The English Major

Grove Press

Chapter One

It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't.

Doubtless every one starts from somewhere. We were married thirty-eight years, slightly more than thirty-seven but less than the magic thirty-nine.

I just cooked my last breakfast here in the old farmhouse, much changed during our marriage due to Vivian's whims and my labor.

I began to lose her during our fortieth high school reunion over in a park in Mullet Lake last year. Now I'm free, white, and sixty but I don't want to be free. I want Vivian back but it's been made clear to me that this is unlikely to happen.

At the reunion who would show up but Fred who left in the tenth grade. His parents were a higher sort, summer people from Petoskey who brought Fred up from Chicago to begin the ninth grade with us small town and farm kids. Fred had trouble in Chicago but he also had trouble up here so his parents pulled him halfway through tenth grade and sent him off to Culver Military Academy in Indiana where is it supposed that they straighten out young rascals from prosperous families.

So Fred shows up for our fortieth high school reunion in an Italian sports car I had never even heard the name before though we all agreed it made a growling sound sort of like the lion I heard at the Grand Rapids Zoo years ago. Anyway, he gave Vivian a ride. They were sweet on each other in high school. They were gone for over an hour and everyone got nervous, especially me, though nobody said anything even though everyone was beered up from the keg. When they returned there were grass stains on Vivian's knees and I got the idea that Fred and Vivian might have closed the deal. The last thing I expected was that my fifty-eight year old wife would become wayward. At the time there was no opportunity to get jealous or heartsick what with having to harvest fifty acres of sour cherries and ten acres of sweets, all of which took about a month during which the Fred-Vivian die was cast.

We got married after I graduated from Michigan State and Vivian had two years there. I taught history and English at the high school we graduated from and after our son left home Vivian became a real estate saleswoman of farms, resorts and cottages. I took over the farm when Vivian's dad died while fishing perch up in the Les Chenaux Islands near Cedarville. This man was a big strong asshole and had gone to glory from a heart attack trying to carry a hundred pounds of perch fillets and ice from a cabin to the pick-up. Soon after the funeral Vivian's mother, Vesper, took off to a place called Carefree, Arizona, and thus it was I became a farmer after eagerly escaping this family fate by going to college and becoming a school teacher.

The shoe dropped at deer camp in November up near Helmer in Luce County in the Upper Peninsula. The snow was too deep to hunt for long so by lunch time we were all back at camp playing poker and suddenly the game stopped and my friends told me that Vivian was having a hot and heavy affair with Fred who had his family's place on Lake Michigan north of Petoskey.

I took to drink which had never been a big item in my life. I drank a lot between deer season and the following June pretty much quitting two weeks ago after I thought I ran over our dog Lola, a thirteen year old lab-collie cross. I had been at Babe's apartment fiddling around which is upstairs from the diner where she works in town, the drawback being that the little apartment always smells like over used cooking oil and French fries which I never liked. Anyway when I got home Lola wasn't in the pump shed at the back of the house waiting for her biscuit. I found her in the weeds underneath the back of my brown Taurus. I would have seen her maybe but I hadn't cut the grass and weeds in the yard. I ran around the yard weeping over my dead dog, turned the headlights on and called my neighbor Dan and yelled, "Lola is dead," and then for some reason I threw myself over the fence into the cattle tank which was still full though I had sold the cattle in early May. Dan showed up a little later at first light with a thousand birds singing. He laughed because I was covered with green algae scum from the cattle tank and was shivering. It was a miracle I didn't catch a cold. Dan showed me how my tires had missed Lola and that she had died of old age with a half-chewed gopher in her mouth. Lola would eat anything from gophers to snakes to woodchucks to one of three piglets I once bought. That was the only time I punished her. If you want pork that tastes like the old days you have to raise your own. Dan and I grabbed two shovels and buried Lola out behind the barn. "You better pull yourself together," Dan said, tamping down the grave dirt with his boots.

Curiously my life began to turn upwards from the moment I discovered that I hadn't run over Lola.

It was strange after deer season when I called Bob our son who flew the Michigan coop right after he graduated from Kalamazoo College which cost us an arm and a leg. Now he lives in San Francisco. When I told him that his mother had left me for another man I was surprised when he said, "I'm not surprised." Since boyhood when he got involved in summer theatre over in Petoskey Bob has been all show business. I can't bring myself to get on a plane but Bob practically lives on them. He said, "You grew in different directions." Since Bob was young he had had this irritating habit of emphasizing every fifth word or so whether the word deserved it or not. "Dad, let's face it YOU never were in sync WITH mom. When she was worried ABOUT her big butt you'd ONLY say that there's nothing WRONG about a big butt. YOU were supposed to say, "VIVIAN your butt is not so BIG." Bob travels the world looking for locations for movie companies. When we found out in his teens that Bob was gay Vivian said she'd rather her son was gay than a farmer. That's Vivian for you. She was always adding fuel to the flame, or as Dad would say, pissing in the whiskey. Once I tried to detox the butt situation by saying that her butt was only big because her mother's butt was big. That didn't work.

So here I am packing up the old farmhouse which the new owner is going to tear down, or so Vivian says. The orchard will be leveled and only the barn will stay. Bob and I each get ten percent of the sale price and Vivian and her mother split the eighty. The two-hundred acres went for a million bucks which to me was an inflated price because I never netted more than thirty from it as a farm. Dan, my vet friend said that a hundred grand isn't much of a retirement but I said it has to be because that's what I got. He said you don't even have health insurance and I said that's true.

As I said my life took an upturn when I found out I hadn't run over Lola and I quit drinking so much. An even bigger item came about when I was sorting through an old trunk and found a jigsaw puzzle from my childhood. There were forty-eight pieces for the states and no state had the same colored puzzle piece. In the box there was also information about the state bird and the state flower. I came to know this puzzle all too well because I spent a lot of my young life taking care of my little brother Teddy who was a mongoloid, what they call now Down's Syndrome. Teddy loved this puzzle and we spent hours and hours doing it over and over.

I took the puzzle downstairs and put it on the kitchen table and popped a non-alcoholic beer since it was only noon. I tuned in my big Zenith...