Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  Michael’s car pulled up the farm drive, and Michael got out. He saw us on the porch, fixed his eyes on mine, and shook his head emphatically. It took me a second: he was indicating that we were absolutely not going to tell Ginny and Silas anything just then. The car’s rear doors opened simultaneously and I went slack, suddenly inhumanly exhausted. I’d learned this with Ginny: if you go limp, like an abused animal, you can avoid the most brutal injury. I felt my self contract, hiding under layers of meat and organ, muscle, flesh. I shrank to a speck, peering out from inside, my eyes like periscopes into the world. Both rear doors opened, but only Silas emerged, and the blood rushed in my veins again. My first thought: she twisted an ankle at the Eiffel Tower. She’s broken a leg! Sprained a knee! Michael’s alarm was unnecessary—she was fine.

  Silas rounded the car and squatted by Ginny’s open door; I couldn’t see their exchange. Michael went to pop the trunk and retrieve their bags. Then Ginny emerged, levering herself from the back seat like she weighed three hundred pounds. Another wave of relief. She’s carsick! I thought. Or airsick! Heatsick! But everything’s fine. And then I saw her face, the ferocious set of her jaw, the anger pulsing in her eyes, and I knew nothing was fine at all.

  Michael and Silas bore backpacks and shopping bags toward the house. Ginny slung her duffel over her small frame and grabbed up a poster tube—it made her look like some military flag-bearer. A great sigh blew from her lower lip and fluttered the bangs against her forehead as she humped her burdens through the heat. Michael came up the steps. Silas waited for Ginny to catch up, then followed her onto the porch.

  “The travelers return!” Michael’s bravado was so false, Eula physically shrank from it.

  I stood as Ginny leaned in—contorted by her oversized bag, holding the poster tube out of the way—to kiss me. Her lips brushed my cheek, and I had a flash of vain, desperate hope that perhaps her air was just a laconic European affectation she’d picked up, a French suavity. I half expected that, like the French, she’d bend and kiss my other cheek, but she didn’t, just hoisted the bag higher on her shoulder and said, “Hi, Ma. We’re beat. I’ve got to go to bed.” She gave Eula and Oren the same wafty, absent kisses and went in through the screen door.

  Silas stepped forward to greet me, but his burdens precluded an embrace. “Hello, Phillipa.” He’s still awkward calling me by my first name. “It was a long trip,” he said.

  “The flight?” I was suddenly afraid the whole honeymoon had been one long trial.

  “Yes.” He looked confused. “The airplane. People, all so close together.”

  “Was Ginny claustrophobic?” But Ginny likes confinement; it’s infinity that’s trouble.

  “No, no, just a lot of people,” Silas assured, “in one place, for a long time. All the viewpoints and opinions . . . No, we had a wonderful time. I think Ginny wished we could stay.”

  I forced a laugh. “Look, at this point, if Bush gets reelected, or slithers his way into office again somehow, I might seriously consider a move to France myself.”

  Silas looked like he’d bitten something foul. His eyes were glassy. He was exhausted.

  I mustered some motherliness and said, “Silas, sweetheart, get yourself to bed before you keel over. Tell us later. You go now and lie down.”

  Silas nodded wearily, not a spark of resistance, and went into the house.

  Michael set down the bags he was carrying and looked like he might slide down the wall beside them onto the porch floor. But Eula, with Oren in one arm, reached for a folding chair with the other and deftly shook it open beneath Michael. He sank into it obediently.

  “What’s going on?” I sat too, eyes shut against whatever Michael was about to say.

  “Dada!” Oren squawked, intent and purposeful. “Dadadadadadadada!” Loaded syllables for this child, perhaps already figuring out how to taunt his mother. Someday he would want to know who his dada was. I had no idea what Eula planned to say. For now, she only hushed him.

  In his folding chair, Michael sighed heavily. “I think she’s off her meds.”

