Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  “I’m here,” I said. “You’re here,” and I melted into him. He held me in the doorway, whispering to my hair, kissing my temples, my eyes, and I felt such relief, hushed by his caress, safe at his insistence of safety. It’s the kind of relief I never gave Ginny. I may have dragged her kicking and screaming to a modicum of health, but I’ve never given my daughter comfort.

  Lucius and I moved to the bed and held each other there until he said, “I need food,” and we ventured out, hand in hand, into rural America’s Friday night. The Gas Stop Bar was packed—families with too many children too close in age; mothers in stretch pants hammocking great fallen bellies; big, crew-cut, goateed dads in acid-wash jeans. The pool table was ringed with swaggering young former Mennonites gone soft with beer and hard with menial labor. Girls’-night-outers—hair teased kinky, bangs blown straight—played drinking games at a corner booth, slinging back Windex-blue shots, vamping like everyone else was there to watch them party.

  Lucius and I entered and hovered a minute by PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED until a waitress swooped in. “Two for dinner?” Before Lucius had the “yes” to his lips, she’d launched a gossipy spiel about how they’d been hammered all day and the only seats were at the bar, and I thought at first she was telling us that the staff had been drinking so hard they needed all the tables for themselves. Lucius’s “That’s fine?” came out as a question, as he looked to me for affirmation, but our hostess was already waving us toward the end of the bar, to the only two seats together in the place, directly beside Creamer, the man who’d silently paid for my beer the week before. He’d taken down the top of his coveralls, but his sweatshirt hood was still up, and between hood, beard, and safety glasses, he exposed almost no skin. I was unsure whether his disability was physical or mental, but felt certain that something about him was not right.

  Lucius pulled out a stool for me. He was raised not to seat his woman beside another man, and the situation thwarted him: he could seat me beside one man, or a long bar of men on the other side, and he understandably chose to put himself between me and the rest of the bar. “It’s ninety degrees out,” he whispered, with a perplexed glance toward Creamer.

  I nodded, mouthing words only Lucius could see: He’s the one. Who bought me the beer.

  Lucius stiffened and gestured to suggest we switch seats, but I waved away his concern. I didn’t fear Creamer, not with Lucius there.

  The bartender was a furry-lipped woman with long gray pigtails and a T-shirt that read: Delicious Fried Eggs at Skyway Jack’s. Up where her breasts may once have been were drawings of two sunny-side-up eggs, side by side. “What can I get you kids?” she asked us, her voice so gravelly it was like she had rock tumblers for lungs.

  “Hi.” Lucius smiled broadly, a flirt without exception.

  “Watch out, gorgeous,” she told him. At me, she winked conspiratorially and asked what we were having. This, I thought, was a dame who didn’t negotiate with men she wasn’t bedding.

  “Bass for me.” I stuck a thumb toward Lucius. “He speaks for himself.”

  She said, “Right on, sister,” and turned to him obligingly.

  “Make it two,” said Lucius.

  “Two Basses.” She slung a couple of pint glasses on the bar, and I watched the muscles twitch under the tanned, crepe-thin skin of her upper arms. She probably could have lifted a truck.

  We ordered and ate our deep-fried starches, drank our beers, and listened to the sassy, country-girl rock that the girls’-night-outers kept loading on the jukebox. Lucius ate with his left hand and kept his right on my thigh beneath the bar. On my other side, Creamer mashed himself against the wall, maybe afraid I’d accidentally touch him, hunching over his beer as though I might steal it. I focused on Lucius, attempting to ignore Creamer’s strange, lurking presence beside me. Lucius was trying both to get a better look at Creamer and not to look at all, the impulses battling in his eyes, fascinated and knowing better than to stare. He whispered, “I think he’s drinking beer through a straw.”

  I nodded, mouthed yes.

  A few minutes later Lucius’s eyes got wide: the fried-egg bartendress had engaged Creamer in some kind of wordless dialogue, and I watched Lucius, trying to gauge from his expression what was going on. He looked like a kid seeing television for the first time.

  There was shuffling and bluster from my neighbor’s barstool. Lucius looked momentarily stricken, and the bartendress said, “Okay, Creamer, you’re done for the night.” Movement behind me ceased. “Now. Creamer, go on home.” She could have been talking to a dog. Creamer dropped from his stool, heavy boots thudding to the floor, and hauled himself off. He bent into the exit door with his shoulder like he was running a football or heading into a blizzard.

