So, yes, on Ginny’s wedding day—my own marriage falling apart, my ass mottled black and blue and purple, my body straining east as though I might somehow reach Lucius by the power of my want alone—yes, my patience faltered. Linda and I stood over Ginny in the church bathroom stalls and held her dress like puppeteers as Ginny painstakingly unwrapped the plastic shrink-wrap from around that tiny white pellet.
I nearly dropped my side of the skirts when the tornado siren went off, and a woman from the choir came crashing into the bathroom to hustle us all down to the basement immediately. Nothing should have been a surprise at that point. I should have thought: Of course, a tornado. Only fitting that my daughter be married in a tempest. “Is there really a tornado?” I asked, but the choir soloist just looked at me as if in disbelief that I’d question the authority of an alarm system. I couldn’t stand her from moment one; I have so little patience with the exudingly, performatively religious—Jews, Christians, the rest of them alike—and she was so fervent and alarmist, white robes proclaiming her churchiness. She was a big help, though, getting Ginny wet paper towels to clean her hands. And then she actually crawled into the stall to hold up Ginny’s dress from behind while she exited. I looked down from my toilet perch as they emerged, the soloist holding Ginny’s train above her own head, the pair of them stepping like a two-man sheep costume in Our Lady of the Prairie’s Christmas pageant.
Outside the ladies’ room we met a junior pastor–person who was waiting to lead us to a stairway at the end of the hall. Over the door, on the EXIT sign, a Magic Marker S had been snaked between the I and the T, so it read EXIST. It felt like we were following a trail of clues. The junior pastor was straight out of Tolkien or The Wizard of Oz, an appropriate guide into Our Lady’s bomb shelter—the catacombs, he called it.
“There’s not really a tornado, is there?” I asked.
He looked at me, his enormous black robe billowing as if it concealed a pair of flapping wings, and said ominously, “Funnels have been spotted.” And I have learned enough in nearly three decades as an Iowan to know that when someone sees a funnel, you don’t ask questions, you just get underground, even if you’re led there by someone who looks like he might have donned his cloak one year for Mardi Gras, been mistaken for a church officiant, and been playing along ever since. He struck me as eccentrically out of place even for a Unitarian clergyman, and when he ushered us through the door marked by that symbol—the atomic bumblebee pinwheel, those three sinister triangles—I had the sensation of being led into a very hip, underground S&M club in some dark, foreboding eastern European city. Which made me think, too, of air raids, and wreckage. Of destruction. Of Michael, and Dresden. It’s where my grandparents were from in Germany—before the firebombing. They got out before the war, but they lost people—friends, family—lost the site of all their memories.
On the landing, Linda stopped, peering down the dusty stairs, and said, “We’re going to fuck the shit out of these dresses in there.” When she heard how loud her declaration resounded in the echo chamber stairwell, she said, “Oh, fuck,” then stripped down to her slip and passed it back up the stairs behind her. “Hang it on the banister or something,” she called, then took Ginny by the shoulders, spun her around, skirts and train twisting her up like a stowed umbrella, and unfastened thirty-six pea-sized satin-covered buttons from their loopings as if they were so many snaps. Ginny came free. The soprano soloist valiantly held the train off the floor and swooped up the gown as it fell from Ginny’s shoulders. She passed it up to hang on the rail beside Linda’s. Their bouquets sat on a step like a pair of elaborately coifed and obedient lapdogs.
When we got to the bottom of the stairs, where a ramp extended the rest of the way into the underground bomb shelter, everyone cheered, and it almost felt like a surprise party, like they’d planned this all along. Ginny and Linda made it off the ramp and into the fray quickly, but the soloist and I got stuck merging into the crowd as people tried to settle on wooden benches along the walls. It was like a city bus at rush hour. A large part of the problem was that Bernadette had commandeered the church’s standby wheelchair and was blocking traffic. She was likely as uncomfortable as I was to be in a church—if only Bernadette had admitted her distrust of organized religion, she and I might have had something over which to bond during our long, unpleasant relationship. She believed fraternal organizations to be the breeding grounds of fascism, and her suspicions extended to leagues (bowling, Little, Junior), lodges (Elk, Moose), clubs (Lions, book, country, golf, baseball-card-trading), and parties (Tupperware and political alike), as well as to VFWs, Jaycees, and Freemasons. When Michael joined the Boy Scouts, he did so without his mother’s consent or knowledge; she’d forbidden it. Yet Bernadette refused to cop to her antagonism toward houses of worship, and left me isolated in the scorn I knew she held, too. That day in the church bomb shelter, she had amassed—on her lap, buffered by the arms of the wheelchair—an impressive collection of handbags. She’d either been designated the wedding’s unofficial mobile bag-checker or was carrying out a strangely overt purse-snatching scheme—there’s little I’d put past her. If I’d noticed Bernadette was without her usual lapful of needlework, I would have chalked it up to the occasion, though I’d’ve been unsurprised if she stitched straight through the wedding, a war widow ceaselessly at her piecework, ceremony notwithstanding.
