The English Major Read online

  I almost forgot! North Dakota is the Flickertail state, their bird is the western meadowlark, the flower is the wild prairie rose, and the motto is a sort of wordy “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.” I gave Marybelle the privilege of tossing out the pale orange Minnesota piece into the Bois de Sioux River. There had been a big thunderstorm in the night and the river was high and muddy. We stood on the bridge and waved goodbye to the Minnesota piece bobbing south on the roiling current. Marybelle said she disliked the purple color of the North Dakota piece and I said we’ll have to live with it. I only had a scant hour of sleep so somewhere along the way a nap was in the offing. I suddenly remembered my last nap using Lola as a pillow out in the cherry orchard in May when the trees were blooming. I could feel Lola’s heart through the back of my head beating in what I remembered from college as iambic pentameter. All the local farmers were worried because the trees budded early which meant they were susceptible to a frost. Now for the first time in twenty-five years I didn’t give a shit about weather what with the farm being sold. This was the fifth day that the weather had become meaningless and the concern for it had drifted from my mind, sometimes drifting back in but easily dismissed. Part of the mental slavery of farming is that you’re always thinking it’s too warm or too cold, too wet or too dry, or that big wind is going to bruise the fruit.

  Marybelle was curled up in the corner of the seat against the door snoozing which would have made me even tireder except I could see an expanse of thigh. I kept shaking my head because my perceptions were blurred at the edges from all of the wine we had drunk. You might say we had a hum dinger night of love though she wouldn’t take off her undies. “I can’t take off my panties on our first date,” she teased. After it happened I recalled reading Henry Miller in college where he said, “I came off like a whale.” Even now in the car my prostrate is thumping with a localized ache. I mused over the age difference of a sixty year old man and a woman of forty-three. It is what the sailing folk over in Charlevoix call a “far reach.” Even though we were a mite drunk she embarrassed me at our lakeside picnic when she said that as a high school senior she had a fantasy of us screwing like dogs out in the hayfield. It had an effect on me like touching an electric fence while standing in a puddle. She was sitting there on a blanket in a grove of trees by the lake sprinkling Tabasco on a chicken leg with her skirt hiked way up. I dropped my fried thigh and flopped forward, my head burrowing up her skirt like a gopher. It was salty lilac country. I was so hard you could have hung a pail of milk on my dick. It was twilight and we were alone but then unfortunately a carload of teenagers roared through the picnic grounds and a teenager yelled, “Throw her a fuck.” Marybelle gave them the finger which was out of character, her physical movements in the throes of desire being quite elegant.

  In between our bouts of love she had spoken distressingly of her marriage, so questionable that it made me forget the recent dissolution of my own. Of course I had been tipped off in her occasional letters. Only last fall she had quoted an Eleanor Wylie poem from our high school American Lit anthology, “Life must go on, I forget just why.” This had alarmed me but then the letter had come before I received the bad news at deer camp. I had walked out in the wintry landscape and watched big snowflakes softly gathering on pine boughs. Earlier during the poker game our alcoholic doctor friend had made a joke about something he had read in the New York Times to the effect that each vagina was as unique as each snowflake. We were all dumbfounded and then he said, “I’m here as a doctor to testify that this is not true, I mean there are billions of dicks and pussies in the world and there are lots of identical twins.”

  After breakfast at Wahpeton and before she fell asleep Marybelle had said it would be nice to do some north and south zigzagging on the way to Bozeman. I didn’t say anything but this distressed me as I had intended to enter and exit each state just once. She had even taken the U.S. puzzle (Puzzibilities©) off the dashboard and laid it on the backseat none too gently and Florida had fallen on the floor with its drawing of a NASA rocket heading into space. I settled down after a while by thinking my plan had been too hidebound and anyway I could resume it after I dropped her off in Montana. I wasn’t cultivating rows of corn or pruning fruit trees or bailing alfalfa. I should be singing the song of the open road.

