Pontoon (11 page)

“Barbara, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “Can you wire me money to get out there? I don’t have it. I’ve got all these bills trying to get my music copied. I hate to ask but I really need you to help me out here. It’s going to cost me a thousand bucks to get on a plane tomorrow.”

“Call Roger. Ask him. I don’t have it.”

He sighed. “Barbara, you can get it from Mother’s account. Mother set up an automatic deposit for me. She sent me three hundred a month. You could get the bank to advance me four months. Please.”

She stood naked in the middle of the kitchen, looking at the Andersons, heads bowed at their picnic table, thanking God for their cheeseburgers. She had just thrown a couple hundred bucks worth of booze down the drain and she wanted to stand in a hot shower and wash away her sins. “Bennett, I don’t know what day it is in New York, but here it’s Sunday. The bank is closed. Number two, Mother’s money is all locked up in her estate right now. I have to sell her house, her assets, pay her bills, total everything up, and divvy it according to the will, which I don’t even have. It takes months.”

“Barbara, I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need your help right now. Believe me.”

“Bennett, you’re an adult. You’ve got a job. Go borrow the money yourself. Don’t ask me for it. I don’t have it.”

He drew a long breath and told her he had been laid off from his job. Four months ago. He was subletting his apartment to a young couple and he was living with an old trombonist friend in East Orange, New Jersey. He was living on Ramen noodles and cheese from a Food Shelf. He was finally finishing up his opera, remember the opera? The Wright Brothers opera.

“I thought you finished that ten years ago.”

“It needed more work. I really think it’s ready now. Soon as I can, I’m going to get some friends in a studio and make a demo and send it around. These things take time.” He made it sound so perfectly reasonable. You doink around for twenty years in your sandbox, wetting the sand, making little castles with crenellated towers, laying out roads, and then people pay you for it.

“Bennett, there is only so much time and that’s all the time
there is. I can’t make more for you. You’re fifty-two years old and you’re calling up your sister and borrowing money because you have to write an opera?? Get over it!”

“Don’t turn on me, Barbara. Mother was extremely supportive, you know—.” He was about to whine about his hard life and she whacked the receiver on the table three times and yelled, “There is no God, Bennett. So don’t expect one to bail you out. It isn’t happening!” And she hung up. She felt awful, thinking of him, poor bewildered man in the kitchen of a friend who probably was even sicker of him than she was, and maybe he was down to a pocketful of small bills, maybe a Happy Meal and a large vanilla shake, and then he’d have to take himself and his opera down to the Salvation Army and see what they could do for him.

Well, let him do it then.

Or maybe he’d walk out into East Orange and take a bus into Manhattan and walk around for a while looking at the Chrysler Building and Central Park and the Met and then screw up his courage and go into the subway and hang around until the exact right train came along and throw himself in front of it.

It’s up to him, she thought. I can’t be his caretaker.

She had exactly $87,450 to her name, plus her old car and the house, which she got in the divorce from Lloyd. She was 57 years old, eight years from retirement. She was bumping along on 25 hours a week during the school year, cooking in the cafeteria, delivering the Minneapolis paper three days a week, some baby-sitting for summer people, and she’d started painting plates again and was selling some of those to the This ‘N’ That shop in St. Cloud. It wasn’t an opera, just plates with sunrises on them and the motto “Live What You Love,” but people paid $21 apiece for them, which was more than Bennett could say.

The phone rang again. Let it ring. No need for sympathy, thank you very much. She got in the shower and soaped herself up and stood under the hot spray and inhaled the steam. She would kick alcohol as a sign to Ronnie and Lloyd and Bennett and all the other losers that she was one of them no longer. And then it appeared, illuminated, in a little balloon over her head. A mantra.
Love What You Live
. Magic. It was like honey on the tongue. Love your life. Love yourself. Have some r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

The phone was ringing. It rang and stopped and then started ringing again. She picked it up. “Barbara—” the voice of Mr. Smooth on his patio in Santa Barbara. “I just got your message.” A fountain burbled in the background, music played, a string section.

