Pontoon (13 page)

“What kind?” asked Kyle.

“Peanut butter and bananas and mayonnaise.”

“You got that out of a book,” said Kyle.

“You don’t have to believe me,” said Larry. “Most people don’t. I don’t care. It used to matter to me but it doesn’t anymore. Elvis said people wouldn’t believe me and he was absolutely right. He told me what to do with my life. He said to me, ‘I want you to jump out of airplanes and sing.’ He was standing as close to me as I am to you right now. He knew about Patrick and he knew it wasn’t my fault. He knew the name of the trucker and he knew about George Bush and he said, ‘It doesn’t matter, none of it. Evil is riding high but God is moving on the waters.’ He sang me a song to prove it was him and he gave me a Dr. Pepper. I’ve been drinking that ever since.” Larry took a long swig of Dr. Pepper. “That sure restores a person. Bless your heart, I want to sing at your grandma’s funeral. I’ll do it for free. I can sing ‘Moon River’ for you.”

Kyle said he didn’t know if that was a good idea or not.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Larry. “It’ll be my pleasure.”

Larry sang a few lines of “Moon River” and actually he was good. He didn’t make you forget Tony Bennett but he could carry a tune.

“What line of work you in?” he asked.

“I’m in school. Sophomore. Going to be a junior in the fall.”

Larry said that he had always regretted his lack of education but there was not much to be done about it now. He was bringing joy to people and that was all that one man could do.

B
rent flew the red-eye from L.A. to Minneapolis-St. Paul on Tuesday arriving at dawn and caught a limo service to St. Cloud where Debbie was supposed to meet him at the bus depot but she took the wrong road, and headed north instead of south and was almost an hour late. He was pacing outside in his navy blue linen suit and sandals, trying to get his cell phone to work. He had dropped it in the urinal in the bus depot and taken off his shoe to fish it out with but it was badly pee-soaked and meanwhile a V.I.P. was calling so Brent picked it up in a hanky which muffled his voice so the man couldn’t understand him and hung up and in all the turmoil Brent had lost his dark glasses. He threw his suitcase into the back of the van and got in the passenger side and looked straight ahead, livid. “I am really pissed,” he said, in case she didn’t notice.

“In more ways than one,” she said, and knew right away it was the wrong thing to say at that moment. “I am so sorry. You’re angry and you have a right to be. I’m so stupid when it comes to directions.”

He said he was not angry at her, he was angry at himself for
being here. “I do not want to be here, believe me.” They stopped to get him a bottle of gin and the liquor store didn’t have his brand, Bombay. He said to skip it. In Bowlus, he changed his mind. He wanted gin. So they stopped at the liquor store there which only carried a no-frills gin called Calcutta, made in Toronto. Eight bucks a quart. “Cheaper than antifreeze,” said the clerk. He bought it, and vermouth, and three bottles of Pinot Noir. Clearly he was settling in for a siege.

“My parents don’t drink much,” she said. He said he had assumed as much.

“My dad has diabetes. We just found out. They’re as sweet as can be. I hope you like them.” That last sentence buzzed in the air. A fatal wish. She knew it the moment she said it. He would loathe them and they would try so hard and be desperately polite and he would loathe them all the more for trying. Brent could be rude when he wanted. And sometimes without knowing it. He was in a cutthroat line of work, shared-time luxury jets were the new thing. Competition was ferocious. The Russians were getting into the market, MiG-15s had been converted to passenger jets, they’d fly you cross-country in seventy minutes. Brent had come a long way from Berkeley and Sartre. He was a Republican now, or as he put it, “a nihilist in golf pants.” He made fun of the Sacred Spirit people mercilessly and God knows they were an easy target with their dinging and whanging and milling, their simple theology—children, trees, music, good; war, injustice, pollution, bad—but she loved them and they made her feel whole. They were nontoxic. How many people can you say that about?

He was slumped in the front seat, dozing, as the car came over the rise and there were the grain silos like an ancient temple and
the lake and then the highway dipped into the town, and she slowed to twenty and he woke up.

“Where are we now?”

“We’re in Lake Wobegon, Brent. This is where I’m from.”

He looked and said nothing. They cruised slowly along Main Street, past the Mercantile and the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, all the highlights of her bicycle years. There on the corner was the old phone booth. She wanted to tell him about it. Some old mayor had insisted on the town buying one. (What sort of town had no phone booth?) So in it went and nobody ever used it. Why would you? Especially after drunks started using it as a toilet. But one day Clarence Bunsen was passing by and the phone rang. An odd high-pitched ring. He had never heard it ring before. He picked it up and a man asked for Maureen. “She’s not here,” said Clarence. “When is she expected?” He said he didn’t know. “Oh,” said the man and hung up, disappointed. So it became a saying. Whenever people complained, you might say, “Tell it to Maureen.”