  My throat filled. I wanted to scream—at Michael. In that moment, it felt like his fault. “Off her meds?” My voice was a croak, a whisper.

  “She says she’s been tapering down, but I don’t know exactly what that means.”

  I was caught in shock, seemingly only able to repeat what was said. “Tapering down?”

  “Tapering down. Lowering her dosage gradually. Or so she says.”

  “I know what it means. You think she’s lying?”

  Michael looked at me piteously. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  It felt like a time warp, like the good years had disappeared and we were back in the horror, doomed to it forever. “Why would she be tapering down?” It sounded like something repugnant. Why would she be eating rat poison? plucking out her own fingernails?

  Michael sighed again, so tragically I wanted to hit him. “To try to get pregnant,” he said.

  “Oh, Jesus.” It was my fault: I’d thought about it, entertained a daydream of Ginny well and stable enough to have a baby. A little Orah or Obadiah. Or Sky, I’d thought, for a girl or a boy—in Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson’s real name is Obediah—but I might be the only one who’d appreciate that. Like an idiot, I’d been naming imaginary grandchildren, not thinking about Ginny’s meds. I’d worried about her ability to conceive, given God-knows-what she did to herself in those years of starving and doping and attempting to die. Stupid. I’d been stupid and starry-eyed. Of course she’d have to come off her meds to host a fetus. I didn’t even know what she was on anymore. I liked imagining that the shock therapy had blasted all the trouble out. I knew she still took drugs, but I realized I had cast these as some kind of buffer medications, boosters, training wheels just in case she got wobbly, but no longer vital to her sanity or survival. I’d been telling myself a lie; Ginny had never been riding that big-girl two-wheeler all by herself.

  Michael was saying something in the worn-out voice I knew so well, the voice of defeat he’d been using since my return from Ohio. “I just spent forty-five minutes listening to her rant about a woman on the plane wearing a W cap.” Michael ran a hand through his hair. Still thick, it would serve him well with the willowy, ambitious grad students who would love him.

  As far as Michael’d been able to understand, on the plane Ginny and Silas were seated in a row with a conservative, Republican, nuc-u-lar Midwestern family: two irritating, video-game-playing kids, a father with a face as white and blank as his polo shirt, and a taut-skinned, aerobicized mother who, for all fifteen hours (including the plane change in Chicago), never once removed her W-emblazoned baseball cap. It stayed on even as she slept, whistling reedy snores through an obviously surgically altered nose. Ginny didn’t sleep the entire flight. She sat in that infernal row, with those infernal people, and seethed, preparing in her mind a righteous speech she lusted to deliver straight into the woman’s pinched, ignorant face. Fifteen hours. When they finally disembarked in Cedar Rapids, Ginny waited at the bottom of the boarding ramp for the family to emerge, Silas hovering behind her like he was the muscle of the operation. Trembling with rage, buzzing with adrenaline, Ginny caught the woman by surprise, stepped right in front of her—the bewildered children and clueless husband bumping to a stop behind her like serfs—and Ginny said she just wanted to thank the woman for wearing that hat and reminding everyone of the astonishing ignorance in this country, and spurring Ginny to work that much harder to make sure that the self-serving, war-mongering, lying, draft-evading, overgrown frat-boy son-of-the-rich didn’t steal himself four more years to grind down and snuff out anything that had ever redeemed this godforsaken country. Then she took Silas’s arm and stalked away, leaving the family there to try to figure out what in hell had just happened.

  Ginny and Silas waited in the car while Michael retrieved their baggage, Ginny sobbing from the endorphin release, the frenetic energy. On the drive to Prairie, relating it all to Michael,
Ginny’d said you couldn’t change the minds of people who didn’t use their minds, just followed blindly their idiot prophet—and all she could hope was that something might register with the kids, something they couldn’t understand now, but might rise, years later, if they ever stopped playing video games and became sentient humans. Something might tug at them, some nagging idea that their parents’ way might not be the only way, and maybe something wasn’t right with the pre-paved path before them. When that crazy woman at the airport long ago said those damning things to their mother . . . what had that all been about, anyway?

