Driving on the Rim

4

I WAS HAVING A REMARKABLY SMOOTH SENIOR YEAR, my passion for the outdoors compensating for my lack of interest in team sports or, actually, my aversion to team sports. It disturbed me to even watch them, especially basketball, where fans huddled to watch two groups mob each other in their underwear. With football, I was attracted to the kickoff, but my interest waned thereafter. For two weeks that fall, I lived alone, looking after myself. My parents had gone to Idaho to care for Aunt Silbie, who was holed up dying of injuries sustained when a train hit her car, which she had parked on the tracks. She had once told me that she had kept her figure during her affairs with five different bosses while their wives grew fat. My mother was greatly consoled that the radio in Silbie’s car was tuned to an inspirational religious station; and the wrecker, ambulance crew, and attending physician all attested that the car, nearly flattened, continued to broadcast uplifting messages even as it was towed away.

“The car just stalled on the tracks,” asserted my mother with a glare.

I remembered the day I had been caught in flagrante by my parents and my mother called me an instrument of Lucifer and said that it would have been better that a millstone had been tied around my neck, etc., among other obloquies resulting in my isolation and unexpected grief at the death of my aunt, whose touch I would never forget. The harshness of my mother’s brand of Christianity was forever impressed upon me.

I was going to college in Dr. Olsson’s hometown and with his financial help. I would live in the home of his friends. Dr. Olsson did what he could to prepare me for my trip; I suppose he assumed some culture shock. “The Hansons are an old and important family in the town and as a resident of the Hanson home, under its protection, you will have nothing to fear from this new place. Karl Hanson is just the latest incarnation of a century of stability, as fine a man as I’ve ever known, and we’ve known each other all our lives.” He hadn’t said anything about Hanson’s wife and so I asked. He paused, and then said, “I am older than Karl. Shirley was homecoming queen of Karl’s class. She’s a beautiful woman and Karl holds her in highest esteem.” I could tell that Dr. Olsson had, for some reason, a low opinion of Shirley. This was enough for me: I couldn’t wait to see Shirley!

I was soon on my way to Calabash College in northern Ohio, a tiny Congregationalist college that, once thriving, had nearly vanished during an imaginary Red scare when local farmers drove out the faculty with pitchforks. I was warmly greeted by my new host, Karl Hanson. He said, “Welcome” and then, after a pause, “welcome, welcome, welcome.” I smiled all the way into the upper corners of the room. “And how is my honored friend Olsson?”

“Dr. Olsson is just fine. He sends his best.”

“I wish we saw more of him. Y’know the bugger won’t play golf. We could have had some winter trips to Camelback. Always out in the woods. Out in the prairie now, I suppose, chasing some dog. But what a guy, and a hell of a doc. He’d had enough. Dyed-in-the-wool bachelor gonna live his life, come hell or high water. He and my wife were sweethearts. She says he’s still carrying a torch. You believe that? Me either. Female bull, is all. When Olsson tells me he’s going to Montana, you could of knocked me over with a feather and, jeez, I’ve missed him ever since. We had the same Chinese tailor, came through once a year, shantung sport coats a tenth of what they ream you for here. I did try to get into the grouse-hunting thing, but first time he cut loose with his repeater I hit the ground. Not my game, not my game at all. Here, let me hang that up for you. I’ll show you your room and then you can meet my ball and chain. Just kidding. Shirley’s the queen of this castle! You could tell I was kidding, couldn’t you? About Shirley?”