She told him the story of Mother’s Death. It was a well-polished tale by now,
Old Lady In Excellent Health Croaks
. She gave him the complete version, including the letter.

“I don’t know what to say. I’m astonished.” He didn’t sound astonished. He sounded like Mr. Smooth.

“So we’re going to do things exactly as she wished. It’s Saturday afternoon.”

“Saturday? I can’t get there Saturday, I’m sorry.”

“Roger, this is your mother we’re talking about. It’s not Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

“I’m supposed to go in for hernia repair on Friday.”

“Get yourself a jockstrap and come out.”

He had an umbilical hernia. His belly button was the size of a golfball. It popped out when he and Gwen were—“Well, never mind,” he said. “We were jumping around a little.” They had been to Paris, at the George Sank hotel. He won the trip for breaking all previous sales records. They had such a fabulous time in Paris, he said, maybe someday they would sell their Santa Barbara house
and move into an apartment so they could travel more now that the kids were grown up, they wanted to go to Costa Rica, Brazil, Vietnam, India—Barbara held the phone away from her ear, his voice sounded like a marble rolling over a linoleum floor. It sounded like someone stirring a pot of overcooked parsnips.

When he stopped, she put the phone back to her ear and told him to call Bennett. “He hates me. I’ve offered to help. He keeps turning me down.”

“Try again. He’s your brother. He’s in desperate need.”

She said to him, “What if the Metropolitan Opera should decide to stage your brother’s opera next year, with Placido Domingo as Orville and Bryn Terfel as Wilbur and Renée Fleming as Lola the girl from Dayton, Ohio, who can’t choose between them—and what if it’s a huge success and
Sixty Minutes
does a long piece about the neglected genius who labored twenty years in obscurity to bring forth his masterpiece and lived on noodles and Velveeta and did his wealthy brother in California, the one with the big fake Spanish house and the Olympic swimming pool, lift a finger to help him? No, he did not. And then they cut to a shot of Roger, hands over his face, ducking and running crouched behind cars in the company parking lot, chased by the cameraman.”

“It’s not a fake house, it’s our house,” he said. “And it’s half the size of an Olympic pool.”

But he got the picture. She could tell. Probably he’d have Gwen call Bennett and take care of the plane ticket.

She put a Stan Getz record on and that made her think about gin so she put on the Concordia College Choir singing Christmas favorites, and “Away in a Manger” made her think of an Old Fashioned. The phone rang and she grabbed for it. It was Raoul. He
sounded like he’d had a rough day. “What would it hurt if I called up Andy Williams? Worst case, he says no, but maybe he’d say yes. He could fly up Saturday morning and sing at the memorial and be home that night. Be good publicity for him.” She told him she didn’t want to turn Mother’s farewell into a media event. If Minneapolis TV stations heard that Andy Williams was flying in to Lake Wobegon to sing for an old lady who wanted to be buried in a bowling ball, they’d be sending crews up by helicopter. They’d come by the busload. He agreed. Dumb idea. He just wanted to do something for Evelyn so the world would know how special she was. She was a peach. People their age did nothing but bitch about cell phones and computers and how terrible music is now and Evelyn was glad for everything that came her way. She mastered e-mail and text messaging and had burned him a CD in her computer.
Songs of 1941
. She was his soul mate and there would never be another for him. You go on for years thinking life will always be good like this, and then suddenly it’s all over. She was gone. You thought you had an endless supply of her and you only had a few years. Barbara listened to his old husky voice and couldn’t quite imagine it coming from a pillow next to Mother’s head. He was a little rough for Mother, she thought. She guessed he was no reader of Dickens. She talked a little about Lloyd and what a wrong turn Christianity had been for him and his spiraling down into hopeless passivity until now he was little more than a mollusk, a scallop clinging to the rock of salvation. “Evelyn and I never had a bad day,” said Raoul. “Every day was golden.” And then he got choked up and said good-bye.

