Pontoon (16 page)

The motorcycle went blasting past the Chatterbox Café at sixty miles an hour and the windows shook and people looked over at LeRoy in his constable jacket and badge and he said, “Long as he is headed
out
of town he is okay. I am not going to chase him down and bring him back.”

“Probably a friend of Debbie’s going for more champagne,” said Darlene.

Myrtle said she’d like to know how much that champagne cost that was sitting in the Detmer’s garage. Donnie saw them unloading it. Ten cases of it. French. “Don’t tell me they got that wholesale.” And somebody said there was a hundred pounds of cheese, also French. “Who is going to eat all that? I wasn’t invited, I know that. Are they flying people in from California or what?”

“Well, I’ll bet you ten dollars they aren’t going to get married at all,” said Dorothy.

She had just emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, her hair pasted to her forehead, two silver bracelets on each forearm with crystals in them which are supposed to help her lose weight.

“My sister heard them last night and they were snapping at
each other and he referred to her as a bitch and he was walking away and she was running after him and hissing at him, something about his whole attitude making her sick.”

“Sounds like they already are married,” said LeRoy, ever the comedian. “Maybe they are only renewing their wedding vows before they expire.”

“She threw the car keys at him and hit him in the head, and it was a hard throw. She told him the whole thing was a big mistake and they might as well stop right now. He was on his cell phone. He found a place next to the Unknown Norwegian where he got a pretty good signal and he was all excited and she was telling him he was the great mistake of her life.”

They all sat stunned. LeRoy said, “Sounds like she read our thoughts.”

But oh boy. Those poor Detmers. Ten cases of French champagne in the garage and Mr. Detmer had gotten himself a white linen suit for the occasion and now this.

“Better to find out now that you don’t like each other than figure it out over a lifetime,” said Myrtle, looking at Florian who was digging into a slab of apple pie.

Barbara was out for a walk and passing the Lutheran church and saw all the cars in the parking lot and remembered the memorial service and put her head down and almost sprinted to the end of the block and around the corner. She did not want to be spotted. She thought of stopping at the Chatterbox for coffee and a cinnamon roll but what if some busybody said, “How come you’re not at your mother’s memorial service up to the church? Didn’t you know that was today? In fact I believe it’s starting right now.” So she started across Main Street and a blue Ford van came
straight at her—it was turning onto Main Street and it swerved toward her as if intent on killing her and she shrank back and the van slammed on the brakes and she saw the assassin—a pair of sunglasses talking on a cell phone, one hand on the wheel—a screech of rubber and the van stopped and she put out her hand and touched it and he yelled, “Okay! I didn’t see her! Okay?” and then he said to the cell phone, “It’s okay. Never mind.” And then he looked at Barbara and said “Sorry” and backed up and drove away. He was yelling, “Oh so I suppose you never made a mistake in your life!” as he drove past. Barbara saw the license plate but didn’t think to remember it. She stood, stunned, frozen. The guy never got out of the van. He came within an inch of killing her. Or maybe putting her in an electric wheelchair that she’d steer with a stick held between her teeth and people’d see her go by and think
There but for the grace of God
and the sonovabitch never turned off the engine or got out, just muttered “Sorry” and off he went. Just like a lot of people nowadays. Barbarians. Their sense of ethics depends on who they think is watching at the time.

Thank you, Jesus
. Somebody said it out loud. It was her. She said it.
Thank you that I still can walk and climb the stairs and take my
own self to the bathroom
.

She did not feel up to crossing the street now, so she turned around. Her legs felt like wooden posts but she swung them, left, right, left, took three steps and got up onto the sidewalk and put out her hand and braced herself against the lightpole. Her legs were shaking. She thought she might faint, so she sat down on the pedestal of the lightpole, a narrow ledge, and then she slid down onto the sidewalk, her knees up in the air, her skirt up around her thighs, her hands on the ground. “How you doin’?” It was Mr. Hoppe, sitting tranquil as a fencepost on the bench in
front of Ralph’s Grocery. He gave off a strong fragrance suggesting he had passed away several days ago. “It’s me,” he said. “I was a friend of your father’s.” She held up a hand:
Peace. Thank
you
,
Jesus
. For not making me a quadraplegic. For not making Kyle have to bury me
and
Mother in the same week. For not leaving Kyle motherless and rudderless in the world. For letting me go on as before, except now with a grateful heart.

And it dawned on her that if she had been struck by the van, people would’ve said
Oh how horrible
but they would’ve thought
Well, it was Barbara and you just have to wonder if she wasn’t
drunk
.

And then it dawned on her who the assassin was. Debbie Detmer’s fiancé from California. The bridegroom.

