Driving on the Rim (9 page)

Early college days were really a delight for me, my first chance at disappearing into a crowd. In so many places I had grown up, especially in the rug-shampoo years, when we were pretty much transients, ignorance was its own reward and standing out in school was a sure way to
get beaten up. But I’d heard John Wayne say, “Life is tough. Life is tougher if you’re stupid.” And I took the Duke’s words seriously, trying to be smart, haunting bookmobiles and the mildewed Carnegie libraries of the American West.

My clothing came principally from the Salvation Army store in town, no hardship implied: with a bit of imagination a person could dress well there and with great originality. I bought numerous Hawaiian shirts discarded by servicemen, bowling shirts and shoes, porkpie hats, and so on. This gave me a reputation on the tiny campus of a real sophisticate, a hipster even, my retro mishmash more mysterious than comprehensible. My great find at the Sally was a Chinese robe that had been dropped off by the family of a deceased Presbyterian missionary. It was a glorious blue silk garment with macramé buttons and a thin lining of down. Drawing upon my new reputation and the delightfully sordid memories of my late aunt out there in Idaho, I wore this on my first college date. It was a warm evening in early fall and I stood at the entrance to the girls’ dormitory barefoot in nothing but the luxurious blue robe and a distinctive porkpie hat with a varnished pheasant feather in its band. The girl, Nancy Bellwood of Owosso, Michigan, was slow adjusting to my appearance and my anxiety-driven shower of non sequiturs, but as her friends gathered and approved enthusiastically of my festive getup, Nancy’s zeal soon followed. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves by the small and slow woodland river that bounded our campus; turtles adorned the low limbs of trees overhanging the water, dragonflies sparkled, birdsong poured from the forest. I rested against the trunk of a great beech whose canopy scattered the evening light. Nancy had all but vanished under the robe and, to prolong my enjoyment, I concentrated on the little fuzzy balls on the back of her tennis socks. “Caramba!” she cried through the robe, reminding me that she was a Spanish major. As soon as it was over, I began thinking again of my studies. I loved to study. It used to be that when people asked me what I was interested in I would say, “Electricity!” Now I told them, “Science!” Ooh, la la!

I admired the Hansons’ home. So many houses in these small towns of the old Midwest were handsome. The towns themselves were beautiful and had been more so, said the locals, before the elms that once shaded them died of blight. Compared to the towns of the West they
seemed remarkably wooded, sheltered really, and more contained than the sprawling towns I knew with only sagebrush to stop their spread. I saw photographs of this town before Dutch elm disease, and it looked like a huge green corsage set out in rolling farmland. The Hanson family had been in this house since 1841, and the attic held the Civil War uniforms of Hanson forebears, including the riddled one of a Hanson who died at Chickamauga, having served in a storied unit of Swedish immigrants. The spacious basement, now holding a stout coal-fired furnace, was said to have hidden escaped slaves. I particularly enjoyed the oak window seats with cushions fitted out into the bays that looked upon the small, well-tended backyard with its old roses and ancient black walnut tree. Here I sat with my schoolbooks, in my Chinese robe, entertaining unrealistic hopes for my future: my daydreaming, my fantasy life was still highly impractical.

The house was quite dark inside, enclosing, and had fireplaces in all the public rooms. A formal dining room opened onto an old utilitarian kitchen with a built-in gas range. The wood counters were worn to hollows, their edges held intact by steel bands and acorn-headed screws. It was a small space, and when I helped Shirley prepare meals there we rubbed against each other between stove and refrigerator with a steadily increasing frequency. The duration of these encounters was directly related to the complexity of the meals which were aimed at Karl Hanson’s enthusiastic palate; therefore we avoided the simple preparations and natural-food approaches advocated by Gloria Swanson, Hollywood vegetarian, resorting instead to complex glazes and various potted things, an elaborate cassoulet, and so forth. By the time Hanson complained of gout and a defiant waistband, Shirley and I were regularly dry-humping next to the counter that held the big chrome Mixmaster and Pyrex coffee machine.

In my second year, I started studying Spanish, abandoned the Chinese costume, and affected serapes. By now my reputation as a sort of Western hipster had vanished and I was viewed simply as a damn fool, a fool with snow falling on his serape four months a year and with mariachi 78s on an old brown record player.

