“It’s me,” I told his voicemail. “Quite a day. Ginny and Silas are back and she kicked me out. I’m at Prairie’s own Gas Stop Inn. I’m a little drunk. I think I just got hit on. Call me?”
I ran a cool bath, waiting for the AC to chill the room, and lay in the tub, in the dark. When the water and my body temperature equalized, I lost my boundaries and became a bathtubful of Phillipa, a Wicked Witch of the West puddle without so much as a pointy black hat to show I’d ever lived. What a world, what a fucking world. I pulled the plug and sat while the tub drained, my own contours returning. When the water slurped away, I heard revelers drunkenly pinballing toward the Gas Stop Bar. I’d gotten in and out before their night even started.
The AC so effectively cooled the room that I climbed into bed under the sheet and the red, stretchy, faux-velour blanket—a material that would, I suspect, melt instantaneously in contact with fire, encasing the sleeper in a red plastic shell like those mini Gouda cheeses I used to pack in Ginny’s school lunch, before I learned she’d stopped going to school and that she gave her lunch to the guy who hung out by the Tobacco Shack collecting change to buy cigarettes. I dialed voicemail in case Lucius had called and it somehow hadn’t registered. There are no new messages. Main menu . . . I lay there a minute, longing for the comfort I wanted his voice to bring me. Then I dialed my home phone number.
Michael’s hello wasn’t morose or petulant or spiteful; it was just Michael saying hello.
“It’s me.” There were now two men in the world to whom I was just me.
“Hi, Phil.” That sounded normal too, not spiked with restrained venom or fraught with checked hope. “How’s it going there?”
“I’m not there. We fought. I’m at the Gas Stop Inn. She said she couldn’t live with me.”
“Oh, Phil.” The earnest tone of his sympathy made me grateful.
“She wants to get pregnant?” It was nearly impossible to imagine Ginny bearing a child.
“I know,” Michael said, “but what are the chances? With all she’s done to her body . . . Maybe that’ll be the saving grace, and she’ll give up and go back on the meds.”
I wished for it too. I didn’t want Ginny near the unknowns of pregnancy; I wanted her medicated and stabilized, happily cocooned with Silas in a straw-bale house built for two.
By the time Lucius called back, I’d fallen asleep and apparently wanted to stay that way, or so he told me the next morning when we actually spoke. I relayed the story of Ginny and the woman in the W hat. Lucius said it sounded like something I might well do myself.
“Might well,” I said, “yes. But had not.” That was, I maintained, an important distinction.
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t know her. But she sounds an awful lot like her mother.”
Well aware that if it had been Michael presenting this argument, I’d’ve initiated divorce proceedings immediately, I had to remind myself that if I dismissed Lucius when he said things I didn’t like to hear, there’d be few people in my life whose opinion I remained willing to consider. Eula I trusted, but she kept her opinions close, and even I could recognize that if the only person’s opinion I valued was a fallen-Amish teenage single mother, I might be in trouble.
Lucius and I talked a long time that morning, hanging up only after he promised he’d visit the next weekend, before he left for France, to stay with me at the Gas Stop Inn, the notion of which seemed to charm him. I resolved to go talk calmly with Gin, apologize, and say that there came a certain point when parents and children should no longer live under the same roof. I’d stay at the Gas Stop for the time being—the weekly rate was more than reasonable—and in three weeks my stupid class would be finished and I’d join Lucius in France. In the meantime, I’d look for a rental for the fall. Part of me wanted to stay in Prairie, find a place there. Despite River City’s convenience, I dreaded its familiarity. A town like ours is wonderful, the way you can walk everywhere and run into seven friends en route to the co-op, where the coffee guy knows how you take yours, and the cashier wants to hear how your basil plant is doing. The ped mall’s full of your students—working the crêpe cart, reading Foucault on a bench, chasing toddlers in the public fountain—and the leafy side streets are lined with your colleagues’ homes. Everyone’s in Iowa-summer mode, drinking coffee on front porches, picking aphids off cucumber plants, mowing dandelion lawns. It’s lovely. Unless you’ve just moved out of your husband’s house, and rumors of your infidelity have probably whipped through the college like a regular Iowa twister, and the prospect of running into anyone makes you want to toss yourself in front of a convenient cam-bus. In that case, it might be nicer to live in Prairie, among the Amish and the Mennonites who either don’t know you, or recognize you and politely look away, or ID you as the Yoders’ Modern mother-in-law and warn their children not to get within sniffing distance of your corrupting influence. If I stayed close by, I might be of help to Eula. And I could keep an eye on my daughter.
