We Are Still Married (21 page)

I was scared because I had to sing songs and talk on the radio, a deep hole that lay waiting in a theater downtown, but it's no worse than anyone else's problems. To stand up in a black tux and sing in a trio, “Only a boy from Anoka who loved to dance the polka, but Oh Oh Oh” and “It's all right to get your appetite walking 'round town, just as long as you eat supper at home” is not one inch closer to death than having to give a book report or play centerfield, it's just that it was happening to
me.
I'd walk around the block trying to remember the lyrics to a new song we had to do on the show that night, like “In a little Spanish town I walked around and searched for you, my love. The stars above seem to say, She went away. I don't know where—Oh, don't you care for me? In my revery, I love you, I love you, I love you. I'll say it once again: in a little Spanish town, our hacienda home, I love you, I love you, my own.”

I was scared, I thought: “How come we didn't rehearse this?
I
woulda rehearsed if somebody had just
called
me.” But we hardly rehearsed even the songs we already knew, let alone new ones. We just sang them once and said, “Oh, sure. That's easy.” We were so cool.

“This is terrible,” I thought. “They're all going to laugh. They'll write about it in the newspaper, what a big joke it was. We can't do this song.”

St. Paul was a place where I believed that if I knocked on the nearest door a woman would open it and when I said, “I feel bad. Can I talk to you?” she'd say, Sure, come on in.

I felt that I was theirs, that Minnesota people were people you could hurl yourself bodily from the stage at and they would catch you and not let you go, but the sad truth is that they only catch you if you fail; if you do well, then you're on your own. It's that way everywhere. The prodigal son's brother knew that: it's failure and disgrace that win the parent's love. You blow the song and people will be nice to you; you make it a big hit and the newspaper will walk up to your house and pee on your roses. And if you feel bad, too bad. Who are you to complain? You got what you wanted, didn't you?

 

 

I left St. Paul in the summer, a sad season for a happy man because summer is so short. When I was young and miserable, all change was for the better, but when you're forty-five, almost nothing can be better, so you grieve for every leaf that falls. June sails in on a warm starry night when a band is playing and you stand on a veranda with your hand around Amanda's pajamas and then summer is gone in a minute, it's fall, a reminder that we, too, are temporary and can be replaced. The beat goes on but I can't dance to it anymore. Of course, I never could dance at all, having grown up in a fundamentalist home, which you can tell by the way I move. We believed that any rhythmic physical movement would awaken our carnal desires, as surely as aspirin dissolves in a bottle of Coke, so we kids had to sit in study hall when they taught dancing in phys ed, couldn't go to dances, not even square ones, couldn't even join marching band. I wanted to dance. Wanted girls to know that what I lacked in aptitude I made up for in sheer avid interest. Couldn't dance because it would awaken carnal desire, which in my case was not only awake, it was dressed and down on the corner waiting for the bus. Those Sanctified Brethren are good people but they do leave a mark on a boy, and even today, when I sweep into a room holding a glass of Pouilly-Fuisse, people see me sweep and say, “I didn't know you were Baptist.” I wasn't. We considered Baptists loose.

I also can't dance because I am a shy person on account of my family lived out in the sticks at the end of the schoolbus route and when I climbed aboard all the seats were full. Nobody would move over, but Wendell the bus driver yelled at me to
siddown! State law!
so I picked out the seat with the tiniest girls in it and hurled myself at the outside one and forced her in, and rode twelve miles to school with one foot braced against the opposite seat so they couldn't dump me in the aisle. This was my initial physical contact with the opposite sex. Girls trying to push me away, saying, “Ish, oh, you're disgusting, you make me sick.”

A shy person would like to walk away from people and have them call gently to him, “Come back—oh, come back, please please please,” and so, to have to hurl yourself at them and hang on, it ruined me as a dancing partner.

