We Are Still Married (20 page)

We formed a straight line and gravely filed one by one past Mrs. Erickson, who whispered our name to a grim-faced man, who then whispered it to the governor, who shook our hands and said, “Hello, Stanley, it's good to meet you.” This was thrilling, until suddenly, when Mrs. Erickson whispered
Shirley,
Shirley clapped her hand over her mouth and rushed away to the toilet, but her name had gone into the pipeline and when the governor shook Billy's hand he said, “Hello, Shirley, it's good to meet you.” He smiled the same warm smile and went right on calling all the rest of the class by the wrong name, including Elaine, who was called Robert. I was called John. He was the governor but he wasn't what you'd call bright.

It was so amazing how many kids (mostly girls) later defended him, saying he was a busy man, had a lot on his mind, had to run the state, etc. We boys said, No, he's dumb. How can you look at a boy and say, Hello, Shirley. The girls said, How do you know Shirley isn't a boy's name, too? Show us where it says Shirley
can't
be a boy's name. How do
you
know? Who do you think
you
are? You're not so smart.

Who do you think you are? You're from Lake Wobegon. You shouldn't think
you're
somebody.

You're no better than the rest of us.

Some of our teachers, however, such as Miss Heinemann, believed that we were good enough and could be improved with proper instruction, and so she set Shakespeare's sonnets in front of us,
Macbeth,
Wordsworth, Chaucer, and expected us to read them and to discuss what was on the page, and if any of us had been so bold as to aspire to a life in literature, she'd have been pleased as punch. The higher the better.

She strolls the aisles between our desks, swishing past in her dull-brown dress, talking about metaphor, the use of language to mean more than what we know it to mean, whereby common things, such as a rose, a birch tree, the dark sky, rain falling, come to mean something else for which there isn't an exact word. She talks about literature as being urgent, impulsively bold, unavoidable, like stopping your car on the highway at night and stepping out and walking alone into dark damp woods because it's unbearable to only know what's in your headlights. Art calls us out of the regulated life into a life that is dangerous, free. I remembered that when I was chosen class poet, to participate in the winter homecoming program and, after the procession of Queen Aileen to the throne and the singing of her favorite song, to stand and recite her favorite poem. Her favorite song was “Vaya Con Dios” but she didn't have a favorite poem, she said, so I said, “That's okay, Aileen, I'll choose a real good one for you.” I had in mind a few lines from Whitman's “Song of Myself,” beginning:

But first I had to show it to Miss Heinemann for her approval. She was incredulous. “Aileen
Heidenschink
chose this? This is her favorite poem? Aileen?” No, not exactly, Miss H., it's one that I thought might be one that—“I think that on Aileen's big day you might come up with something more appropriate than this. Really.
I have no church, no philosophy?
Aileen is Catholic. Her family will be sitting there. Think.”

I
was
thinking, that the Queen's Favorite Poem was a rare occasion when Art had a chance to lift its hairy head and call my classmates toward a higher spiritual life, but Miss Heinemann didn't see it that way; she said, “Don't be mean to Aileen. Find something she'll enjoy, like ‘Invictus.' Or else don't do it,” which disgusted me, idealist that I was, and also was a huge relief, because the thought of reciting Walt Whitman to a gym full of Lake Wobegon made me sick with fear. So I bowed out as Homecoming Poet on the issue of artistic freedom, keeping my principles intact and taking a big load off my mind at the same time.

 

 

Thirty years later I lived in St. Paul, in a big brick house on Crocus Hill, a nice neighborhood where if you needed to buy a volume of Whitman or a dozen white Japanese candles or a Mozart piano concerto you could find it in a shop close by, but if you wanted caulking compound you'd have to get in the car and drive a mile to Seven Corners Hardware, where graceful old houses were restored to a condition of elegance such as the builders could scarcely have imagined and were lived in by people with plenty of books and lots of money.

When I sat in Miss Heinemann's class, I was reading
Main Street
and
Babbitt,
imagining myself as a rebel against the materialism and provincialism of the Midwest as Sinclair Lewis described it, the culture of the Shriners and boosters and plumbers and shopkeepers and dull solid unimaginative people who seemed to dominate the landscape and hold us mysterious and artistic people back from our destiny. But now, a quarter-century later in my neighborhood, all the shops sold beauty and music and art and cuisine and nobody could tell me where to find a little replacement part for the burners in my furnace. This burned me up, because I am a writer and have stories to create and couldn't afford to spend a whole Monday morning running around St. Paul looking for a tiny grommet or nipple or whatever it's called that the gas flows through when it burns. I drove to a plumbing-and-heating shop and got the impression that furnaces were only a sideline for them, that they were really performance artists waiting for word on their new video and then they'd be off to New York.

“I never saw one of those,” a man there said, “where'd you get it?”

“I got it off my furnace, of course.”

“How do you know it doesn't work?”

“The house is cold.”

I drove home. The Blazer had a funny clicking sound in the axle. I'd had it in to the garage three times but they were artists, too, not dull technicians who do menial jobs like figuring out why my car clicks. I paid them money and the car still went k-chick, k-chick, and when I called to complain they said, “We didn't hear anything.” They were avant-garde automotive artists of anti-mechanical repair, their purpose to confront me, their audience, with my car's problems. For this I paid $112.32, money I earned by sitting in a little room by myself and writing in such a way that a reader runs the risk of laughter, a pleasurable sensation of trembling along the spine.