D
ebbie Detmer was fine. She was just fine. In fact she had never felt better. She had broken up with Brent and that was that. Done. She had seen the light. It wasn’t a sudden thing. It was a number of little things. Brent was simply not ready to make a life with a bowl of goldfish, let alone someone with the power of speech. Such stupidity and selfishness she had never witnessed before, it was almost incomprehensible. He told her last night: “I came here even though I didn’t want to come. I want you to know that. This is your show, not mine.” He accused her of being angry and controlling. This man who treated her mother and father like unwashed peasants and refused to engage them in conversation had accused
her
of anger. He said, “The whole past two weeks when I was on the road, I felt so good and then I come here and it’s like the door has slammed shut on my life and suddenly I am like a character in a movie or something and it’s not my movie!”

“
Movie?!”
she said.
“Show?! This isn’t make-believe. It’s marriage.”

“You keep saying that! Why don’t you marry yourself?”

She thought he was just acting out but he wasn’t. They got in the van to go find a bottle of red wine for dinner and he almost
ran over a lady in the crosswalk. He was on the phone with his office and ratcheting at them and in his anger he cranks the wheel and comes within six inches of pasting a lady to a lamp pole and then instead of apologizing to her, he yells at Debbie for warning him that the woman was there!!!

He yelled at Debbie for yelling at him that he was about to kill somebody.

So she told him he was an asshole and to get out of town and the sooner the better.

“Whatever,” he said.

She told her parents the wedding was off, as she tried to reach her travel agent and get herself on a plane back to California and call Misty and Georges and Patrick and wave them off though it was too late to cancel the giant shrimp shish kebabs, which had arrived that morning and were resting comfortably in the freezer at the high school, courtesy of Mrs. Halvorson, the superintendent’s wife, a friend of Mrs. Detmer.

Mr. Detmer kept asking where Brent was. “Gone home,” said the Mrs.

“Good,” he said.

“Good riddance,” said Debbie.

Oh, she had seen this coming for six months and she had denied it and denied it and denied it, trying to make things work out, and then today the man had left for good, having barely avoided a manslaughter charge, and she couldn’t be happier. Except she wished she could call the lady they’d almost killed. A tall dark-haired lady in her fifties or early sixties, dangly earrings, maroon University of Minnesota T-shirt, shorts, sandals, knobby knees.

“No idea,” said Mrs. Detmer.

Debbie fixed them a meat loaf en croûte, meat loaf encased in a light pastry crust, and sautéed green beans. She was happy. She had cut herself loose from the Misery Express and told the engineer to take a hike, which she should’ve told him back around Christmas. He’d been waiting for her to cut him loose and now she had. It was all clear in her mind. She had succumbed to an illusion. Craving a happy domestic life, she had invented Brent as Mr. Husband and coaxed him along and prompted him, giving him easy tests, watching him, and then came the big test—Lake Wobegon—and the boy failed miserably. Because he was a jerk.

She had an appointment to teach aromatherapy at the veterinary school in Davis as an adjunct professor—she’d sell the house in Santa Cruz and buy a little farm and raise llamas and teach. She had come to a seam in her life and once she had crossed over it, she would move forward, no regrets. She was centered, she was directed, she was intact.

“I first knew it yesterday when we were talking about what to read at the ceremony and he insisted on reading this long poem by a friend of his called ‘Diptych of Desire’ so I said okay, I’ll read Whitman. So he says he hates Whitman. As if I am supposed to know that. ‘I celebrate myself and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’—What is the problem there? It means nothing, he says. It’s just a lot of gas. Okay, I said, fine, no Whitman. It’ll be Whitman-free. How about the Song of Solomon? ‘Come away, my love, for lo the winter is past, the rains are over and gone.’ And so forth. He says, ‘What about “Your neck is like a tower of David and your breasts like two small rabbits”?’ I said I didn’t think it was appropriate. We didn’t have to get into breasts. We could do ‘Comfort me with apples’ or one of those. Why breasts?
He says, ‘Why do you have to be in charge of everything all the time? Down to the last detail. You can’t give an inch. We’re always fighting over the smallest things.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You read anything you want. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.’ ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘I’ve been down that old passive-aggressive road with you before. I read about breasts and you’ll be very cool and distant for the next six months.’ I said, ‘Go ahead. Read it. It’s not important to me.’

“‘No no no,’ he says.