I caught Ginny at the Yoders’ the next morning before they went to Jazz Fest, and I apologized, and she apologized, and we agreed space was important. I told her about Lucius’s upcoming visit so that it wouldn’t be a surprise, and she said “Okay” but nothing more. My car loaded with everything I had at Eula’s, I drove back to the Gas Stop.
The inn was owned by a couple, Donna and Henk Presidio. Donna had the desk that day. The Presidios weren’t natives; they’d moved down from Mason City to make a go of the inn. The monthly Prairie horse auction assured them regular business, now further bolstered by the new, annual Trek Fest in nearby Riverside—“The Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.” The Presidios had two kids, one who drove trucks in Iraq, the other itching to finish high school and enlist. It was my inquiry about staying on at the inn that occasioned the conveyance of all this information.
“We got room for you till Trek Fest,” Donna said. “That’s the last weekend in June, and we don’t got a bed, recliner, or scratch of carpet not spoken for by April. But once we get past that, and Fourth of July, we got the rooms to spare. Even got July Fourth openings. I think maybe folks is staying at that new Comfort Inn by Liberty, closer to the fireworks. Now”—she opened the ledger—“we could get you in the movie room, and you’d only have to vacate one night, June 20. Gentleman comes from Missouri to the auction every month, standing reservation on the movie room. Otherwise it’s yours.” Her hand was poised to pen me into the vacancy.
“The movie room?” I asked.
Donna riffled for something under the counter, pulled out a laminated sheet, looked at it, scowled, and ducked to continue the search. Eventually she resurfaced with the correct tattered laminate, and turned it proudly toward me. It was a homemade promotional flyer advertising the Gas Stop Inn’s claim to fame: With advanced reservations, guests can stay in the room where FBI agent Sally Russell (Lolita Davidovich) stayed during the arson investigation into a rash of Amish barn burnings in the 1996 film “Harvest of Fire.” It had been a Hallmark Hall of Fame/Patty Duke vehicle, and I wanted to ask if Patty Duke had played Amish, but Donna was already speaking: “We got an official poster framed on the wall, with all the stars signed it.”
“Wow,” I said, “that must have been quite a time around here.”
“Sure it was,” Donna confirmed.
“You know,” I said, “I’m really fine where I am. Keep this for drawing people in.”
“You sure?” Donna seemed concerned. “Makes a good story . . .” And though Ginny has accused me of doing most everything I do in the world because I think it will make a good story, I told Donna I was too lazy to move down the hall. She laughed, said “I hear you,” and penned me in for another two and a half weeks in 116.
I did not venture into River City for Jazz Fest that day. I stayed at the Gas Stop instead, reading This But Begins the Woe: From Cooperation to Collaboration.
Ginny can’t read. Okay, that’s not true. It’s not that she can’t read—she was an English major for a time,
once upon a time, and she can get through sales tags and purchase orders at work at the Sheibels’ nursery. It’s hard to know just what she’s capable of, post-shock, but it definitely curtailed her ability to read extended narratives. No one can tell us why. Shock’s like that: they don’t know exactly how it works, but it’s effective in some cases, so they persist. And, to be honest, Ginny’s trouble reading began long before. After high school—or when she should have finished high school—she spent a year, inpatient, at the eating disorders clinic at U of I Hospital. She stabilized long enough to get a GED and apply to an alternative college, a place for kids not suited to standard curricula, the sort of place she belonged, in theory. Her first semester there she took a lit class, but had trouble finishing reading assignments. She talked to the professor, got extensions. The semester ended and she took an incomplete, promised to get the work in by a certain deadline—they were used to students like Ginny; it was, in theory, a school for people like Ginny—but ultimately she could not get the work done.
