Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  I heard Eula and Oren in the basement. Michael was outside watering, and I went to him. Good morning struck me as thoughtless—What’s good about it?—though Michael would never say something like that. When the back door slammed and he turned, I said only, “Hi.”

  He didn’t turn the hose off, only looked at me over the spray. “Hi.” He sounded worn, not mad. We both turned to the flower bed and watched the spray catch sunlight.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “again. Always. I’m sorry.” I fought against any tone of steeliness; I didn’t want to sound obligingly contrite when I was really just sorry.

  My husband turned to me, letting go the trigger. He was tired—of my apologies, of his need for them. Maybe we needed a blowout to end the stalemate of our separation. If we fought and I didn’t apologize, would we get somewhere? Maybe my sorries stalled us. Always creeping back, tail between my legs. Michael gestured vaguely at the house. The leaky nozzle dribbled down the front of his khakis, like he’d zipped up too soon after a pee, and I looked away. “Or maybe don’t sell Carpathia,” he said, as if we were in the middle of another conversation. “Sell this place instead?” He waved the hose, flinging a splash in my direction. I jerked back; he thought I was balking at selling the house, and responded accordingly: “What? You’re coming back?” Then he softened. “Neither of us could afford this place alone. Who needs all this room?”

  I squinted at him. “You want to move back to the house where you grew up?”

  “It’s a perfectly fine house.”

  “Sure, yes, I just . . .”

  “This one’ll be easier to sell.”

  “Okay.” It was true, and I had no leg to stand on. I missed my home—missed having a home—but couldn’t see returning to live there by myself. I certainly didn’t want Bernadette’s house. Largely unchanged since she bought it in the ’50s, the place had now been a student rental for four years; it was probably a wreck. But Michael and I had different issues, different ghosts. Ripping up linoleum and tearing down wallpaper might be good for him. Maybe it was easier to imagine living in the house he’d shared with his miserable, nasty mother than the one he’d shared with his lousy, cheating wife. “Okay,” I said again. I readied myself to go. “Please, Michael, call when you’re ready to deal with her things. The boxes. Or if you don’t want to deal at all. I’m glad to . . . before the semester starts . . .” Did I have ulterior motives? A desire to root through her possessions? I don’t know. I think, by then, I really didn’t. I think I felt done.

  Michael nodded absently, then seemed to remember the hose in his hand, and pressed the trigger, returning to his coneflowers, his black-eyed Susans. You don’t have to be a real gardener to garden in Iowa; all you have to do is toss down a few seeds, throw them some water occasionally, and the earth makes plants, and the plants bloom and flower and fruit like magic beanstalks. But Michael’s never lived anywhere else, and he thinks he’s a gardener, and that gardening is easy: you pick off a few aphids, squash some leaf eaters, fence out the rabbits. Rich soil and humid, hot summers are all he’s ever known. God forbid the man encounter a blight, or clayey, sandy, lousy dirt. He’d do what he’s done all his life: plant seeds, water, and wait for them to grow. And if they didn’t, he’d simply stand there watering, shaking his head, bewildered.

  WHEN EULA, OREN, and I got back to Prairie, Silas’s car wasn’t in the driveway. A note in his hand said they’d gone “to the doctor.” I didn’t know if that was a euphemism or just Silas’s Amish-ish-ness. “The doctor” was Planned Parenthood, I assumed—how could I not? I left home and drove to my strip-mall Linksys to look up Planned Parenthood protocol. Drinking a drive-thru insta-latte, I learned that Iowa doesn’t do same-day abortions: she’d have a diagnostic visit first, then the clinic would have a specially designated weekday for fetal extractions. For obvious reasons, that day wasn’t listed online. I had no email from Lucius, but wrote him anyway. Ginny’s aborting, and I’ve apparently joined the right. What’s wrong with me? Politics hit home and suddenly it’s not a choice, it’s a child?

  I was back in Prairie in under an hour. The Festiva was still gone, but Randall’s monster truck now sat in the drive. I parked, already uneasy. Eula was rocking on the porch swing, clearly distraught, with Oren crawling nearby in a wooden baby-jail that’s surely illegal by modern safety standards. I castigated myself for leaving them at all. “Why’s Randall’s truck here? What happened? Are you okay? Gin and Silas aren’t home yet?”

