Pilgrims (24 page)

They walked into the house, which was cold, and Carl disappeared down the basement stairs to check the furnace. Thirtyfour messages on voice mail. She emptied out her suitcase. Threw away the slip of paper with Paolo's phone number. She walked around her house, room to room, touching the cold walls, studying the little details, trying to remember everything for when she would be old and sick and laid up in Florida. The pictures of the kids on the fireplace mantle. The hollows in the old green sofa. The smooth round stones she had collected along the shore the morning after their honeymoon night at Lamb's Resort on Lake Superior. She sat down at the kitchen table. Out on the lake, the old Pontiac sat on the ice for the Sons of Knute Guess the Ice Melt Contest, a dollar a shot, the winner to get a Rototiller, the profits to go to the Shining Star Scholarship Fund to enable some bright young person to go to college and never come back to Lake Wobegon again but to live among the glib and the privileged and make cool contemptuous jokes about the people who brought them up and taught them kindness and perseverance and self-control.

She had always made fun of the Deluded and now she was one
of them. No different from her classmate Charlotte who joined the Church of the Faithful Remnant and spent three years in a compound in Waco, Texas, awaiting the Second Coming, expecting to be Raptured into heaven but it didn't happen and now she's in public relations in Houston.

No different from Cousin Del who found his paradise on a mesa in Arizona where he stopped on vacation and paid $250 for a Hopi Experience—four hours, including sweat lodge, sacred mushrooms, Sun Dance, and a visit to the spirit world with a seventy-nine-year-old Hopi seer named Stanley Sassacaowe who looked Del straight in the eye and told him to heal himself by getting rooted in Mother Earth and thereby he would live to be ninety-six and never know one moment of regret. Del, dehydrated, exhausted from dancing, delusional from the mushrooms, bought the whole story. With Diana fighting him every step of the way, he came home, took early retirement from UPS, sold his home, and moved to the Painted Desert and a mobile-home park called Mesaview.

Diana lasted two months and came home. Del stayed. Every January when a blizzard hit Minnesota and the snow was blowing sideways on CNN, he'd call up Marjorie to ask if she was okay. Yes, she'd say, and how are you?

Oh, fine, he'd say, but you could hear the despair in his voice. He missed the challenge of winter. You can shovel snow, you can't shovel dust. What did he imagine he was going to find down there? Did he think the Hopis were going to initiate him into the Sacred Circle and tell him the Seven Mysteries of the Sand Ceremony? Did he imagine he would be granted the power
of time travel and hang out with Jefferson and Adams and also be best pals with his great-grandchildren? Well, it didn't happen. He was a lonely man sitting on the desert and watching the Golf Channel.

And then the phone rang.
ASSOCIATED FEDERAL
, said the caller ID. It rang three times and then he hollered up the stairs, “Are you going to get it?” and rather than have him answer and hear the whole wretched story from a stranger and then throw her out into a snowbank, she picked up the phone. It was the nice man who had enrolled her in the Family of Depositors and given her the coffee cup and rubber gripper.

“Mrs. Krebsbach, it's Stan Larson, how are you doing today?”

Close to death, Mr. Larson. Thanks for asking. I am going to
pour some weed killer into that coffee cup you gave me and add
hot water and drink it down and walk out in the snow and lie
down and die a painful death in approximately twenty minutes,
according to what I've read online about poisons
.

“Glad to hear it. I'm just checking in with you about that money transfer you ordered the other day—were you wanting us to go ahead with that or should we wait awhile longer?”

“What are you saying, Mr. Larson?”

“Well, I just wasn't sure what you wanted. You told us to wire the five hundred thousand to that bank in Rome but you didn't give us a delivery date, so I was just waiting here for further instructions. Better safe than sorry. I hope I didn't misunderstand.”

“You have not wired the money to Rome?”

“Nope. The bank there has sent me a couple dozen sort of terse
e-mails asking about it but you didn't tell me when you wanted it to go so I'm just sitting tight and waiting for the green light.”

She felt a big silent
whoosh
of the planets realigning themselves into orbit around the Sun rather than Uranus and the tides moving on schedule and the rivers flowing downstream, as originally planned.

“It's none of my business, of course, and I realize that, but it's a large amount of money, don't you know, and I didn't want to send it until I got confirmation from you. So—I mean, if you want me to, I got it all drawn up here, I can send it in two minutes.”

“Please don't,” she said.

“Don't?”

“Don't.”

“Okay then. I'll just rip up that transfer then and you have yourself a good evening.”

