Pilgrims (2 page)

It's the leader's job to be positive and she was the leader now.
She
had never been a leader before in her entire life
. Fifty-three years old and she'd always trotted along like a good girl, helping the nuns, clapping the erasers, a very quiet good girl who got good grades, joined clubs, wrote poems, married, raised kids, never a leader, and when Carl's sister Eloise moved back to Lake Wobegon from Minneapolis, her with her booming voice and confident clear-cut sentences, and was elected mayor, Margie deferred to her, but now Eloise was cast down by the loss of the treacherous Fred, and the torch had been passed. Thrilling. Absolutely thrilling. Having spent decades tolerating dopes and bores and obeying braggarts and petty tyrants, to at last emerge from her cocoon as a Benevolent Leader of Her People on an Expedition to a Distant Land.

In the Amsterdam airport, she'd spotted a book called
How
to Deal with Impossible People
and snapped it up. The first
rule was “Always Be Confident.” “Start every endeavor with a surplus of Positive Energy.” “Be a Builder-Upper.” “Do not anticipate failure.” Which struck her as profound—the sort of wisdom you'd never learn in Lake Wobegon, a colony of doubters and backbiters. And then, moments later, she saw Eloise weeping afresh over Fred and sat down and patted her hand. And Eloise was holding a sheet of paper that a strange woman had handed her.

Eloise thrust it at Margie. “Oh my God,” she said, “we are in trouble now. See what you've gotten us into. A nun gave this to me. A nun.”

“Listen,” Margie said. “This is hogwash. Pure idiocy. We're perfectly safe.” She tore the sheet into tiny pieces.

“You don't think we should talk this over?”

“Damn it to hell, Eloise. Just pull yourself together, willya? Get a grip.”

Eloise was stunned. Margie never cursed—never ever. “You don't think we should—” Margie took hold of her shoulders and shook her. “Listen to me. Just grow up! I mean it! Get over it!”

Eloise nodded.

And right there was where Margie took command, pushing Eloise around, telling her to grow up. Anyway, the trip had been her idea from Day One. It was she who called them up in January and said, “Guess what? Carl and I are going to Rome. Want to go?”
Where?
Italy.
Kind of expensive, isn't it?
Hey, a person
only lives once.
I've heard that. How much does it cost?
Less than you'd think. So she bought the plane tickets from a web site called Cheapskate.com and booked the hotel and phoned the pilgrims with regular helpful reminders (Passport. Cash card. Adapters for electric shavers) and shepherded them onto the plane in Minneapolis (
What if someone else has taken our
seat?
) and through Schiphol in Amsterdam (
Why do we have
to wait so long at Passport Control when the Europeans go
scooting on through?
) and into Rome (
Was it okay that I packed
some Nut Goodies in my suitcase? What if they search my bag?
I see the sign about not bringing food products into Italy—is
Nut Goodie a food product? Should I tell the police or should I
sneak into a restroom and flush it down the toilet?
). And she had dealt with Evelyn who sat there in Amsterdam holding a small cardboard box someone had given her.

Who was it?

“I don't know. He just asked me to take it on the plane for him.”

Oh my God. Evelyn!

“What's wrong?”

So she grabbed the box and threw it into a stairwell. And she herded them away to a coffee bar where Marilyn had a meltdown while looking at a chicken salad sandwich and burst into tears and said, “Why didn't I bring Mother along? She would've loved to come. I never even thought to ask her. Oh my God. She was probably just waiting for me to say something and I never did. She's still hale and hearty, she could've come and enjoyed this. It might be
her last chance
. And I didn't even think to mention it.
It didn't even cross my mind!
” And she wept. “I am a bad person,”
she said. “God is going to punish me, I know it. I just hope he spares my kids.” Oh, it was the old Midwestern ritual of brutal self-accusation—out of pure vanity people lashing into themselves—
how worthless I am!
—and thereby dragging sympathy and praise out of you—No, you are
not
a bad person, you are a
good
person, and no we don't hate you, not at all, we all
love
you. Indeed, we do. So she had comforted Marilyn and rounded up the sheep and moved them to the next plane and on the flight to Rome she had reminded Lyle why they were going to Rome—to put a picture on Gussie Norlander's grave—and at the Customs counter she said
Buon giorno
to the policeman who checked her passport and
Grazie
when he handed it back—and at the baggage carousel she had spotted a porter and tapped him on the shoulder and said “
Per favore, signore
,” and so well, with rolled
R's
and all, that his face lit up and he poured out his heart to her in Italian and she simply raised her hand and said, “
Sono Americano
—I'd rather speak English. Thank you.
Grazie
.” And the man grinned and squeezed out some English. She handed him ten euros, he brought a cart for the bags. So cool. Eloise whispered, “Where did you learn that?” “In the movies,” she said.

True.
Roman Holiday
starring Audrey Hepburn as a princess spinning around Rome on the back of a Vespa, her arms around Gregory Peck. Margie saw it in high school and Audrey became her patron saint whom she tried to emulate, her ballerina elegance, her bubbly demeanor, though bubbliness did not come naturally in Lake Wobegon. People tended to be dry. A woman who bubbled was considered ditzy. You were supposed to be a little dark. Treat yourself to dark scenarios about your kids, the schools, the elms, the future of the bluebird species. Any effervescence
was a symptom of unreliability. If you bubbled, people didn't want their kids to ride in your car.

