Silas, though tired, looked buoyant with anticipation. Twenty-two years old: today, married; tomorrow, his first airplane ride.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” I said again, and they nodded, beaming. I drew them to me again—so mortifyingly similar to the way my grandparents used to envelop me in their arms and refuse to let me go. I used to think it was an affectation of old Jews—Jews of a certain age who’d lost so much and held histrionically tight to whatever they loved—but I understand now that it’s more universal than that, a fundamentally irresistible desire, a need to hold as close as humanly possible those who are dear to you. When we’re forced to pull away, the loss feels crushing, but also strangely buoying. Love is so bizarrely nourished by the desolate emptiness of separation, so perversely fortified by longing.
Rather than ferry Bernadette back to East Prairie, we brought her home with us again. I was trying to hold on to the joy of the barn and Silas and Ginny, but Bernadette was a buzz kill. Michael parked and she let him help her from the back seat as if she were docile and helpless; she cultivated the myth of her own infirmity the way some people build tax shelters.
The tornado had done little damage in our university neighborhood. If not for the digital blinking 12:00 on the microwave, we might have been unaware of the afternoon’s power outage. Michael made his way through the house resetting clocks, Bernadette went down to her basement, and I picked up the phone to hear the day’s voicemail: one message from East Prairie Elder Living informing us that their utilities building had taken a direct hit in the storm. Damages were extensive; evacuations had been necessary. It might be weeks before the community was fully functional and safe for residents to return. They were “so relieved” Bernadette had been with us, said the administrator diplomatically on behalf of the East Prairie “family”—all of whom were undoubtedly thanking every star in the damn sky that Bernadette Maakestad was not, just then, their burden to bear. East Prairie hoped we were all safe, that the wedding hadn’t been impeded by the weather, and they suggested we come by the next day to collect whatever Bernadette might need from her room.
Michael passed by and I called to him. He looked exhausted, like he’d aged since my return. I held out the phone and shook my head, amazed. “East Prairie.” I pressed Replay and put the receiver to Michael’s ear. He took it without touching my hand, and I left the room.
In the kitchen I put the kettle on for a cup of tea, and when the exterior water burned off and stopped hissing I heard Michael’s voice and leaned back into the dining room to see what he needed, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was on the phone, and I knew by his tone—devoted, and crushable—that it was Ginny. Michael’s love for her is defenseless ardor. “We need to allot . . . what?” he was saying. “Six hours? We don’t know how the roads’ll be . . . The flight’s four-thirty-five? Two hours for international? So eight-thirty. I’ll come after breakfast. Okay, Gin. No—you’re welcome. Of course.” He hung up, already shaking his head. “I’m assuming you probably don’t want to drive them to O’Hare tomorrow?”
“What? Why?”
“Storm damage at the airport here. Everything’s grounded until at least the day after tomorrow, but if they can get to Chicago, they can still catch the connection to Paris. But if I’m driving them, you’ll have to take my mother to East Prairie for her things.”
