Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  The girl who opened the door was very put together: new jeans, a clean sweatshirt. Only when she turned did I see a knot in her long, fine hair that would need to be worked through with baby oil and tweezers, or just cut out. “Mo-om,” she hollered, “it’s a lady!” When no answer came, the girl went back and left me staring in the storm door. The place was a disaster of sherbet-hued baby paraphernalia. Something was wriggling in the rubble.

  When Jaycee Spendler emerged, she was talking on a cordless, and paused, receiver clamped ear to shoulder, to scoop up what I figured was a battery-powered toy, plastic legs beating furiously. It turned out to be a baby. Less than a year old—Oren’s age, maybe younger—it smiled in that thrilled-baby way, flailing and slamming its head into Jaycee’s shoulder. She was little and thin, her dark brown dyed hair hanging over an acne-scarred face, gaunt, puffy, and preternaturally exhausted. The baby beamed at her in unmitigated adoration. “Look, I’ll call you back,” Jaycee said to the receiver, and I had an odd sense that it was pantomime, no one on the other end. Jaycee looked at me like I was vaguely familiar.

  “I’m your ride to the polls,” I said.

  Jaycee chuckled a little. “They really got you working, huh? Not Bush. Not Bush.”

  I smiled wearily. “We’re trying to get to anyone who might possibly vote for Kerry.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Terry, Terry, right.”

  I tried to stay focused. “Can I take you to the polls to vote, Jaycee?”

  She glanced down at herself: acid jeans, a black T-shirt, fiery insignia, scrawl as illegible as Randall’s Tenaj. “Don’t got a car. Lost my license. You got one, I’ll go.”

  “I even have a car seat,” I told her. The adrenaline rushed again.

  I don’t envy parents attempting to get out of the house with a baby these days. We didn’t know how easy we had it before everything was officially dangerous. Jaycee adjusted Oren’s car seat for baby Travis, while Angel, age seven, readied a diaper bag. Travis: a name destined for the meth den, his face probably already inked on some guy’s hairy shoulder. Travis’s diaper bag knocked the back of Angel’s knees, but she carried it with poise. Gripping a fresh-from-the-freezer teething toy in one hand and a milky bottle, warm from the microwave, in the other, Angel climbed in beside Travis like a tiny au pair. Jaycee got in front with me. I wished I’d cleaned up the car.

  “Angel voted in school today.” Jaycee stuck a thumb at her. “Didn’t you, baby?”

  “That’s great.” I smiled. “Who’d you vote for?”

  Angel thought about this for some time. Finally she said, “I think it was a male.”

  I sighed—“If you think we’re crazy today, just wait till there’s a female on the ballot!”—and backed down Sunset View Way, the Prairie Dairy cow looming in my rearview. “How is it, living right here by Carrie?” I asked, expecting, I suppose, delight—from Angel, at least.

  “Loud,” Jaycee answered. She meant the dairy, I realized, not the cow.

  “It’s loud,” Angel agreed.

  “Trucks all friggin’ night,” Jaycee said. “Exhaust fans. It’s worse than the train tracks.”

  “No, they were way worse,” Angel said. “Right when you fell asleep, that bell ringed.”

  Jaycee nodded. “Those bells sucked rocks.”

  “It’s better here,” Angel added. “The dairy people are nice.”

  “Angel Dawn,” Jaycee cautioned, “you don’t go talking to them at the dairy, you hear?”

  In the back seat, Angel murmured, “Sorry,” as Jaycee turned to me: “I come home, find her talking out there to them men work at the dairy. She’s got no idea. No clue.” Jaycee shook her head. “Fucking cow,” she muttered. She meant Carrie, not Angel, but it felt nasty anyway.

  I tried to change the topic. “I know someone who works at the dairy.”

  “Hey, look, I don’t mean offense,” Jaycee said. “There’s decent people there. I don’t mean no offense. Angel’s just too fucking friendly—excuse me—for her own good. Right?”

  Behind us, Angel nodded obediently.

