. The older women thought, “What if everyone just did as they pleased? What about the children?” Reading O Paradiso, Margie felt like slipping across the hall with a glass of red wine and dropping her nightie on the floor, diving into bed, saying “Hi, isn’t this what you were hoping for?”

  What was his thinking there? Why had he chosen celibacy? And Eve said unto Adam, “Why are you ignoring me? I am the only woman around.” And Adam said, “Am I ignoring you?” Eve said, “You haven’t made love to me in a long time.” And he said, “If that’s what you want, fine. It’s up to you. You tell me. I’m not a mind reader. If you want to, that’s okay by me.” But he made no move in her direction.

  “It takes two to tango,” she said. “We can make love or not, either way is fine. I am only pointing out that we haven’t. I don’t want you to make love out of a sense of obligation or pity.”

  He said, “Well, as long as you don’t care, then let’s not. I don’t want you to do it on my account.”

  “Well, it’s up to you,” she said. “If you want it, fine. But if not, that’s okay too. No pressure.” So they didn’t do it. And so Eve died childless, and Adam lay in his old age and had a vision of great cities that would never come to be, grand inventions never to see the light of day, unwritten books, the vast unfulfillment of God’s promise, and he wished he had made love to his wife but it was too late.

  Oh but it wasn’t about sex, not really. It was about touch and proximity and the way she could ask him, if she wanted, to please rub her back and he would. She lay on her side, back to him, and he lay on his side facing her and
with his good right hand kneaded her shoulders and neck and made gentle circular sweeps down her back to the base of her spine and caressed her buttocks and then back up and then, if she were lucky, he would scootch up close and fit his frame to hers, the whole length of her, spooned in tight, and she’d lift her head and he’d slip his left arm under it and his right arm around her belly and his face in her hair, breathing into it, and sometimes they fell asleep that way and woke up still commingled in the morning. That was what she missed. The spooning, the comminglement.

  For one week, two weeks, it was a curiosity, and after two weeks it was a sorrowful situation, and she went to work trying to solve it. She wore a red blouse and red lipstick. (Which he didn’t notice, she had to point it out to him. “I like it,” he said.) She spritzed perfume on her neck, the bottle he gave her for Christmas, Mystique. She bought him a box of chocolates (it triggers seratonin in the brain) and she stood behind him caressing his shoulders (to stimulate oxytocin). She wore skimpy black underwear. She put on a Lulu Walls CD.

  You don ‘t love me anymore

  You walk right past my door

  We’re still married but what for?

  You don’t love me anymore.

  (Lulu Walls was glamorous so it was hardly credible that anyone would walk past her door. That woman had to lock her door, she had men taptaptapping on her door morning, noon, and night.)

  “Why are you sleeping in the guest room?” she asked him in early February. “I like to read late at night, I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said. Which was crazy, of course. He always had read in bed, sometimes until two or three, so engrossed in a book that he didn’t hear when she talked to him. She’d say, “I am moving to Nepal and switching to Buddhism. I don’t know—I’ve felt something missing in my life and Buddhism seems like the thing for me so I am changing my name to Serene Wisdom, but you can just call me Whiz. Okay, pal?” And Carl says, “Okay,” and his eyes do not leave the page.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, and I’m going to Nepal with a man I met at a Buddhist web site. His name is Joyful Anticipation.”

  One morning she followed Julie’s advice on the Rise and Shine show on WLT and she locked the door and took off all her clothes and stood in bright light studying herself in the mirror, her creased belly, her bulbous breasts, her sloped shoulders and big hips, and felt bad. What a nothing she was. She wasn’t fat, she wasn’t a string bean, she was just sort of incredibly ordinary. One of the world’s four billion brunettes. Five foot four, 122 pounds, glasses, big feet, big hands. No wonder he didn’t care to undress her. Midwestern men go gaga over Asian girls or lanky Swedish models or freckle-faced Irish girls or dark Latinas with the swing in the hips, but the butcher’s daughter, mother of three, teacher of English—not high on a guy’s list. Every day a man sees hundreds of lovely young mammals peddling soda pop, automobiles, underwear, power tools, one tasty morsel after another and he comes home and finds a lumpish lady scrubbing the bathroom floor. Who wants to seduce the cleaning lady?

  She sat down one morning and wrote him a note—Sweetheart, you’ve left our bed without a word of explanation. Are you mad at me? Having an affair? Am I suddenly repellent to you? Do I snort and toss in my sleep? I love you. I miss you at night. You are a wonderful lover and the only man I ever loved and I can’t bear sleeping without you and not knowing why. Please talk to me. Please. Your loving wife, Margie—but it sounded so needy and pitiful. So she tore it up and wrote him another. Did you ever lust after me? Did you ever feast your eyes on me? Did you ever feel an uncontrollable urge to rip my clothes off and throw me down and Have Me Right Then And There? And if so, how did you control that uncontrollable urge? And she tore that one up. And that morning she wrote the first poem she’d written in years.

  I sit and say nothing for fear

  My words will turn to stone

  And though they are sincere,

  They will become a prison of their own.