  She woke up near Jamestown after thrashing around from a dream. She poured a cup of coffee from my thermos and looked out at the landscape with suspicion. I turned north toward Devil’s Lake having read about all of the submerged cropland in that area in Farm Journal, a nationwide publication in which there is altogether too much information about soybeans, a crop not much grown up in my own area. Suffice it to say that our farmers are threatened by the bounteous Brazilian production of soybeans.

  I was intrigued by the landscape and still half asleep, the only thing keeping me awake was Marybelle’s hellish description of academic life which would stink a rat off a gut wagon as dad used to say. Here it is in a thimble: her assistant professor husband has ADD (attention deficit disorder) and can’t finish his book which would spring them out of Morris into a major university in the East or far West, preferably someplace near the ocean. He’s in a competitive field as there are far too many PhD’s in anthropology floating around the country tending bar, etc. She met him in New York City when she was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence and he was graduating from Columbia and had a fellowship to Indiana University, blah, blah, blah. Brad (his name) was handsome and witty and she impulsively married him. Brad liked to think he was on the cutting edge of everything including his idea of “pan-sexuality” which he believed had a firm historical basis. Translated this means he fucked his students. Meanwhile she had their two kids but still managed to finish her B.A. in theatre history. After Brad finished his PhD they had moved three times to minor colleges in Kansas and Missouri ending up in the comparative paradise of Morris. They always moved by U-Haul trailer and now the sight of one nauseated her. She nearly divorced Brad when the kids were young because he gave her a case of herpes. They stayed together for the children. She had been nearly bedridden for two years with a case of mononucleosis. The reality of Brad not finishing his book had thwarted their lives. The book was about possible Native American cannibalism in prehistory (around Boyne City Native Americans call themselves Indians). All in all Marybelle’s tale of woe made farming or even real estate appealing. I was this little fraction of her life that wouldn’t amount to much or so I decided.

  Things turned up after I pulled off on a gravel road near Fort Totten and I took a nap in back of the station wagon. There was a nice breeze off Devil’s Lake and I slept deep as a stone for an hour. Marybelle had gone off for a stroll with my binoculars and when I woke up she was fiddling with my pecker finally sitting on it as if I were the seat of a chair. She said our second day was our second date so we could go “all the way,” an old high school term. I heard a motor noise I recognized as a John Deere. Marybelle covered her face but I glanced out the side window and saw the farmer on the new model Deere, his eyes averted from us. I speculated that he was likely a Lutheran.

  We headed over toward Rugby which is the geographical center of North America though there is nothing in the broad landscape to tip you off to this fact. Marybelle was miffed in a Rugby diner that I spent so much time talking to the German-Russian immigrant farmers who also seemed to have uniquely large heads. Back in the car she announced she had studied the map during my snooze and thought we should hit the Missouri over at Garrison Dam and follow it south sticking as close to the river as possible. This made me real glad she was along or such an idea wouldn’t have occurred to me buried as I was in the idea of our multi-colored jigsaw states. I was getting lightened up in my mind by the immensity of the landscape and the idea that moment by moment everything I saw was something I had never seen before. Marybelle had a tendency to babble about what she called “The Arts.” She read The New York Times on her computer and was real current on this world unknown
to me. It reminded me of when I was a junior in college and thought I might be meant for big things though I didn’t have a specific idea what they were. This was probably the genes of my goofy dad in me. Courting Vivian plus the influence of my iron mother brought me back to what they thought of as the practicalities. At the time Vivian pretended she was getting pressure from a lot of young men so I better “shit or get off the pot” as they say. We were short of money when we got married so on our honeymoon we only drove to Detroit to see a Tigers game and spend a night in a hotel called The Renaissance Center which didn’t in the least remind me of the Renaissance I saw on slides in an art history class. We had to get home in a hurry to help Vivian’s dad harvest the cherry crop.