I slept in Ginny’s room that night, in my dress. When I woke in the morning Michael’d already left. I changed my clothes, went downstairs, made coffee, and chugged it down when I heard Bernadette ascending from her dungeon. When she was settled in the Volvo’s passenger seat, I tuned the radio to the infernal, chattering-white-noise station she loves, drove at exactly the speed limit, refrained from flipping off the barn on Route 26 with the two-story W for Bush painted on it, and nodded “Mmm-hmm” in an attempt at polite acknowledgment as Bernadette read road signs and advertisements aloud: “Get your MBA in just eight weeks,” “Stumps grinded 358-1926,” “Life Is Fragile—Handle with Prayer,” “Cherry Juice, Tue 1–3,” “Pray for Bob.” She read without apparent expectation of response; I doubt she could hear much in a moving car anyway. Bernadette had hearing problems, among various other ailments—arthritis, high blood pressure—for which she took a number of medications. I never fully knew the details of her health; decent people, apparently, did not talk of such things. Bernadette was ever intent on informing me of the way in which decent people conducted their lives. For how could I possibly know what decent people did? Like so many of the churchly Americans Bernadette distrusted, she, too, was superficially decent and fundamentally dishonest. She claimed, for instance, to be Midwestern, but anyone who ever heard her speak could tell her accent was decidedly foreign to the heartland, if it was from this land at all. In the years I knew Bernadette she had, at various times, referred obliquely to her past in Iowa, Ohio, and Idaho, all of which sounded the same to her. Any attempt I made to press for clarification was met with annoyance and scorn, as if I’d rudely corrected her grammar. Lay, lie, Iowa, Idaho, who cares? I don’t know which Michael would corroborate, since he had never in his life simply demanded to know where in hell his mother was really from. Ohio—or Idaho, or Iowa—she said, and he accepted it, conflicting evidence be damned. The woman sounded more foreign than my immigrant bubbie and zadie. Twenty-six years married to Bernadette’s son, a number of those in which we all worked for the same university department, and here’s what I knew: Her “ancestors” were “from Europe.” Michael’s father, her late husband, was supposedly killed toward the end of the Second World War when Michael was a few months old. The young widow was so deeply traumatized she never spoke of him again. And I have tried to empathize, tried to imagine a man she loved so completely and so singularly that, when he died, the only way she could keep on was to willfully eradicate all memory of him. I’ve also imagined it could have been hatred, not love, that kept Bernadette from the memory of her husband. Or something more complicated and gray than love or hate. Or maybe the whole damn thing’s a lie, and the less she talked about it, the less she risked getting caught. Michael must have learned very early that one did not curry favor with Bernadette by asking questions, and his need for favor trumped his curiosity. He’d grown, in turn, to be ferociously defensive of his mother’s privacy. He had never seen a photograph of his own father; Bernadette burned them, Michael told me, upon news of his death.
“How odd,” I had commented.
“It’s not odd,” Michael snapped. “She was mad with grief. She had an infant to care for. What good would photos do her? She had to move on.”
This was an explanation my husband had likely spent his entire childhood constructing, an explanation that enabled him to get on with his life, and it was not a story I felt I had a right to demolish. There are, of course, things one lets slide in a marriage. My inquiries into Michael’s family history were met by such an absolute black hole that at some point I stopped trying, not for lack of interest, but out of frustration and fruitlessness. We had other things to deal with. We drifted into a kind of complacency, an acceptance of The Way Things Are. I was, up until that day, guilty of never having simply asked my mother-in-law outright to explain the origin of her accent. It had always sounded French to me. When Ginny was a child, she shortened “Grandma Maakestad” to “Grandma Ma,” which sounded like “Grandmama,” which sounds French, especially in Bernadette’s voice. This was all my own projection. French is the only foreign language I know. My forebears were German and Russian Jewish immigrants who spoke nothing but English in the home, embraced their own acculturation with the zeal of converts, and raised American-born children, my own parents: progressive Californians, “foodies” before the term was coined, unrepentant and unapologetic Francophiles.
As Bernadette and I drove toward East Prairie the morning after the tornado, with the town and my marriage to her son in shambles, I felt a little like a looter. I said, “Maybe while we’re there today, you can find your family album, the one you mentioned? For
the wedding gift I’m having made for Ginny and Silas?”
Bernadette only sniffed ostentatiously.
Months earlier, before I left for my semester in Ohio, I saw something at a crafts show in Cedar Rapids: an artist’s rendering of a couple’s personalized family trees, coming together and growing entwined. I liked the thought of giving them something that contained a kind of homage to Orah and Obadiah. And my idea had practical applications as well: if Ginny and Silas decided to have children, they’d need to know what sorts of screenings their genetic union might necessitate. I was determined to get the information out of Bernadette somehow. I’d contacted the artist, and had been trying to track down and compile the requisite ancestry to fill in the tree’s branches. Bernadette had hemmed and hawed at my queries and led me down a series of false paths to dead ends. Michael stood firmly against bringing up anything related to his dead father; it was against his express wishes that I’d asked Bernadette if she had any family photographs. If I couldn’t get names, the tree artist said she could do something with photo-collage, so I’d inquired, half expecting Bernadette would claim that, like the Yoders, her family was Amish, and that’s why she had no photos. Instead she surprised me by referring to an album “packed away somewhere.” So she hadn’t burned everyone’s pictures. She did keep photos of us—Michael, Ginny, and me—in frames in her room at East Prairie, though she probably tolerated my face in those shots with her beloved son and granddaughter the way she tolerated my actual presence: grudgingly, and with unconcealed displeasure. I always imagined that, if Michael and I split up, she’d relish X-ACTOing me out or sticking something over my face—an Easter Seal, a Chiquita banana sticker. That’s not my daughter-in-law, that’s just PLU #4011.
