The English Major

  It’s strange how memories can arrive in swarms like bees. Memories are obviously one thing we have all to ourselves. Rebecca lost her cherry and got knocked up by the lout athlete through the well known trick of vodka and orange juice. I was so bereft I couldn’t bear human company. I ignored my studies for final exams that May and walked in the woods with our mongrel terrier Fred. By mid-June dad took me aside to explain the “facts of life.” He was irked because I didn’t even want to go fishing on Sunday morning. He said, “Don’t go after the prettiest girl. It’s like pissing in the wind. Besides, they make the decision and if it’s not you there’s nothing to do about it. By and large the prettiest girl in town is a curse on the life of the male she picks.”

  Suddenly Marybelle was behind me and I was looking at her with the eyes of a fifteen year old sophomore. Dad was wrong in that you can’t aim your desire like a rifle during deer season. Desire isn’t subject to logic. For instance Marybelle looked attractive in her short pale blue skirt until she said that her friend in Minneapolis was having “sexual issues” at which point she became a zombie and lunch was a better idea than the grandest fuck in the history of mankind. Ever present was the cultural fantasy that you could separate the fuck from the fuckers.

  I ate alone at the tavern on the outskirts of Casper. I promised to bring a sandwich to Marybelle who had had a sudden insight on her friend’s problems and was back on her pink phone with her bare toes doing pitty-pat on the windshield. I had one of the top five burgers in my life (unfrozen half-pound patty) and listened to cowboys, ranchers, and townspeople, many of whom were drinking their late lunch, talk about the current political situation. In the past couple of years I had learned to favor the raving opinions of drinkers over newspaper and television pundits. The drinkers could be nonsensical (“Halliburton is giving George Bush one billion dollars the day he finishes his second term”) but had the virtue of being fresher and more original than the pundits who always inferred they had sources unavailable to the rest of us even though their secret sources apparently had nothing new to say. The exception seemed to be the columns of Frank Rich and the late Molly Ivins that my son Robert faxed me through Vivian’s real estate office. My government reminded me of nothing so much as the fraternities’ way back when at Michigan State. The ninety-five percent of us that didn’t take part in “Greek life” were outside the pall. There was little or no communication between our two worlds.

  When I brought out Marybelle’s sandwich (peanut butter and strawberry jam) she was serenely happy. Her friend would meet us in Bozeman and drive back to Minnesota with Marybelle.

  “I think a road trip would do Marcia a world of good. I mean our trip has been really stimulating me. I mean I was just sitting there in Minnesota hitting the tranqs and brooding about my future and now, surprise, I’m in Casper.”

  I felt too good in the aftermath of my first rate burger to want to deal with big issues. I nodded to a herd of Angus out in a pasture in silent thanks that they taste so good.

  MONTANA II

  “These reading glasses have always made me think more deeply.”

  We were passing a Wyoming town with the peculiar name of Kaycee. Marybelle was sitting there in the gun seat having won our first serious argument at the end of which I had felt the deepest sympathy for her husband. Now she was posing as a stenographer with the glasses tilted down her nose as if they were bifocals. The upshot was that she insisted on helping me on my “creative project” of renaming birds and states. This pissed me off since the idea had long been a private little amusement for the boredom of tractor time, or the weeks of pruning cherry trees on cold and windy March days, I considered it as a piece of silliness I shared only with Lola who was quite interested in anything I said.

  “Wordsworth wrote alone,” I had said, perhaps the weakest straw I could grasp since I could remember almost nothing about Wordsworth except a visual image of him flouncing around the Lake Country.

  “You’re wrong there, kiddo. His sister Dorothy was right there beside him for every line he wrote.”

  “O bullshit,” I had said even though college was closer in time for Marybelle and she perhaps remembered things about Wordsworth that has slipped my mind. She then headed for the peripheries as Vivian always did during a quarrel. I had thought of this tactic as Indians circling a wagon train before dashing in to scalp the woeful pioneers who already were suffering from cholera. For instance, if Vivian wanted to go to a Saturday night polka party and she sensed that I didn’t she might begin by criticizing that I always wore the same thing to polka parties (a lightweight green Hawaiian shirt Robert had sent me from Maui). As Vivian grew larger she used a smaller voice, nearly the kind of baby talk used on puppies and human babies. It was hard on the nerves when the volume rose during quarrels.

  Marybelle’s attack was more sophisticated and intended to exhaust her prey before the kill. She suggested that I had given Lola the name Lola because of the scandalous novel by Nabokov called Lolita. I said no, the name came from that absurd song, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.” Anyone who taught school knows that seventh grade girls are the nastiest critters in the school yard and are well beyond romantic or erotic interest.

  She took another tack saying that I obviously needed therapy to “draw me out” from my solitary profession of farming. She herself had been in therapy for twenty years which enabled her to communicate with everyone except possibly her own daughter and husband. Marybelle then did an end run returning to Dorothy Wordsworth without whom the poet would have been nothing.

  “We haven’t exactly been brother and sister,” I contended.

