Leaving home, p.12
Leaving Home, page 12
When the service was over, we got one ride on the ferris wheel, rising up over the bright lights into the dark night toward the stars, and falling back into our real lives. On the long ride home I slept, and when I woke up I was in a classroom that smelled of floor wax; Mrs. Mortenson was asking me to explain the Smoot-Hawley Act.
In 1955 my uncle Earl saw an ad for the $2,000 Minnesota State Fair Cake Baking Sweepstakes, sponsored by Peter Pan Flour, and he entered my aunt Myrna. He didn’t mention this to her because he didn’t want to upset her. She was a nervous person, easily startled by a sudden hello, and he was right, she made the greatest chocolate angelfood cake on the face of the earth. (To call it devil’s food would give Satan encouragement so we didn’t.) She also kept the cleanest kitchen in the Christian world. I liked to walk in, say hello, and when she recovered, she sat me down and fed me chocolate angel-food cake. As I ate it, she hovered overhead and apologized for it.
“Oh,” she sighed. “I don’t know. I ought to throw this out for the dog. It’s not very good. I don’t know where my mind was—I lost track of how many eggs I put in, and I was all out of the kind of brown sugar I always use.” I looked up at her in a trance, confused by the pure transcendent beauty of it, and she cut me a second, larger piece. “My mother was the one who could make a chocolate cake,” she said, and then she allowed herself one taste of cake. And frowned. “It’s gummy,” she said. “It’s like pudding.”
“No,” I said. “It’s the best chocolate cake I ever tasted.”
“Oh,” she said, “your mother makes cake just as good as that.”
Once my mother heard that and smiled at me, hopefully, but all my life I’ve tried to tell the truth, and I replied honestly, “Sometimes she does, but not often.”
Aunt Myrna was one of the few truly slender women in town. She set an impossible standard for the others. “She’s small-boned,” they said, but the truth is that she was so critical of her cooking, which was head and shoulders above everyone else’s, that food didn’t satisfy her. She was supernatural that way, like an angel. Angels who visit earth don’t feed on corn dogs and pizza. Heavenly creatures have low metabolism, a little bite of something perfect is more than enough. Like her cake. An angel visiting Minnesota to do research on sweet corn could go for a week on one thin sliver of Aunt Myrna’s chocolate cake.
When, in early August, Uncle Earl got an invitation from the Peter Pan Flour people, none of us was surprised she was chosen, she was so good. She was mad at him when he broke the news; she said, “I can’t bake in front of a hundred people. Stand up and make a cake and have them stare at me like I was some kind of carnival freak. I won’t do it.”
He considered that for a minute. “I was thinking of it,” he said, “as an opportunity to witness for the Lord. If you win the bake-off, I’m certain that you get to make a speech. You could give that Scripture recipe, ‘Take four cups of 1 Corinthians 13 and three cups of Ephesians 4:32, four quarts of Hebrews 11.1….’”
“I don’t know if I would be up to it….”
“I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. Phillipians 4:13.”
She practiced for two weeks and baked about forty cakes, most of them barely edible. She was experimenting with strange ingredients, like maple syrup and peanut butter, marshmallows, cherry bits. “You can’t just stand up in front of a crowd and bake an ordinary chocolate cake,” she said, but we convinced her that hers was good enough. She baked two of them that Friday, both champs. On the big Saturday she packed her ingredients, cake pans, mixer, and utensils in a cardboard box and covered it with a cloth, and they drove to the Cities, stopping on account of car trouble in Anoka and transferring from the Dodge to the bus. The bake-off was at three o’clock.
They arrived at two-thirty. She had assumed the bake-off was in the Home Activities building and then she discovered it was here at the grandstand. Peter Pan Flour had gone all out. The bake-off was part of the afternoon grandstand program, which also included high-wire acts, a big band playing Glenn Miller tunes, and Siberian tigers jumping through hoops of fire. She and twelve other women would stand on stage and bake cakes, and while the cakes were in the oven, Joey Chitwood’s Thrill Show would perform daredevil stunts on the dirt track, and Olson Younger the newspaper columnist would judge the contest and award the prize. We helped Aunt Myrna to the stage. She was weak and moist. “Good luck,” we said.