It's a good piece of work for a middle-aged man who feels as depressed as I do sometimes. I keep my weight down, am constantly seeking more fiber, bang around on a racquetball court twice a week, and try to relax and enjoy life, but two days a week I feel lousy. Some day
Reader's Digest
will print an article about the tiny gland below the kneecap called the hermer that produces a thin golden fluid that enables the brain to feel pleasure: if a person quits the bad habit of crossing his legs, his hermer can recover and life become wonderful. But so far all the
Digest
says is what I already know: drink plenty of liquids. I need to know something more miraculous than that, the secret of happiness. What, as a child, I thought Christmas would give or college or show business, and, as a youth, I thought that sex would give, now, as a man, I am still looking for. I thought I'd find it in my writing but writing is only work, like auto repair except more professional.

I remember when I switched from Christmas to sex as the secret of happiness, it was when I saw a dirty magazine at Shinder's newsstand, corner of Hennepin and Sixth in Minneapolis, down the street from the Rifle Sport pinball parlor, a rough block. Every alley smelled of piss. Tough guys lounged under the marquees of dirty theaters and yelled remarks at girls passing by, like “Hey, baby! Wanna come home wimmy?” Drunks sat collapsed in doorways. I had been at the public library up on Tenth, where dirty magazines were not offered, though I searched for days, and where all the cards in the card catalogue under “Sexual” were marked “Inquire at Desk.” I decided to wander down to Shinder's and sidle inside and examine the merchandise. I picked up a copy of
Life
and tucked another magazine inside it, called
Peek,
with a photo of a woman with her shirt off, which, in 1958, excited me to the very core of my being, which suddenly I knew which part of my being that was, and I began to indulge a rich imaginative life that eventually settled on a lovely person whom I dreamed of marrying. Thoughts of her kept me awake at night, standing at the window and staring out across the snow, and when, after years of thinking those thoughts and courting her and getting engaged and the date of our marriage fast approaching when I would cross over the river into the land of bliss, the excitement was debilitating.

Now, of course, young people cross over into the land of bliss pretty much whenever they want to. There are bridges, there are islands in the river, and the water is so low that most places you can wade across, but back then the river was wide and deep and fast and the church owned the boats. The church ferried you across to the land of bliss and you stayed there for the rest of your life with the one you went across with, or so we believed. Marriage was a fact, immense.

One cold fall day, three days before we would walk up the aisle and into a motel room, my mind full of carnal thoughts, I took a walk along the Mississippi near where I lived, thinking the cold would clear my mind, but cold is an aphrodisiac, as we Minnesotans know, and I rehearsed once again in my mind exactly how I would go about making love, changing some details, tossing in a few improvements, and I practiced making ecstatic cries. I'd never made love before and had never cried out in an ecstatic way (except one Christmas when I got a Lionel train, but “Oh, boy, thanks, Mom and Dad” was wrong for sex) and I wanted to do it right. Spontaneously, freely, joyously, but also correctly. I stood at the edge of Riverside Park above the river, looking across toward the gray shapes of the University, and attempted to make outbursts of sexual passion. Loud ones like Tarzan, soft sighs, grunts, some growling. I tried yipping and wahooing, even something sort of like yodeling.

Then it hit me: what if sex for her and me turned out to be nothing to yip and wahoo about, but a series of small and sort of interesting events like a checkers match in the course of which you'd just say, “Are you having a good time?” or “As long as I'm up, can I get you anything?” I was a Minnesota guy and we are no great lovers. Minnesotans make love once a month, on the 15th, and when it's over and done with they don't whoop and holler or smoke a cigarette and listen to Bach, they get up and brush their teeth. Then they go to bed. When a Minnesotan sleeps with someone, normally he sleeps. I knew this. Who did I think I was, a movie star?

Minnesota was a repressive place to grow up in and there's a lot I'd change, even as I think about sunny bygone days in Lake Wobegon. The fear of being different paralyzed every kid I knew, and there was so little room for affection, so much space for cruelty. People didn't have enough fun. Above all, we learned to repress the urge to achieve and be recognized, because the punishment for being different was so heavy. It might be postponed for a while, but when it fell on you, it fell hard, as when I wrote a book about Minnesota, called
Lake Wobegon Days
, and the local newspaper put me in my place but good. They marked my front yard with orange rinds and nailed a dead cat to the porch. I started to nourish the thought of leaving for someplace like Australia, the farthest away you can go and still speak English, and wondered if, in the long flight, I'd sleep and wake up as the finer person I longed to be, a sweet-tempered marsupial man who'd hang by his tail and cry out ecstatically whenever he felt like it, to hell with the newspaper.

 

 

St. Paul was a beautiful city until it got so small, a shame, but life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty. A summer night in St. Paul is so beautiful it makes you sad, to walk along Goodrich Avenue in the dark and hear the water sprinklers whisper across the grass and hit the bushes. You smell raw grass and sweet water, and hear voices whispering from the front porches, behind the dark screens. Lights in upstairs bedrooms and a child momentarily framed in a window, and porch lights on in one big old frame manse after another, they must be waiting for someone. Waiting for you perhaps, and whispering about you, too: “My friend will be here soon, I can't wait, I'm so excited.” The great lover out for a walk, the lover of his own good town. A radio is on in this low bungalow, low seductive voices there, and a cat has stretched out its loins on the cool cement. You sidestep her and stroll into a spray of water leaking from a hose that wets your pants, and then enter an aroma of hamburgers and charcoal smoke, drifting from behind a fence. The life we all know, God bless it, like it says in the hymn:
Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above.

Whenever I felt lucky and happy this street was like a watercolor,
St. Paul, Summer Night,
but when I was scared it seemed real and I imagined if I threw myself on the bosom of St. Paul, it would catch me.
We share our mutual woes, our mutual burdens bear, and often for each other flows the sympathizing tear. Before our Father's throne, we pour our mutual prayers; our fears, our hopes, our aims are one, our comforts and our cares.
Love has the power to rescue us and not let go, otherwise it isn't love.