Pontoon (14 page)
Authors: Garrison Keillor
*
She remembered Kyle’s graduation. He was No. 3 in his class, wore a gold tassel, won the Shining Star scholarship, got a big round of applause. That was the year the seniors hooked up a tiny plastic hose to the lectern and when Mr. Halvorson stood at the podium to talk about daring to make a difference, he felt the front of his pants getting very wet. A great big dark wet spot. He had to do his Groucho walk back to his seat and sit with his legs crossed and let somebody else hand out the diplomas. So Kyle was out late that night celebrating with his coconspirators, and the next day, Sunday, she put on a big open house, 1 to 3 p.m., with a ham and turkey buffet, potato salad and fruit salad, punch and coffee, and a sheet cake with
CONGRATULATIONS KYLE
in green icing and a hundred people dropped by and slipped some money in envelopes in the big basket in the living room. Lloyd was there, with terrible back pains, leaning against the kitchen wall, tears in his eyes. She snuck a look at a few envelopes and ten bucks seemed to be the average. It made her furious. Everybody loading up on food she
had made and sitting on lawn chairs she had scrounged up and admiring the yard, the opulence of the hydrangeas, the sidewalk washed, and they couldn’t be a little bit generous? Would it kill you? Norwegians! The worst! Kyle strolled by, cutting a wide swathe, working the crowd, and Flo said, “So, what are you going to do next year?” And he said, “I’m thinking I might take a year off to sort of think about it, and I’ll stay with my dad in the city and get a job and earn some money for college or whatever.”
It
was such a lame reply
, she wanted to throw fruit salad in his face—and then she overheard him say something similar to other relatives. A sunny June afternoon in Lake Wobegon with her cheapskate relatives and her martyred ex-husband and lackadaisical son and the whole air of
Okay Then Not So Bad Hey
and visions of that bright boy adrift and some little trollop latching onto him, a romance like a brain tumor, and in two years he’s working in retail for $8.50 an hour and in debt up to his eyebrows paying for the chintzy rambler and the crummy furniture. She took Kyle aside and said, “You can tell people whatever the hell you want, but you’re not living with your dad next year and you’re not working. You’re going to enroll at the University as you told me you would and you’re going to make a 3.8 grade point average and in return I am going to pay for the whole thing. That’s the plan we agreed on and that’s what you’re going to do. Just so you know.”
He said, “It’s my life, you know,” which was also lame.
And she said, “It is and I won’t let you piss it away. Be as angry at me as you like but I’m not going to let you piss away your chances in life and wind up wearing an apron, putting price stickers on cans of creamed corn. And that’s that.”
He started to say something about needing to find his own way. “Listen,” she said. “The world has enough slackers, and featherbedders and thumbsuckers so don’t become one of them—it’s really very simple—there are the doers who go at the job and get it done and there are the folks who find a comfy spot and surf the Web and download more pictures of themselves onto their website”—this was a dig, she had seen his website. Dreadful. Stupid. Vulgar. “You give me the next four years, and you can do as you like with the rest. And you’ll have more to do as you like with,” she said.
*
And after some stomping around and slamming doors and muttering at her, he, by God, went to the University and studied and got good grades. Not a 3.8, but 3.4, sometimes 3.6, acceptable. Once he tried to pledge a fraternity and she put her foot down: he wasn’t going to join a gang and live in a house smelling of beer and livestock, dirty clothing strewn, underpants with skid marks in the seat, sink full of empty beer bottles, pizza boxes stacked six feet high. She found him a studio apartment, a little cell, white walls, tile floor, a futon, a door on sawhorses for a desk, no curtains so you wake up with the sun. And she mortgaged her house and paid his way. A pretty straight deal. If necessary she would rob a bank. Why not? Find one in a shopping center and walk in with a nylon stocking over her head and a pistol in her purse and tell them to hand over the hundreds and make it snappy. Most bank robbers got away with it. They don’t tell you that on television but it’s true. You could pick up $50,000 in a lunchbag and walk away and that night on
Eyewitness News
they’d be talking about the Larceny Lady and here she’d sit in Lake Wobegon cool as a cucumber, the loot in a Tupperware dish tucked away in the box of Christmas decorations. The ladies at church would say, “I can’t imagine who would do a thing like that.”
Two o’clock. She needed a drink. Really and truly. If a girl in a frilly apron walked in right now and asked, “What’ll you have?” she would order a brandy sour. Slice of lemon. So delicious on a hot day. And what harm would it do? None. We are poisoning the earth, blasting the ozone layer, the Arctic ice cap shrivels, polar bears perish, and why not have a drink, Barbara Peterson?
*
Three o’clock, the doorbell rang. Front door. Nobody used that door except Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the UPS man. It was the boy from the crematorium, the one she kissed. With a big heavy box that the moment she took it she knew what was inside. It was Mother. She set it on the desk in the living room and cut the box open and lifted the bowling ball out. It was wrapped in heavy clear plastic which she cut off. The ball felt light, with its core drilled out and Mother’s ashes inside. The hole that held the ashes was covered with a plaster patch. She thought maybe she should have the patch waterproofed to keep it intact. But why? Why preserve the ashes? It didn’t matter. Mother was extinguished, her fire was out, let the water in.
She went and fetched the blue loose-leaf binder of Mother’s letters. She had rounded up a few dozen and was keeping them to give to Kyle someday. That morning she’d found one from last December.
Dec 9
Dear Barbara,
I am in Reno, beat, absolutely knackered, and am trying to make this hotel computer work. I wrote you one letter already
and then hit shift for a new paragraph and the screen went blank. A thousand words of deathless prose, lost in a single stroke. Ah, progress.