  When Michael seemed finished, I drew a breath. “What did you say?”

  He shook his head, minutely, like he was trying to remember something from the far-distant past. “I don’t think I said anything.” His voice quavered. “I kept checking her in the rearview, to see what’s going on in her head. I don’t think I said anything. Silas either. By the time we were off 380, she just stared out the window. This is angrier than I’ve seen her in years, Phil.” And then Michael was looking to me for help. “Not since 2000—” He broke off there so as not to cry, and maybe Eula sensed that, for she stood abruptly, joggled Oren to her shoulder, and looked out over the fields, whether in real or improvised contemplation I don’t know. And Michael and I sat there staring at each other with that dumb helplessness we knew so miserably well.

  When Ginny descended that evening, I’d already poured myself a glass of wine and was out on the porch, where Eula was spooning mashed carrots into Oren’s gummy mouth. Ginny pushed through the screen door wearing the top of a scissored-off full slip and a pair of boxer shorts so enormous and rolled over so many times at the waist they looked like a toddler’s bathing suit with a built-in flotation device. She’d knotted her hair up off her neck, but it was sweaty at her face. Still bleary with sleep, her cheek pillow-dented, eyelids swollen, she went straight for the porch swing, curled her body into a cannonball—arms tight around her legs, chin propped on her knees—and wrapped her skinny toes over the edge of the seat. My daughter, the roosting canary. She said, “I’m sorry,” and Eula and I were both poised to protest any need for apology, but didn’t get the words out before Ginny asked, “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He went home,” I said.

  “Oh.” Disappointed, she looked off toward the fields. When she turned back she said, “Daddy went home, but you’re still here. What’s going on, Ma? I saw your stuff upstairs. This isn’t just about Grandma Ma being at the house, is it? Are you and Daddy separating?”

  It seems moronic to say I was caught off guard, but I’d been so ready to question her, I’d all but forgotten the need to explain myself.

  “Mom.” Her eyes were clearer now, focusing. “Tell me.”

  Michael always said I’d make the worst spy. Torture wasn’t an issue; if someone asked a question, I was powerless to refrain from answering. I said, “We’re spending some time apart.”

  Ginny narrowed her eyes. She did not have to say, You just spent six months apart.

  “Some more time apart,” I added.

  She shook her head. “He looks too wounded to be having an affair.”

  How in hell, I wanted to ask, are you in a place to assess your father’s emotional status?

  “Did you meet someone in Ohio?” Ginny asked point-blank. Down the porch, Eula spooned orange mush into Oren’s mouth as if it might be the only thing to save us.

  “Ginny . . .” My face contracted; my eyes went pleading like a dog’s. “Gin, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. What happened in Ohio?” And suddenly, perched on the Yoders’ porch swing before me was a Ginny from the past, a Ginny who would not be distracted from her compulsion, whose brain couldn’t leave a question alone until it had been answered satisfactorily. Or until her mind knotted in on itself and nothing would help but another round of shock. I stared. Fear of telling her about Lucius was replaced with fear for Ginny’s sanity, although the young woman before me looked sharp, poised, and way too savvy to be lied to.

  I spoke like an automaton: “I got involved with someone. We didn’t mean for it to happen—we tried not to—but I love him—” A ragged gasp from my throat alarmed even me.

  Ginny perched, chin on knee. Diplomatically, she said, “Okay, Ma.” That was it.

  I wiped my eyes. I needed to blow my nose, but took a sip from my sweating glass instead, and choked as cold wine hit my throat. I coughed until it was ridiculous, then got up for some water. I blew my nose. When I came back, I sat beside Ginny on the swing.

  “He’s very sad,” she told me.

  “Daddy? I know, Ginny. So am I.” Maybe my tone was colder than necessary, but I didn’t need her to tell me Michael was sad.