It was four o’clock. Barbara put on jeans and a shirt and squared her shoulders and marched over to Mother’s house. She stripped the sheets and the thin cotton blanket from the deathbed and put
them in a green garbage bag and tossed in Mother’s undies and nylons and nighties. She worked fast. It felt good. She stripped the clothes drawers and the closet in about three minutes flat and dumped some stuff in the garbage bag and the rest she folded neatly into a cardboard carton for the church rummage sale. Old pals of Mother’s would browse through the ladies’ wear and find this denim skirt and this fancy embroidered blouse and think of Evelyn and mist up and blow their noses and put the items aside. They’d never buy a dead woman’s clothes. Bad luck.

Hey. We’ve all got that bad luck, so get over it, girls. But maybe one of them would purchase this green beaded dress, never having seen Evelyn wear it. A nice dress for your silver wedding-anniversary dinner, your old hubby standing next to you, still grumpy about something, and your children, grown old and slow and careful themselves, lined up behind you, and you in the green beaded dress. The dress that says, “
Go ahead, ask me to dance, I
might say yes.” “Where’d you get that?
” You’d give them a Mona Lisa smile and say, “
That’s for me to know and you to find out
.”

Barbara went home, loaded the dishwasher, and poured herself a glass of tea from a pitcher in the fridge. She had no desire for alcohol, not at that moment, and she crawled into bed and said a prayer to the sky for Mother’s safe arrival and repose and then reposed herself.

I
t was diabetes. The specialist at the hospital had suspected diabetes and given Daddy insulin and he was doing better now. He had suffered a brain concussion and there seemed to be some memory-loss issues there but he was responding well and he had told the doctor a joke so he was just fine. So Debbie drove into St. Cloud and brought him home.

He was nattily dressed in pressed khaki pants and blue shirt and blazer and she signed a receipt for him and on the way to the car he stopped and hugged her. “You mean so much to me, Pookie,” he said. “I missed you.” He thought for a moment. “How’s your mother?” Fine, said Debbie. “I don’t mean to worry you, but she strikes me as a little unsteady”—he tapped his forehead—“up here, I mean.”

On the way home, just north of Holdingford, he started to snuffle. He pulled out a hanky and blew. “I’m just so happy you’re here,” he said, through his tears. He’d always been a sentimental guy, even before he got brained by the bathtub. He’d dissolve in a puddle of tears at a Chopin étude at a piano recital or the Mills Brothers singing “We’ll Meet Again” and Christmas Eve was
devastating, the first verse of “Silent Night” tore him to pieces. And now he reached over and touched her hand on the steering wheel and sang, “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town.”

“Remember that one?” he said. She did. “I sang that to you when you were itty-bitty. And now you’re getting married.” He sat silent, tears welling up in his old brown eyes. “I would like to say a few words at your wedding,” he said.

“A few words about what?”

“About you and about when you were a little girl. And about the future too. Maybe a little about Scripture.”

“About the Rapture?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Daddy, do you remember those enormous ducks that they used to have on the lake? You took me to see them once. They were as big as boats. Maybe they were boats.”

He remembered boats, of course. Ducks? Did she mean docks? He used to have a dock and he tied his boat to it. Remember that boat? Or did she mean dogs? They had a dog named Bailey. A black cocker spaniel. He died in the kitchen while eating his dog nuggets, had a stroke and lay down and was gone. Mr. Detmer teared up to think of it. But when they reached home, Mrs. Detmer remembered the ducks right away. The Sons of Knute had them. Ages ago. Big Boy giant fiberglass duck decoys eighteen feet long. The hunter lay on his back inside the duck and pedaled the drive shaft that turned the propeller as he looked out through a periscope in the duck’s neck, scanning the skies for incoming ducks and when they came in for a landing, the hunter sprang up and threw open a trapdoor in the tail of the duck and blasted away
from there. No need for duck blinds. Just climb into a decoy and go to wherever the ducks are.

The Knutes purchased four of the things and they were a big disappointment. A crowd turned out for their debut and a Knute climbed into one and it flipped belly up. So they put concrete blocks in for ballast and that helped but not much. They still were tippy. Even in a light swell they rocked back and forth to beat the band. You lay inside and it was hot and stuffy and you had to pedal and it was hard to steer and then the dang things rocked and rocked and rocked. Even on a calm day. A Knute went out in one and got claustrophobic and started yelling and he fired his gun, both barrels, and blew a hole in the side and the thing sank and he would’ve drowned except he was in shallow water. So they hauled all of the Big Boy decoys off to storage and nothing more was said about them. There was no recrimination, no kidding. It was too painful. The giant ducks no longer existed. They were non-ducks.