As I said in that letter, I left Tuesday all of a sudden when I realized that if I didn’t, I was going to get roped into baking forty dozen saffron buns for St. Lucia Day. I could feel the phone trembling—Sonya getting up the nerve to call me and pour out her troubles and how hard it is to get people to bake anymore—but I have baked my last bun and am done with it, so to make that clear, I vamoosed. I tried to call and your line was busy. I cleaned out the fridge, hauled away the deer bones that somebody’s dog hauled into the yard, locked the house, and put sunflower seeds in the feeder for the birds to gorge on. Did you know that chickadees eat their weight in sunflower seeds every few days—think of a truckdriver ordering the 200-pound cheeseburger,—but I don’t need to eat one more saffron bun, and that’s why I had to get out. Christmas depresses the daylights out of me. All that damn food. Gladys came home with a mouse tail hanging from her mouth the other day and she was moaning the next morning so on the odd chance she was poisoned, I took her to the vet in St. Cloud, the lesbian one, and there she was in her white lab coat and offering a Comprehensive Care Analysis for $150—I said, “But it’s only an old cat!” She winced at that. She listened to Gladys with a stethoscope for awhile and reported that Gladys has a heart murmur. She said that surgery is an option to consider. (Did you know about Medicat? It’s health insurance for cats.) I said, “Not on your life.” And I paid her twenty bucks and took Gladys out to Rollie Hochstetter’s who owed me one for the times I lied to his wife about his whereabouts when he
was running around with the horse-faced lady. He was in the machine shed dinking around with one of his antique tractors and I set Gladys down and told him to shoot her. So he did. It took him a minute to get the gun and I patted her and told her that it was for her own good. Her hips are stiff and she whimpers when she sits and I can hear her wheezing at night and life for her just isn’t the feast it should be and I am not going to pay money to have her be a biology experiment. I said, “I’ll join you soon enough, but there’s one more dance in the old girl yet and so I’m off to Reno. And you are off to the Great Meadow in the Sky.” She didn’t believe a word of it, of course. She gave me a scathing look that I’ll remember to my dying day and Rollie set her up on a stump and I turned my head and he blew her little head off. And now here I am, in the Business Center of an enormous hotel, weeping for a dead cat. It’s a mistake to have a pet—they’re so dear and you get to know them too well and then they turn into a tragedy in which you are the betrayer. I can’t forget how she looked at me, her disdainful look, and today I saw that same exact look on the face of a fat old lady on her way to the slot machines. She glared at me just like Gladys did and I thought I saw whiskers on her. She said, “Where you been? I’ve been looking for you.” I said, “I don’t think I know you.” She said, “Oh, Pfffffft.” A cat hiss.
By the way I stopped in Sauk Rapids and saw Muffy who is very very happy and has a blessed life and you should know that. She can’t read the newspaper or do math and I can’t ride a bicycle on a high wire, and life goes on.
I love hotels, even ones with slot machines jangling everywhere and old fat ladies with jangly bracelets and music dripping from the ceilings and grinning Filipino bellmen who are
your instant best friends. There is dancing here and men to dance with and that’s exactly what I want to do instead of sit in the church kitchen baking saffron buns and listening to people lament the dead. I want a gallant man to lead me out onto a dance floor with a prom ball sparkling and the band playing a rhumba and I want to do steps and turn and be turned, over and over again. But meanwhile I am missing my old accusatory cat. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t bring her over to your house. She is dead. I ain’t. Neither is Muffy. She saves all my postcards so I will write her another, soon as I say,
Love, your Mother
Drinking had gotten Barbara excused from kitchen duty: people were afraid she would drop glassware. It also got her out of teaching Vacation Bible school which was good. She had hated that for years, teaching innocent little kids about Noah’s Ark. The kids were doped up on chocolate, vibrating like hummingbirds, so they really didn’t pay attention, and the science was transparently weak—a gene pool of one male and one female means monstrous inbreeding—and then there is the issue of genocide. Judy Ingqvist said, “Yes, it’s a hard story for children. So don’t dwell on it.” So one year Barbara had God send snow and cold instead of rain and instead of an ark Moses built a fort and God gave him fire, which the wicked did not have and so they froze to death.
Moses in the bulrushes, okay. A child destined to lead the uprising, raised by the very family who he will overthrow. Sweet. Or David and Goliath. An all-time favorite. Abraham and Isaac, on the other hand, this was madness. She told Judy Ingqvist, “A god who tells you to kill an innocent child is not a god to be worshipped.” Judy smelled liquor on her breath. She frowned and
turned away and Barbara was not invited to planning meetings the next year.
*
The next morning, she was trimming the trumpet vines and then Kyle arrived. She wrapped him in a warm embrace that he tried to wiggle out of. “Mom, people are looking,” he said. Their little joke. He said he had spent the night in Mother’s house. He let himself in through her bedroom window and slept on her sofa. She had come to him in a dream and told him to live his life and go out in the world and travel and meet women.
“Horse hockey,” said Barbara. He looked sleepy, unkempt, unclean, and she embraced him tighter. “People are gonna be thinking incest,” he said. She told him that he was her treasure in this world and she didn’t care who knew it. “You screw up though, and I’ll pound the crap out of you.”
Roger’s boys Jon and Sammy were spoiled rotten in Santa Barbara, drifting along, writing dopy songs, working dead-end jobs, going through girlfriends like rats through crackers. They were almost thirty and they went around in those damn droopy shorts and untied shoes and backward baseball caps and wires coming out of their ears. They owned every expensive piece of junk there was and Roger kept buying them more. They had the attention span of a fruit fly. The thought of sitting down and reading a book was alien to them, like tinkering with a car or growing vegetables to eat. Why would you do that?