I’d better note that my relationship with Shirley, while steamy, was inconclusive and passed as ironic household play—that is, on Shirley’s
part. I seemed all too caught up in it, my experience having been confined to the pleasure my aunt Silbie dished out, and dished out directly. This was different. I resolved that some sort of legitimate barrier based in the marriage vows of the Hansons was going to require me to finish the work myself after one of Shirley’s humpfests.

Between astronomy and civics, an unscheduled two hours found me either at the library or back at the Hansons’ for an afternoon snack, usually prepared by Shirley. Since these were such obvious opportunities for hanky-panky, we made a point of avoiding it, and the result was that my snacks were often beautifully prepared little meals that sent me back to class content, and reconciled to my lost opportunities. Because I was so unassertive at these times, I blamed myself for awaiting Shirley’s initiative and wondered what might have happened if I’d just had the nerve to reach out and touch her. The chance that she would scream, “Get your hands off me!” just as Hanson popped in filled me with terror.

Today she served me a lovely little wedge of homemade shepherd’s pie and a green salad with walnuts and olives. She asked me, “Are you taking any history courses?” She had a beautiful smile on her pretty face, her auburn hair piled atop her head with a few strands tumbling over her forehead.

“I had American history last term.”

“That’s my favorite.”

“American?”

“Mm. Especially the Civil War.”

“That was good,” I said.

“The Revolutionary War, well, you see those paintings, they don’t really resemble us. But the Civil War, they had photos.”

“It makes it so much closer to our own time,” I said, fishing. I knew that I had sort of missed the point, so I added a few details about the incomprehensibility of the Revolutionary War period, Washington’s wig, knee socks, wooden teeth, three-cornered hats, the whole nine yards. “Plus, they didn’t free the slaves.”

“We can’t even imagine what
that
must have been like. Try to picture Michael Jordan or Bill Cosby as
slaves.
”

“I can’t.”

“Imagine how uppity they’d be?”

“I know, I know.”

“So, let’s confine our thoughts to the Civil War.”

“Well, in American history,” I said, “we touched on lots more than that. The Teapot Dome Scandal and so on.”

“The difference is, the Civil War has such a hold on our imagination.”

“Amen to that.” I wasn’t trying to be an asshole; I just didn’t know how to follow this line of conversation. At the same time, I intuited a lot of passion behind Shirley’s enthusiasm for that war. I felt so lost that I finally asked her why we kept talking about this particular subject; that was about as bold as I got in those days. She gave me a hard look and said, “I just lay the rail. I don’t drive the train.”

Shirley got the idea that Audra had the hots for me. This was no accident. Audra, who treated me with such savagery on the second floor, grew girlish in my proximity on the first floor. She seemed to have the capacity to emit light dew from her skin and add starlight to her eyes at will. By fluttering around me in the presence of both Hansons she produced a double effect: Hanson began to treat me with a new formality that verged on a surprising coolness; Shirley, doing housework for appearances upon Hanson’s return, always straightened slightly when Audra entered the room, then turned with a wintry smile to greet the three of us without focusing on any one, a teacher welcoming a new class. In this atmosphere, Audra swam like a happy fish looking to Hanson’s every need. Upstairs, she told me to quit acting like a member of the family: I was just a boarder. “And a fairy.”

Hanson’s law firm, three men, was small but it enjoyed a statewide reputation. That it had never departed this modest town in the generations following its founding by Hanson’s great-grandfather gave it an old-fashioned dignity unshared by high-powered competition elsewhere. It was still a prestigious place to have one’s legal work done, and this reputation was reflected in the decorum of the partners, who dressed with nostalgic severity and always paused before answering questions. I don’t know how else to say this, but the longer Audra was in the house the more peculiar were Hanson’s observations of his partners: one came to be described as “slow” and the other, now near retirement, was astonishingly referred to as a “prize boob.” A far cry from the collegiality of old. These comments left Shirley wide-eyed, and their being
offered in Audra’s presence gave them an effect not experienced in this household before. Hanson had always seemed so somber, politely somber, though it’s true he was jollier these days, despite the new sarcasm, and his clothes brighter. His partners now looked grimly drab in his company. When Ton Yik Tailors came through that fall, Hanson ordered some high-spirited and entirely ghastly plaid sport clothes. Families—in this case households—are always evolving; on balance, ours was now more pleasant, that is, livelier. A pretty young woman always has this effect on groups, and Audra was very pretty. Anyone could see that she was slowly turning Karl Hanson into an idiot.