Calabash College had recovered in the intervening decades, somewhat, and served students who wished to attend college but could not find admission elsewhere. As a result, the student body was a heterogeneous group of idiots, local mediocrities, and brilliant misfits. Our backgrounds were so diverse that we acquired functional identities as the very first information about us emerged. As someone from the West, I found myself branded the campus cowboy. Wiley would have had a good laugh over that. An undernourished Portuguese boy from New Bedford was “a whaler.” Girls who kissed with their tongues were whores. The kid with Hollywood mufflers on his jalopy was “Brick Track Jack” for the Indianapolis 500. The dorm room where we got free haircuts was Barber College, and so on. It was a loose atmosphere entirely, even from the standpoint of the administration. In my brief stint writing a sports column for the mimeographed campus weekly, I suggested that the chronically losing basketball team might look to ways to play better. The team beat me to a pulp, and even the president, a former tool-and-die executive, judged I had spoken out of turn. All of this was quite manageable, and in fact I did manage, with the expenses of my education borne mostly by Dr. Olsson and reduced by my living in a house owned and occupied by Karl Hanson and his wife. I’m sure Dr. Olsson had no way of knowing that in their subtle way the well-to-do and well-educated Hansons were every bit as strange as my own parents. They were only twice as old as me — that is, somewhere in their thirties, with Shirley sporting a sort of Jazz Age look that had lingered in these Midwestern pockets. The Hansons’ house was somewhat disorderly, as their live-in black lady had gone back to Georgia. Each year a representative of Ton Yik Tailors of Hong Kong made the rounds of the Rust Belt, measuring local nabobs for custom-made suits, the equivalent of Hart, Shaffner and Marx at a third the cost; and each year Karl had a new one made, worsteds, wool, mohair, shantung sport jackets, and so on, all exploding from his closet on the second floor. Shirley’s specialty was fox furs with the heads and black glass eyes that surmounted her fitted Chanel knockoffs and accented her excellent figure. I quickly noticed that excellent figure, and as soon as I could, I told her the men in my family were not long lived and that my greatest fear was dying a virgin. I just let this one soak while I went to class. I could tell by her expression that she couldn’t decide quite what to do with me but that for the moment she would dismiss me as a hopeless goober.

I felt the futility of coming of age in the time of two iconic buffoons, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. And when I got to college I was still a very backward boy. I’ll never forget the expressions on the Hansons’ faces the first time they saw me licking my plate. But I’m a quick study, and it wasn’t long before I was quite a conventional youth, managing at once to do my schoolwork well, get drunk, and manually inspect the occasional coed. I was well along in self-invention, representing myself to be the son of ranchers Gladys and Wiley. I’m ashamed to say that I was not proud of my own parents. I was at a ghastly stage in life, having raised faultfinding to a science. Some of this came from my Bible-crazed mother, who treated every phenomenon as a possible false sign or lying wonder.

At the beginning of my years at Calabash College, Karl Hanson and his wife, Shirley, were very kind to me. The Hansons had a strong social conscience, and this led them to hire a housekeeper, Audra Vasiliauskyte, a displaced person from somewhere in Eastern Europe, Lithuania, I think. Audra had come to America with her sister, and the two of them were gorgeous schemers. Audra’s sister, Anya, had stolen a Great Lakes freighter captain away from his wife. Audra really stirred things up around the Hanson household, and in the end I was the beneficiary of her troublemaking. When Hanson would come in from work on cold winter evenings, Audra would help him off with his coat and even kneel before him to unbuckle his galoshes, a show enhanced by the omission of several blouse buttons. An excellent cook, she introduced Lithuanian dishes until once I heard Shirley cry out, “One more platter of kugelis and I’m outta here.” Audra was extremely but coolly polite to Shirley. I was more age-appropriate to her enthusiasms, but she treated me with acidic contempt and took the fact of my social awkwardness as proof of homosexuality. She’d spit out, “You fairy!” when we passed in the upstairs corridor. Her mistake was assuming that I was not only gauche but also unobservant. Hence I was able to examine the cautious but steady gravitation of poor Karl into Audra’s web.

In fact, I was more observant than even that: I took note of Shirley’s vigilance as Audra went from helping with his heavy winter coat to meeting him at the door of his car, the better to touch his elbow as he clambered out. The biggest problem was that Audra at twenty-eight was, as Karl confided to me, “easy on the eyes.” She was indeed: fresh-faced, cascading oak blond hair, and a tidy figure made poignant by the cheap Eastern European clothes she’d arrived with. She spoke an oddly correct schoolgirl English and radiated the sort of industry that predicted success in her new country. She was also a baseball nut, like Karl, and their amiable skirmishing over statistics drove Shirley to distraction. Audra feverishly studied baseball magazines in her room, as though she were trying to pass the bar exam. I several times sidled up to her, but she blew me off disdainfully, which I lamented as only a blue-balled late adolescent could. We each had our rooms on the north end of the second floor, at the end of a blind corridor, and shared a bathroom. That she sauntered around up there in her underwear, breasts spilling from an abbreviated bra, only emphasized how insignificant I was. Because of Audra, my energy was grossly depleted by jacking off, and had I not brought this vice under control, my grades surely would have fallen enough to keep me out of medical school. And what a way to fail a career in medicine!