This used to strike her as funny, but now that she thought about telling it to Brent it seemed dopy. So she didn’t. She drove down to the lake and parked under a red oak tree and snuggled up next to him. “We’re going to be married out there,” she said.

“But by your friend, right? So it’s not exactly a wedding.”

“To me it’s like a wedding. What’s the difference?”

“You and I agreed that we didn’t need some big legal whoop-de-do. This is our commitment to each other, right? It’s just between you and me.”

So he was already planning to leave her. Oh God. How stupid she was. The man had played along with the thing, consented to
be here and say his lines and act the part, and now he was making it clear that it was nonbinding. He was thinking beyond Saturday, wondering who the next babe might be.

“But you would marry me if it came down to that, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean, ‘if it came down to that’?”

“If I asked you to.”

He looked out to the lake and he brushed his hair back and finally he said, “We don’t have that sort of proprietary relationship.”

“But we’re going to be true to each other, aren’t we?”

“Of course.” He said this in an odd tone of voice, the clink of a counterfeit coin on the counter. “Let’s head for home, okay? It’s been a day to remember. We’re starting a new print ad campaign.” He pulled a paper from his pocket and read: “The aura of authority is an indispensible element of leadership, and nothing says
authority
like a private jet waiting for you at the airport—to go where you want to go, when you’re ready.” He put the paper away. “This is going to be big, I tell you. Let’s go. I need a drink.”

She backed the car up and drove around behind Ralph’s and onto Main Street and up the hill toward her parents’ house and she thought,
This is never going to work. How did you get yourself
into this mess? You don’t need this. Cut this bozo loose
. And then she thought,
Maybe he just needs a good night’s sleep. Everybody has a
bad day now and then. Give him a chance
.

W
ednesday was Barbara’s third day of recovery and it was rough. Monday and Tuesday were easy; she remembered how bad she used to feel, brain-dead, nauseated, guilt-ridden, dizzy. But Wednesday morning she woke up feeling pretty good and thinking about crème de cacao. She skipped coffee because of the liquorish associations and made green tea which is supposed to help counter alcoholic urges, according to something she read online.

It’s a new life
, she told herself.
You’re doing great. Keep at it
.

She would be sober. She would exercise every day. She would go on a detoxifying diet she had read about that incorporated nutrients found in honey and locusts. She would sell her house and leave town and start Part Two somewhere else, maybe near an ocean, in a sun-swept town on a hillside, in a house with a walled garden covered with vines, on a red-brick patio under a banyan tree. She had it all clear in her mind. And either Oliver would get with the program and marry her or he would be history.

He had never set foot in her house. She had been in his house once and he was so embarrassed by the mess, the boxes of sugar wafers, a case of Spam, piles of soda-pop cans, twelve packs, empty
burger bags, pizza boxes, chaos in the kitchen, that he turned around and drove her to the Romeo Motel and that had been their meeting place ever since. He’d call or e-mail her and say “What you up to tonight?” She’d play along. “Not much. You?” He wasn’t up to much either. Just sitting and thinking. “About what?” Things. And then he’d say it. “Sure would be nice to see you.” And she’d go, or she wouldn’t go, and it was always the Romeo, room 135, in back. He could pull up in his old Caddy and walk ten steps to the door and be in the room. He’d pay over the phone and have the clerk leave the door unlocked. Oliver liked dim light and anonymity. He was not ready to stand beside her in the light of day and hold hands and be her boyfriend. She was but he wasn’t.

“Come to my house. I want to fix you dinner,” she said, and he shook his head. “I don’t want you to go to the trouble.” Lie, lie. He didn’t want her watching him eat. Period. She had seen him once coming out of McDonald’s with a box in his hands. It was big enough to hold dinners for six. One could only guess at the contents and shudder.

