A joke about your wife is the cheapest material there is. It costs the man telling it nothing, the room carries half of it for him, and it will run for twenty years without once requiring a second look at the woman it is about. I got twenty years out of mine.
Glenna was at the table with two propane invoices squared up in front of her, this year’s and the one before it.
“The truck came on the sixth,” she said. “You were home.”
“I was home.”
“How long was he on the yard.”
I had come in twenty minutes earlier from a remote at the implement dealer, where a man had backed a skid loader into the sign in front of about sixty people and I had it, I had the whole thing, the timing was already built. I got as far as the sound the sign made.
“Wendell. How long.”
“I don’t know. Fifteen minutes. Twenty.”
She wrote a number on the invoice and drew a line under it and said the tank was reading short for the time he’d been on the yard, and she’d call them, and that was that, and I stood there in my coat with a skid loader in my mouth and no place to put it.
Something else came out of my mouth on the air about two weeks after that, on a morning when I had nothing and the network feed was running long. Between the market report and the school menus I said, folks, I want you to understand the situation over at my house. She runs this house like I’m one of her audits.
The request line lit while I was still on the vowel. A woman out on County ZZ called to say hers was the same and she’d married him anyway. Merle DeVries, who owned the station then and had not come out of the sales office for a joke of mine in six years, stuck his head in and said keep that.
So I kept it.
A wife bit is a machine and it has three parts, and I did not build it. I took it off the morning men I listened to as a boy with my ear against a radio in my father’s kitchen.
Part one is that she has to be competent. A man complaining about a fool is a man in a bad marriage, and nobody wants that at ten of seven. She has to be formidable, so that losing to her is funny instead of sad.
Part two is that he has to lose, and in a particular way. Not badly. He loses the way a man loses who is privately pleased about it, and the audience hears the pleasure underneath, and the pleasure is what makes it safe to laugh at.
Part three is that she does not get a turn.
That is the machine. It costs the man nothing and it is the fastest way there has ever been into the nine seconds you get with somebody who is putting on boots. Every county in this state has one running right now.
Glenna Torkelson has been in the lab at the Halbert plant since she was twenty-three years old. She writes the date on the lid of a jar in pencil when she opens it. She keeps the receipts in a shoebox by year and can find one. She reads the co-op newsletter through the part about the bid for hauling sludge. She will not sign a paper she has not read to the bottom of, and she has cost this family things by that, and I will get to one of them. She can tell you the weather on a day you name in a year you name, and if you go look it up you will find out she is right, which people did, for a while, until they got tired of losing.
That is the woman. What I had was a woman in a chair with two invoices, and out of her I built a bit, and the bit ran on a transmitter for twenty years.
I am going to be plain about that, because it is the reason for this. Somewhere in the middle of those twenty years, at a funeral lunch in the church basement, a woman I have known since school patted my arm by the coffee urns and said she did not know how I stood it. She meant it kindly. She meant it as a kindness to me. And I stood there holding a paper plate and understood that I had been telling a story about my wife to nine thousand people, most mornings, for a long time, and not one of them had ever heard a word of it from her.
Tobin was thirteen the one time I asked whether anybody at school ever said anything to him.
“They just say the audit thing,” he said. “It’s fine.”
The Trading Post
We are twelve-fifty on the AM with a hundred-watt translator up on the FM side, and if you are picturing something, picture smaller. Sign-on at five-thirty. Two of us on the air and one in sales. The log is a real log and somebody has to initial it, and for most of my life that somebody was me.
The Trading Post runs at nine-forty and goes until the calls quit. No dealers, no firearms, one item at a time with a price on it. Lavonne Prasch has sold the same chest freezer on that show twice and had it back twice, and both times she came on and read the dimensions off a card in the same voice. A man named Skaar out on County M used to call in cattle panels and stay on eight minutes about the price of steel. There was a stretch in the nineties when one washing machine went up and back three times between two families who were not speaking, and I took the calls both directions and kept out of it.
The obituaries run at noon. There is more craft in that than people think. You do not read one until the funeral home tells you the family is reached, and reached means all of them, which in this county means somebody’s brother in Alaska who works a schedule. You read the name the way the family says it, not the way it is spelled, and the spelling out here will lie to you. I read Fjelstad wrong on the air in 1994. I gave it the flat American vowel, the one you would guess. Lucille Fjelstad called the station before I was up out of the chair and said it for me twice, slowly, and made me say it back to her. She was burying her mother that week. I have gotten a great many names right since on the strength of that phone call.