  She shook her head. “Randall’s inside, waiting for them.”

  I found him in the Bush-Cheney den, bowed over, his fists clenched. Alone with him, I felt strangely vulnerable: Randall’s a very large man, and though he’d never intentionally hurt me, he was in a highly emotional state and I didn’t know how much self-control he had. When his head lifted I feared he was about to howl, but as he raised his face, his arms fell limp to his sides. Tears coursed down his pocked cheeks. He dropped to his knees, and I must’ve moved toward him, because his head was at my rib cage, so I held him, stroking his hair as he wept into my shirt. “Please don’t let her do it,” he begged, and I started to say, “I wish I had the power—” but he cut me off: “She can’t. She just can’t.” Then he was weeping again, and I remember becoming aware for the first time of the crushing enormity of Randall’s love for Linda, so huge it was inconceivable I’d been unaware of it so long. No one knew their whole story—what came out that afternoon and what I’ve patched together, piecemeal, are no longer distinguishable in my mind—but there were things not even Ginny knew about Linda, and I’d be lying not to admit to a hint of vindication at seeing Ginny proven a little clueless herself.

  Linda, I learned, could not have children. Something genetic I don’t fully understand, and she won’t, or can’t, talk about. What I’ve gleaned is that she once had a pregnancy that ended gruesomely, a preterm birth that happened in a public place, Linda stoically bearing the pain until it felled her. I’m no longer sure which lines here are ones I’ve drawn myself to connect the stars in that vast dark sky to try to make a picture, but I think the lost pregnancy may have been followed by a hysterectomy. My limited understanding is that Linda and Randall wanted a child, couldn’t have one, and knew no adoption or foster agency on the planet would place a kid with a pair of heavy-drinking recovered drug addicts with a handful of suicide attempts and incarcerations between them, even if they were two of the best-hearted people on this planet. Silas and Ginny’s child would be the closest Linda and Randall got to parenthood, and the idea of Ginny aborting it sent them into desperation as helpless as when Linda lay hemorrhaging in a Babies “R” Us break room, her dead fetus wrapped in paper towels and nestled among packing peanuts in an old diaper box.

  I told Randall the incontrovertible truth—if I asked Ginny not to abort, I might as well offer her a ride to the clinic—and miraculously managed to do so without breaking into “Never Say No,” from The Fantasticks. Randall had a much better shot himself. Best, also, to remove myself from the premises so as not to remind Ginny that what he wanted was also what I wanted. I got Eula and Oren back into my car and drove to the nearest air-conditioned place I could think of. Which is how we wound up, in the middle of that blazingly sunshiny summer day, carrying a sleeping Oren in his car seat into the dark and nearly empty Gas Stop Bar. Only the pigtailed bartender was on duty—we learned her name: Regina—so we set Oren on the bar and sat there to save her from traipsing across the room to serve us at a booth. She peeked in at Oren. “Few too many already, I see.”

  I was starving, and Eula hadn’t had lunch, so we ordered full meals and Cokes and sat in that strange, quiet place, sleeping baby on the bar between us. Eula’s hair was starting to grow out, and she’d taken to tying it off her face with a scrap of fabric. Dressed in Obadiah’s old, plain clothes—dark pants, a blue-gray button-down—and her own scuffed boots, she might have been lunching in a SoHo dive with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. A cheese factory worker came in, sat at th
e end of the bar, and started chatting quietly with Regina. Inside the Gas Stop it’s easy to forget there’s a world out there at all; not one window in the place. Not a one.

  Patrons trickled in, and by the time Oren woke, the happy hour swell had begun. Eula leaned toward me, a hand to her breastbone, and said, “Phillipa, I must feed Oren,” so I paid, tipped too much, and we left. Randall still hadn’t called. “We could drive someplace where no one’s around,” I suggested, and Eula directed me down a dirt road just out of town. We parked and got out at a riverside clearing beside a trashy fire pit surrounded by stumps: a townie drinking spot. I could picture Ginny there, back in her partying-with-the-druggies days. She probably had been there, partying with the derelict Amish youth of Prairie. I thought to wonder, then, if Ginny knew who Oren’s father was; it wasn’t hard to imagine this hangout as the site of his fathering.