Ginny has attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to explain what happens when her mind derails, but the one illuminating metaphor she’s ever been able to provide me was when she likened her brain to Tetris. I didn’t know Tetris then, but soon familiarized myself. Compelling, dizzying, Tetris’s constantly accelerating, geometric shape-fitting could threaten the soundest of minds. It’s the crack cocaine of video games, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. When Ginny tried to read, she said, a page of text turned into something like a Tetris screen, words descending like emergent Tetris worms, falling continuously in an eternal rain. To understand what she read, Ginny had to seamlessly fit her comprehension of each word up against her comprehension of the preceding word. The words kept coming ceaselessly and she’d scramble to keep up. Unrelenting words streamed from the page into her brain, and Ginny struggled to fit each snugly against the one before. In real Tetris, if you mess up and leave a hole in the matrix, it’s okay, you get a chance to correct it, but if Ginny left a gap in her understanding of a text, she’d failed. All sense and meaning collapsed, got “vacuumed up.” If she left a hole in the Tetris wall of a text, the entire narrative got sucked out the hole, meaning lost—and not just the meaning of the text at hand, but all meaning. The vacuum consumed everything. Her mind ate itself like a black hole, left Ginny free-falling in infinite nothingness. Reading—or failing to understand what she read—lost Ginny her grasp on the world. But college students, even at progressive schools for troubled kids, can’t not read. So Ginny developed strategies to slow the words. If she kept herself empty and hazy, refrained from food and resisted sleep, she had a better chance of not “fucking up and leaving a hole.” She spoke with revulsion, like she was confessing to bludgeoning a baby or taking a cleaver to the family cat. It was nightmare logic: she’d be doing something, not realizing it was wrong until she’d already hammered the child’s skull or hacked the cat into chunks of bone and meat and fur. Only afterward could she see the irredeemable horror of what she’d done, faced with the evidence: dead baby, butchered cat, block of uncomprehended text.
Ginny’s trouble with reading went as far back as high school, but by college she’d developed ways to talk about it, to make Tetris metaphors and try to let us in. When she was a teenager, Michael and I and the doctors were the enemy threatening to take away the only things—starvation, mind-altering chemicals—that kept her going. But by the time she got to college—and she was twenty or twenty-one by then, with all the detours and lost years—she didn’t want to be sick anymore. She knew something was wrong with having to deprive herself of sleep and food in order to read her schoolbooks without fucking up and bludgeoning the baby. We’d also erected enough of an emergency system around her—a safety net of therapists at school to check in with, people attuned to the warning signs—so someone would know if she didn’t, say, move from a chair for entire days, needlepointing to calm herself until her fingers blistered. But Ginny was also a master of deceit. Though she wasn’t eating or sleeping, she could still pull herself together, wash her hair, put on lipstick, go out, and be with people. It was when she couldn’t maintain that anymore, and started self-medicating with Valium to slow her brain, that it all fell apart. We drove to get her, brought her back to the clinic at the U, and I can say with certainty that had Michael and I not worked for a university with a teaching hospital and clinical network, a university that provided insurance that availed us and our offspring of those services, Ginny would be dead.
The evening of the day I didn’t go to Jazz Fest, I called Michael from the Gas Stop. I knew Ginny and Silas would have gone by to visit him and Bernadette after the festival, and I wanted to know how Ginny had seemed to him. I could just see Michael shaking his head, choosing his words. He walked a few paces on the wood floor, sank onto the couch; I knew those sounds. He said, “Okay, I guess.”
“Did they stay long?”
“Visited a bit with my mother, then came up and had some coffee with me. Not a long visit, but . . . Have you talked to her?” Our lines were so stupidly familiar.
I had not, I told him, since the morning.
