Lake Wobegon Days Read online

When I was twelve, I had myself crowned King of Altrusia and took the royal rubber-tipped baton and was pulled by my Altrusian people in a red wagon to the royal woods and was adored all afternoon, though it was a hot one—they didn’t complain or think the honor should have gone to them. They hesitated a moment when I got in the wagon, but then I said, “Forward!” and they saw there can be only one Vincent the First and that it was me. And when I stood on the royal stump and blessed them in the sacred Altrusian tongue, “Aroo-aroo halama rama domino, shadrach meshach abednego,” and Duane laughed, and I told him to die, he did. And when I turned and marched away, I knew they were following me.

  When I was fourteen, something happened and they didn’t adore me so much.

  I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman’s poem,

  Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

  Is hung with bloom along the bough.

  It stands among the woodland ride,

  Wearing white for Eastertide.

  Now, of my three-score years and ten,

  Twenty will not come again….

  and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, “Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow,” they would have said, “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren’t cherry trees, those are crab apples.”

  Now I lie in bed in St. Paul and look at the moon, which reminds me of the one over Lake Wobegon.

  I’m forty-three years old. I haven’t lived there for twenty-five years. I’ve lived in a series of eleven apartments and three houses, most within a few miles of each other in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Every couple years the urge strikes, to pack the books and unscrew the table legs and haul off to a new site. The mail is forwarded, sometimes from a house several stops back down the line, the front of the envelope covered with addresses, but friends are lost—more all the time, it’s sad to think about it. All those long conversations in vanished kitchens when for an evening we achieved a perfect understanding that, no matter what happened, we were true comrades and our affection would endure, and now our friendship is gone to pieces and I can’t account for it. Why don’t I see you anymore? Did I disappoint you? Did you call me one night to say you were in trouble and hear a tone in my voice that made you say you were just fine?

  When I left Lake Wobegon, Donna Bunsen and I promised each other we’d read the same books that summer as a token of our love, which we sealed with a kiss in her basement. She wore white shorts and a blue blouse with white stars. She poured a cup of Clorox bleach in the washing machine, and then we kissed. In books, men and women “embraced passionately,” but I didn’t know how much passion to use, so I put my arms around her and held my lips to hers and rubbed her lovely back, under the wings. Our reading list was ten books, five picked by her and five by me, and we made a reading schedule so that, although apart, we would have the same things on our minds at the same time and would think of each other. We each picked the loftiest books we knew of, such as Plato’s Republic, War and Peace, The Imitation of Christ, the Bhagavad-Gita, The Art of Loving, to have great thoughts to share all summer as we read, but I didn’t get far; my copy of Plato sat in my suitcase, and I fished it out only to feel guilty for letting her down so badly. I wrote her a letter about love, studded with Plato quotes picked out of Bartlett’s, but didn’t mail it, it was so shameless and false. She sent me two postcards from the Black Hills, and in the second she asked, “Do you still love me?” I did, but evidently not enough to read those books and become someone worthy of love, so I didn’t reply. Two years later she married a guy who sold steel supermarket shelving, and they moved to San Diego. I think of her lovingly every time I use Clorox. Half a cup is enough to bring it all back.

  When I left Lake Wobegon, I packed a box of books, two boxes of clothes, and two grocery sacks of miscellaneous, climbed in my 1956 Ford, and then, when my old black dog Buster came limping out from under the porch, I opened the door and boosted him into the back seat. He had arthritic hips and was almost blind, and as Dad said, it would be better to leave him die at home, but he loved to go for rides and I couldn’t see making the long trip to Minneapolis alone. I had no prospects there except a spare bed in the basement of my dad’s old Army buddy Bob’s house. Buster was company, at least.

  Bob had two dogs of his own, a bulldog named Max and a purebred Irish setter who owned the upstairs and the yard, so Buster spent his declining months on a blanket in Bob’s rec room, by my bed. Bob kept telling me that Buster should be put out of his misery, but I had too much misery of my own to take care of his. Instead of shooting him, I wrote poems about him.

  Old dog, old dog, come and lay your old head

  On my knee.

  Dear God, dear God, let this poor creature go

  And live in peace.