I stand here and look up at the grandstand and can see how nervous she must’ve been. I remember sitting up there in the forty-ninth row, under the pavilion, looking down at my tiny aunt in the green dress to the left of the saxophones while Joey Chitwood’s Thrill Show drivers did flips and rolls, roaring around in white Fords. She stood at a long table whipping mix in a silver bowl, my aunt Myrna making a cake. She was mine, my relative, and I was so proud.
And then the cakes came out of the oven. The State Fair orchestra put down their newspapers and picked up their horns and played something from opera, and the radio-announcer emcee said that now the moment had come, and Olson Younger pranced around. He wore a green suit and orange tie and he waved to us with both hands. It was his moment of glory, and he sashayed from one entrant to the next, kissing her, rolling his eyes, and tasting her cake. When he tasted Myrna’s cake, she shrank back from his embrace. She said a few words to him and I knew she was saying, “I don’t know. I just can’t seem to make em as rich as I used to—this isn’t very good at all. It’s gummy.” It was the greatest chocolate cake in the world but he believed her. So she came in tenth.
A woman in white pedal pushers won because, Younger said, her cake was richer and moister. He had a hard time getting the words out. You could see the grease stains from her cake, beads of grease glittered in the sun. Uncle Earl said, “That’s not cake, that’s pudding he gave a prize to. This is a pudding contest he’s running. He wouldn’t know chocolate cake if it came up and ate him.” And he was right. When Younger waltzed over to give Aunt Myrna her prize, a bowl, you could see he didn’t know which way was north. It wasn’t fair. She was the best. We waited for her in front of the grandstand. We both felt bad.
But when we saw her coming, she was all smiles. She hugged us both. She hardly seemed like herself. She threw her head back and said, “Oh, I’m glad it’s over. But it was fun. I was so scared. And then I just forgot to be.”
“But it wasn’t fair,” I said. She said, “Oh, he was drunk. It was all whiskey cake to him. But it doesn’t matter. It was so much fun.” I never saw her so lighthearted and girlish.
That night an old man came forward at the Harbor Light gospel meeting. He was confused and may have been looking for the way out, but we latched onto him and prayed for him. When he left, he seemed relieved. He was our first convert and we were thrilled. A soul hanging in the balance, there in our tent. Heaven and hell his choice, and he chose heaven, with our help, and then Dad lent him busfare.
That night, I said to my mother, “This is the last time I wear a rayon shirt, I hate them.” She said,.“All right, that’s fine.” I said, “You’re not mad?” She said, “No, I thought you liked them, that’s all.”
I went up in the ferris wheel for a last ride before being thrown into seventh grade. It went up into the stars and fell back to earth and rose again, and I had a magnificent vision, or think I did, though it’s hard to remember if it was that year with the chocolate cake or the next one with the pigs getting loose. The ferris wheel is the same year after year. It’s like all one ride to me: we go up and I think of people I knew who are dead and I smell fall in the air, manure, corn dogs, and we drop down into blazing light and blaring music. Every summer I’m a little bigger, but riding the ferris wheel, I feel the same as ever, I feel eternal. The combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, diesel smoke, and sawdust, in a hot dark summer night, it never changes, not an inch. The wheel carries us up high, high, high, and stops, and we sit swaying, creaking, in the dark, on the verge of death. You can see death from here. The wind blows from the northwest, from the farm school in Saint Anthony Park, a chilly wind with traces of pigs and sheep in it. This is my vision: little kids holding on to their daddy’s hand, and he is me. He looks down on them with love and buys them another corn dog. They are worried they will lose him, they hang on to his leg with one hand, eat with the other. This vision is unbearably wonderful. Then the wheel brings me down to the ground. We get off and other people get on. Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.