He was a true Minnesotan. It was in his voice, the droopy vowels, the nasal twang. Good old Minnesota hesitation—that sheeplike Waiting Around for Further Instructions tendency that she despaired of in her students—had saved her from her own foolishness.

She told him to wire $50,000 and to send a message: “Dear Maria, I don't want the apartment, thank you, but the experience was invaluable. Best wishes, Marjorie.”

She wasn't due back at school until Wednesday but she went in on Tuesday and Mr. Halvorson was on the loudspeakers with morning announcements, ratcheting on about students parking their cars in spaces not meant for students as if it were a threat to national security and three freshman boys were hauled in by
Mr. DeWin who'd caught them peeking through a vent into the girls' shower room.

“They have magazines for that, you know,” Doris said. “Or you could look at statues.” And then she saw her… . “Margie!” she cried. “Welcome home! How was Italy?”

Italy was good. Everyone had a good time
.

How was the weather?

It rained some but that was okay
.

Did you meet the Gennaro woman?

Yes, indeed
.

And how was that? All you expected? Or sort of a letdown?

More than I expected. Much more. I'll tell you all about it
tomorrow but now I have to get home and fix lunch for Carl
.

How's Carl?

He's fine too.

She walked home in the dusk, lights on at the Diener home, the Sorgens, the Muellers and Soderbergs and Demarets, the Munches. A winter sunset of pink and purple and gold and platinum. On the sidewalk near church was a stretch of “cat ice” like what she remembered as a kid, ice that had melted underneath to make a thin shelf that when you step on it, it shatters with a sound like breaking glass and the pieces go skittering along the ice shelf. The wonderful feeling when you find a patch of cat ice that no other kid has stomped on and the simple giddy pleasure of destruction is all yours. This sheet was enormous, twenty feet long and six feet wide, and when she put her right foot on it, lightly, to test it, she could see the scuffed oxfords and the kneesocks of her girlhood, the blue pleated skirt of her innocent days—she
hesitated for a delicious few seconds and then stomped the length of it and kicked the bigger pieces clattering like tin plates into the street. She stopped at the Chatterbox and Dorothy brought out a slice of apple pie with cheese and chopped jalapeno peppers in it, and a cup of coffee. She said Darlene was sick and she rolled her eyes—“sick” meant depressed. The poor woman had met a man named Frank through Craigslist and now he seemed to be stalking her. Cliff had put the Mercantile up for sale (again).

“The poor man is angry because he can't deal with computer inventory. It's a shame he never had kids. They could've explained it to him. But Cliff was married to the store. So I don't know.” Cliff was a case. He used hairspray every morning to stiffen his wispy blondish hair so he could comb it up into a high hair edifice, like a dome made of spun sugar. He was never meant for retail sales. Meant to be a great dancer and lover. But God forgot to plant him in Las Vegas.

She figured Carl could finish the Ladderman house by spring, what with the infusion of all that cash into Krebsbach Construction, and she could donate the house to Thanatopsis on condition they drop that ugly name and become the Lake Wobegon Women's Club. A quiet retreat on the southern shore for the good ladies of town to come and sit, read a book, take a nap, write in your journal. No cell phones, please. No wireless. No music, thank you
very much. A place where you can hear yourself think. No fundraising, no community projects, no planning meetings.

Nobody will try to harass you into good works. Just come and look out on the lake and contemplate your life and hope to see through your children's hands waving wildly in your face to the Larger Meaning beyond, assuming there is one. Or if not, then remember the Beautiful Moments behind you.

That evening, over chili and grilled cheese sandwiches, she told Carl that Norbert Norlander had left her a large sum of money in his will and that it was in a savings bank in St. Cloud and should be enough to rescue them from bankruptcy.

“You just found out about this?”

Yes, she said.

He was stunned. He didn't laugh, he didn't cry, he got up and walked to the window and stood there, looking out at the street, absorbing the news slowly, and then came back to the table and finished his supper. “That's good news,” he said, at last.

“You're a good man, you deserve some good news.”

That night, they lay in bed in the dark and she asked him to rub her back. She lay on her side, back to him, and he rubbed her shoulders and neck and pressed his thumbs along the length of her spine and caressed her butt. He slid up close to her, spooned behind her, his left arm under her head and his right arm around her breasts, his face alongside her neck, his breathing slow and steady.

“Are you happy?” he said.