  “I don’t think you’re quite as sad as he is.” She gave me that piteous look of hers that says how pathetic it is that I cannot grasp the tiny fact that the world doesn’t revolve around me.

  “Well,” I shot back, “good to know he’s winning in morals, righteousness, and sadness.”

  Levelly, she said, “I can’t live like this.” She stood, went inside, and pounded upstairs.

  Eula was trying to wipe Oren clean, but succeeded only in smearing the carrot around. “Phillipa?”

  I shook my head, pursing my lips to keep from crying again. “I’m sorry,” I said, and though Eula shook her head to say I needn’t apologize, it only felt like further admonishment.

  I GOT A room that night at Prairie’s only hotel. The Gas Stop Inn stands on a treeless, grassless lot at the intersection of Highway 1 and Main, with a view of Prairie’s only four-way stop. The adjacent gas station is the original Gas Stop from whence the other corner establishments derive their names. The Gas Stop gas station’s convenience store is also Prairie’s community gathering place: one booth beneath a wall-mounted TV, a bulletin board of ads for FREE KITTENS: ASK AT REGISTER, and AMISH-MADE DOG AND BIRD-HOUSES—1 MI., LEFT AT HOFER, 2 MI., ON RIGHT. Almost no one around here’s got a telephone, let alone email. Triangled between the Gas Stop Inn and the Gas Stop Gas-Mart sits the Gas Stop Bar and Grill, which is Prairie’s only bar, and would be Prairie’s only grill if in fact there were a grill on the premises, but the Gas Stop Bar and Deep Fryer doesn’t have the same ring. This is the evening and weekend hangout of most every quasi-Mennonite day laborer in the county—boys raised in the tradition, lapsed when they came of age, opting not to farm their father’s land but to be roofers and drywallers, masons and plasterers. The lapsing is not such a big deal among the Mennonites as among the Amish, but still, these young men drink like they’ve got a lot to forget, or prove.

  That night at the Gas Stop I ordered fried clams with cottage fries, each with its own mayonnaise dip. I drank a Bass. The instant I’d drained it, another appeared before me.

  “Compliments,” said the bartender, pointing down the bar, “of the gentleman.”

  Bearded and grizzly, the “gentleman” wore a workman’s jumpsuit over a hooded sweatshirt—way too much clothing for the weather. Even in the Gas Stop’s AC, he must have been boiling. His plastic-framed glasses were so thick they looked like safety goggles. I lifted my beer glass in thanks, but he didn’t turn my way. The bartender, though, nodded at my left hand. “You might want to show Creamer your wedding ring,” he said in a voice that this Creamer could surely hear. He seemed to be telling me Creamer was insane, because who in his right mind, the bartender implied, would look twice at a middle-aged woman eating dinner alone at a bar? The barkeep turned to wash his tools. On the back of his T-shirt was one of those little peeing-boy images you see as truck window decals or silhouetted on mud flaps. The boy appeared to be pissing over the bartender’s shoulder and down his arm.

  Two pints of beer and a bellyful of grease later, I walked across the trash-strewn lot to the Gas Stop Inn. Stenciled above the front desk was the Iowa state motto, OUR LIBERTIES WE PRIZE AND OUR RIGHTS WE WILL MAINTAIN, but something about the font made it look militaristic, threatening, as if what it really meant was: OU
R LIBERTIES WE PRIZE AND OUR RIGHTS WE WILL MAINTAIN with guns. The lobby fluorescents flickered, and the wall art—John Deere prints and framed watercolor renderings of “Klassic Kountry Kwilt” samplers—quivered with static life. Fucking white Americans, taking any opportunity to tuck a “KKK” in wherever they can. My room featured further examples of the oeuvre, plus a knockoff La-Z-Boy and an overturned ashtray with the international No Smoking symbol emblazoned in red on its bottom. I switched on the air conditioner. What the Gas Stop Inn also had going for it was a nearby cell tower. I sank into the recliner and called Lucius in Ohio.