  I followed Eula past the fire pit, down a herd path to a rock outcropping over the creek, where she sat, undid a button, and offered Oren her breast. Instinctively I looked away, then back again so as not to be one of those women who avert their gaze at the sight of another woman’s breast. You’d think once you’ve been a mother and nursed a child, you’d have joined the ranks of people who know what to do with their eyes, but not me. Straight out of my nursing bra and back among the awkward, worried that looking away will appear disapproving, and watching will seem untoward. I attempted, pathetically, to affect the carriage of someone so at ease it would never cross her mind to worry where she was looking. Late-afternoon sun dappled through the tree canopy. Eula switched Oren to the other breast. My phone rang. I stood to answer it. “Randall.”

  “Hey,” he said, and I held my breath. “Hey, so, I’m here with Ginny”—he couldn’t talk freely—“um, and things’re good, so it looks . . . well, like I’ll head home now.”

  So we drove back, lightheaded with relief. Ginny was already asleep upstairs; Silas sat at the kitchen table. The doctors at Planned Parenthood had been alarmed at Ginny’s state, he told us, and prescribed a host of medications, all of which started with Z and sounded like superheroes or planets from Land of the Lost. Antidepressants, antiemetics. Ginny scheduled an abortion, but Silas persuaded her to give the drugs a chance first. With two weeks left in Iowa’s legal-abortion window, Ginny was slated just under the first-trimester wire for Friday, August 20. They could “cancel at any time,” Silas told us, and I didn’t bother saying it was like one of those old record club ads on TV, which Silas wouldn’t have understood on so many levels it wasn’t worth explaining. I also did not share that on Wednesday, August 18, two days before the appointment, Lucius was due to return to the States.

  After everyone went to bed, I drove back to Subway. Lucius had written, and his note was lovingly, if patronizingly, chiding. I’m not sure if it made me feel validated or just dumb.

  Phillipa, stop it. Just stop. No one’s gone pro-life! Your happily married, grown-up daughter who wanted to have a child—and got pregnant on purpose, with planning and forethought, pregnant with your first and probably only grandchild—now wants to have an abortion, and you’re upset about it. That doesn’t make you pro-life, it makes you human.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I ate breakfast, went to the porch, and then must have dozed on the swing. I heard the creak of the screen and opened my eyes to Ginny, standing in the doorway. I hadn’t seen her upright, unaided, in weeks. “Hey, Ma.” Her eyes were squinty, but there was a softness to her affect, her body not bracing against the next wave of sickness.

  “Gin, how are you?” It was the wrong question, I knew instantly, and I feared she’d snap from her sleepy calm to rip my head off: How am I? Jesus fucking Christ, is that the only thing you can say? I steeled for it, but Ginny stood there in a pair of cutoff sweatpants and a stretched-out T-shirt, took a deep, steadying breath, and said, “I think I’m not so bad.”

  “Aw, Gin . . .” I wanted to hug her, but tried to conceal my relief lest that set her off. I only slid over, patting the spot beside me. She shook her head no, but shook it too fast—her balance faltered. Closing her eyes, she refocused, then said, “Maybe don’t swing?” I dropped my feet and ceased all movement. “Thanks.” She smiled, with effort, leaned against the house, and slid down to sit, knees into her chest. “I got some heinously expensive pill they give chemo patients. It’s like ten bucks a dose.” She was gauging me; Ginny didn’t have prescription coverage.

  “We can help,” I said.

  “But you can’t, really,” she asked, “can you?”

  “We can,” I said emphatically. “We’re glad to.” With Bernadette gone, and no more nursing home care, money would go a lot further. But I didn’t know what was left in her savings. I bit my bottom lip to keep from speaking, then stopped because that gets Ginny’s ire, too: You think I don’t see you biting your lip to let me know you’re not saying whatever it is you want to say? I closed my eyes and tried to stop from doing anything, realized I was unconsciously rocking the swing, and stopped abruptly. I attempted to sit and breathe in a way that wouldn’t upset her, and when I opened my eyes she was looking down the porch with a contentment I hadn’t seen in far too long—since the wedding. I closed my eyes to the warmth of morning sunshine.