She said she was, knowing from experience that when your lover asks you if you're happy, you shouldn't wait too long to answer. If you think about it and do the math, count your blessings, assess your griefs, come up with a projection, an adjusted
net total, he will be hurt and after ten seconds he'll ask what's wrong and when you say, Nothing, he'll say, Yes, something is wrong, terribly wrong, and he'll go veering off into horrible Minnesota self-accusation—
I've failed you. I am a bad husband,
a lousy lover, a failure as a father, a discredit to my race. I
deserve to be dragged through the dirt and hurled into outer
darkness
—so she said, “Yes.”

“Are you really?”

And she was. At that moment she was. He fell asleep in her happiness and gently she extricated herself from his arms and padded downstairs. There was a full moon and the snowy lawns of Lake Wobegon glimmered in the dark. A man in a white leather jacket trimmed with fur who for a moment she imagined was Gussie walked down the street. He walked with a long stride for one who was walking on ice and his head was up and he appeared to be singing.

Mr. Keillor studied the poem, sipping his coffee at the counter of the Chatterbox as Darlene passed by with a fresh pot. “Warm that up for you?” she said. “No thanks,” he said, by which he meant “Yes, please,” and so she warmed it up for him.
Thanks
. He thought about maybe inserting himself in the poem as the stranger who dances with Alison and drives her jealous husband to suicide but decided not to, nor change the story of Margie and make himself Paolo—it wouldn't work. In his youth he had written a few stories in which a tall dark woman was in love with him and called him “Sweet darling” and whispered “Touch me, touch me” and told him that he drove her to frenzies of longing and when his sister found the story she screamed with delight and read it aloud to her friends and they were convulsed with laughter. So he wrote a story about his sister in which she was riding her bike home as fast as she could to tell Mother that he was kissing a girl and was struck by a garbage truck and up to heaven she went, and there was Jesus. He said, “How was your trip up?” and she said, “Jesus, my brother tells lies and gets away with murder and I personally think you ought to give him a bad disease, to show him he can't get away with that stuff. I just don't
understand how he can get away with everything and I've been good all my life and I wind up getting mashed by a truck. Why? Where is the justice in that?” And Jesus puts His arm around her and says, “You're in heaven. Enjoy yourself.” And she says, “I just want to know why he gets everything his way and there I am crushed under a truck full of tin cans and coffee grounds and potato peelings. It's not right!” And she stamps her foot, and suddenly she isn't in heaven anymore. She's in a waiting room. No windows, no magazines. People in the next room sobbing. It's hell. No lake of fire but every ten years a hoofy man with red feathers comes out and says, “It'll be just a few more minutes.” It was a blasphemous story, as she pointed out to him when she found it, and she told him he had turned away from God and would never find his way back, and fifty years later he was still thinking that maybe she was right.

It was nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning and he was an hour late for breakfast at his mother's house and still he sat as the time drifted away. And then in came Carl and Margie and took off their coats and went back and sat in a booth by the window. She wore a nice long black coat, like a heroine in a Tolstoy novel, and he wore his old gray car coat. They sat across the table from each other and she looked into his face and he gazed out the window. Why doesn't he turn toward her and take her hand and kiss it?

He's in love with her. You can see it in his face. He has the stupid look of a man in love. Women in love look beatific as if Botticelli had painted them. Men in love look as if someone clubbed them with a baseball bat. He's in love but he should talk to her and tell her that we do have the power to remake our days into gardens of delight, and though we were raised to believe
in adversity, now we're older and we don't have to think that anymore.

So you're ambivalent. So is everyone else. Is it a bad thing? Yes and no. We all contain contradictory feelings. But touch her arm and feel the little hairs tremble as your skin brushes against them. The goodness of life is all around you, even in April when the snow is slow to melt.

And now, rising from the stool, he tries to catch Margie's eye to say,
Hi, it's me. Remember? You introduced me at Thanatopsis.
We went to Rome
. But she is gazing at her husband the carpenter. He made love to her last night so tenderly. A miracle of the ordinary kind. Nature leads us in that direction even after it no longer has use for our sperm; for there is still the urge to make life beautiful. So that is why they don't speak, because there is nothing more to be said. And Mr. Keillor now realizes that he has left his billfold, his car keys, his cell phone, and his cash in some other pocket than any in these jeans or this coat. They are gone. He has no memory of having seen them lately. He checks again and again. Nothing. Darlene watches from inside the servers' window in the kitchen. He must now ask Darlene to put it on his account and then hike up the hill to Mother's and try to figure it out from there, how he'll get back to St. Paul before three o'clock when he is supposed to do something, he can't remember what.