At the point that Shirley looked likely to voice her indignation, I thought to reintroduce my manufactured fear of dying a virgin. From then on, it was merely a matter of waiting for Karl’s next business trip to coincide with Audra’s time off.

While Shirley drove Audra like a government mule, cooking, cleaning, polishing floors, washing windows from a ladder, cleaning eaves troughs, and ironing, Audra never lost her composure; only I knew how close to eruption her moods could be as she shoved me out of the way en route to the bathroom or pretended to spit in my face when I smiled at her. Karl only occasionally asked Audra to do something, and usually it was something quite small, like keeping an eye out for lost keys or glasses. If Shirley was present, Audra complied like a dutiful servant. If Shirley was not present, Audra let her joy at being of service to Karl shine in her eyes before purring, “Of course I find dose glasses. A lawyer must be able to see!” A pause before, a pause after. Then Karl, quietly, “Thank you, Audra.”

Early college days were really a delight for me, my first chance at disappearing into a crowd. In so many places I had grown up, especially in the rug-shampoo years, when we were pretty much transients, ignorance was its own reward and standing out in school was a sure way to get beaten up. But I’d heard John Wayne say, “Life is tough. Life is tougher if you’re stupid.” And I took the Duke’s words seriously, trying to be smart, haunting bookmobiles and the mildewed Carnegie libraries of the American West.

My clothing came principally from the Salvation Army store in town, no hardship implied: with a bit of imagination a person could dress well there and with great originality. I bought numerous Hawaiian shirts discarded by servicemen, bowling shirts and shoes, porkpie hats, and so on. This gave me a reputation on the tiny campus of a real sophisticate, a hipster even, my retro mishmash more mysterious than comprehensible. My great find at the Sally was a Chinese robe that had been dropped off by the family of a deceased Presbyterian missionary. It was a glorious blue silk garment with macramé buttons and a thin lining of down. Drawing upon my new reputation and the delightfully sordid memories of my late aunt out there in Idaho, I wore this on my first college date. It was a warm evening in early fall and I stood at the entrance to the girls’ dormitory barefoot in nothing but the luxurious blue robe and a distinctive porkpie hat with a varnished pheasant feather in its band. The girl, Nancy Bellwood of Owosso, Michigan, was slow adjusting to my appearance and my anxiety-driven shower of non sequiturs, but as her friends gathered and approved enthusiastically of my festive getup, Nancy’s zeal soon followed. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves by the small and slow woodland river that bounded our campus; turtles adorned the low limbs of trees overhanging the water, dragonflies sparkled, birdsong poured from the forest. I rested against the trunk of a great beech whose canopy scattered the evening light. Nancy had all but vanished under the robe and, to prolong my enjoyment, I concentrated on the little fuzzy balls on the back of her tennis socks. “Caramba!” she cried through the robe, reminding me that she was a Spanish major. As soon as it was over, I began thinking again of my studies. I loved to study. It used to be that when people asked me what I was interested in I would say, “Electricity!” Now I told them, “Science!” Ooh, la la!

I admired the Hansons’ home. So many houses in these small towns of the old Midwest were handsome. The towns themselves were beautiful and had been more so, said the locals, before the elms that once shaded them died of blight. Compared to the towns of the West they seemed remarkably wooded, sheltered really, and more contained than the sprawling towns I knew with only sagebrush to stop their spread. I saw photographs of this town before Dutch elm disease, and it looked like a huge green corsage set out in rolling farmland. The Hanson family had been in this house since 1841, and the attic held the Civil War uniforms of Hanson forebears, including the riddled one of a Hanson who died at Chickamauga, having served in a storied unit of Swedish immigrants. The spacious basement, now holding a stout coal-fired furnace, was said to have hidden escaped slaves. I particularly enjoyed the oak window seats with cushions fitted out into the bays that looked upon the small, well-tended backyard with its old roses and ancient black walnut tree. Here I sat with my schoolbooks, in my Chinese robe, entertaining unrealistic hopes for my future: my daydreaming, my fantasy life was still highly impractical.