  Bob kept telling me to forget about college and he would line me up with a friend of his in the plumbers’ union. “Why be so odd?” he said. “Plumbers get good money.” His son Dallas was in the Air Force, stationed in Nevada, and he liked it a lot. “Why not the Air Force?” Bob asked. One day, he said, “You know what your problem is?” I said I didn’t. “You don’t get along with other people. You don’t make an effort to get along.” How could I explain the duty I felt to keep a dying dog company? A dog who had been so close to me since I was a little kid and who understood me better than anyone. I had to leave him alone when I went looking for work, and then while I was working at the Longfellow Hotel as a dishwasher, so when I got back to Bob’s, I liked to give Buster some attention.

  Bob remembered the war fondly and had many photographs from his days with my dad at Camp Lee and then in a linen-supply unit of the Quartermaster Corps, stationed at Governor’s Island in New York City, which he showed me after supper when I was trapped at the table. “People were swell to us, they invited us into their homes, they fed us meals, they treated us like heroes,” he said. “Of course, the real heroes were the guys in Europe, but it could’ve been us instead of them, so it was okay. You wore the uniform, people looked up to you. Those were different times. There was a lot of pride then, a lot of pride.”

  Clearly I was a sign of how far the country had gone downhill: an eighteen-year-old kid with no future, sleeping in the basement with a dying dog. Bob left Air Force brochures on the breakfast table, hoping I’d read them and something would click. One August morning, when a postcard arrived from the University saying I’d been accepted for fall quarter, he warned me against certain people I would find there, atheists and lefties and the sort of men who like to put their arms around young guys. “I’m not saying you have those tendencies,” he said, “but it’s been my experience that guys like you, who think you’re better than other people, have a lot of weaknesses that you don’t find out about until it’s too late. I just wish you’d listen, that’s all. But you’re going to have to find out the hard way, I guess.”

  Buster died in his sleep a few days later. He was cold in the morning. I packed him in an apple crate and snuck him out to my car and buried him in the woods by the Mississippi in Lilydale, which was like the woods he had known in his youth.

  I felt as bad that night as I’ve ever felt, I think. I lay on the army cot and stared at the joists and let the tears run off my face like rain. Bob sent his wife, Luanne, down with some supper. “Oh, for crying out loud,” she said. “Why don’t you grow up?”

  “Okay,” I said, “I will.” I moved out, into a rooming house on the West Bank. I lived in a 12 × 12 room with three bunkbeds and five roommates and started school. School was okay, but I missed that old dog a lot. He was a good dog to know. He was steadfast, of course, as all dogs are,
and let nothing come between us or dim his foolish affection for me. Even after his arthritis got bad, he still struggled to his feet when I came home and staggered toward me, his rear end swung halfway forward, tail waving, as he had done since I was six. I seemed to fulfill his life in some way, and even more so in his dotage than in bygone days when he could chase rabbits. He was so excited to see me, and I missed that; I certainly didn’t excite anyone else.

  More than his pure affection, however, I missed mine for him, which now had nowhere to go. I made the rounds of classes and did my time in the library every day, planted myself in oak chairs and turned pages, and sorely missed having someone to put my arms around, some other flesh, some hair to touch other than my own. And I missed his call to fidelity. My old black mutt reminded me of a whole long string of allegiances and loyalties, which school seemed to be trying to jiggle me free of. My humanities instructor, for example, who sounded to be from someplace east of the East, had a talent for saying “Minnesota” as if it were “moose turds,” and we all snickered when he did. You don’t pull that sort of crap around a dog. Dogs have a way of bringing you back to earth. Their affection shames pretense. They are guileless.

  I needed Buster to be true to and thus be true by implication to much more, to the very principle of loyalty itself, which I was losing rapidly in Minneapolis. Once I saw Ronald Eichen in Gray’s Drug near campus, my old classmate who twice lent me his ’48 Ford now sweeping Gray’s floor, and because our friendship no longer fit into my plans, I ducked down behind the paperbacks and snuck out. I was redesigning myself and didn’t care to be the person he knew.