Linda maneuvered herself and Ginny to the far end of the bunker where a child’s playpen sat, blue-gray and ocher with mildew, so thickly draped in cobwebs it looked like a silver angora nest. The Fisher-Price kitchen set beside the playpen was like one Ginny had as a kid—it might’ve been hers, a Goodwill donation once she’d outgrown it. A slab of plastic sirloin lay thawing on the counter. Randall squatted on the floor beside a filthy Sit ’n Spin.
Silas cut a beeline to Ginny’s side. Watching him shed his tuxedo jacket and ease it over Ginny’s shoulders was, for me, more beautiful than any vows before a minister. In a matter of minutes, Ginny went from semitraditionally attired bride to pop queen circa 1984: white satin bustier, crinoline tutu, oversized topcoat with wilting pink boutonniere. She was glorious. Who’s that girl? That’s my girl.
Noticing Ginny kneading her cramped abdomen, Linda procured her some Advil, but Ginny had nothing to wash them down with until Randall came to the rescue. From his seat on the ancient Sit’n Spin, he reached a stealthy hand into the front panel of his jacket, removed a sizable flask, and handed it to Ginny. She thoughtfully unscrewed the cap and took a whiff of its contents, then swigged. I assumed it was water, the flask merely an affectation. Randall liked messing with people. I can imagine him whipping it out at NA meetings just to turn heads, swallowing dramatically with a shimmy and sigh, as if feeling the burn slide down his throat.
Ginny swallowed hard, gave a shudder, shook herself, and cleared her throat loudly. Silas thumped her on the back. He has such an intuitive sense of Ginny’s needs, uncannily perceptive, and I don’t know if it’s a product of his love for her or some genetically indicated, healing Amishness, but he cares for Ginny better than I ever did. I suppose he is caring for her post-brain-zapping, and I was contending with her before that miracle, but still, he’s good for her in ways I never was. He’s certainly a better partner to her than I’ve been to her father. When I feel strong, I have rationalizations for these things and am able to understand my life as something other than the collected ways in which I’ve failed the people I love. But in my weaker moments—well, we all know well enough what the weak moments are like.
Randall accepted the return of his flask, took a swig himself, and lifted it in a toast. He spoke in the voice of a bingo announcer, so loud and commanding it made people turn: “Keep off the junk!” He clinked an imaginary drinking partner, then stowed the flask and said, in that same thundering bass, “Sure you don’t want me to marry you-all right now?” Silas looked mildly alarmed. I don’t think Ginny was listening. She stood there smiling a sated-chipmunk smile, head swaying lazily as
if some sultry song were being piped into her ears alone.
Meanwhile, Eula Yoder had, with typical foresight, brought a roll of heavy-duty trash bags down to the fallout shelter and was distributing them as makeshift seat covers, picnic blankets, and protective garb. The two little Bontrager flower girls opened the seams on one bag and sat cross-legged, facing each other, singing, “Oh little playmate, come out and play with me . . . ,” clapping and snapping and slapping their palms in choreographed ritual. Joan Silberstein had simply stuck her young Joshua into a trash bag feet-first and held him on her lap, his head and arms poking out the top like carrot greens too tall for the grocery sack. For herself, Eula fashioned a trash bag jumpsuit: a neck slit and arm holes in one made a smock, leg holes turned another into a pair of bloomers, the whole ensemble cinched at the waist with a Hefty belt. She’d become a walking garment bag for the bridesmaid’s dress she still wore. And, over it all, Oren slept in a quilted baby sling Eula wore as proudly as a pageant sash. I hoped she wouldn’t try nursing him under a Hefty privacy poncho—that seemed inadvisable.