One spring day I stood on the gravel road in my new spring shirt from Wards, a light jacket and chino pants and a brand-new pair of penny loafers, listening to the meadowlarks, feeling that finally life was summoning me, that the bus'd come, I'd climb up, and Wendell'd smile and Dede'd pat the empty spot beside her, her strawberry lips forming the words “Here, sit here, next to me.” The bus came over the hill, orange, like the sun rising, and stopped, and the door opened. The odor of hair oil and bologna sandwiches rolled out. Wendell looked like the side view on a wanted poster. Everyone was silent, nobody would look at me, they were gripping the seats until their knuckles were white. “That's all right, I'll just stand,” I said.

“Siddown. ”

“Chuckie? Could I sit here with you and Barb?”

“No. I got my lunchbox on the seat, can't you see? Whatddaya expect me to do? Sit with them.”

“Bill? Bob? Could I?”

“Huh? What? Are you kidding??? Get outta here.”

“Dede?”

She turned away in disgust, as if my presence had ruined the rest of her life and having looked at me she could never be happy again.

“Siddown,” he said, “or else get off, whatsamatter witcha anyway.” So I got off. Walked to school and was two hours late, took a shortcut across a field where there was a lake of melted snow but I ran through it in faith I'd walk on top and got the new loafers wet. I knew they were ruined, they flapped like slippers. I snuck into Miss Ellefson's eighth-grade English class and slid into my desk just as she looked up and smiled and said, “Today is the day for our five-minute speeches about a personal experience—Gary, let's start with you.”

This is that speech, thirty years overdue. Miss Ellefson is dead now, sitting in the teachers' lounge in heaven, enjoying a smoke, and I'm talking about painful matters that would be better forgotten.

 

 

One day while I still lived in St. Paul, I got a bad toothache from biting on peanut brittle and endured it until two o'clock in the afternoon, afraid to look for a new dentist. My old one was a Lutheran who went to India to fix teeth in rural areas, and I was afraid I'd get a real St. Paul Catholic dentist, impervious to pain, one who believed that St. Paul in his epistle to the Anesthesians says that agony can be offered up for God's glory, but instead I found a young woman dentist who gave me Novocain
and
gas and relaxed me so deeply I almost drowned from the spray on the drill, but it was painless. It put me right in a hopeful mood to get a haircut. Ordinarily I'd have gone to Walt's barbershop on Como and said, The usual, and gotten an earful of wisdom about fishing, but he got out of barbering in 1967. Since then I had wandered from shop to shop, looking, hoping. I drove up Grand Avenue and saw a shop called “Hair One Day and Gone the Next—Persona! Hair Stylists,” and walked in. It was all done in black and white: tile floor, chairs, white walls, black ceiling. The magazines were all about expressing the True Woman Inside You, even the men's magazines were about that. A young woman came around the corner. Yeah? she said. I said, “Uh, you're probably booked up, you wouldn't be able to get me in right away, would you,” turning away. Her hair was pink; it looked like she wasn't getting all her vitamins, or was getting some she shouldn't.

“No, I can take you now. My name's Candy.”

She was chewing gum. She looked about seventeen. We went to a black cubicle and she sat me in a little black chair. There were stuffed pandas and kangaroos. She put a red silky cloth around me and ruffled my hair and said, “Uhhh, howdja like it?” I almost said, The usual, but to look at Candy there didn't seem to
be
a usual. I said, “Oh, just a trim around the edges and not too short.” I tried to sound like it wasn't important. I was brought up to believe beauty is not worth thinking about, what's important is your soul, your mind—you don't want to be a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head. But I was feeling hopeful.

She started to cut. She wore a couple dozen plastic bracelets on her hands that clattered in my ear like an old John Deere combine. She didn't talk except once, to ask, “Do you live around here?” I said no. She seemed satisfied to know that and said no more until she unpinned the smock and handed me my glasses. I put them on and saw in the mirror an old old clown. She hadn't painted big blobby lips or a red nose on me but the hair was right. All I needed was a pair of exploding pants.