“I want one for my wedding,” she said. “Or two. Two would be perfect.”

“You are so creative!” Mother cried. “Where do you come up with these ideas?” She was settled in on the porch, sipping a cool drink Debbie had made with mysterious tasty ingredients that put her in a lively mood. She was feeling very vivacious and girlish. “Remember when we got married, Daddy?” He did not, or he preferred not to. “We were married in a hailstorm,” she said. “Hailstones the size of Ping-Pong balls. It hit just as we were standing at the altar. It was in August. The minister had given a very nice talk on the parable of the vineyard and we were about to say our vows and there was a racket up on the roof and men jumped up and went to look and we just plowed right ahead and
said our I Do’s, right, Daddy?” Daddy looked as if he couldn’t remember if he were married to this old lady or not. “They played the wedding march and we went up the aisle and out the door and it was all ice out there. August and there was ice on the ground and our car was all beat up and so were the others. And my dad jumped in his car and drove home and his corn was all pounded into the ground. Only good for silage. He had paid for my fancy wedding and now he didn’t have money for gas or feed. He came back and ate the wedding cake he’d paid for and he danced one dance with me and he said to me—I’ll never forget this—he said, Betty, this is the worst day of my life. If it weren’t that the bank would get everything, I’d go out to the woods and shoot myself right now. He said that to me as we were dancing and then your father and I got in our car and drove to the Curtis Hotel in Minneapolis. Remember that, Daddy?” Daddy shook his head sadly. His mind had drifted off elsewhere.

“Let me tell you about
my
wedding,” said Debbie. She had a notebook on her lap, everything written out. It would be called a Celebration of Commitment. Not a wedding, as such. Same thing but different. She had ordered a sign for the pontoon boat, “Celebration of Commitment.”

“Boat?” said Mother.

Her minister, Misty Naylor, would conduct the service aboard the pontoon boat,
The Agnes D
. Wally’s pontoon boat. She had rented it for the weekend. “What church is she from?” asked Mother. “Misty is a seeker,” said Debbie. She used to be Presbyterian but she had a near-death experience during breast enhancement surgery and a door opened onto a garden full of golden light
and beautiful plants and every different sort of person, Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Jew, all rejoicing and living in harmony, and when Misty returned to life, she dedicated herself to world peace and to Momentism—you know, the idea that all of time takes place in one moment, there is no eternity. “Very interesting,” said Daddy. “I hope I get a chance to talk to her and clear up some things.” He was also hoping there would be supper served soon, something meaty and substantial.

Misty Naylor was the founding sister of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Spirit in California, a church with no building, only a website. Every few weeks Misty announced a Confluence and a few hundred of the Sisterhood gathered in a park or plaza and they milled for half an hour, shuffling slowly in a circle, lost fragments of the universal divine. Openness without self-limiting expectations, no touching, no talking, just spirit essence, and as they milled, they listened for the tone as Misty blew it on a ceramic pitchpipe and they resonated with it to make the Sacred Chord, and when the entire Confluence had landed on the Sacred Chord, they held it and hummed powerfully together until they felt the Spirit from their toenails to the roots of their hair, and then they bowed, backed away, and dispersed. SOSS was Debbie’s spiritual family and Misty was flying out as a very very special favor. Debbie needed to clear out the upstairs bedroom for Misty to sleep in.

“And where will Brent sleep?”

“He’ll be fine on the porch.”

Water and fire are holy elements to the Sacred Spirit people, she explained, and so she (and Brent) wanted to say their vows on the water. She had rented the
Agnes D
for that purpose. The two of them would sail, with Misty, and carry a barbecue grill, the
coals lit—water and fire—and say their vows while cruising across the water, observed by family and guests assembled under an awning where lunch would be served.