The crowd in the fallout shelter clustered most densely by a kerosene lantern someone’d managed to light, and they strained like seedlings there toward a banana-yellow shower radio from which the emergency weather broadcast emanated weakly amid bursts of static. I made my way over, for Michael was among them, and it wasn’t until I arrived at his side that I realized I had no reason, outside habit, to gravitate toward him. He stood beside the hired flutist, who seemed unaware that he was the father of the bride. “Is it the whole state?” she asked, and Michael said, “Sounds like something touched down over in Story City, and now they’re worried about the ones coming up from south-central—Appanoose, Wapello, Keokuk counties—up between Ottumwa and Oskaloosa. There was a hit at Indian Hill Community College. Sounds like it’s headed for us, through Joetown, Prairie, Frytown, up through River City, then northwest—Morse, Mount Vernon, Mechanicsville . . .” He grew self-conscious then, realizing his response was out of proportion to the question, but what I heard in this exchange between Michael and the flutist lifted my mood immeasurably. I imagined Michael talking this way to other young women, telling them the sad story of the disintegration of his marriage, provoking reactions of sympathy and desire. Though he was certainly in great tumult, I looked at my husband there in that basement and thought: Michael’s going to be fine. Once a professor who marries his grad student, always a professor capable of marrying a grad student.
The flutist was very polite. “Did they say until when?”
Michael checked his watch. “Four-forty-five.”
“What time is it now?”
Michael checked his watch again, as though it might have changed. “Four-fifteen.” He seemed grateful for the weather reports—maybe for the tornado itself, something outside us to focus on, to track and watch and fear.
The flutist—who, we learned, also played jazz clarinet in a Music Department quintet—said, “It’s just that I’m supposed to play another gig after this. Up at the riverboats in Dubuque.”
“Oh,” said my husband.
I spoke then. “I don’t know a riverboat’s where you want to be in a tornado,” and both the flutist and Michael turned, surprised; they hadn’t known I was there, or realized I was me.
Nearby, the Bontrager girls on their trash bag flying carpet abandoned the clapping game for a song, each seeming to think she knew the words better than the other. They chirped and twittered, coming together on one repeated line, their voices so high and slight they sounded like they were imitating little girls singing: “. . . part of your world. La la la la la, part of your world . . .”
The flutist, beside Michael, opened her mouth as if to speak, but instead began to sing along. She did know the words, and the Bontrager girls heard and followed her lead, three voices echoing sweetly through the basement chamber. The girls jumped to their feet, bouncing with excitement, the littler one crying “Ariel!,” the name bursting from her as if in a flash of religious ecstasy. The flutist paused, held up a finger—wait—and went to look for something on a bench. From a black case she removed the pieces of her flute and returned, assembling it. She played a few warm-up notes, and the chamber quieted, and I thought of a story I heard often as a child. It came to my grandparents from one of our “European cousins,” who were not actual cousins but Jews who’d survived the war and landed in Berkeley, to be taken in by my grandparents’ community there. In the story, a concert is being given in a large city—Paris, maybe, or London—a city with a metro system. When an air raid begins, the audience exits the concert hall and crowds into an underground station for protection. A few of the performing musicians, who could no more leave behind their instruments than they would their children, carry violins and oboes and piccolos into the shelter, where they play for the people while bombs fall overhead. The story always sounded to me like a scene from a movie, as if it couldn’t have really happened. Like the band playing on while the Titanic sank—they didn’t, really, did they? But in Our Lady’s bomb shelter that day, the flutist began, without fanfare, to play the Little Mermaid’s song. The Bontrager girls fairly shook with excitement, trying to figure out where to join in. I once sat on the thesis committee for a women’s studies major’s ardent exposé of sexism in animated movie musicals, and was earnestly instructed in the antifeminist offense of The Little Mermaid. Still, I can’t help my affection for Ariel’s song—far more appropriate than the soprano-soloed, flute-accompanied “Let Hope and Sorrow Now Unite,” whosever idea that was.