  “Did he pay?” Lucius asked our bartender.

  “Creamer? Oh, Norma pays up front. We deduct through the month. Tip, too. Twenty percent.”

  “Norma?” I said.

  “His mom.” Her face puckered up sourly, then she gestured like she might cross herself.

  “Why does he . . .” I began. “Why the hood, the clothing . . . ?”

  Lucius sat mute, as though we were speaking a language he didn’t know.

  “Oh, he works at the dairy,” she said, and I must have looked perplexed, for she continued: “In the ’frigeration. With how cold it is in there and how hot it is out, he’d get himself sick to death going back and forth. Takes a while to reclimatate, after, you know?”

  Lucius nodded, then asked, “Why’d you kick him out?”

  The bartender lifted her chin in a gesture I couldn’t decipher. She smiled slyly and leaned an elbow on the bar. One fried egg stared up at us. “You remember that Unabomber guy?”

  Lucius and I nodded like schoolchildren.

  “When Norma dies, God friggin’ knows what they’re going to find in that house!” Then something got her attention down the bar, she made a quick “ ’Scuse me,” and ducked away.

  “He’s like Kaczynski?” Lucius asked. “Or his mother is? Should I fear for your safety? Am I going to be forced into early retirement to move to Iowa to protect you?”

  “Your retirement, old man,” I said, “would not be early in the least.”

  Half an hour later, as Lucius and I left the bar, a huge vehicle rumbled into the lot, a military-looking monster truck with an enormous rusting snowplow in front. It pulled across three parking spots and humphed to a halt. And then Randall jumped down from the driver’s seat. The passenger door opened and Linda lowered herself to the ground.

  “Hey hey,” Randall called, coming toward us. With discretionary instinct, Lucius dropped his arm from my waist, then replaced it protectively an instant later.

  “Randall!” I tried to sound bright, but I fear I was unconvincing. “Linda!” They wore T-shirts pinned with campaign buttons that read: MENARDS WORKERS FOR KERRY. Menards, the Midwestern home-improvement box store on the outskirts of River City where Randall and Linda worked, could not have allowed its name to be used in a political campaign, especially since I’m pretty sure they’re Republican owned. Randall probably made the buttons himself, saw all those other “for Kerry” slogans—ARMENIANS FOR KERRY, GARAGE SALE MOMS FOR KERRY, CHIROPODISTS FOR KERRY—and figured why not?

  Linda lifted an arm hello, and Lucius again removed his hand from my waist to raise it in greeting. He let it drop to his side. I introduced him simply as “Lucius,” then said, “This is Ginny’s best friend, Linda. And our own Reverend Randall, who married Ginny and Silas.”

  “We just left all them all at Eula’s,” Randall said, and we then learned what I already suspected: the past weekend at Jazz Fest, amid the macramé jewelry and deep-fried-Oreo vendors, Ginny’d found the Iowa Democrats at their red-white-and-blue booth and, true to her threats to the W-hat woman, volunteered herself to the campaign. ELECTROSHOCK PATIENTS FOR KERRY!

  “See my new wheels?” Randall gestured to the tank parked before us. “Insurance gave me seventeen hundred for the van. Pick
ed this puppy up at Surplus for five hundred.”

  Linda said, “He donated the rest to Kerry.” She looked proud.

  “Least I could do,” Randall said. “We just was at the Yoders’ now, campaign planning.” He paused as if ready to define his lingo, but seeing we were on board, continued. “Figuring how to get to folks. The party don’t have much by way of records in the area.” He said “the party” the way my parents’ old Berkeley commie friends had. “Amish can vote, but don’t, and”—here his voice took on an affectation like he was quoting someone—“they don’t register a . . . what’s it called?”

  “Affiliation,” Linda said.

  “Most folks do that at the DMV,” he went on, “when you get a license, which Amish don’t, so mostly we’ll be doing this thing farm to farm. Find ones who’re less strict, Mennonites, Moderns in the family, you know? Just got to figure the best way to get to people.”

  Lucius said, “This bar would be a good place. You’d get them in a good mood, too.”

  Randall’s face opened. “That’d work—where they drink is where the change happens.”