  “Men always bring up sex when they’re at a loss. I call that dick thinking.”

  I was trapped in this whirl of the irrational. Sensing victory she took out her deep thinking glasses and a tiny notebook and an orange pen with a grinning clown head. My limited imagination went dead on birds and states. I remembered a morning in March when the northern world was icy slush and I had a stupid conversation with Babe, my waitress lover. We began arguing about snow depths and like most people she remembered a fictional past when the great north was suffocated in snow every winter. I used a line I remembered from my college Shakespeare’s class and said clumsily, “You have but a woman’s reason, you think it so because you think it so.” The diner fell silent and people stopped eating their health giving biscuits with sausage gravy. I sensed that my smart mouth had gotten me into deep shit. To get out of this jam I had to buy Babe an IPod so she could listen to country music on her morning walks. Without this gift there would be no sex, an act she called “making the two-backed beast,” also from Shakespeare without her knowing it.

  All of these dark thoughts had affected the splendid landscape between Casper and Buffalo which I dully recorded as if my glum mood had repainted the green hills and snowcapped Big Horn Mountains. We drank too much before dinner, had bad steaks and limp lettuce and in desperation tried to make love. When I stood in the toilet applying the steroid ointment and slipping on three condoms it stole my spontaneity. My weenie lost its pride and shrunk. I left the motel room and bought a pack of Lucky Strikes, a habit I had quit a decade before. I had two more bourbons in a bar and reflected on the brittle silliness of life.

  Dawn came bright and clear and cold, the first break in a week of heat. Marybelle missed the Montana border in what was doubtless a sleeping pill trance, curled up in my lined denim coat. Montana was “the treasure state,” with the western meadowlark the bird, “oro y plata” (gold and silver) the motto, and the bitterroot the flower.

  I now regretted that I hadn’t given Marybelle a single imaginary bird or state name. I had stonewalled when I should have made a joke out of it. I had ruminated like an old cow. Now she looked like a bleak Dickens tyke, an author my students disliked because he was so “pessimistic.” My dreams had put me in a pleasant turmoil. Homeland Security had prevented me from crossing the Mississippi on my eventual trip home back to sanity. I couldn’t co
unt to ten or spell my name and had the dream perception that life herself was a huge sow rooting in a swamp near the deer camp in the U.P. What could this possibly mean except that the sow came first and meaning later? When I was in first grade I held a little girl piglet I named Patty and a few years later she weighed over four hundred and drowned when she fell through the pond ice the day before Christmas.

  Because the morning was clear and cold with a stiff breeze from the north I had the nice illusion that my thinking was clear and cold. Here I was at sixty with no home to return to but that didn’t make me unique. Time tricks us into thinking we’re part of her and then leaves us behind. My home depended on the continuity of my marriage to Vivian which I always assumed would only end at my death. I also assumed I still loved her but then love can be a routine like farming. I wasn’t jealous when she expressed sexual desire for an actor in a TV movie so maybe my love had faded? My friend Ad had said that toward the end of a marriage you’re like a rat trapped in a septic tank.

  When I pulled into the parking lot of the Custer Battlefield at Crow Agency, Montana, I lightly shook Marybelle who had casually exposed a pretty good knowledge of American history. She looked at the Park Service signs with sleepy disgust, “Custer was a murderous peacock who mistreated his men, wife, and dogs,” she said and promptly went back to sleep.

  I was a solitary wanderer on the battlefield and was quite amazed at the markers that signified exactly where each of our brave or perhaps stupid soldiers had fallen, not that it mattered if the authorities were off a few feet. Not having been in the armed services myself I had always been a little embarrassed by such notions as “obeying orders”, “semper fidelis,” “death before dishonor,” or “live free or die.” The most frequent words in the media which I tended to avoid of late were “car bomb.” I was far too distracted by Marybelle to wonder if our current president was yet another of the many Custers who willy nilly have littered our history. This was the briefest of thoughts compared to the growing fiction that Marybelle was at least three people rather than one. Maybe we are all several people but I doubted it. I had certainly hoped my trip would ease my feeling of puzzlement but it hadn’t so far.

  All of the graves on the green hillside drew me back to the idea that at my age of sixty you could drop dead at any moment. Weather-wise was it autumn or early winter in my life? My jacket was too short and I could feel the cold wind in my kidneys. Just before I left Ad had cooked dinner for me but he had confessed to drinking two bottles of expensive wine and the stew was glutinous. I somewhat dreaded Ad’s after dinner conversations because he could have a glass of French apple brandy and sit back in his Lazy Boy chair and assume the posture of a wise old owl. He would say some sensible things but then drop a sentence similar to opening your freezer and finding a chopped up muskrat. He had said, in effect, “Yours is an American story. You lose your life’s long term substance, your wife and farm and dog. You are cut loose. At your age you can’t think of new worlds to conquer or big deal adventures in far flung places. The only real adventure in most people’s life is adultery.”