  “I love that,” Ginny said. I feared it was sarcasm, but when I opened my eyes she wasn’t sneering, or even looking at me at all, just gazing down the porch. “It makes me remember how I could’ve thought bringing a child into the world might be an okay thing to do.”

  “The farm?” I tried to follow her gaze. “The farm makes you feel like that?”

  “The light,” she said.

  “The sun does feel good . . .”

  “Yeah, but not that. The shadow.” She pointed at the house’s white clapboard siding. Somehow a silhouetted window frame was being projected onto the porch wall. Shadows from a willow, too, its branchlets swinging and fluttering inside the four-paneled shadow-frame.

  “It doesn’t make you sick?” I asked. “The fluttering?”

  Ginny shook her head minutely, shrugged a shoulder to say, Who knows?

  I said, “It’s kind of like a Japanese scroll, but elongated.” She nodded. This—a pretty silhouette I’d never have seen if she hadn’t pointed it out—this was what made Ginny not need to abort her gestating fetus. A shadow on the wall—that’s where she found salvation.

  A short-lived peace. By noon she was vomiting again, but we were all grateful for the reprieves, however brief. She was still asleep that afternoon when Randall and Linda drove up, pulling Randall’s trailer behind the truck. He rolled down the window: “Figured, I live in a damn mobile home, why not mobile it over here till this all’s done?” He waved a hand in the region of his belly. They parked, hooked the trailer to the well and to a generator, which made the yard sound like a helicopter landing pad, and took up residence on the Yoders’ lawn.

  Silas roofed from dawn to dusk on those long, hot Iowa days. Michael came out to Prairie a few times a week. I made dashes to Subway to email Lucius. And then it was mid-August, with pre-semester faculty meetings on campus and appointments with my student assistant director, choreographer, musical director. We had Drood auditions to plan, rehearsal rooms to reserve, pianos to be tuned. I’d done no class prep, and I’m no Lucius, who could waltz in to lecture brilliantly and charm everyone without any planning. He was due back that Wednesday, and I was to spend the weekend with him in Ohio before classes began the following Monday. Abortion Friday, nestled right in the middle, was hard to plan around, since no one knew whether it was happening or not. Wednesday evening, when Lucius was due home, Linda and Randall had an NA function in Ames, Eula worked Bluntmore’s Auction, and Michael had a meeting and couldn’t look after Ginny. So, as Lucius was returning Stateside, I was home with my daughter, without cell or Internet service. I left once on the pretense of an errand and stole down the road until I got a cell signal, hoping to have a message, but the only voicemail was my assistant director rescheduling our Monday meeting fo
r Friday. Pissed, I called back to say I couldn’t do Friday; maybe I should have explained, but I didn’t. He was confused, then overly apologetic, and I had no patience for any of it. As his anxiety mounted, I met it with defiant indifference. The poor kid. Sure, he’d heard talk that Phillipa Maakestad was moody and erratic and could be difficult to work with, but he hadn’t seen it himself before. Once upon a time, I cared more what the students thought of me. Used to be I cared about the shows, at least. But when your daughter’s about to abort your grandchild, and the love of your fucking life is finally in telephone range after weeks and weeks away but doesn’t care enough to call, it’s really hard to give a shit about a musical revue. An entire career, such as it is, in the theater, and what I have to show for it is a head full of peppy harmonic rhymes I’ll never shake from my consciousness. There’s undoubtedly an echelon of hell reserved for those of us who can’t hear the phrase “try to remember” without needing to chime in, “and if you remember, then follow . . . follow follow follow follow follow . . .”

  Lucius did not call me from the Chicago runway the instant the plane’s wheels touched down, and he didn’t call before or after the attendant okayed the use of personal electronics. He didn’t call while awaiting his connecting flight, nor from the baggage carousel, nor as he waited for the U of O colleague who was fetching him. And he didn’t get home, flop on the bed, kick off his shoes, and dial my number. No, Lucius called me that night after he’d showered, poured a drink, gone through the mail, skimmed his accreted New Yorkers, and took a gander at the coupon packets—1000 address labels for 1¢ with an order of 200 personalized checks! Large pizza = FREE BREADSTICKS!—never once thinking I might be anxiously awaiting his call.