  I couldn’t afford to buy new clothes at Al Johnson, Men’s Clothier, so I tried out a Continental accent on strange girls at Bridgeman’s lunch counter: “Gud morrning. Mind eef I seat next to you? Ahh! ze greel shees! I zink I hef that and ze shicken soup. Ah, pardon—my name ees Ramon. Ramon Day-Bwah.” This puzzled most of the girls I talked to, who wondered where I was from. “Fransh? Non. My muthaire she vas Fransh but my fathaire come from Eetaly, so? How do you say? I am internationale.” I explained that my fathaire wass a deeplomat and we traffled efferyvhere, which didn’t satisfy them either, but then my purpose was to satisfy myself and that was easy. I was foreign. I didn’t care where I was from so long as it was someplace else.

  A faint English accent was easier to manage, at least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. My composition instructor, Mr. Staples, was English, and an hour in the morning listening to him primed the pump and I could talk like him the rest of the day. Englishness, however, didn’t free my spirit so well as being truly foreign did. Mr. Staples smelled musty, walked flat-footed, had dry thin hair, and went in for understatement to the point of blending in with his desk. European was a better deal. If I could be European, I’d be right where I wanted to be as a person.

  I invented new people for the ones I knew, trying to make them more interesting. At various times, my father was a bank robber, a college professor, the President of the United States, and sometimes I imagined that we weren’t really from Minnesota, we were only using it as a cover, disguising ourselves as quiet modest people until we could reveal our true identity as Italians. One day, my mother would put the wieners on the table and suddenly my father would jump up and say, “Hey! I’ma sicka this stuffa!” She’d yell, “No! No! Chonny! Please-a! The children!” But the cat was out of the bag. We weren’t who we thought we were, we were The Keillorinis! Presto! Prestone! My father rushed to the closet and hauled out giant oil paintings of fat ladies, statues of saints, bottles of wine, and in rushed the relatives, hollering and carrying platters of spicy spaghetti, and my father would turn to me and say, “Eduardo! Eduardo, my son!” and throw his arms around me and plant big wet smackers on my cheeks. Caramba! Then we would dance, hands over our heads. Aye-yi-yi-yi-yi! Dancing, so long forbidden to us by grim theology of tight-lipped English Puritans—dancing, the language of our souls—Mamma mia! Now that’s amore! Viva, viva! Do the Motorola!

  I went home for Christmas and gave books for presents, Mother got Walden, Dad got Dostoevsky. I smoked a cigarette in my bedroom, exhaling into an electric fan in the open window. I smoked another at the Chatterbox. I wore a corduroy sportcoat with leather patches on the elbows. Mr. Thorvaldson sat down by me. “So. What is it they teach you down there?” he said. I ticked off the courses I took that fall. “No, I mean what are you learning?” he said. “Now, ‘Humanities in the Modern World,’ for example? What’s that about?” I said, “Well, it covers a lot of ground, I don’t think I could explain it in a couple of minutes.” “That’s okay,” he said, “I got all afternoon.”

  I told him about work instead. My job at the Longfellow was washing dishes for the three hundred young women who lived there, who were the age of my older sister who used to jump up from dinner and clear the table as we boys sat and discussed dessert. The three hundred jumped up and shoved their trays through a hole in the wall where I, in the scullery, worked like a slave. I grabbed up plates, saucers, bowls, cups, silverware, glasses, passed them under a hot rinse, the garbage disposal grinding away, and slammed them into racks that I heaved onto the conveyor that bore them slowly, sedately, through the curtain of rubber ribbons to their bath. Clouds of steam from the dishwasher filled the room when the going got heavy. Every rack that emerged released a billow of steam, and I heaved the racks onto a steel counter to dry for a minute, then yanked the hot china and stacked it on a cloth for the servers to haul to the steam table. We had less china than customers, and since they all wanted to eat breakfast at seven o’clock, there was a pinch in the china flow about seven-fifteen, when I had to work magic and run china from trays to racks to steam table in about sixty seconds, then make a pass through the dining room grabbing up empty juice glasses because the glass pinch was next, and then the lull when I mopped up and waited for the dawdlers, and finally my own rush to nine o’clock class, American Government.