What I want on the record about the machine is that it worked, and that it kept working, and that the room did half of it. Somebody would say the audit line back to me at the hardware store and wait for the rest, and I would give them the rest. Merle sold against it. There was a feed store that bought the seven o’clock spot for eleven years and the man who owned it told me straight out that he bought it because of my wife.
Alvie Nybo said it to me once at the sale barn, in front of his hired man, and then he looked at me and said, “She ever hear that show?”
The Null Behind the Ridge
There is a place east of the ridge, out along County ZZ, where you cannot hear us at all. Same transmitter, same power, same thing going out that everybody in town is getting. The ridge stands between them and the tower and puts a hole in it. For years people out that way believed we shut down at dark, and they would tell you so, and they were not wrong about what they were hearing.
Glenna’s plant makes cheese, and has since 1942, and it is ninety-some jobs in a town of nineteen hundred. She started in the lab washing glassware and she has run the lab since 2003.
Every tanker that pulls onto that yard gets a sample pulled off it and screened for antibiotic residue before one drop of it goes anywhere. Every load, every plant, everywhere in this country, by law. If it comes up positive the load does not get unloaded and it does not get sold for anybody to eat, and every farm that put milk in that tanker gets sampled inside of three days to find out whose it was, and the one it was pays for all of it. The whole load. Plus the hauling and the dumping.
She also signs the charts off the pasteurizer. It heats to a hundred and sixty-one and holds it fifteen seconds, and a pen draws that on a paper disc while it happens, and if the temperature slips even a degree a valve throws the milk backward into the raw side and the pen writes that down too. Somebody has to read the disc and initial it and file it, and for better than twenty years in that building the initials on the disc have been hers.
Out here a man who does his job to the letter and puts nothing on top of it gets called solid, and the word follows him all the way to the church basement. The same exactness in a woman comes back to her in different words, and which word you get depends on who is telling it and what they want that day: she is cold if she is quiet about it, she is running the place if she is not, and either way there is a tone. I have been in the business of what a county says about a person for forty years. I know how that gets built, because I built some of it, on purpose, at ten of seven, and got paid. The other direction, a man read as absent for the same steadiness, is a different weather and belongs to a different piece.
In 2009 the phone rang at our house at ten at night and Glenna took it standing at the counter and said maybe three sentences. She said a number. She said what the next step was. She said the man’s name once, at the end, in the same voice she had used for the number.
Then she came back and ate the rest of her supper cold and did not tell me who it was.
I asked. She said, “Work.”
I want to be honest about what I did with that, because it is the part I would defend if you came at me. What I had, standing there, was a wife who did not tell me things and who wanted to know how long a propane truck had been on the yard, and to me those were one fact. They stayed one fact for a long time.
She got up at five-fifteen the next morning like always and I heard her scraping the windshield, and I lay there and let her.
Cold Copy
The plant did a communication styles day in the spring of 2016 for the supervisors, which is the kind of thing that happens to a plant after a bad quarter. It was the sixteen-type system with the corners sanded off it. Glenna came home with a stapled packet in her bag, set it on the counter, and never mentioned it again.
I took it to the station. I want that stated flat, because I have caught myself telling it as though I found it. I did not find it. I took it out of my wife’s bag and drove it to work with the intention of getting three minutes out of it by the end of the week.
There is one way I read anything. I read it out loud at half voice with a pencil, at the board, with the network feed in one ear, and I mark where the laugh is going to sit. Cold copy, meaning a page you have not seen before, live, with nobody’s help, is the whole trade, and after forty years I can tell you inside two sentences whether a page has anything in it. I read that packet the way I read a fair schedule.
Her name was across the top of the page, GLENNA TORKELSON, and under it in bold, ISTJ. There is a paragraph in the middle of the page that says the letters are not scores, they are habits, and they are ranked: the one a person runs on from the minute they wake up, then the one under it, on down to the one they hardly have. The full ranking for this particular set of letters has a page of its own, and I have been through it twice since.