I came in from class wet from a spring snow flurry, my books damp and my worn-out shoes letting water into my socks. I went straight upstairs to change into something dry and warm. Audra was waiting for me in the hallway. She was leaning against the wall, her hands behind her at the small of her back and palms pressed to the wall; her chin was on her chest and she was regarding me with patronizing amusement. The single low-wattage lightbulb that frugally illuminated the hallway gave the scene an old-time Hollywood quality. “I have a small word with you?”

“Sure,” I said, simply hating my all-purpose enthusiasm.

“I’m thinking you show much fondness for Mrs. Hanson.”

“Yes,” I barked, “very fond. Very nice lady.”

“Ooh no, is not what I mean. Is what I mean is
fond.
”

“I don’t know about
that.
”

“Well, is not important. Is more important that Mrs. Hanson is
fond
of you.”

“Well, that would be nice.”

She snickered and I found it a bawdy snicker; curiously I noticed that I was morally indignant at this insinuation when I barely thought of anything besides sex with Mrs. Hanson, who exuded the ripe sensuality of early middle age. It proved another opportunity for Audra to one-up me: “I just hope the two of you don’t upset that nice man!” she cried, turning abruptly into her room and slamming the door. It worked: Karl Hanson
was
a fine man and I felt guilty.

As part of my obligations to the Hansons, I seemed to be something of a yard boy, for Shirley was a passionate but careless gardener. Before I
arrived at the Hanson house, she had made a terrific effort to renew the perennials around the place—and there were many little flower beds under windows, around airyways and trees, along the stone sidewalk and between the house and the garage, which had a trotting-horse weather vane. But she couldn’t quite remember where she put things, and so in springtime she was consumed with mystery and anticipation as she awaited the appearance of flowers.

“I really don’t like spring,” she said to me as I followed her with an armful of tools—a forked implement for digging out weeds, pruning shears in three sizes, and an empty watering can. “Spring isn’t about hope for the coming season. It’s about being sick of winter.”

“Can’t it be both?”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“See the dead ones? Can’t you tell by the bark? Those are the ones you lop off. Right close to the trunk. I already showed you this once.”

I had to keep one eye on her as I pruned because she changed her mind from task to task and I rarely had the chance to finish anything. My main job was keeping up as she strode around directing my efforts here and there while quite obviously drifting off in thought as I started each thing destined for incompletion. One bed I was supposed to spade up for annuals turned out to be full of crocus bulbs. She’s the one who forgot she’d put them there, but she blew up: “Christ! Couldn’t you stop digging when you saw the first one?”

“I didn’t know what it was.” I thought it was onions.

“What it was, was an annual bulb, for crying out loud!” But then she ran her hand over my buttocks while watching the street, so I felt I was forgiven. She said, “Baby, let’s go to Florida.”

T
HE
H
ANSONS ALWAYS ENJOYED A COCKTAIL
between Karl’s return from work, his face often heavy with fatigue, and supper. One end of the living room served as a small private bar of a kind that flourished before the age of the exaggerated “wet bar.” A leaded-glass cabinet held glasses, cocktail shakers with the patina of age, a cylindrical device into which CO
₂
cartridges were inserted for the making of one’s own carbonated water, a leather-bound ice bucket; then, on display, the “top brands” lined up with their somber labels to the fore. I would have a ginger ale on the rocks, while the Hansons tossed back highballs, invariably Crown Royal and soda. Audra, having long since made herself the bartender, lately cast melancholy glances at the three of us, once we had our drinks, before making an uncharacteristically mousy exit. This evening, when Karl came in trailing the smell of cold and snow, he joined us vigorously at the bar, clapping his hands together in a spirited effort at warming them, and directed Audra to make it a stiff one. I already had my ginger ale, resentfully proffered by Audra, Shirley her accustomed highball, and Audra now prepared Karl’s, filling the whiskey to the usual level, then teasingly drizzling some a bit before adding soda. Karl watched every drop with enthusiasm, then suddenly said, “Audra, it’s time you joined us for a drink.” I saw Shirley cut her eyes at him, but if he noticed he didn’t let on. Audra posed primly at the bar, indicating by the tiny space between her thumb and forefinger that a small amount of the libation was all that a little princess should want. To cover the silence, Shirley went on a bit about what a cold, snowy spring it was, and Karl, turning from the preparation of Audra’s drink, raised his glass to one and all and said, “We need the moisture.”