  SOUTH DAKOTA

  As we crossed the state line of South Dakota below Fort Yakes Marybelle joked that I sounded like I had been in long term parking for twenty-five years. My feelings were a little hurt and when we stopped to bury the North Dakota jigsaw piece under a rock in the austere landscape my mind wandered back forty years to when my brain was so alive I could barely sleep. Maybe my brain had developed three stomachs like a ruminating cow, thus radically slowing the thought process?

  South Dakota is the Mount Rushmore state, the ring-necked pheasant is the bird, the flower the American Pasque Flower and the motto “Under God the People Rule,” none of which tells you much. What were these state fathers describing? I used to teach de Tocqueville to my bored seniors and there was a man with a silver tongue and pen. I was wondering if politicians had blurry thinking or they just couldn’t write clearly about their thoughts?

  My body was seizing up from sitting in the car so I told Marybelle I needed to take a walk for an hour every morning, something I did with Lola, rain or shine. A bit of the devil entered then because Marybelle wondered if I couldn’t take my walks near a populated area so she could catch up on her cell phone. I made bold by saying that a populated area would defeat the purpose of a walk. These empty western areas are bad for cell phone reception so I said I’d try to park on a hill, and if that didn’t work when we reached a good sized town I’d park and go into a diner for coffee and a piece of pie and she could chatter to her heart’s delight.

  “I don’t chatter,” she said, “I exchange survival information with friends.”

  “What are you surviving?” I stupidly asked.

  “Life itself. “Marriage. Children. My stunted growth as a human.”

  “You seem real lively to me,” I offered.

  “You’re seeing the best side. You draw out my best side. You were my favorite teacher. You mentored me.”

  I swerved a bit to miss a gopher who was eating a dead brother or sister squashed on the center line. It reminded me of a squirrelly student who wrote an essay, “Mutant Cannibals Ate My Mother’s Body.” This kid was utterly convinced of the world of aliens and flying saucers and was nicknamed “space cadet.” He was good looking but all of the girls thought him “weird.” I heard that he nicknamed his dick, “The Force of One.”

  I was entranced by the town of Lemmon. Marybelle wasn’t but I held my ground. I had an urge to live there just like there are certain paintings you want to inhabit say like Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton. My head was riled because Marybelle seemed to become less like she originally presented herself in her letters or in our first hours together. I’m not saying she was deceitful but that she was slowly unwrapping herself and the fresh layers were as caustic as Drano. For instance, when we checked into the motel that afternoon in Lemmon it was pretty hot outside and she stripped down to her bra and panties and poured herself a water glass of Sapphire, a high-end gin I had bought for her in Bismark. I was in the toilet again when I overheard her call her husband a “lame brained mother fucker.” My goodness, I thought, and on my way out there she was on her tummy poised to make another call when I left, her panties drawn up fetchingly in her butt crack. This was a fanny that could start a war and I felt blessed that I had the use of it for the time being, knowing how much I’d miss it when it was gone. An English poet said, “Kiss the joy as it flies.” You bet I would.

  When I returned I was sweating from a heavy load I had bought guessing that Marybelle might not be fit for dinner—a small portable Weber grill, charcoal, T-bone steaks and salad. Through the screen door I heard her muffled voice saying something sexual in computer terms like “he really downloaded my hard drive.” I felt a moment of pride but then it occurred to me she might be referring to another lover rather than myself. We men are scarcely unique. I started the charcoal before I went in, delighted that she wasn’t as drunk as I might have expected. Her hair was wet from the shower and she was wearing brief lilac colored undies. My worm did a gentle flip-flop. She grinned broadly and said it was too hot for full blown sex and would I go down on her a little to release her “spirit,” a reasonable request. I dove off the high board with gusto realizing I had dreaded my return to the motel after strolling the almost mythological serenity of Lemmon. I had stood on the steps of a large Catholic church after walking shaded streets and heard angelic female voices in a rehearsing choir inside a church. Now I was hearing Marybelle’s not so angelic chirrups and yodels which were still somehow sanctified.

