Love Me Read Online Free Page B

and Iris went off to help old people in pee-stained pants who were pushing their shopping carts around, combing the Dumpsters for collectibles. She was their champion. She was a bulldog on the phone. She was good at harassment. She stood up to the big cheeses in the blue suits. She fought for the underdog. After someone had been in a fight with Iris, he wasn’t anxious to go again. The mayor, for one. He was a slippery little sucker with a big pickerel smile and a quick hand and he’d grab your elbow and massage your back and murmur endearments in your ear even as he was planning how to dispose of your body. A one-time antiwar radical who became a liberal Democrat and then a Republican. He slid across the floor playing his squeezebox and loved anybody within ten feet of him and was in complete agreement with the last five things anybody told him and he kept his promises for up to one half-hour. He was a Smile on Wheels and 100 percent Content Free. When he slipped his hand around Iris and told her how much he admired her and her work in the community—work he had tried to sabotage in every way he could—she said, “Norm, if you don’t quit doinking around, I am going to cut you a new asshole.” His smile faded. He turned away and he found somebody else to love for fifteen seconds.
     
     
    You don’t talk like that in Minnesota. But she did. And then she came home and fixed tuna hotdish or her famous Not So Bad Beans with ground beef and ketchup and onions and Worcestershire and was her own sweet self. She kept in touch with her old pals from the U, Bob and Sandy and Katherine and Frank. She took up the recorder and played in the Macalester Groveland Early Music Consort. She read Doris Lessing. We subscribed to Whole Earth and attended Pete Seeger concerts and joined Common Cause and believed in people of all races and religions working together to make a decent world. We believed that, deep down, people really are good. Or she did. And I believed in her.
    She was big on birthdays and anniversaries. She told me once, “I would forgive you if you decided to be a Republican but I couldn’t if you forgot my birthday. So don’t.” So every March 8, we celebrated with supper at Vescio’s and a U of M hockey game and I wrote her a poem. Happy birthday, dear Iris. I would write it on stone or papyrus. My heart is on fire since I met you in choir, and it’s either romance or a virus.
     
     
     
    Every July we made the pilgrimage to her parents’ cottage on Cross Lake north of Brainerd, a family shrine crammed with historic furniture. The authentic original linoleum floor that Grandpa Guntzel laid in 1924. The novels of Booth Tarkington and Cornelia Otis Skinner and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. Antique dinnerware and a broad assortment of forks and spoons. Embroidered dish towels that deserved to be in the National Museum of Washing & Drying. Iris’s craft projects from grade school. We sunned on the sandbar and fished for bluegills and sunnies and fried them up in cornmeal and drank gin and tonic, which the Rev referred to as “a beverage,” and we put vodka in his, instead of gin. He couldn’t bear arguments. Politics was not for the dinner table. He and the Missus took a long walk after supper—“so you young people can be to yourselves”—and that was so we could have sex. There was a stuffed lynx named Wal ter which, whenever somebody farted, they looked at and said, “Cut that out.” And a jar you put a quarter in for every cuss word and at the end of summer, the 75 cents (or a dollar) went toward ice cream cones at the superette. Iris liked to stand in the open door just before the place was locked up on Labor Day and say, “Any vandal who breaks in here, goddamn the goddamn son-of-a-bitch to fucking hell, the ice cream’s on me.”
    Every August 4, we observed our wedding anniversary with a canoe trip on the St. Croix. My frugal wife fixed an elaborate picnic lunch of fresh guacamole and cold roast