“What’s a four-letter word meaning ‘Swear or repair’?”
“A four-letter word for a four-letter word?” I say, and she laughs. It’s a special thrill to make her laugh. We all try at the dinner table. It isn’t hard to do, especially with impersonations of teachers or neighbors. On exceedingly rare occasions, Mom laughs so hard she has to push back from the table mid-meal and run to the bathroom to avoid tinkling in her pants. Getting Mom to race to the can is an unexpected triumph, like getting three jokers to line up on The Joker’s Wild.
“‘Darn,’” I say.
“What?” Mom says.
“‘Swear or repair’ is ‘darn,’” I say.
“Of course,” she says. “I should have known that.”
Mom believes in euphemisms for swearing, and she believes in darning socks. Her three-tiered sewing kit is more impressive than any tackle box in Minnesota. Among its many implements is a lightbulb-shaped device over which she pulls socks for darning. When she does laundry, she rolls every pair of socks into a ball, which is then swallowed and held fast by the elastic cuff of one of the socks in the pair. This is the right way to pair socks because there is a right way to do everything. Mom is a devout balancer of the checkbook, a priestess of passbook savings accounts. If she were a contestant on The Dating Game, her turn-ons would include Heath bars, Triscuits, and ironing bedsheets.
Among her turn-offs are freeway on-ramps. Just before merging onto I-35W, which bisects Bloomington on its way from Dallas to Minneapolis, she comes to a complete stop. Then, when there is a gap the length of a football field, she accelerates from zero to fifty-five in a hundred twenty seconds in a Chevy Impala station wagon. This often results in shouts of uneuphemized profanity from outside the car, and occasionally from within.
Nor does Mom care for getting wet. She has a miraculous way of swimming—a gentle, bobbing breaststroke—that practically leaves her bone-dry. Mom floats through a thrashing crowd of Marco Polo players in the Holidome pool of a Holiday Inn, ascends the shallow-end steps, and applies a couple of light dabs with a beach towel, and it’s as if she had never swum at all.
Her twin aversions to getting soaked and speeding vehicles give her a special loathing of amusement-park rides. She will never set foot on a roller coaster, bumper car, or Ferris wheel, but her least favorite of human activities is the water flume. When Valleyfair, Minnesota’s own Disneyland-by-the-Dakotas, opens just south of Bloomington in 1976, Mom will stand a safe distance away, just out of misting range, patting her hairdo into shape, while the rest of us slot into a fiberglass log and go cannonballing down a steep decline that ends in a frigid explosion of white water.
Dad’s turn-ons include black coffee, televised college football, and Milk Duds. And drawing, apparently. Two Christmases from now I’ll get a large hardcover book inscribed to me from Dad. It’s called Fun with a Pencil by Andrew Loomis. “I had this when I was a kid,” he’ll say, and something in his expression will tell me that he had this—and only this—when he was a kid.
The instructional book was published in 1939 and is filled with the most amazing pencil sketches of that age—gangsters in double-breasted suits, cardsharps in green eyeshades, prizefighting palookas, icemen, beat cops, grannies. In a section called “Let’s Mix Up the Races,” an African man in a loincloth stares at a toothbrush, a cartoon question mark floating above his head. This collection of cultural stereotypes—a Chinese coolie, an American Indian chief smoking a peace pipe, a mustachioed Italian man singing opera—was Dad’s first view of the wider world beyond Fort Wayne, Indiana, before Mickey Mining and the 747 conspired to show him what it looked like firsthand.
At the back of the book, as at the back of Pik-Quik, are pictures of women in various stages of undress. Two full pages are headed “Vamps” and “More Vamps”: a bare-bottomed, bare-breasted Eve batting her lashes at Adam; a topless burlesque dancer covering herself with a feathered fan; a Hollywood starlet prone on a bearskin rug.
It scarcely matters that they’re drawings. These are the first boobs I have ever seen, if you don’t count the trick in which punching 5318008 into a calculator and turning it upside down reveals BOOBIES. 710 77345 inverted on the calculator becomes SHELL OIL, but that trick doesn’t fascinate us in quite the same way that BOOBIES does.
My next endeavor is to see a naked woman. It is the final frontier. My friend Tom McCarthy and I have already tried smoking—rolling the dried leaves in my backyard into a sheet of Mom’s typing paper, then torching one end with a book of matches procured from above the range. I let Mac go first. When it’s my turn, I take one deep drag and scorch the back of my throat, then fling the burning paper to the grass before my fingers also go up in flames. Stomping out the fast-growing brush fire—of paper, grass, and dried leaves—I’m cured of ever smoking again. I’m also cured like a ham, to judge by the smell of my hands and head, which I scrub meticulously under the backyard hose.
And so I’ve moved on to another vice. There are three places within walking distance of my house where a boy can see a naked woman—or at least a badly degraded photograph of a woman who is also, in her own way, being badly degraded.
Snake Hill is on the path that leads from the end of our block through the woods to the Bloomington Ice Garden. Up a small rise is a sudden clearing. In it, an elm tree stands surrounded by empty beer cans and crushed cigarette packs. The hollow of that tree acts as a kind of safe-deposit box for generations of Bloomington children. Stashed inside is a perpetually five-year-old copy of an off-brand men’s magazine with a name like Gent or Swank or Oui.
It is common knowledge that another magazine featuring women disporting in the altogether is hidden under leaves in the woods somewhere behind the Torgesons’ house. But the closest of these magazine stashes is somewhere in the marsh across the street from our house, a wetland that extends for many square miles and is covered in reeds taller than I am. It would take a team of archaeologists using sonar and satellites the better part of a year to find a single nudie magazine buried in this swamp, though its precise location is known to half the boys in South Brook.