“How's that?” she said. “That's fine,” I said. I was ashamed to complain, which would imply that I had imagined she could make me look nice. “That's sixteen dollars,”. she said. I gave her a twenty. “Keep the change,” I said. A twenty-five-percent tip. Just because a man looks ridiculous doesn't mean he can't pay extra for the privilege. I bought a Twins cap at the drugstore. “Care for some hair cream?” the woman said. Drove home, and walked in the door, steaming mad just like all of us Wobegonians get mad, about twenty minutes after the fact, angry retorts coming to mind too late to be retorted. My wife took one look at me as I took off the cap and she said, “You have the most beautiful green eyes, do you know that?”

 

 

One spring, when my son was little, we got a cat named Mrs. Gray who we decided to allow to have babies so that he could observe at first hand the wonder of life. She was married, obviously, so it was all right. One day she went into heat, put on her lipstick, and lay on her back out on the front lawn, rolling and moaning and smoking cigarettes by the carton, and the gentlemen cats of the neighborhood stood around and watched. They had had operations in their youth, and didn't know what was wrong. They stood around in their yards and discussed mutual funds as she moaned and sang to them, and finally a ringer came by and said, “Hi, doll,” and they screamed at each other all afternoon, made love, and she raked him with her claws and drove him away. We explained to the boy that the wonderful part would come later, but when it came time for Mrs. Gray to have her babies, she felt extremely bad. When the first little wet sack of kitten emerged, she looked back at it with horror and tried to run away with the umbilicus still attached. She needed a lot of help. It was a mess. Maternal things didn't seem to be instinctive with her. When I came down to the kitchen to check on her later that night, she climbed out of the box where her little family lay, blind, squeaking, and she ambled over to the back door and scratched on it. She wanted out of the deal. She gave me a baleful look when I locked the door. She said, “That's okay, I can wait. Tomorrow, next week, one of these days that door'll open and I'm gone outa here. I'm gonna leave the wonder of life sitting there in its box for you to take care of, Mister. I got a life of my own to lead.”

It was a cool sweet spring night. Sex hadn't worked out for her and neither had Christmas. She was restless, she wanted to go to Los Angeles. I know the feeling. I left Minnesota and since then have known one problem after another but restlessness hasn't been one of them. Ever since I left home and came to New York, I've known exactly who I am.
Ich bin ein
Minnesotan. In Minnesota, it's never really clear what that means, but living in Manhattan, I know
exactly
what Minnesotaness means—it means
moi
—and I plan to stay right here and enjoy it.

 

 

These letters were written between 1982 and 1988, in roughly this order, and were true at the time. I haven't bothered to fix the little facts that time has altered, such as my age.

—G.K.

W
E SHY PERSONS NEED TO WRITE a letter now and then, or else we'll dry up and blow away. It's true. And I speak as one who loves to reach for the phone, dial the number, and talk. I say, “Big Bopper here—what's shakin', babes?” The telephone is to shyness what Hawaii is to February, it's a way out of the woods,
and yet:
a letter is better.

Such a sweet gift—a piece of handmade writing, in an envelope that is not a bill, sitting in our friend's path when she trudges home from a long day spent among wahoos and savages, a day our words will help repair. They don't need to be immortal, just sincere. She can read them twice and again tomorrow:
You're someone I care about, Corinne, and think of often and every time I do you make me smile.

We need to write, otherwise nobody will know who we are. They will have only a vague impression of us as A Nice Person, because, frankly, we don't shine at conversation, we lack the confidence to thrust our faces forward and say, “Hi, I'm Heather Hooten; let me tell you about my week.” Mostly we say “Uh-huh” and “Oh, really. ” People smile and look over our shoulder, looking for someone else to meet.

So a shy person sits down and writes a letter. To be known by another person—to meet and talk freely on the page—to be close despite distance. To escape from anonymity and be our own sweet selves and express the music of our souls.

Same thing that moves a giant rock star to sing his heart out in front of 123,000 people moves us to take ballpoint in hand and write a few lines to our dear Aunt Eleanor.
We want to be known.
We want her to know that we have fallen in love, that we quit our job, that we're moving to New York, and we want to say a few things that might not get said in casual conversation:
Thank you for what you've meant to me, I am very happy right now.