The one on top of my wife is a stored record. The word people reach for is memory, and then they picture the showy kind, the fellow at the reunion who can still name the starting five. Hers is a running file of particulars, laid down without effort and consulted without announcement, so that whatever is in front of her arrives already sitting beside every other time a thing like it happened. There is no moment where she decides to check. It comes in checked, the way a bad splice arrives in my ear whether or not I am listening for one.
The one under it takes the file and puts it out where other people can use it. Dates on lids. Charts initialed and filed. The step after this step, said out loud, whether or not you asked.
I got about a third of the way down the page marking laughs and then I quit marking.
The propane invoices went first, at the board, with somebody’s spot playing. She had a number off a delivery in a prior year sitting beside a number off this one, and the two would not line up, and the truck was the only thing in the picture she could get at, so she asked me about the truck. Every question in that kitchen had been about propane. I had spent nineteen years answering a different set.
Then 2009, the phone at ten o’clock, the three sentences. She said the number and the next step and the man’s name, and the reason there was nothing on top of it is that she was not putting anything on top of it, and I had heard the flatness as a verdict on the man, and possibly on me, because a verdict was the only thing I knew how to hear in that register.
Then Tobin’s paper, which I am not over. He was seventeen and there was a form for a shop program that wanted a parent to certify hours he had not finished yet, and everybody signed those, and she would not, and he did not go. I have called that stubbornness in front of him. It was on the page in front of me in a sentence about not certifying what you have not verified, and I sat there with a pencil in my hand and understood that the thing I had called stubbornness in front of my son is the same thing that makes her employable. I also still say she was wrong about the form.
The page also had a number on it I went and looked up later, because numbers are the part of any script I check. There is a national sample from 1998, three thousand and nine people, and in it this particular four came out to about one man in six and about one woman in fifteen. The type most people out here have ready for a careful, quiet woman, the one who does everything for everybody and is warm the whole time she does it, runs closer to one woman in five. That last part is me talking and not the page: for every woman in this county built like my wife there are getting on for three of the other kind, and when a room goes looking for a picture of a careful woman it has three times as many of those to reach for.
Lowell came in and asked what I had.
I said personnel stuff, and put it in the drawer with the carts.
And then, for about a year, I had better material than I had ever had in my life. That is the true sentence in this and I am not going to dress it. The bit got sharper because now it had a mechanism under it. I did a tag about her running a rotation on me. I did one about being on a shelf with a date written on me in pencil, and it went over so well I moved it up to the six-fifty slot.
The Open House
The plant turned seventy-five in the spring of 2017 and Curt Ostergaard wanted a day of it. Tours, samples on toothpicks, the old photographs out of the office in frames on a table. He wanted us there live from ten to noon. They put me at a card table inside the door by the cheese case and ran the station through the overhead in the whole building so the people on the tour could hear it.
It was a good crowd. I did the county board chairman, I did a kid from the high school ag class, I did Curt twice because Curt is free.
A little after ten-thirty a tanker came onto the yard and stopped short of the bay and did not unload, and after a while I understood I was watching my wife work, and that I had never done that.
She came out in a hairnet with a sampler in her hand and went up the ladder on the side of that truck herself and pulled the sample and went back in with it. Eight or nine minutes. Then she came out through the bay door with a clipboard, and Curt met her halfway across the concrete, and the two of them stood there in front of a couple hundred people eating cheese on toothpicks, and then Curt went and got Alvie Nybo out of the crowd by the elbow.
I was thirty feet away with a live microphone and I could hear all of it.
“It’s yours,” she said. “It screened positive and I ran it twice.”
Alvie said something I did not catch.
“They’ll pull a sample at every farm on the route inside of seventy-two hours. Yours’ll come back positive and the others won’t.” She turned the clipboard around so he could see it. “It’s the whole load, Alvie. Fifty thousand pounds. And the hauling, and the dumping.”
“That’s not” he said. “Nobody treated a cow on my place.”
“Somebody did.” She said it the same way she had said the pounds. “Get your hired man on the phone before you leave here. You’ve got a treated cow going back in the tank, and until your own tank tests clean they can’t pick you up, so the sooner you find her the shorter this is.”
Alvie’s boy was standing about four feet off with a paper cup in his hand.