  The soap powder was pungent pink stuff; it burned my nostrils when I poured it in the machine, but it made glittering white suds that smelled, as the whole scullery smelled, powerfully clean. The air was so hot and pure, it made me giddy to breathe it, and also the puffs of sweet food smells that wafted up from the disposal, cream and eggs and, in the evening, lime sherbet. (I saved up melted sherbet by the gallon, to dump it into the disposal fan and breathe in a burst of sugar.) I worked hard but in that steambath felt so slick and loose and graceful—it was so hot that even the hottest weeks of August, I felt cool for the rest of the day—and felt clean: breathed clean steam, sweated pure clean sweat, and even sang about purity as I worked—all the jazzy revival songs I knew, “Power in the Blood” and “The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago” and “O Happy Day That Fixed My Choice” and

  Have you come to Jesus for the cleansing power,

  Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? (Slam. Bang.)

  When Lucy of composition class, who let me have half her sandwich one day, asked me if I had a job and I told her I was a dishwasher, she made a face as if I said I worked in the sewer. She said it must be awful, and of course when I told her it was terrific, she thought I was being ironic. Composition class was local headquarters of irony; we supplied the five-county area. The more plainly I tried to say I liked dishwashing, the more ironic she thought I was, until I flipped a gob of mayo at her as a rhetorical device to show unsubtlety and sincerity, and then she thought I was a jerk.

  I didn’t venture to write about dishwashing for composition and certainly not about the old home town. Mr. Staples told us to write from personal experience, of course, but he said it with a smirk, suggesting that we didn’t have much, so instead I wrote the sort of dreary, clever essays I imagined I’d appreciate if I were him.

  Lake Wobegon, whatever its faults, is not dreary. Back for a visit in August, I saw Wayne “Warning Track” Tommerdahl stroke the five-thousandth long fly ball of his Whippet career. “You move that fence forty feet in, and Wayne could be in the majors,” said U
ncle Al, seeing greatness where it had not so far appeared. Toast ’n Jelly Days was over but the Mist County Fair had begun and I paid my quarter to plunge twenty-five feet at the Hay Jump, landing in the stack a few feet from Mrs. Carl Krebsbach, who asked, “What brings you back?” A good question and one that several dogs in town had brought up since I arrived. Talking to Fr. Emil outside the Chatterbox Cafe, I made a simple mistake: pointed north in reference to Daryl Tollerud’s farm where the gravel pit was, where the naked man fell out the back door of the camper when his wife popped the clutch, and of course Daryl’s farm is west, and I corrected myself right away, but Father gave me a funny look as if to say, Aren’t you from here then? Yes, I am. I crossed Main Street toward Ralph’s and stopped, hearing a sound from childhood in the distance. The faint mutter of ancient combines. Norwegian bachelor farmers combining in their antique McCormacks, the old six-footers. New combines cut a twenty-foot swath, but those guys aren’t interested in getting done sooner, it would only mean a longer wait until bedtime. I stood and listened. My eyes got blurry. Of course, thanks to hay fever, wheat has always put me in an emotional state, and then the clatter brings back memories of old days of glory in the field when I was a boy among giants. My uncle lifted me up and put me on the seat so I could ride alongside him. The harness jingled on Brownie and Pete and Queenie and Scout, and we bumped along in the racket, row by row. Now all the giants are gone; everyone’s about my size or smaller. Few people could lift me up, and I don’t know that I’m even interested. It’s sad to be so old. I postponed it as long as I could, but when I weep at the sound of a combine, I know I’m there. A young man wouldn’t have the background for it.

  That uncle is dead now, one of three who went down like dominoes, of bad tickers, when they reached seventy. I know more and more people in the cemetery, including Miss Heinemann, my English teacher. She was old (my age now) when I had her. A massive lady with chalk dust on her blue wool dress, whose hair was hacked short, who ran us like a platoon, who wept when I recited the sonnet she assigned me to memorize. Each of us got one, and I was hoping for “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” which might be useful in some situations, but was given Number 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” which I recited briskly, three quatrains hand over fist, and nailed on the couplet at the end. The next year I did “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.”