DAVID AND AGNES, A ROMANCE
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Cool weather and, down at the football field, twenty boys are working out under the cool eye of Coach Magendanz. After fifteen laps and three rounds of pushups, it doesn’t feel so cool, and they lie on their backs, imagining it’s a beach, and a woman says, “Did you really play football?” and you say, “Oh, yeah. Sure.” Coach says, “You wanna sleep, go home.” She says, “Honey, who is that big ugly loud man?” Coach says, “All right, up, ten laps, come on, ladies!” And you jump up; the woman is gone, so is the beach blanket and the frozen Daiquiris. It’s just hot sun and a cinder track and a big man yelling at you.
Cool nights, getting down around fifty, and it has all the farmers murmuring over their coffee cups at the Chatterbox. Farmers are worriers, and even though it’s been the best year anyone can remember—record crops of oats and wheat, rain has been perfect, a half-inch a week—still, Rollie says, “I don’t know, she’s been so cool at night now. It makes you wonder if maybe it isn’t going to be an early frost this year. It sure isn’t doing the soybeans any good. Sure, the oats and wheat were real good, but the price went down, you know. And we could use a little more rain, to fill out the ears of corn.” Things are real good but they could be better, because, you know, you never know. Right? “Ja, that’s right, I know what you’re talking about.”
That’s what they were talking about, but other people were talking about an item that appeared in the Herald-Star on Thursday. It read: “THANK YOU. I would like to thank my family and friends for their prayers, visits, flowers, gifts, food, when I was recovering in the hospital. I will never forget your love and generosity. Mange takk. Florence Tollefson.”
Virginia Ingqvist read it and called up Arlene Bunsen. “Has Florence been in the hospital recently?” Arlene didn’t think so. Neither did Irene when Arlene called her, or Marlys Diener or Marilyn Tollerud. Virginia called her nephew Pastor Ingqvist. He ought to know, and he said he didn’t think so either, but then, Val Tollefson has been upset with him, so maybe if Florence went to the hospital, Val got another minister for her, who wouldn’t sneak in liberal doctrine at bedside when she was too weak to resist. Virginia called Arlene back. She felt terrible to think maybe Florence had been in the hospital and nobody knew and she had felt so abandoned she put the ad in the paper to shame them. Arlene said, “I don’t think Florence would do that.” But it did seem to both of them that, about a month ago, they hadn’t seen her for a while. Florence is so quiet, though, it was hard to know. Virginia ran into her Friday at Ralph’s Grocery and said, “Florence, I’ve been thinking about you. How are you feeling these days?”
It seemed like an odd question to Florence, one that a number of people had asked her since Thursday. She looked down in the freezer chest among the hams and wondered if something was the matter with her. Did she look that bad? She’s a little heavier, but then she always gets a little heavier during the summer months, especially if she’s put on some weight over the winter.
It was Arlene who finally came right out and asked. Florence said, gosh, no, she wasn’t in the hospital. If she had been, she’d have made sure people knew about it. It’s the Christian way: if you need help, you tell people, so they won’t feel bad for not giving it. That thank-you item was ten years old, from Florence’s old appendectomy. Harold Starr put it in the paper because it was on his desk. He’s got stacks of stuff on his desk, some of it going back to childhood, and once in a while you open the paper and a piece of old news jumps out at you: here’s the honor roll from high school a quarter-century ago and I’m still not on it, years later, and no smarter. And here’s an obituary: your poor old grandma has died, again; once should’ve satisfied her, but no, she wanted to reperish.
So Florence was fine. Arlene still wondered: wasn’t she gone for a few days about the middle of July, she and Val? Seems like we didn’t see them—well, I suppose they were around somewhere.