“I’ve got the number for the state man in Bellwood,” she said. “I’ll write it down for you. And it’s me that called it, so if you want to be sore at somebody, it’s me, not Curt and not the plant.”
Alvie stood there. Then he said, “Write it down, then,” and she did, and tore the sheet off and gave it to him.
I had a minute and forty of dead air coming at me and a room that had gone quiet and was looking for what to do with its face.
So I leaned in and said, folks, if any of you have ever wondered what it is like at my house, you have just had the tour. That is my wife. She runs this house like I’m one of her audits, and I want you all to know I have been on a hold since 1997.
It went through the overhead into every corner of that building and it got the laugh. It got a good one, the kind that comes up off the floor, and somebody clapped, and Curt Ostergaard laughed with his head back.
Glenna was crossing the concrete with the clipboard against her chest. She did not look over. Her hand stopped moving on the edge of the clipboard and then it started again, and she went in through the bay door, and the door came down behind her.
Alvie’s boy set his cup on the table by the framed photographs and went out to the truck.
At noon I broke it down and coiled the cord, and she came by on her way back from the office and asked me if I needed the extension moved before the men put the tables away.
Twenty Below
Here is what I did with the next year, and I have never written it down before, and it does not improve on acquaintance.
I decided I was the one who had been wronged.
I had it worked out inside of two days. She had known there was a positive load coming into that yard on the day of an open house and had not walked twenty steps to tell me. She had let me sit there in front of a live microphone with less information than the hired man. That was my case. I built it in the truck, the way you build anything, out loud, and by the end of the week I could deliver it.
I ran it at her on a night when she was tired. She said the sample had been on her bench nine minutes and there had not been a thing to tell anybody until it ran twice. I said that was convenient. She said it was not convenient, it was the procedure. I have had this one in my mouth for nine years, so here it is the way it went out. I said, “You’ve got a procedure for everything except me.”
She looked at me for a while and then she went upstairs.
Three weeks after that I did the bit again on purpose. Not the old one. I built a new one and I put the plant in it. I said the trouble with living with a woman off the make floor is she runs a swab program on her own kitchen, and I said I had come up positive twice this year, and I said the only thing they had not done to me yet was hold me and bury me.
That is on a log with my initials next to it.
What that did: a hauler said the swab line to her at the loading dock, twice, the second time in front of two men from the state. Curt had to ask her whether she was going to be able to hold a line with producers now that there was a joke going around about her holding lines. She told me about the second one and not the first. I found out about the first from Lucille Fjelstad, of all people, who heard it from her nephew and told me at the counter of the hardware store while I was buying a hinge, and who did not know she was telling me anything.
We went about six months in that house without either of us saying an unkind word, which I would not recommend. She did the wash on the day she does the wash. I did mornings and slept afternoons. Tobin was out of the house by then and I quit calling him for a while because he asks direct questions.
In the second week of that winter it went to twenty below with wind, and the plant lost power at two in the morning when a limb came down on the line out by County M, and her phone went off, and she was up and dressed in six minutes.
I lay there and listened to her scrape the windshield again. That is a sound I have heard several thousand times in my life. Then I heard her stop, and stand there, and I knew exactly what she was doing, which is she was looking at the truck and deciding whether it would start.
I did not get up. I want it understood that I was awake for all of it, and that the thing I was doing, lying there, was waiting to be asked.
The Drain in the Make Room
Lavonne Prasch ran that lab for twenty-six years before Glenna and she trained her out of a three-ring binder she wrote herself. She is eighty-one now and she has never once let a pan of hers leave her house without coming back.
In the fall of 2018 she brought back a roaster she had carried off from a funeral lunch two years earlier, and she stayed for coffee and told me the church had gotten new hymnals nobody wanted and where the money for them had come from and what she thought about that, and then she asked me how Glenna was holding up after the year she’d had, and I said fine, because I did not know what she was talking about and did not want to say so.
Lavonne is patient the way she was patient with me about her name. She waited me out and then she told me.
In the late winter of 2017 a drain in the make room came back positive for a bug they swab for, the one that lives in wet corners in food plants and can sit in a building for years without a single person getting sick from it, and the fact of the positive is not itself a disaster. What is a disaster is the same drain coming back positive again. Which it did. The same drain twice means the thing lives in your building. You go out from that spot in a star and swab everything within reach, and you hold product, and you tell the state, and the state comes.
