For three weeks of agony last
February, Dorothy (the waitress at the Chatterbox Cafe) was gone on
vacation to Tucson,
and her cousin Flo from Burnsville, who is too nervous to run around at
noon with a dozen orders in her head, filled in. "I
don't know how you do it," she told Dorothy, and she wasright, she
didn't. Flo has her own way, a daily menu like a hot
lunch program - you plunk down your $2.50 and get Luau Pork Chops with
pineapple and marshmallow dainties and
cherry-cola Jell-O salad, or, if it's Tuesday, Tuna Mandalay with
Broccoli Hollywood, End of the Trail Bean Salad, and
Yum Yum Bars or Ting-A-Lings (your choice). Liver casserole au gratin
appeared once, and Chicken Surprise and Potato
chip cookies. Flo herself did not eat lunch, or drink coffee. Her
coffee had an oil slick on top.
Good old Norweigan cooking: you don't read much about that, or
about good old Norweigan hospitality. At Art's Bait &
Night O'Rest Motel, guests find the cabins are small, the chairs are
hard, and the floors are studded with exposed nails. For decoration, an
exciting wildlife picture, and for relaxation, you get two cast-iron
lawn chairs with a scallop shell that
makes a twenty-four hour impression on your back, even through a shirt.
In Cabin One is a hand-lettered sign tacked to the
wall beside the door. "Close the damn Door," it says. In Cabin Two, you
will read, "Don't clean Fish on the picnic tables.
How many times to I have to repeat myself? Use the table by the
Botehouse. That's what it's there for. Anyone caught
Cleaning Fish on Picnic tables gets thrown out Bag+Baggage. This means
You. For Pete Sake, use your goddamn Head"
Underneath that gruff exterior is a man who means every word he says.
Every summer you will see at least one car
hightailing it out of Art's with a red-faced man at the wheel and the
back seat full of scared children. The man is livid. If
Bambi walked out of the woods, he might not swerve to miss her. At the
end of Art's long dirt road, he turns east on the
gravel, skidding half sideways, the back wheels spinning, stones flying
like they were shot from guns, and he stomps it and
hits eighty on the quarter-mile straightaway to Hansens', hits
thebrake, and takes that long deceptive turn around Sunfish
Bay sliding up into the left lane, his wife saying, "Stop. Stop right
here and let us all out." What has burned his bacon is
the utter shame of it. The humiliation. He caught the sunnies about a
hundred yards off the dock, one, two, three, four, big
ones, and rowed back to show them off. He was so excited, he cleaned
them right away for breakfast, on the picnic table,
intending to wash it off afterward. Then a skinny, sawed-off
sonuvabitch with a face like a blood-hound's came up from
behind, grabbed the knife away from him, and said, "Get the hell out of
here. You got five minutes and then I get the
shotgun." He waved the knife at him. The man was beserk, one of those
psycho-rural types you see in movies, unshaven,
drooling brown spit, who take in city-folk for the night so they can
murder them in their beds. A vacation is ruined. He
had to run around the cabin throwing stuff into suitcases, hustling
sleepy kids into the car, grabbing up wetswimsuits and
towels, while his wife said, "Can't you just talk to him?" and the
maniac still outside the door saying, "If you can't read a
simple goddamn sign and follow one simple goddamn instruction, then you
can just get your fat butt the hell out of here."
Right in front of the children. And he wouldn't give back the knife.
Careening along the dirt road, the dad's gorge begins to
rise for good, and down the strightaway, he begins to rethink his
position on gun control. The speedway turns are
tocompensate for his not decking the man on the spot and cutting his
scrawny throat. Oscar Hansen has seen a lot of cars
almost spin out on the long turn and come up through his barbed wire.
He's thought of putting up a sign:
CALM DOWN.
HE'S LIKE THAT TO EVERYBODY.
School gave us marks every nine
weeks, three marks for each subject: work, effort and conduct. Effort
was the important
one, according to my mother, because that mark showed if you had
gumption and stick-to-it-iveness, and effort was my
poorest showing. I was high in conduct except when I dared to do wrong
by the other boys, and then I was glad to show
what I could do. Pee on the school during recess? You don't think I
would? Open the library door, yell, "Boogers!" and
run? Well I showed them. I was not the one who put a big gob of snot on
the classroom doorknob during lunch though, the
one that Darla Ingqvist discovered by putting her hand on it. Of all
the poeple you'd want to see touch a giant gob, Darla
was No. 1. She yanked her hand back just as Brian said, "Snot on you!"