  There you have it. On the bare grassy battlefield I thought of my pleasant feelings about Wordsworth’s “Prelude” as a college junior but couldn’t pin down any particulars. It was like playing horseshoes. You had to keep at it. About a hundred yards away I could see the top of Marybelle’s head through the car’s front window and wasn’t sure if I wanted to return to the car which put me back in the dubious battlefield of answered prayers. You tie biology to the imagination and you can have a mudbath. Forty-five years of sex fantasies come true and I’m thinking that I wish I could go fishing.

  MONTANA III

  I laughed when I got back in the car. After more than a week of sweltering here I was shivering as if I had just left my ice shanty over on Mullet Lake. Marybelle seemed cozy enough in my jacket but there were goosebumps on her pretty legs (she had a trampoline in her backyard). I had a cup of weak thermos coffee, lit a courageous Lucky Strike, had a coughing fit and studied the road atlas. Montana was a big assed state but with any luck I’d be done with my passenger in two days. At the top of the page the information revealed that Montana was three times the size of Michigan but with only one tenth in population, though in truth most of Michigan’s population was down in the bottom third of the mitten (the shape of the state). Of course it’s hard to draw conclusions from maps or from the dozens of stories I read as a boy about Montana in outdoor magazines wherein a vast slavering grizzly bear charged a tiny hunter whose rifle looked like a tinker toy in his hands. In terms of artistic perspective the bear in the illustration would have weighed two tons and the man fifty pounds. Another thing that seemed to happen in Montana is alarmed fishermen in boats unwittingly plunged over waterfalls and clung to rocks downriver. If they survived they started a fire with waterproof matches to dry out until Ranger Rick found them. In short, Montana was fraught with sporting peril though contemporary versions of the sporting magazines used words like “sustainable” and “mega fauna.”

  Driving north toward Billings with my antique Taurus buffeted by the wind I began to think of Robert’s last trip home for Christmas the year before the disaster. To humor me we had gone ice fishing first stopping at a dealer’s to buy him a snowmobile suit and moon boots to keep him warm. Were it not for the aqua foulard at his throat he would have looked like a normal dumpy ice fisherman. Our traditional Christmas Eve dinner was fried panfish (bluegills and perch) when the lake ice was solid enough to fish. By midmorning it was only ten degrees but I had a fire going in the shanty and had set out a legal number of tip-ups after spudding the holes, taking turns with Robert who had always been strong as an ox and said he went to a gym four days a week.

  Anyway, the sun came out by late morning and Robert put on these big polarized goggles that covered half his face and had cost him a hundred bucks. It was a little like talking to someone from outer space. Fishing was slow which left us plenty of time to chat and I said farming had become less pleasant because of erratic market pressures. Sweet and sour cherries would never recover from the over planting after a couple of good years two decades before when big money entered the business. We were out producing the market by ten percent. Beef was in fine shape but mostly because we had embargoed Canada due to mad cow disease. Robert asked me what I had netted this year and I was embarrassed to say nineteen grand. He said, “Dad, that’s shit,” but then a tip up flag signaled a fish and Robert was joyful pulling up a fat foot long perch, his favorite. When he calmed down I was subjected to a grueling number of business questions including the suggestion that I put the farm “to sleep” and go back to teaching. I didn’t say “What would old Lola do all day without me?” but said I’d rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching. Robert was irritated that Vivian wasn’t kicking in some of the real estate money she was saving for our retirement. We let my dire situation drop and he told amusing horror stories about the movie business and their berserk market pressures and how in the manner of farming they invented “crops” no one wanted. The real bomb was dropped at noon when we were eating our baked bean and raw onion sandwiches and he admitted he had been averaging more than three hundred thousand dollars a year. It was incomprehensible that my whimsical, wayward son could make that kind of money. He said that since he was destined to have no heirs himself I should let him know when I needed money. On the way home we stopped at a tavern in Boyne City where we knew everyone and Robert announced loudly, “I too am an American sportsman,” and the drinkers cheered. They all knew his sexual predilections but then again he was “local.”

  When we were coming down the hill into Billings Marybelle yelled “mom” in her sleep. This was a little alarming but I was too impressed by the Yellowstone River to be concerned. The river was too huge to be believed. The watersheds in Michigan are fairly short so I was unused to vast rivers except for crossing the Mississippi up in Minneapolis when we took the 4–H kids on a junket to the Minnesota State Fair and I
hadn’t paid much attention what with trying to stop neckers from coupling in the school bus.

  I was so fascinated with the bigness of the Yellowstone that I missed my turnoff for Malta but a hasty look at the map revealed a second option. Meanwhile a few miles past Columbus I pulled off on the shoulder, climbed a fence and walked through a herd of Angus heifers down a hill to the river which was so loud and turbulent I couldn’t hear myself think. I’m sort of neutral in terms of religion but ever since I was a kid I’ve thought moving water to be the best thing God made. Daily in grade school when I started trout fishing with my dad he told me that gods and spirits lived in creeks and rivers, information he got from his own father’s Chippewa buddy. I never doubted this one bit. Where else would they live?