They held eight days of product. They tore out and replaced a section of floor. The swabbing went on for months, and my wife went into that building every morning of it knowing that a bad result on a food contact surface, one, could put ninety-some people out of work in a town of nineteen hundred and put the plant’s name in the paper in a way a plant does not come back from.
The drain was hers, is the other part. It was not on anybody’s required list. She had added it two years before because of where the floor pitched, and had swabbed it every month since, and had a paper record going back two years that let them draw a line around the problem instead of around the whole plant.
None of that was in the paper. Nothing was in the paper. That is the outcome.
“She wasn’t keeping you out of it,” Lavonne said. “She was keeping it off you. You’d have had to sit on it, Wendell, and you’d have had to sit on it at ten of seven every morning.”
I have had eight years with that sentence and I still say she should have told me. I have said so to Glenna and she does not argue it, which is not the same as agreeing. It is one of two or three things in this house that never got settled, and I have quit expecting them to.
I should say what the packet was worth, since I have been quoting a stapled handout for ten years. It gave me words for a set of habits that are really there and really do come as a set. It also has limits its readers do not carry around with them. The one piece of retest evidence anybody has is a single four-week window, four hundred-odd people, and about two out of three came back with the identical four letters, better than one in four moved a letter. The scales underneath it hold steadier than the labels sitting on top of them, which is my own reason for trusting the words on that page further than the box they came in. And the page was written about a category. There is nobody in this county who is a category. The page never claimed there was; the people quoting it did, and I quoted it into a microphone.
The letters do not cover her, either, and I would rather say so than be caught pretending. She cries at the school concert, every year, at children she is not related to, and I have watched her get news at a kitchen table that would take the legs out from under most people and go put the kettle on. In the fall of 2004 she took three hundred and forty dollars out in cash on a day I can name, this from a woman who can produce a receipt for a garden hose she bought when Tobin was in grade school. I asked. She said it was handled. It has been twenty-two years and it is still handled.
There is a thing I have to put in here and it is not an aside.
Milo Sipe farmed out past the ridge and started giving me the audit line back around 2010, his wife’s version of it. Elverna keeps a file on me. Elverna’s got me on a schedule. He did it well, and I fed him. I would work something up on the air and he would have it at the hardware store counter by the weekend and hand it back improved, and for six years the two of us had a running thing that other men in there enjoyed.
Elverna Sipe did not drive. She had not driven since before I knew either of them and the reason given, by him, at the counter, was that she was particular about the car.
Their daughter told somebody in 2019 and it went the way things go, and I heard it from three directions in a week. Every rule in that house was his. The schedule was his. The file was his and it was on her. He had taken the funniest thing I owned and put it on backwards, and it fit, and for six years nobody out here looked at it twice, me least of all, and it was my tooling.
So I cannot give you a way to tell from outside, because I am the outside and I got it wrong for six years in a building I stood in every week.
What I have got is one thing to look at from inside, and it is not the number of rules. It is what happens to a person who says a rule is costing them. Tobin did that twice about her rules for his truck, and both times the rule came back a week later in a shape he had not asked for and could live with. If saying it costs you, and then costs you again, and the costing is what the rules are for, then what you have got is not somebody’s temperament and nothing on that stapled page comes anywhere near it. Put the phone down and ask somebody who is not in the county.
I have been on the wrong side of the cheap version of this. It is why I bother.
What I do now is small and I will not oversell it. I tell her times. I come in and say I will be back at two, and if it is going to be three I call at one-thirty and say three, and I give her the number instead of the story about why. It took me most of my life to work out what the questions were ever for. She was trying to get one thing to sit still so she could set the next one down beside it. Accounting for myself never entered into it.
The other night I sat down across from her after supper with the fair schedule and gave her the whole week. The hall at nine. The two remotes. Out of the second one by three, home by half past.
She wrote it on the pad by the phone and put the pen back in the jar, and then she sat there a minute with her hands flat on the table the way she does when a thing is finished.
“Take the other truck,” she said. “That one’s due.”
I have my reading of that and I have had it for years and I have never asked her whether it is right. The truck was due. That part I checked.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.