The house was quite dark inside, enclosing, and had fireplaces in all the public rooms. A formal dining room opened onto an old utilitarian kitchen with a built-in gas range. The wood counters were worn to hollows, their edges held intact by steel bands and acorn-headed screws. It was a small space, and when I helped Shirley prepare meals there we rubbed against each other between stove and refrigerator with a steadily increasing frequency. The duration of these encounters was directly related to the complexity of the meals which were aimed at Karl Hanson’s enthusiastic palate; therefore we avoided the simple preparations and natural-food approaches advocated by Gloria Swanson, Hollywood vegetarian, resorting instead to complex glazes and various potted things, an elaborate cassoulet, and so forth. By the time Hanson complained of gout and a defiant waistband, Shirley and I were regularly dry-humping next to the counter that held the big chrome Mixmaster and Pyrex coffee machine.

In my second year, I started studying Spanish, abandoned the Chinese costume, and affected serapes. By now my reputation as a sort of Western hipster had vanished and I was viewed simply as a damn fool, a fool with snow falling on his serape four months a year and with mariachi 78s on an old brown record player.

I’d better note that my relationship with Shirley, while steamy, was inconclusive and passed as ironic household play — that is, on Shirley’s part. I seemed all too caught up in it, my experience having been confined to the pleasure my aunt Silbie dished out, and dished out directly. This was different. I resolved that some sort of legitimate barrier based in the marriage vows of the Hansons was going to require me to finish the work myself after one of Shirley’s humpfests.

Between astronomy and civics, an unscheduled two hours found me either at the library or back at the Hansons’ for an afternoon snack, usually prepared by Shirley. Since these were such obvious opportunities for hanky-panky, we made a point of avoiding it, and the result was that my snacks were often beautifully prepared little meals that sent me back to class content, and reconciled to my lost opportunities. Because I was so unassertive at these times, I blamed myself for awaiting Shirley’s initiative and wondered what might have happened if I’d just had the nerve to reach out and touch her. The chance that she would scream, “Get your hands off me!” just as Hanson popped in filled me with terror.

Today she served me a lovely little wedge of homemade shepherd’s pie and a green salad with walnuts and olives. She asked me, “Are you taking any history courses?” She had a beautiful smile on her pretty face, her auburn hair piled atop her head with a few strands tumbling over her forehead.

“I had American history last term.”

“That’s my favorite.”

“American?”

“Mm. Especially the Civil War.”

“That was good,” I said.

“The Revolutionary War, well, you see those paintings, they don’t really resemble us. But the Civil War, they had photos.”

“It makes it so much closer to our own time,” I said, fishing. I knew that I had sort of missed the point, so I added a few details about the incomprehensibility of the Revolutionary War period, Washington’s wig, knee socks, wooden teeth, three-cornered hats, the whole nine yards. “Plus, they didn’t free the slaves.”

“We can’t even imagine what that must have been like. Try to picture Michael Jordan or Bill Cosby as slaves.”

“I can’t.”

“Imagine how uppity they’d be?”

“I know, I know.”

“So, let’s confine our thoughts to the Civil War.”

“Well, in American history,” I said, “we touched on lots more than that. The Teapot Dome Scandal and so on.”

“The difference is, the Civil War has such a hold on our imagination.”

“Amen to that.” I wasn’t trying to be an asshole; I just didn’t know how to follow this line of conversation. At the same time, I intuited a lot of passion behind Shirley’s enthusiasm for that war. I felt so lost that I finally asked her why we kept talking about this particular subject; that was about as bold as I got in those days. She gave me a hard look and said, “I just lay the rail. I don’t drive the train.”

Shirley got the idea that Audra had the hots for me. This was no accident. Audra, who treated me with such savagery on the second floor, grew girlish in my proximity on the first floor. She seemed to have the capacity to emit light dew from her skin and add starlight to her eyes at will. By fluttering around me in the presence of both Hansons she produced a double effect: Hanson began to treat me with a new formality that verged on a surprising coolness; Shirley, doing housework for appearances upon Hanson’s return, always straightened slightly when Audra entered the room, then turned with a wintry smile to greet the three of us without focusing on any one, a teacher welcoming a new class. In this atmosphere, Audra swam like a happy fish looking to Hanson’s every need. Upstairs, she told me to quit acting like a member of the family: I was just a boarder. “And a fairy.”