  Words do that. Words spoken in anger

  Are inscribed in brass,

  A loved one becomes a stranger,

  The door blocked: Do Not Pass.

  And so in hope we can transcend

  This current bout of misery

  I don’t say anything, dear friend,

  I’m waiting for what joys might be.

  But I hope you know, my darling one.

  I love you, after all is said and done.

  She put it in her jewelry box. And then she decided they should go to Rome and find out how to live joyously.

  REMEMBERING GUSSIE

  It was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, the moon a crescent in the early evening sky, the planets Jupiter and Venus side by side, and then (1) Carl stopped sleeping with her, (2) she took a phone call from a woman named Maria Gennaro in Rome about a World War II hero, August (Gussie) Norlander, (3) she called Gussie’s brother Norbert Norlander in Tulsa, and (4) she saw a dead woman at the side of the highway, under a yellow tarp.

  Four stories in five days.

  It was a Monday at Lake Wobegon High School. She had come down to the office from her eleventh-grade English class, leaving them to work on the quiz on Cummings’s “since feeling is first / who pays attention to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you; / wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world / my blood approves.” (What do you think “syntax of things” refers to? Do you agree that “feeling is first”? Try to explain the phrase “wholly kiss you.” Do you regret an instance in which you were a fool?) She gave the class a little talk about passive aggression—how people can have very specific expectations how things should be done, and yet never tell you what they want. If you ask them, “Is this okay?” they just say, “Sure. Whatever.” Though actually they hate what you’ve done, and think you’re a fool, incompetent, possibly in Satan’s employ. The only way you know this is that they never look you in the eye. Say what you think, she told her students. I want to know how you really feel. So tell me. They looked at her, suspicious, thinking it might be a trap. I would rather know what you truly think than have you make up something to try to please me. They weren’t sure how to take that. They stared at the poem.

  When she (Margie) thought of “wholly to be a fool,” she thought of her niece Melody Krebsbach, Donny’s girl, who ran away from home at 15 to be a model. She’d told her mother one morning over the oatmeal, “I’ve been thinking of leading a nomadic life.” Hard to imagine a girl who loved her bed so much sleeping in ditches, but a week later she was gone. She was devastatingly beautiful, shockingly thin—tiny flat butt, legs like rake handles, a brassiere like two demitasse cups—one good fart would’ve blown her away—and a month later she was in Vogue (“The Urban Guerilla Look”) as Mladia Majerkova and then the pendulum swung over to Bruised Fragility and then American Slut and she looked good in stiletto heels and python pants and orange blouses with no buttons, everything hanging out, but she was so skinny that her underwear fell down if she walked fast, unless she wore boy’s briefs, which she couldn’t do, and she got on powerful muscle relaxants laced with codeine, and was skidding toward addiction when a juvenile court judge—Melody was 16 at the time—put her into foster care with an Amish family near Lanesboro. Her Amish name was Modesty. She donned the brown woolen dress and white bonnet and learned to churn butter, which let her express anger in a useful way. No TV, no radio, no cell phone: it was all good for her. She gained fifty pounds and fell in love with an Amish boy and there she is today, the mother of six kids, built like a brick outhouse, churning butter, spinning wool, baking pies. Kids. So dramatic. It’s got to be high-priced glamour or the life of a serf. No in-between.

  Margie came down to the office to pick up her mail and also because she felt a little overwhelmed by what “wholly kiss you” might mean to her pupils and if one of them would pour out a story about sex in the backseat, kids sometimes bared their souls in English class. And then what are you supposed to do? Marilyn Tollerud’s son Dar
ren blurted out, in a paper on Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” that he was gay. Was Margie supposed to send the boy to counseling? Tell his mother? She just gave him an A, wrote “Well-constructed—nice use of personal detail—very persuasive” at the top and patted his curly head. Good luck, son. Welcome to the land of confusion. We saved a spot for you.

  The superintendent, Mr. Halvorson, was in a bad way that morning, having passed by the girls’ toilet and heard young voices singing:

  Rah rah for Wobegon High

  I’ve got some crystal meth we can try.

  And a bag of mary jane—

  We can smoke it with cocaine.

  We won’t go crazy, we won’t OD.

  We’ll go around in pure ecstasy

  Taking little pink pills

  And washing them down with beer.

  Margie had heard the song long ago, but Mr. Halvorson had been insulated by his high office—he was horrified. “What am I supposed to think about this?” he cried.

  “Think positive,” she said. “Or give up. Your choice.”

  Doris the school secretary was trying to decipher the beer-stained receipts from the Friday night basketball game and Margie stood by her desk reading a circular from the Professional Organization of English Majors about the burgeoning interest in poetry—writing of poems up 28% among 18–25-year-olds when the phone beeped and Doris picked up: “Who?” And again, “Who?” She said “Hold on” and put her hand over the mouthpiece and rolled her eyes. “Some whacko says they’re Italian.” Margie picked up. “My name is Maria Gennaro, I’m here in New York,” the woman said. “Excuse my English, it isn’t that good. I’m from Rome. Italy. I’m in New York on my holiday and I called to find out where is Lake Wobegon. I do not find it on a map.”