“She picked up campaign papers downtown, said she was ‘going politico.’”
I said, “That’s worrisome,” and Michael snorted—as if my giving voice to my worry was to suggest he didn’t share it. To make things worse, I began enumerating my fears, riling my own anxiety. “Does she not recall what that did to her in 2000?” and Michael was saying “I know,” but my tirade continued: “She used to know. For two years she’s had sense enough to know what she can and can’t take on. Now she ditches the meds and forgets it all? Silas doesn’t know her like this, he’s never dealt with this before. What’s it going to do to him? To them?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Phil.” Michael and I were good for each other at these times. One of us launched on a flight of panic, and that seemed to anchor the other to ground. We flew each other like kites in blustery, shifting winds. “Let’s try to sit tight a little while,” he said. “Maybe things are different. Maybe we’re being alarmist. Maybe Silas will keep her steady.”
WHEN LUCIUS VISITED ME at the Gas Stop the next weekend, it was the first time someone besides the housekeeper—Donna Presidio’s fifteen-year-old niece from Decorah—had knocked on my door, and I tripped getting up from the La-Z-Boy, nearly impaling myself on a floor lamp.
At the door, Lucius was just as flustered. He said, “That’s a long drive.”
I panicked, god-awful clichés running through my head, all in the voice of Bernadette Maakestad: When the honeymoon was over with this paramour of hers, she crawled home. Why Michael took her back I can’t understand. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
“Phil?” Lucius looked concerned. I was standing before him envisioning our demise and my simpering return to the old life that still seemed to exist alongside this new one. I could take it up again at any moment, which made me feel that I had to keep choosing not to, keep choosing Lucius, and myself. Which is the sort of thing that can make a person feel really self-centered. Selfish: Bernadette’s go-to descriptor for me. Her voice in my head was nightmarish; I couldn’t remember who I was. If Lucius stopped loving me—if our love proved to be anything less than everything—I feared I’d be free-floating alone through infinity.
“Phil? What’s going on?” Lucius bent himself into my field of vision, found my eyes, and hovered there, pupils twitching back and forth searchingly. Later, he told me his first thought was that something had happened to Ginny, and it made me love him all over again. What I did not admit to Lucius is that my greatest fear was not that I’d lose Ginny, but him. Granted, I had a lot more experience imagining the loss of Ginny; she’d kept me in good practice. Most of her suicide attempts—slow-acting, time-release methods like starvation, promiscuity, recklessness—get classified as “cries for help,” not fast tracks to death, but even Ginny’s one true attempt—the one I’m aware of, anyway—was not dive-from-the-Golden-Ga
te decisive, though I do believe she was serious about wanting out when she swallowed those pills. Many pills, of many kinds, all at once. We were lucky Linda found her and got her to the hospital. By that time, it seemed that Ginny had been trying to die for so long, in so many different ways, that something in me was hardened to it, steeled against the possibility of her success. I hate her a little bit for that, and part of me—a shameful, unspeakable part—thinks that if she’d succeeded, my hate might be justified. Maybe then, later, I could get past the hate and move on to pity, sympathy, maybe even healing. My own mother nursed my father through a decade of hideous Alzheimer’s decline, during which she loathed and cursed him, hated him for not being the man she married, hated him—and herself—because she hated life as his nursemaid, hated what they were reduced to. But then he died, and it was over, and she could stop being angry and remember who he’d been before the decay. Then she had room to love him again, assemble the photographic mantel-shrine to her lost love, speak of him as he was in his heyday, mourn. She spent a year in adoring widowhood—a tiny window of redemption—before a stroke got her, too. Sometimes I fear that Lucius is my reward, the porthole of respite and joy in my life as Ginny’s mother. Murphy could so easily whisk Lucius away, fell him tomorrow—heart attack, brain clot, interstate pileup, house fire, falling piano. But then there’s this: what kind of mother imagines more easily bearing the loss of her daughter of twenty-five years than her lover of two months?
“Phil,” Lucius said again. “Phillipa, where are you?”
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 14