Hanson’s law firm, three men, was small but it enjoyed a statewide reputation. That it had never departed this modest town in the generations following its founding by Hanson’s great-grandfather gave it an old-fashioned dignity unshared by high-powered competition elsewhere. It was still a prestigious place to have one’s legal work done, and this reputation was reflected in the decorum of the partners, who dressed with nostalgic severity and always paused before answering questions. I don’t know how else to say this, but the longer Audra was in the house the more peculiar were Hanson’s observations of his partners: one came to be described as “slow” and the other, now near retirement, was astonishingly referred to as a “prize boob.” A far cry from the collegiality of old. These comments left Shirley wide-eyed, and their being offered in Audra’s presence gave them an effect not experienced in this household before. Hanson had always seemed so somber, politely somber, though it’s true he was jollier these days, despite the new sarcasm, and his clothes brighter. His partners now looked grimly drab in his company. When Ton Yik Tailors came through that fall, Hanson ordered some high-spirited and entirely ghastly plaid sport clothes. Families — in this case households — are always evolving; on balance, ours was now more pleasant, that is, livelier. A pretty young woman always has this effect on groups, and Audra was very pretty. Anyone could see that she was slowly turning Karl Hanson into an idiot.

I came in from class wet from a spring snow flurry, my books damp and my worn-out shoes letting water into my socks. I went straight upstairs to change into something dry and warm. Audra was waiting for me in the hallway. She was leaning against the wall, her hands behind her at the small of her back and palms pressed to the wall; her chin was on her chest and she was regarding me with patronizing amusement. The single low-wattage lightbulb that frugally illuminated the hallway gave the scene an old-time Hollywood quality. “I have a small word with you?”

“Sure,” I said, simply hating my all-purpose enthusiasm.

“I’m thinking you show much fondness for Mrs. Hanson.”

“Yes,” I barked, “very fond. Very nice lady.”

“Ooh no, is not what I mean. Is what I mean is fond.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well, is not important. Is more important that Mrs. Hanson is fond of you.”

“Well, that would be nice.”

She snickered and I found it a bawdy snicker; curiously I noticed that I was morally indignant at this insinuation when I barely thought of anything besides sex with Mrs. Hanson, who exuded the ripe sensuality of early middle age. It proved another opportunity for Audra to one-up me: “I just hope the two of you don’t upset that nice man!” she cried, turning abruptly into her room and slamming the door. It worked: Karl Hanson was a fine man and I felt guilty.

As part of my obligations to the Hansons, I seemed to be something of a yard boy, for Shirley was a passionate but careless gardener. Before I arrived at the Hanson house, she had made a terrific effort to renew the perennials around the place — and there were many little flower beds under windows, around airyways and trees, along the stone sidewalk and between the house and the garage, which had a trotting-horse weather vane. But she couldn’t quite remember where she put things, and so in springtime she was consumed with mystery and anticipation as she awaited the appearance of flowers.

“I really don’t like spring,” she said to me as I followed her with an armful of tools — a forked implement for digging out weeds, pruning shears in three sizes, and an empty watering can. “Spring isn’t about hope for the coming season. It’s about being sick of winter.”

“Can’t it be both?”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“See the dead ones? Can’t you tell by the bark? Those are the ones you lop off. Right close to the trunk. I already showed you this once.”

I had to keep one eye on her as I pruned because she changed her mind from task to task and I rarely had the chance to finish anything. My main job was keeping up as she strode around directing my efforts here and there while quite obviously drifting off in thought as I started each thing destined for incompletion. One bed I was supposed to spade up for annuals turned out to be full of crocus bulbs. She’s the one who forgot she’d put them there, but she blew up: “Christ! Couldn’t you stop digging when you saw the first one?”

“I didn’t know what it was.” I thought it was onions.

“What it was, was an annual bulb, for crying out loud!” But then she ran her hand over my buttocks while watching the street, so I felt I was forgiven. She said, “Baby, let’s go to Florida.”