Tornado damage out by East Prairie was far worse than in River City. The funnel had skipped across the state, intermittently making land and blowing apart whatever it touched. The landscape looked like a targeted-missile strike zone: one house standing as though painters had just brushed on the last coat of trim, the next a pile of splinters, oven door wrapped around a tree branch forty feet off, bathroom toilet a throne in the rubble, a wicker basket of potpourri perched on the tank, fragrant and untouched.
As we neared the nursing home, Bernadette grew agitated. I tried reassuring her, but her anxiety confounded me: she worried who would be in the room as she packed, and where she would store things at our house. “What am I permitted to take?” she asked, as if I were Gestapo.
“Just whatever you’ll need to be away a little while. Clothes, toiletries, your sewing things.” Bernadette sewed the way people chain-smoke, like it was the only thing preventing her from jumping out a window. I should show a little more respect and gratitude: she taught Ginny to sew, and there have been times when the push and pull of thread through fabric may well have kept my daughter from a defenestration of her own. When Bernadette was still at the U, she was ever at work on some costume, something for a show or an outside commission—that war widow doing piecework late at night in her kitchen for a few extra pennies a day. In retirement, she was always sewing something “for charity,” though what she made and for what sort of charity was never clear. I imagined her secreting away her embroidered creations, ironed and folded and tucked in a trunk under lock and key like an illicit trousseau for some imaginary, dreamed elopement. She probably took them out to stroke and finger when no one was around.
At my mention of her sewing things, Bernadette snorted with impatience, waving off her dolt of a daughter-in-law who clearly didn’t understand the intricacies of the situation—of which she had no intention of enlightening me. I didn’t learn until much later about the changes in her medications, the new one for blood pressure interacting badly with the arthritis pills she’d taken for years. Switching arthritis meds had caused her symptoms to flare, the pain and swelling inhibiting her ability to sew. I’d’ve had sympathy if I’d known, but the woman never shared a single thing. I suppose I was never all that receptive an ear. Should I have noticed her hands were not busy? Mea culpa. I was distracted with loving a man five hundred miles away. Mea maxima culpa.
Utilities were still down in East Prairie. The skinny cop directing traffic at the sole stoplight looked more like an Eagle Scout than a law enforcement official. Stores on Main Street were closed—though that may have been a Sunday thing, not the tornado—but generators were powering the nursing home into a kind of slow-motion mayhem. I pulled into the circular drive and stopped the car. Winds had divested the main building of its kitchen and most of the dining room roof, the tables now en plein air, detritus of the evening meal lying in half-eaten waste. As Bernadette checked her face in the visor mirror, I watched a little girl in a pink jogging suit move unsupervised among the tables, gathering goodies in the upturned belly of her sweatshirt. The snapping clasp of Bernadette’s purse I took as my cue to get out of the car, but as I popped my seat belt, I felt her bristle. “You stay here.” She sounded strangely afraid.
“Bernadette, that’s silly. I’m glad to help. There’ll be things to carry.”
In response, she flung off her seat belt, heaved open the door, levered herself out, and slammed it shut while I sat having flashbacks of dropping Ginny at court-mandated shrink sessions. I got out and followed at a safe distance up the walk. Tornado debris had been cleared and piled up like shoveled snow. We checked in at a makeshift reception desk and were led inside by a dark-skinned African orderly with a bouncy stride and mellifluous accent.
Everything was in perfect order in Bernadette’s wing, but our guide informed us that the utilities building had been virtually demolished: no air filtration or climate control. He held open the door to Bernadette’s room. “If I may be of assistance . . . ?” he offered.