“So then we haggle about the music. More of the same. He wants this, he doesn’t want that. Okay, okay. I’m trying to go along with him. And then he says, ‘You’re not really going to have that creep come down in the hot-air balloon, are you?’ ‘What creep?’ I say. ‘You mean my old friend Craig?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘your ex-boyfriend.’ I said, ‘Sure, that’s the plan, you knew that.’ He says, ‘I never knew that.’ ‘Yes, you did,’ I say. He says, ‘Couldn’t you have found
somebody
to pilot a hot-air balloon whom you have
not been intimate with
?’ I said to him, ‘Brent, I am not going to start a life with you in an atmosphere of jealousy and distrust.’ And he says, ‘Okay, then don’t.’ I said, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ He says, ‘I came here even though I didn’t want to. I came here for you. It’s not for me, that’s for sure. I want you to know that.’ And I said, ‘Baby, you are out of here. Right now.’ So he is out of here.”

“Maybe you only need some time apart,” said Mother. Hopefulness was her style.

“We need a lot of time apart. Like thirty years for starters. Maybe more.” Brent was high-maintenance and she had known it, she just hadn’t known the extent. He was so completely wrapped in luxury-jet time-shares. His head was full of it, the
break-even point of X number seat/hours, the turnaround sublets, the overage fees, and talking to him was like interrupting a man playing chess. Brent was business and he had no time for life. He was fine as long as he was on the phone, moving and shaking, but you put him in an alien environment—Lake Wobegon—where people live at a stately pace, and his sneering, bullying side came out. He was in love with her only in certain locations under favorable circumstances. A temporary regional romance.

“Well,” said Mother, “whatever you want, dear, we’re certainly in support of. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

Debbie didn’t mention what she had said to Brent as he packed his bag. She stood in the guest room door and said, “You are so
putrid
.” It was a word she liked to use in high school. It just came winging out of the past: putrid. He turned, stunned, and said, “What?”

“You’re not a person, you’re a pathology,” she said. It felt good after all of the humming and harmonic converging, to haul off and sock the guy.

“If I’m so bad, then why did you almost marry me?” he said.

There wasn’t a good answer for that so she reached for the antique china pitcher on the bureau and as he cringed and ducked, she flung it at him and it shattered on the side of his head. He dropped to his knees and clapped his hand to his temple where he was bleeding. Slightly. But he groaned and made the most of it. She seized his bag, an expensive soft brown English leather thing, and walked to the open window and pitched it out the window unzipped and his shirts and underwear flew out and fluttered down on the Larsons’ yard next door. Mrs. Larson knelt at her flower bed, as if praying for her geraniums. She jumped when the
bag hit the ground and glanced over her shoulder and then resumed work.

“Why did you do that?” he said. He was sitting on the floor, nursing his head.

“Just wanted to make the day a little more real for you, so you’d remember it, shithead.”

“Where does all of this anger come from? Explain that to me!”

She thought about it as he trotted over next door and recovered his undies. Mrs. Larson did not look up from the flowers as he collected his clothes. He stuffed them in the bag and headed downtown, forgetting his cell phone on the night table. Debbie threw it in the garbage where, a few minutes later, it rang a few times, weakly.

She pondered the question further that afternoon, and then the answer came to her: he had been unkind to her mother and father, her family, her people. He had asked if her father had always been “that way”—and he said, “If your mother asks me one more time if there’s anything she can get me, I am going to scream.” He was sneering and supercilious toward them and their home, their books, their art, the food they ate, their conversation—he accepted their hospitality and he laughed at them behind their backs—that was the reason for all of the anger.
You
don’t look down on people who are good to you. Maybe you can love
your enemies, maybe not, but for sure you can be decent to your hosts,
you prick
.

And then she recalled her own cruelty at age 17. And also 16 and 15. And 18 through, oh, 31 or so. It was dizzying. She had to lie down on her bed. The white chenille bedspread of her youth. The yellow sheets with the flowery borders. The maple desk that
Carl Krebsbach had made for her 14th birthday. The old bureau that had been Grandma Berg’s. The old photos of the Beatles and Leonard Cohen and Anne Frank and Juliet Greco and Jacques Brel.

Someday she might come back here, when she was done with California, and move into this house and live out her days. She could be an old lady here and little kids would visit and she’d give them cookies and tell them stories about when she was very bad. Once upon a time there was a young woman named Debbie and she ran away from home because she was afraid of being normal. That was the worst thing she could imagine. So she hurried out to California and lost her virginity as soon as she could, to an older man who was very sad about something, and then she learned to be a freak, making it up as she went along, and then she held cats and dogs on her lap as they breathed in healing smells. Oh, and she also used a lot of cocaine at one point, children. And she ate some mushrooms that gave her dramatic visions of ocean waves and rainbows rising from peninsulas and gargoyles falling out of trees. She was original and creative and vibrant and independent and praised by one and all and then one day she suddenly got very sick of herself and had to get away and she came back here. It’s peaceful here. You don’t have to be wonderful here. You can just be who you are.