It dawned on me then that Reverend Hrkstra, the officiating minister, was not among us. I inquired, but no one, including our soprano savior from the bathroom, recalled seeing him before the sirens. I sought out the junior pastor. “Nope,” he said, “the Reverend hadn’t arrived yet when we came down here.” Alarm overtook his face. “Oh, I hope he wasn’t on the road. He was driving from a wedding in What Cheer . . . that’s the path of the storm! Oh my!” He looked like he wanted to run, to check on his boss—friend, lover, whatever his relation to that other man of the cloth—but there was nothing to be done. Such a terrible feeling of impotence, that. I stood with him awhile, listening as storm reports and severe warnings repeated until it seemed we were surrounded, checkmated by twisters. After a time I excused myself to look for Eula, whom I found behind the cobwebbed playpen in a circle on the floor with the flutist and the Bontrager girls. Eula had joined in their song, and she, too, appeared to know all the words.
The weather radio issued several loud burps of static, then lost reception, buzzing until someone thought to turn the volume down. Thunder exploded with such violence it seemed to come from the very earth around us. There were gasps, a hush, the muffled cries of a child. And then the flutist resumed her song. Across the basement, Silas was talking with Angus—a Yoder cousin, I think, less strictly Amish and more Mennonite-ish—who’d gone up to look out the porthole in the emergency exit door at ground level. “Can’t see a foot outside,” he reported. “I was afraid to get too close to the glass, case it blew. Felt like I was in a submarine!” He thrilled at the image, but then dark shame took over his face: sinful to fantasize oneself into a submarine. “You know,” he qualified, “what with the water against the window.”
The radio didn’t get a signal for another fifteen minutes, but once it did, Michael, our unofficial correspondent, announced the National Weather Service’s clearance to emerge. I was one of the last up to ground level, since I was in the depths of the shelter with Eula and the Bontrager girls, and the poor flutist, who grew increasingly agitated about her gig in Dubuque, which was also apparently some sort of audition. For a good five minutes before we actually got out of the building, she had cell reception and got word that Dubuque hadn’t been under so much as a tornado watch. Everything was on for the show. When we emerged, blinking in the daylight, our flutist was nearly apoplectic. She turned to me pleadingly.
“Go, go,” I said, “go, and good luck. Who k
nows when we’ll get on with things here. You go. Drive carefully.” You’d think I’d granted the girl a stay of execution. She took off for her car, which appeared undamaged. A beaver dam of debris blocked the exit, but without much hesitation she drove straight through a decimated flower bed. I wonder if she made it to the gig.
The rest of us remained to bear witness to the destruction. The iris bed, marked by the fleeing flutist’s tire tracks, was now a patch of crushed green stems and torn petals, purples and yellows quivering in the wind. Petals were everywhere—flecks of color against the asphalt, oddly beautiful, like when scarlet larkspur and hillside monkeyflower came up from the char after a California wildfire, or the way they say fireweed emerged in Europe’s bomb-blackened fields after the war. On one side of the lot, crushed beneath a willow that had earlier offered a parking spot of plentiful shade, lay what remained of Randall’s poor old Chevy Caravan, flower petals wet-slapped and fluttering against its broken windows and mangled sliding door.
People inspected their cars for damage, grabbing each other—My God! Look at that!—pointing like it was a competition. They talked on cell phones. The junior pastor was speaking in great animated bursts, seemingly to no one, as he paced the rectory pathway, impatient as a stock trader. He spotted me and strode fast in my direction, and I could see then that he wore a cell phone headset. “Reverend Hrkstra’s fine,” he called, and I dramatized a posture of great relief at the news. With a predatory intensity one doesn’t usually associate with a man of the church, the junior pastor came at me. “The Reverend was on 22, coming east from What Cheer.” He was as excited as a gossiping middle schooler. “They warned him—the folks at the other wedding—warned him against leaving. He promised he’d keep the radio on and pull over if it got dangerous. He was about to Keswick when he heard it was coming up near 149 from Sigourney toward Webster, and then he saw signs for 149, and then they said anyone driving 22 between Thornburg and Riverside, pull over and get in a ditch. So he did! He saw it pass! The sky turned purple, then green, then purple again, and black. He said he never saw anything like it in his life—and Reverend Hrkstra’s no young man. It was God, he said, touching down in his—”
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