In fact, Val and Florence had planned to go to Mount Canaan, Washington, in June, to pick up a trunk of books and papers and things that had belonged to Val’s father, David Tollefson, who died last April. Val had not attended the funeral. He hadn’t told anyone that his father died. Most people thought his dad died long ago. Val meant to go west in June, thinking there might be some important Tollefson family history in the trunk, and then he got cold feet and told them to ship the trunk to Minnesota. It arrived around the middle of July. That was when Florence and Val disappeared for a few days. They were in the house reading his dad’s papers.
Val’s parents were David and Mary Tollefson, married in 1927, and Valdemar was the oldest boy, born in 1928. His father was a carpenter, and in 1946, when Val was eighteen, his father went to work on a house down the road from them that belonged to the Hedders. David added on a bedroom and a living room with a stone fireplace. It took him two months, even with Mr. Hedder’s help, and about Labor Day, when he finished the job, he came by the Hedders’ house late one night in his Ford coupe and picked up Mrs. Hedder and they went off together and never came back.
They left seven children behind, two of hers and five of his, and drove west, all night, and were married the next morning in South Dakota, which made them guilty of bigamy, but perhaps they thought adultery was worse. They continued west and wound up in Mount Canaan, and he got work there as a carpenter, and ten years later he tried to get back in touch with his family in Lake Wobegon.
Nobody in town had so much as mentioned his name for ten years. The space he occupied was a blank. He was a popular man; men thought he was a real good worker, women thought he was polite and handsome, and children loved him, even little kids who didn’t know him—they’d run right up and he scooped them in—but when he left five children and a wife in the middle of the night, there was no doubt which side Lake Wobegon was on, and he was put out of mind and his name disappeared. Ella Anderson was his younger sister. He wrote to her and she wrote back. One Sunday, Ella, talking to Mary after church, mentioned that David was well, and Mary shot her a look of pure bitterness and walked away and wouldn’t speak to her again for more than a year.
Val was eighteen and he never forgot. Nobody’s father ever left, not in that town; a father was as permanent as the color of your eyes. Val took everything his father had ever given him, every gift, books, bicycle, even a new deer rifle, and he threw them away. He took the rifle down to the lake and swung it around by the barrel, and it flew out over the water, and he heard the splash and crumpled to the ground and lay there and cried.
The trunk that came in July was the first thing of his father’s he had seen in forty years. He hauled it down to the basement and it sat by the fruit jars for a week before he opened it. When he looked through the first layer, Val realized that of course there wouldn’t be any Tollefson family history in it—his father had taken none with him. David’s history in the family stopped when he turned the key in that Ford coupe. There were old brown Sunday-school magazines on top, books on Scripture, hymnals, a certificate thanking David for years of faithful service to the Zion Lutheran Church of Mount Canaan, and a Bible. In the front of the Bible was his father’s name and the name of his second wife, the former Mrs. Hedder. Val had never known the name of the woman his dad ran off with. Her name was Agnes.
Agnes. Val sat down on the trunk, feeling a little weak to have her name after all these years. Agnes. It felt unfaithful to his mother to know that name. He was surprised how curious he was to know who that woman was. He knew the story about his dad working on the house. He imagined them glancing at each other as the walls started to go up. Perhaps she helped him. His dad hammering, planing, sawing lumber—fresh lumber smells—and her coming out to ask how everything was going. Perhaps she made him a good lunch every day and they talked, and what did they talk about? What sort of man would do this: as you work on a man’s house and build him a new bedroom, to be planning to run away with his wife?
In an old Folger’s coffee can, Val found letters, dozens of them, addressed: “Dear Mrs. Hedder,” then “Dear Agnes,” and some “My darling Agnes,” all written in pencil, in a handwriting he recognized right away, even forty years later. Val thought, “I don’t want to read these,” but he did. The letters had been folded into small squares. Maybe he had hidden them for her to find.
“Dear Agnes,” he read, “Something has taken hold of my heart, a wonderful feeling, and I cannot turn away from it or I would die inside and be no use to anyone. This feeling leads me to you, my dear lady, and though I know that what you say is wise and true, still I know what is in my heart and I want you to come away with me.”