She needed some distraction from the urge to fix a drink. She had discovered a miniature bottle of brandy in the cupboard, left over from Christmas. It was there, next to the brown sugar and the cinnamon sticks.
Get out a glass, fill it with ice, have a drink. What’s the
big problem? Why make such a big deal over it?
And then a girl named Sarah called, asking for Kyle. Barbara went into her hostess mode—“I’m expecting him soon,” she said. “How are you doing? He’s told me so much about you.” Lie, lie, lie. She said, “I’m worried about him. I think he has dropped out of school and quit his job and he left me an odd note—” Oh? “I think he’s having a kickback or something.” A kickback? “It’s when you react to one crisis by creating
another one.” Oh. Interesting term. Are you in psychology? “No, but I’m in elementary ed. Special ed, actually.” The girl paused for a deep soulful breath. Barbara could sense something coming, like a drop of water forms on the lip of a faucet and balloons—“I don’t know if I should tell you this or not,” the girl said. “I mean—”
Tell, girly girl
, Barbara thought.
Tell everything, open up the hatches, baby-
cakes, and drop the whole load of beans on the pavement. We’re big
people here. Mother died Friday night. No time to waste. Let’s hear it
—“I found a page Kyle wrote for a journal or something, I don’t know—it was in the garbage, he tore it in pieces and stuck it inside a milk carton—but anyway, I read it and he is all confused. Stuff about currents and searching and a lot about journeys. A
lot
of journey stuff. I think he’s been drinking, and I know for a fact he’s been smoking dope. I just thought you should know. Also I found some e-mails he sent to a gay website about how do you know if you’re gay or not? I think he’s worried about that. But he’s not. I mean, I know he’s not.”
Okay. Good to know, I guess. Say no more
.

“But he had sex with this other girl, somebody he met online.” Her voice quavered. “He was trying to prove something to himself. Honestly, I never met anybody with so many problems, and of course he blames it all on me for interrupting him. Why does he hate me? I’ve never been treated this bad by anybody before. I love him. He’s the only boy I ever loved.” She started to cry and hung up.

Barbara had never spoken to Kyle about sex. There was a unit on sex education in seventh grade, and she remembered him bringing home a pamphlet with diagrams of genitalia and underneath it, it said: If there are questions about sex that trouble you, ask your parents or your minister. The idea of him asking her about sex scared her then and horrified her now. Or, worse, asking Pastor Ingqvist. Mother gave Barbara a book once,
Everything A Girl Should 
Know
, that basically said, “When you bleed, stuff this in there. Don’t worry about a thing. Someday you will be very very happy, and meanwhile, don’t think about it.” And that was it. Subject closed. Parents are beautiful ignorant people and a child is a miracle, and they have no idea where it comes from, only that it completes their life in a wonderful way. That’s all parents know about sex. Lloyd was putting his hand down there and getting all breathy and urgent, and before she knew what was happening, she was holding Muffy in her arms and Mother was beaming and Daddy was happy and she felt like she’d been torn apart and stuck back together.

She worked the crossword puzzle and moved the sprinkler to water the flower beds. She put out fresh seeds for the finches and oriole and the bluebird who had taken up residence nearby. The sun was blazing and the grass hurt her bare feet and the neighbor’s radio irritated her, that awful chuck-wacka music.
I have got
to go on all day like this and nothing is going to get better
. She called Oliver and his cell phone was turned off. Probably a supervisor was hovering so he couldn’t take nonbusiness calls.

What a prince that fat man was! Her cousin Joanne said, “Barbara, you ought to find yourself a nice guy!” And Barbara wanted to tell her, “I got one and you don’t know it, so ha ha ha! Got a better one than you do, that’s for sure.” Joanne’s husband Allen had a laugh like a dog bark. Imagine putting up with that woofer for twenty-five years. He was completely unselfconscious. You’d be talking to him and he’d reach into his mouth and pick a popcorn husk out of a back molar, or stick a finger in his ear and clean out some wax and examine it and roll it into a ball, and then reach around back and do some proctology. Allen was a college graduate. Big deal. He snored so loud he knocked the alarm clock off the bedside table so she sent him to a sleep clinic and he was sent home because he woke up
other patients. Oliver was a high-school dropout and he didn’t run off at the mouth like Allen did about the president and climate change and all, but he had his own wisdom. Still waters run deep. Mrs. Chatterley’s lover was a gardener and he was no intellectual but he sure mowed her lawn. And Oliver made her feel glamorous which she never had been, not for a day in her life.

She called Oliver again and he picked up this time. “Just wishing you were here,” she said. “Kind of a hard day. I’m okay. Just feeling sad. I miss my mom. Why don’t you come over? I’ll fix supper.”

She could hear wheels turning in his brain. “I told a friend I’d help him move some stuff,” he said. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

“I think I may sell my house and move away,” she said. “Start a new life. What do you say?”

There was a brief vast silence.

“Sounds like you made up your mind,” he said. “Excuse me,” and he put the phone down and talked to somebody about windshield washer fluid.