  The grocery store plastic cutlery was unwieldy so we ate our t-bones with our hands with bath towels on our laps. I watched closely as a raindrop of pink juice trickled down Marybelle’s chest only to be absorbed by her bra.

  After dinner including an acrid, bottled salad dressing I had quite a head of steam under my belt and started making love from behind her but she fell asleep. I finished when startled by her first slight snore. I recalled that once earlier in our marriage Vivian and I had made love like dogs out in the garden when she was wired on peppermint schnapps. She said afterwards that she “came” so hard it scared her but she never consented to do it in the garden again. I admit I wondered about this at the high school reunion when she returned with Fred with grass stains on her knees. As they used to say up home, “someone has been tipping my heifer.”

  Early morning and Marybelle was back on her cell phone. I had a nice walk out past the edge of town and took a photo of a fine thick necked Angus bull who seemed to be watching the meadowlarks fluttering around him. The owner stopped in his pickup and we talked farming in general and he was amazed at how many cattle I could feed on my sixty acres of alfalfa. Of course in Michigan we get so much moisture compared to South Dakota and some years I got three cuttings.

  Our little conversation was so pleasant that I almost dreaded going back to the motel. Marybelle’s husband had gotten a deal on the internet and had given her three thousand minutes for her birthday. She talked to her “sister” in Minneapolis frequently and that got her cranked up on all available “issues.” Of course the sex was beyond my fantasy daydreams but given more than enough sex you see that it isn’t the be all and end all of human existence. In you go and out you go. I mean it’s a fine thing but I had been hardly paying attention to the varying landscape that I had counted on lifting my spirits after losing Vivian. Instead I had become “pussy blind” as young men call it. My AD (alcoholic doctor) friend had said at a poker game that there was a certain kind of monkey that will give up lunch to see photos of female monkey butts. AD tends to say odd things when he’s trying to pull a bluff during a poker game in order to throw the rest of us off.

  Back at the motel I was relieved to see her studying the road atlas at the desk beneath the art print of the sad eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers. She announced with more than a trace of false humility that it would be nice if we could head south toward Norden east of Valentine, Nebraska, because it was a beautiful area she was familiar with because her husband had been on an anthropology “dig” in that area as a graduate student. They lived in a tent on the Niobrara River that summer and everyday she bathed nude in the river even though she knew there was a nasty old professor jerking off in the bushes while he watched her. This didn’t seem to be a very attractive story. I mean I don�
��t think of myself as squeamish and I scarcely see human dignity at stake in sexual matters but I felt sort of sorry for the old professor. He must have felt sort of silly when a session was over. Maybe he said, “Oops.”

  When Marybelle was taking her morning doze in the car I began to focus on her as a new kind of person. A few years back Vivian had sold two hippie couples a nice little farm down the road. Vivian said that they couldn’t really be old time hippies because they paid cash for the farm and one of the couples owned a brand new Volvo. Vivian suspected that they had been in the dope trade down in East Lansing. Anyway, the two men liked to wear leather clothes and the woman wore billowy peasant dresses and made a lot of baked goods which were none too good. One of the women, Deborah by name, told me she could tell I needed flax in my diet. Soon enough the men took to wearing bib overalls and they bought a tractor which they would drive around to no apparent purpose. They raised a hundred chickens for eggs and meat but they didn’t have the heart to kill any for dinner. One of the women brought me some flax seed bread that only Lola would eat if amply spread with butter. I caught a calf so she could pet it and she burst into tears at the beauty of the calf. None of them seemed to know anything in particular but were full of general good feelings. Vivian said they must be keeping their THC levels pretty high. One Sunday we went to a picnic of scorched chicken at their place. There were many of their friends up from downstate and most of the cars were pretty fancy. All of these people treated each other as if they were the most fascinating people on earth though I didn’t hear anyone say anything of particular interest. They were that new kind of Democrat that didn’t seem to know any working people. They were limited to their own breed. Late one fall with the usual hard winter coming the two couples moved to Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. They were disappointed when we wouldn’t accept their old chickens or buy their tractor.