  The change. I thought of my own encroaching menopause, of Jekyll and Hyde. I pictured Randall, that bull in a china shop, swaggering into the Gas Stop to effect change. Randall wore his hair as though he were Charlie’s fourth Angel. On one meaty shoulder blade—so that he could only see it in a mirror, but it was visible to all in the muscle shirts he sported—he bore the life-size tattooed face of a baby son he hadn’t seen in years. The kid was a teenager now, unaware that somewhere in Iowa, on the back of a gigantic former meth head, rode his creepy tattooed baby face. The boy’d been named for a grandmother, but backward, and this was inked below the face in fussy, scrolling calligraphy: Tenaj. Tenaj, wherever you are, your father is off to effect change.

  Randall was still musing. “Campaigning at the Gas Stop.” He looked to Linda. “I say we start A-SAP. ’Magine if we could just stick a ballot in front of ’em—sign here, buddy!”

  I was about to say goodbye, but then Randall asked, “How long you here for, Lucius?”

  “Just the weekend,” Lucius said.

  “Great, great. So what’ll you-all be up to, then?”

  I should have made excuses and gotten out, but it seemed suddenly, stupidly necessary to demonstrate that Lucius was not here to spend the weekend in my bed, but to see the sights of southeast Iowa, and I started chattering like a demented magpie: “We’ll see the university. Drive out to the covered bridge, maybe. Or the fossil gorge?” I looked to Lucius; he leaned on a pickup in a pose of effortful leisure and lifted his eyebrows gamely. “Or the raptor center: blind owls, one-legged hawks . . .” As I rambled, Lucius tried to look as though these were, of course, all the reasons he’d come to town. “I thought maybe we’d have lunch out at the Liberty Grill . . .”

  Randall’s face assumed a sagacious authority. “They got a new wine bar there down the street. If you-all like wine. The Liberty’s got real good food, if you like good food.”

  “After eating dinner here tonight, we deserve it,” I said, then felt embarrassed, like I’d just insulted Randall’s own cooking. My throat constricted with anxiety, but sensing it, Lucius leapt to my aid. He put a hand to his belly. “Speaking of which, I could use to walk off some of those fries.” It was absurd, but Randall and Linda smiled, and soon we said our goodbyes, and Lucius and I headed for a postprandial stroll around the Gas Stop triumvirate of Prairie, Iowa.

  “Would you believe,” I told Lucius out of earshot, “he’s her NA sponsor?”

  “They let couples sponsor each other?”

  “Oh, they’re not—not a couple, not in that sense. That’d be nice, huh?” I held the thought: Randall and Linda in love. “That’d be lovely, but no, just sponsor and . . . sponsee?”

  “Hm.” Lucius wagged his head, surprised, trying to clear away the idea of Linda and Randall as a couple, which he’d thought so obvious he hadn’t imagined otherwise. I watched him doing what I seem to do so often: rearrange my assumptions when I’m made aware I’ve misread a situation. “Hm,” he repeated, as if to say Go figure, which is something I should say to myself a lot more often: Go figure, Phillipa. Go figure it out before you make an ass of yourself, would you?

  Lucius and I saw no sights that weekend—no university landmarks or regional points of interest. We refused to share each other with waitresses, birds, or sommeliers. Save a few dashes out for sustenance, we stayed in room 116, in bed, until he had to drive back to Ohio. Letting him leave was like trying to stop breathing. The body fights for what it needs. The body—fragile as it may sometimes seem—fights for life. We gasp, we clot, we vomit. We keep on.

  AS MY STUDENTS SAY —and probably did say on the course evaluations for that summer session I can’t bring myself to read—I phoned it in. Do they still say that? Texted it in? Neither is accurate: I was present, but in body only. Lucius left for France and our correspondence was limited. As forewarned, I had to check out of my room at the Gas Stop when the Trekkies arrived en masse the last weekend in June. By then, Ginny and I had come to a familiar truce-like peace, and she invited me back to the farmhouse for the week and a half until I left for France. Trepidatious but desperate—Trek Fest had the area hotels filled beyond capacity—I packed up and returned to the Yoders’ on Friday morning, June 25. Ginny and Silas were at work, and Eula was out in the garden, with the baby in a bouncy chair under an umbrella. I waved and went in to put down my things, only to discover that Orah and Obadiah’s family room had been transformed into Kerry HQ. John Kerry yard signs were stacked six-deep against the walls, every horizontal surface piled with papers, handouts, flyers. A glance at the far wall could make a person think she was in the wrong house: floor to ceiling, it was patchworked in 8½ x 11 color printouts—white print on a royal-blue background—of BUSH-CHENEY ’04 posters, aligned and Scotch-taped with the precision of an Amish quilter. And how I wished Eula had hung those flyers—wished anyone but Ginny was responsible. Each sheet bore a different slogan above the BUSH-CHENEY logo, and at the bottom of each, in blue letters in a tiny white box, was: Paid for by Bush-Cheney ’04, Inc. But the slogans were all twisted, like: The Solution to Poverty. The Final Solution Bush-Cheney ’04 and America for Rich White Christians Bush-Cheney ’04 and Jews, you’re successful . . . vote like it! Bush-Cheney ’04.