You’ll never find a better lover than me, fat man. I can cook your
chicken, baby, just how you like it. I can clean up your mess and never
give you a hard time about it. And I can lay you down on that big bed
—

“I gotta go sell somebody some motor oil,” he said.

She didn’t want to make a big announcement about not drinking. Better to wait until people start to notice.
Hey, Barbara, I notice
you’re off the sauce, huh? How long has that been going on?
Six months.
Really?
Really.
So how’s that?
Not bad.
How come you decided not to
drink?
I just decided, that’s all. I drank my share. Time to stop.

Oh, my, how she wanted a drink. A glass full of ice and brandy—that’s what she drank when she and Lloyd were going dancing at roadhouses and making out in the parking lots. And then she
graduated to screwdrivers, an occasional Manhattan, and then, during the Ronnie period, she drank beer and boilermakers. She moved on to an affair with a Catholic priest who taught her to appreciate martinis. Met him at a peace rally in St. Cloud. She went with Arlene Bunsen. In front of the courthouse. A couple hundred people waving signs, why more $$$$? and
WAR IS POISON
, and this very cultivated gentleman struck up a conversation with her about Irish literature and James Joyce and what did she know about James Joyce? Nothing at all. But he was a beautiful talker and made her feel smart and when he asked her to join him for a drink, No did not seem an option. It was wrong, wrong, wrong, and she went and did it. Lied to Arlene. (“I met a friend and she’ll give me a ride.”) And went and had a martini at the St. Cloud Hotel. He said, “Life is a feast and most people are starving.” He said, “James Joyce would have loved looking at you. You would’ve been a majestic presence to him. He would’ve sat over there and stared at you for hours and gone and invented a character who looked like you, and you know? You are more interesting than the one he would have invented.” What a fine compliment! Nobody had ever referred to her as majestic before, or said she could make a man yearn for ruin, which Father had said to her in the elevator. What did that mean? He said she was an angel, she was wholesome and good and good people deserve to have sex too.
How did I get here?
she wondered afterward, in the shower, listening to him piss three feet away.
And what would Mother
think? In bed with a Catholic priest, naked, his whiskers against her
cheek, murmuring poetry in her ear. “Since feeling is first, who pays any
attention to the syntax of things will never holy kiss you,” he said and he
kissed her
—so that was what martinis held in store. And two months later she was pregnant with Kyle. The father was Father. He was off in New York, the head of something, a monsignor, and there was no
reason to bother him about this. And what a lovely gift to get from a martini.

And then there was single malt Scotch. Donnie Krebsbach. He was standing beside a lovely red hatchback the day she strolled into Krebsbach Chev. Donnie, an old basketball star gone to pot but still a charmer. She almost bought that car from him though she’s Lutheran and Lutherans drive Fords because the Krebsbachs are Catholic and so the money you spend there goes in part to pay for diamonds for the Pope’s shoelaces but she was tempted because the car was red and it was a Caprice. And because Donnie was selling it. She thought maybe it was time she had a Caprice. “It’s a good car,” he told her. “And we could come down on that price a little.” He stood next to her and opened the door. She could smell the leather and also Donnie’s cologne, a dark musky smell. He put his hand on her shoulder. “She’s a real good handler,” he said. “You want to get in?” He jingled the keys. So she did. They drove all the way to St. Cloud and parked the car outside the Best Western and went in. He was married, Catholic, and a lousy lover. No foreplay and he was inside her for sixty seconds and afterward he rolled over and turned on the TV. The Golf Channel. He was fascinated. Evidently he’d never seen golf on television before. He said, “Boy, look at those greens.” The man had been intimate with her minutes before and now he was engrossed by Tiger Woods chipping out of a sand trap, sending a plume of sand in the air. “Wow,” said Donnie. He bought her a single malt Scotch afterward. It tasted like paint remover. She didn’t buy the Caprice.

Lots of liquors left, rum and bourbon and vodka, so who knew what mysterious gentlemen awaited her?

But not yet.

Not now, thank you, Lord.

A person cannot coast along in old destructive habits year after year and accept whatever comes along. A person must stand up on her own two legs and walk. Get off one bus and go get on another. Climb out of the ditch and cross the road. Find the road that’s going where you want to go.

Damn, it was hard not to pour that brandy into a glass of ice right now.

But she owed this to her boy. The only sermon that counts is the one that is formed of our actions. She would quit drinking and thereby show Kyle:
life is what you make it
. A person can grab hold of her life and change things for the better.
This happens all the time
. We are not chips of wood drifting down the stream of time.
We have oars
.