“Lunch?” said Mother, starting to rise from her chair. “I should call up Evelyn.” Visions of kitchen work, making ham salad, cutting crusts off sandwiches, frying Swedish meatballs and sticking toothpicks in them. Then she remembered that Evelyn didn’t do lunches anymore. Also, that she was dead.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered,” said Debbie. She had ordered ten cases of Moët champagne and four wheels of cheese, Camembert, Roquefort, white cheddar, Caerphilly, fifty pounds of French pâté with peppercorn crust, sixteen dozen giant shrimp shish kebab fresh frozen and flown in from California, and French vanilla ice cream with fresh peaches. God is within us and so when we are good to ourselves, we do a sacred act, said Misty. So there would be a wedding feast. “You can sit and put your feet up and enjoy it,” she said to Mother.

“Who is going to prepare all of that? It isn’t going to magically appear.”

Her good buddies Georges and Patrice from the world-famous Restaurant Nantes would do everything.

“But why on a boat? Why not in a church? What if it rains?”

Because the Sisterhood believes that life is a voyage, she and Brent would vow to cherish and to support each other in their life voyages; the two giant fiberglass ducks, powered by the pedaling Swanson boys would cross their path, strewing flower petals, and then Craig would descend in his hot-air balloon and pick up Brent and Debbie and take them away—free! Drifting with the wind! And if it rains, all the better!

“Craig?”

“You remember Craig. He and I went to Concordia together. He drove out to San Francisco in 1981. He lives in St. Paul now. He teaches geometry and he flies hot-air balloons.”

“Is that safe?” asked Mother. Daddy grimaced. He thought of power lines and a balloon striking one and the occupants, including his daughter, bursting into a shower of sparks.

Debbie decided not to mention Craig’s friend Larry who goes around the Midwest dressed up like Elvis and jumps from a plane with a loudspeaker in his pants and sings “Love Me” and “One Night With You”—Craig said they often work as a team and Debbie said okay, though she wasn’t an Elvis fan. (Why didn’t anybody impersonate Jerry Garcia and sing “Truckin’”?)

Mother asked about the wedding dress and Debbie got up to make more tea. She was planning to wear wedding jeans and a wedding T-shirt (“Love, Honor, and What?”) but they would talk about that later.

“I’m concerned about this young man and his spiritual situation,” said Daddy. “We are living in the Last Days, you know….” His voice trailed off. “But nobody asked for my advice in the matter, so I suppose I should shut up.”

“Do you remember Evelyn Peterson?” said Mother. Debbie did not.

“The old lady down by the Lutheran church. The one who traveled all over and let her lawn go to rack and ruin. She died Friday night.”

“Okay.”

“Used to see her sitting on her porch with her nose in a book. In the morning. Let the laundry go, never mind cleaning. She sure had a vivid imagination, I’ll say that. She told me once she thought she could be happy, living in Minneapolis. Minneapolis, I said. Who needs it? It’s a lot of noise, if you ask me. Charge you an arm and a leg for a cup of coffee and think nothing of it. Evelyn always had expensive tastes though. Poor Jack found that out. He was my cousin, you know. All Jack wanted to do was fish and all she wanted to do was go somewhere else. So she divorced him and made him go live in that shack at the lake, poor man. He sat over there and drank himself to death. Oh, she was quite the mover and shaker. Had her hand in everything. Bossy, some people would say. I don’t know. I never cared to get mixed up in all of that, the Thanatopsis Club and the Women’s Circle and all. My No. 1 job was taking care of your father and keeping him happy. Just the homebody type. Evelyn told me once she wished she could just go around and live in hotels for the rest of her life. I said to her, Jeeze, Evelyn, how do ya think of those things? Oh, she was motoring in the fast lane all right. She’s out in the cemetery now. Goes to show: you never know.”

“She was cremated, they say,” said Daddy. “If you can imagine that.”

Debbie refilled their glasses with iced tea. It was seventy-eight degrees on the kitchen thermometer. Brent would arrive on Wednesday from Chicago. She hadn’t spoken to him in a week. He didn’t like to get phone calls on the road. She hoped he was looking forward to Saturday.