“You can go,” Bernadette snapped.
The man bowed away. “I shall be here, in the hall, should you require my aid.”
Bernadette panned the room, pointed to an indestructible rubber plant capable of going years without attention or water, and told me to take it to the car.
“Bernadette, the staff will care for your plants just like always, they’ve said—”
“Phillipa.” She regarded me piteously. “You know you can’t trust these people.”
So I bent down, scooped up the ugly plant, and went out without another word. The orderly stood in the hall text-messaging on a cell phone the size of a Zippo. He looked up as I emerged; the phone whooshed into his pocket. His hands reached for the plant.
“It’s okay. I think I’m banished.” I shrugged. The orderly nodded, his patience luminous, and bowed back against the wall. No East Prairie employee was innocent to the wiles of Mrs. Maakestad. She took everything as a personal slight—the size of her dinner portion, the wattage of a closet bulb, the thoroughness of cleaning services, the scent of the laundry’s detergent—and railed against whomever she decided to blame for the gross injustices she was forced to endure.
Back out on the debris-strewn lawn, the unchaperoned girl in pink had settled herself cross-legged on the underside of a table flipped by the wind, its legs stuck in the air like a dead animal. She was dividing her loot into piles, the way Ginny used to sort her Halloween candy, and looked plumply contented with her bounty of saltine cracker packs, stale dinner rolls, and salad dressing pouches. She had an impressive assortment of tea bags. “Nice haul,” I called over my rubber plant. The girl’s head snapped up. I fought the instinct to set down the pot amid her treasures and make for the car, gun off, leave my mother-in-law to fend for herself.
Walking the hallway back to Bernadette’s room I smelled smoke, and I remember thinking the orderly might be sneaking an unsanctioned cigarette in the post-tornado disorder, and hoping he wouldn’t get sniffed out by someone in authority. Was he in the U.S. legally? I didn’t know, and Bush’s Department of Homeland Security would probably make his life miserable regardless. My Nazi mother-in-law is welcome in this glorious country where the government creates any excuse it needs to purge “undesirables.�
�� But this guy, he’s from Africa, you say? Africa’s close to the Middle East, right? He’s probably a terrorist. Lock him up, kick him out, keep America safe. Homeland Security: the SS of a new age.
But the orderly wasn’t in the hall having a smoke. As I approached, I heard his voice coming from inside Bernadette’s room. I sped up, confused and alarmed. The scene into which I stepped came together in pieces. First: the orderly, face wide with incredulity, seized upon me as I entered, begging me to believe him. “Ma’am,” he cried, “your mother has started a fire!”
My first, primal instinct was to correct him—That is not my mother!—but I’d’ve had to outshout Bernadette, who was trying to wrench herself away from the orderly. He had her firmly by the upper arm, and she decried his abuse, demanding release. “I am getting rid of trash—old trash! Is that a crime? It’s a crime to dispose of trash?”
The orderly and I gaped: Bernadette seemed insane. Then something changed in the orderly’s face and he turned to me with newfound horror, asking, “She has the Alzheimer?”
“No, no, no!” Bernadette and I cried in unison, like a demented protest rally. The orderly’s body caved in relief. He let go of her arm, but she kept arguing: “How is it a crime—?”
The source of the smoke was a plastic trash basket in the corner, which I lifted to the window’s light, then found two pens to use as tongs to retrieve the smoldering thing inside. Behind me, Bernadette huffed and stamped like a rankled horse. Feeling like a child playing detective, I closed my pincers. The item they held was an old photograph. Professionally mounted on dense, embossed card stock, from a time when even insignificant things were finished beautifully. Three distinct burns blackened two of the corners and the bottom center where Bernadette must have held her match before the orderly caught a whiff from the hall and wrestled himself between her and the photo she was bent on incinerating. That was the first time I saw the picture of the three little girls, and though seventy or eighty years had probably passed since the portrait was made, I’d wager anything that the snub-nosed kid on the right, peering scornfully into the camera—her sadness and fear nearly palpable—was Bernadette Maakestad.
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 8