but she already knew. She couln't wipe it off on
her dress because she wore such nice dresses so she burst into tears
and tore off to the girls' lavatory. Mrs. Meiers blamed
me because I laughed. Brian, whodid it, said, "That was a mean thing to
do, shame on you" and I sat down on the hall
floor and laughed myself silly. It was so right for for Darla to be the
one who got a gob in her hand. She was a jumpy,
chatty little girl who liked to bring money to school and show it to
everyone. Once a five-dollar bill - we never had a
five-dollar bill, so all the kids crowded around to see it. That was
what she wanted. She made us stand in line. It was
dumb. All those dumb girls took turns holding it and saying what
theywould do if they had one, and then Darla said she
had $400 in her savings account. "Liar, liar, pants on fire," Brian
said, but we all knew she probably did have $400. Later, Brian said, "I
wish I had her five dollars and she had a feather in her butt and we'd
both be tickled," which made me
feel a little better, but putting the gob on the knob, knowing that
Darla was monitor and had the privilege of opening the
door, that was a stroke of genius. I almost didn't mind Mrs. Meiers
making me sit in thecloakroom for an hour. I put paste
on slips of paper and put them in the pockets of Darla's coat, Hoping
she'd think it was more of the same.
It was Booger Day. When Mrs. Meiers turned her back to write her
loopy letters on the board, John Potvin whispered,
"Bunny boogers. Turkey tits. Panda Poop," to Paul who was unprepared
for it and laughed out loud. Mrs. Meiers
snatched him out of his seat and made him stand in front, facing the
class, a terrible humiliation. Everyone except Darla
felt embarrasment for Paul; only Darla looked at him and gloated; so
when Paul pretended to pull a long one out of his
nose, only Darla laughed, and then she stood up in front and he sat
down. Nobody looked at her, because she was crying.
On the way home, we sang with special enthusaism,
On top of Old Smoky, two thousand feet tall,
I shot my old teacher with a big booger ball.
I shot her with glory, I shot her with pride,
How could I miss her? She's thirty feet wide.
I liked Mrs. Meiers a lot, though, She was a plump lady with bags
of fat on her arms that danced when she wrote on the
board: we named them Hoppy and Bob. That gave her a good mark for
freindliness in my book, whereas Miss Conway of
fourth grade struck me as suspiciously thin. What was her problem?
Nerves, I suppose. She bit her lip and squinted and
snaked her skinny hand into her dress to shore up a strap, and she was
easily startled by loud noises. Two or three times a
day, Paul or Jim or Lance would let go with a book, dropping it flat
for maximum whack, and yell, "Sorry, Miss Conway!"
as the poor woman jerked like a fish on a line. It could be done by
slamming a door or dropping the window, too, or even
scraping a chair, and once a loud slam made her drop a stack of books,
which gave us a double jerk. It worked better if we
were very quiet before the noise. Often the class would be so quiet,
our little heads bent over our work, that she would look
up and congratulate us on our excellant behavior, and when she looked
back down at her book, wham! and she did the best
jerk we had ever seen. There were five classes of spasms: The Jerk, The
Jump, The High Jump, The Pants Jump, and The
Loopdeloop, and we knew when she was prime for a big one. It was after
we had put her through a hard morning workout,
including several good jumps, and a noisy lunch period, and she had
lectured us in her thin, weepy voice, then we knew
she was all wound up for the Loopdeloop. All it required was an extra
effort: throwing a dictionary flat at the floor or
dropping the globe, which sounded like a car crash.
We thought about possibly driving Miss Conway to a nervous
breakdown, an event we were curious about because our
mothers spoke of it often. "You're driving me to a nervous breakdown!"
they'd yell, but then, to prevent one, they'd grab us
and shake us silly. Miss Conway seemed a better candidate. We
speculated about what a breakdown might include - some
good jumps for sure, maybe a couple hundred, and talking gibberish with
spit running down her chin.
Miss Conway's nervous breakdown was prevented by Mrs. Meiers, who
got wind of it from one of the girls - Darla, i
think. Mrs. Meiers sat us boys down after lunch period and said that if
she heard any more loud noises from room 4, she
would keep us after school for a half hour. "Why not the girls?" Lance
asked. "Because I know that you boys can accept
responsibility," Mrs. Meiers said. And that was the end of the jumps,
excepts for one accidental jump when a leg gave way
under the table that held Mr. Bugs the rabbit in his big cage. Miss
Conway screamed and left the room, Mrs. Meiers
stalked in, and we boys sat in Room 3 from 3:00 to 3:45 with our hands
folded on our desks, andremembered that last
Loopdeloop, how satisfying it was, and also how sad it was, being the
last. Miss Conway had made some great jumps.
QUESTIONS FOR CLASS DISCUSSION
I. Can you name other American Presidents whose pictures make you
feel uneasy?
2. If you wrote a message to the child who will have your desk in
thirty years, what would it be?
3. Do you think the author should have worked harder in school?
This is the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women
are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the
children are above average.