She took a deep breath and put on an Audrey smile and cried, “We are going to have
such fun
in Italy! Fun such as you cannot even imagine! Boy O boy O boy. This is one for the history books! C'mon, let's see some happy faces! Smile, darn ya! You people look like somebody peed on your sugar bread. Lighten up! We're on vacation! Seven glorious nights and six fun-filled days!” She poked Carl. “Right?” “Right,” he said. She got in the shotgun seat in the big white van as Mr. Columbo loaded the bags in back. Enormous bags. The others had packed like refugees who might never see home again. For her: two carry-ons. Underwear, jeans and pullovers, one black dress, one pair of walking shoes. “If I need more, I can buy it there,” she told Marilyn. “It's only a week.” Marilyn admitted she had brought four sweaters
Four sweaters:
Four sweaters. Just in case.

Marilyn, Eloise, Evelyn sat in the second seat; Wally, Irene, Lyle, in the third; Carl, Daryl, Clint, Father, in the backseat. Mr. Keillor stood by the open door, waiting for someone to scootch over. “Jump in,” said Margie. “Where?” he said. “Anywhere.” The seat with the three ladies was full and so was the second, what with Irene parking her carry-on bag next to her. Father Wilmer said, “I'm afraid there's no leg room back here. It's tight for me and you have longer legs.” Finally, Irene heaved a sigh and moved the carry-on bag onto her lap and Lyle swung his legs out to allow the radio host to squeeze in between him and Irene—“I have to sit on the outside on account of my
knees,” he said. So Mr. Keillor found himself wedged in tight, trapped, like a caged animal. He slipped his left arm around onto the seat back behind Irene—to make more room—and she said, “Don't.” So he had to sit crooked, Lyle's elbow in his kidneys. When the van pulled away and bounced in a pothole, it sent shock waves up his spine. Just last Friday, a black limo had picked him up at LaGuardia and taken him to Town Hall for
A
Prairie Home Companion
, where he shared a dressing room with Yo-Yo Ma who was gracious and treated him like Somebody, and now here he was back in the fourth grade among cruel bus mates. “We may need a bigger van,” he muttered. “Some of us may need to lose weight,” said Irene. She sighed a long articulate sigh. Which he remembered suddenly and very clearly from years ago.

They were juniors in high school. It was May. She and he, sitting on the iron rail by the side door to the gymnasium. Under an old wounded elm tree split by lightning and still alive. Sun pouring down, she in her white blouse and denim wrap skirt, a half circle of sweat under her arms. He, not daring to look at her:

“I was thinking about going to the Prom but I don't know. I might have other plans. It's hard to tell. Were you planning to go?”

“You mean, to the Prom?”

“Yes.”

And then he realized that she did not want to go to the Prom with him nor anywhere else. She did not want to be sitting there beside him. There was magnetic repulsion going on. She was
about to throw up her arms and scream, “Get this person away from me!”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” he said. “I just realized, I can't go, I told some people I'd do something else. Sorry.”

“That's okay,” she said. She gave him a sidelong glance and in that glance he withered like a delicate shrub in a hard frost. Here he had almost asked her to the Prom, had opened the door to the possibility of his perhaps asking her, and then withdrawn this non-offer. Then she cried, “Hey! What took you so long!!” to some guys in a souped-up Model T pulling up and she ran and jumped in the backseat.

And now, years later, he was that kid all over again, seventeen years old and six three, 150 pounds, high-water pants, size thirteen shoes, horn-rimmed glasses slipped down on his nose, short hair shaved up high in back, pipsqueak arms, solemn voice that broke into adolescent duck quacks. Why had he come on this trip? Some dark lust for punishment had driven him to travel back to the Land of Pain.

And he was subsidizing the trip! Oh God. The ultimate irony! Fifty-seven thousand dollars he was paying!

You escape the cold steel bars of high school and go off to a happy life in radio broadcasting as the host of your own show and then, through weird circumstance, you donate money to pay for your old neighbors to visit Rome and you go along for the honor and they punish you for your good deed. What a dope! Dumbhead!
Stoopnagel!
You could've spent that money on a fourteen-day luxury cruise on the Baltic and instead you are jammed into a van with the Jealous & Resentful!

The van hurtled down a ramp to the freeway, hit another pothole, which drove a nail into Mr. Keillor's spine, and flew past construction sites, piles of concrete slabs and logs and gravel, and then a grove of palm trees and twelve-foot rosebushes. They drove through a little village, tangles of fencing and bungalows perched on hills, clinging to steep rocky slopes. It looked like California. Apartment buildings and every apartment with a balcony that overflowed with billows of flowering vines. Margie leaned forward and tried to commit it all to memory. She had expected Italy to be exotic, swarthy men sitting on wine barrels under arbors strumming mandolins, singing in plaintive tenor voices as big-hipped ladies swung their skirts and old nuns laughed and old men argued, hands in the air waving, but of course Italians go to offices too. They have dental appointments. They must go shop for toilet paper and put it on the roller. And then she saw a burst of bougainvillea growing out of an old decrepit apartment building, five stories high. One enormous plant. And then gigantic wisteria plants that looked like they were eating a three-story house. “Look,” she said. And someone said, “What?” And then it was gone. A string of bicyclists crossed an overpass as they sped under and then Carl said, “How long until we get there?” Like a child on a car trip. “Fifteen minutes,” said Mr. Columbo.