  I asked Eula about the signs, and she admitted—with an embarrassment that made me angry at Ginny—to not really understanding them. “I think they’re meant to be funny?” she said.

  That night, Ginny and Silas stayed out late with Linda and Randall at Trek Fest’s opening. I went to bed before they got in. Saturday, I got up with Eula and Oren, and was standing in the family room looking queasily at the Bush-Cheney wallpaper when Ginny came downstairs. She sidled up, like a museumgoer hitting on a fellow art gazer, and said, “Aren’t they fabulous?”

  “What are they?”

  “You didn’t hear about these? For like a day, they had this thing up on their campaign website.” She dipped her chin into her neck and did an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice: “The Sloganator.” This is how it went with me and Ginny: we’d act like things were fine, and then they’d be fine, to all appearances, until the whole thing inevitably exploded, again, repeat, ad infinitum. I didn’t know how to respond. Ginny had plenty to say about The Sloganator: “They made a program on the site so people, supporters”—she let out an airy little snort to highlight the restraint she was showing—“so Republicans could write slogans and create official flyers or yard signs or whatever. But, of course, other people, nonsupporters, started using it for our own nefarious purposes.” She looked positively gleeful, eyes twinkling. “The Bush people shut the whole thing down pretty soon, but a bunch had already made it through the censor. This”—she waved a hand to the wall—“is only a sampling of the really prize ones. Leave Every Child Behind! Every time I think I’ve found my favorite, another one pops out. Axis of Idiocy . . . ‘I believe what I believe is righ
t.’ Don’t change horses mid-Apocalypse! That one kills me.”

  Permit me a self-indulgent moment here to say that I don’t think people who’ve tried to commit suicide should be allowed to idly enumerate things that “kill” them. Maybe especially in the company of those who gave birth to them, and had to go back to the same hospital—where once upon a time things had looked so promising—in order to visit a red-eyed wraith who’d been revived by health care professionals and forced to remain in the life you foisted on her. She’d vomited so violently she popped blood vessels in her eyeballs.

  “So,” I said, “you printed them and arranged them like this?”

  “It took eons.” She grinned conspiratorially. “Lots of repeats—Leave no billionaire behind, No billionaire left behind. I’m surprised there aren’t more Nazi slogans—Tolerance is a sign of weakness, et cetera—they’re so fitting . . . There’re tons—we could do the whole room.”

  “I’m sure Orah and Obadiah would have loved it,” I said, snide and biting.

  Ginny stopped. She turned from me, shoulders rising, then falling as she let out a choppy breath. She faced me again. “I will not contend with your sarcasm right now.”

  “I’ll be earnest, then, Gin. Does Silas know you when you’re like this? Does he know this side of you? Did he know it before you got married?”

  She drew another breath and let it out, her body clenched, lower jaw thrust forward in defiance, face washed in rage. “Silas knows every side of me.” She breathed again. “He actually cares for—loves—those sides of me, not just the pretty ones, not just the nice, easy ones. Silas actually loves the whole person I am, not just the palatable parts my mother’s willing to engage.”

  “Pardon me.” I had the sense that we’d said this all before, already had this very fight. “Pardon me for not loving your sickness. Pardon me for not loving what attacks the person I love. For not embracing your disease with adoration! Excuse me for not loving . . . If you had cancer, would you want me to love the cancer? They’d be your own cells—technically part of your whole person. You’d want me to love that cancer? Just root for those cancer cells. Goooo cancer! Woo-woo!—because they’re part of you and I’d be a terrible, unaccepting mother if I didn’t love the cancer that was eating your body from the inside. Oh, I’m so sorry, Ginny. So sorry for not loving all of you. For not being as good a person as Silas. For not being Amish. I’m so sorry I don’t love and forgive and accept and think everything is just the way God wants it—”