  “He’s not really a friend, really,” I said. “I mean, I just know him.”

  “No offense,” Jaycee repeated. And then, as if she had something to make up to me, she started shaking her head, repeating, “No Bush, no Bush,” marveling over the phrase.

  I spoke, as if to Angel: “I voted for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.”

  “Kerry,” Jaycee said, “Kerry.”

  “Right,” I said, slightly relieved. “Right. Kerry’s the Democrat.”

  “Creamer’s a Democrat,” Angel said.

  “Creamer?” I nearly gave myself whiplash. “You know Creamer?”

  “Course,” Angel said. Jaycee didn’t react, but I wasn’t sure if she’d stopped listening or if maybe Angel was allowed to talk to Creamer. “He voted for that one you said,” Angel told me.

  “Creamer did?” In the rearview, Angel was nodding, and I said, “He told you that?” She nodded again and I shook my head, grinning. “Good man, Burton Kramer. Good man.”

  “Who’s that?” Angel asked.

  “Who? Burton Kramer? Creamer.” I was excessively pleased to be more in the know about Creamer than this seven-year-old. “It’s a nickname.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Angel admitted, and I imagined her telling Creamer about our conversation: how the lady who took them to vote for John Terry said Creamer’s real name is Burton. He probably loathed “Burton,” was taunted as a child—Bur-ton, Bur-ty, creamy, dirty Birdy—though for all I knew he could’ve hated “Creamer.” Maybe he’d thank me.

  “Where’s his bottle?” Angel asked. About Travis, I realized, not Creamer.

  “In the bag?” Jaycee looked around her seat. “Guess we forgot it.”

  Angel seemed worried; I was anxious too. Would there be Republicans monitoring the polls, challenging the votes of convicted felons? Was I leading Jaycee into something awful? But we were already there: Arnold J. Stoltzfus Middle School, no turning back. Angel asked, “Will I go here if we keep living here?” and Jaycee said, “Maybe, probably.” I felt suddenly drunk, my depth perception off, like the car had stretched and I was piloting from the back seat, my arms and legs extra long and rubbery, feet working pedals somewhere far ahead. I pulled over and we tumbled out. Someone unclicked the car seat from its dock, and Travis, silent and dull-looking, watched skeptically from his padded half shell. The world careened past; my voice was too loud. We slammed car doors and marched to the entrance like we’d come to the end of the yellow brick road—Here we are, Emerald City! I prayed we wouldn’t be turned away at the gates.

  Inside, white-haired ladies and gray-scalped men behind cafeteria tables strained over huge binders of dot-matrix printouts. “This woman’s here to vote!” I called, and a hunchbacked poll worker shook his head as if afraid I’d do something dangerous or obscene. Or maybe he had Parkinson’s. I was shaking too, couldn’t get my bearings. The geriatric poll workers greeted each voter like the first voter ever, rediscovering the check-in process anew every time. Jaycee produced an ID, lists were checked and cross-referenced, and she had to fill out a card. No big red FELON stamp. Small favors. Awkwardly, Jaycee juggled pen, paper, and baby, and I stood uselessly by until it dawned on me to take Travis. “You don’t mind?” She seemed surprised.

  “Oh, no, not at all.” I’m not a woman grubby to get my hands on a baby. I often sense I won’t be trusted, given how I did with my own. But Jaycee passed Travis right over. Freed from the car seat, hitched on my hip, he flailed once, then stilled, staring out, listless. He was so placid I wondered if something was wrong with him; then, as if to disprove me, he commenced to howl. Angel fumbled in the bag and produced a grimy, gnawed pacifier, but it placated Travis, who laid his cheek on my chest, shut and opened his eyes several times, and fell sound asleep.

  At the next table, a man in a urine-yellow shirt slid a ballot into a privacy folder, his hands also shaking with Parkinson’s. Jayc
ee opened the folder and looked for something to lean on. Divested of the baby, she was freer, confident and performative. We were a whirlwind of paper and people and baby junk, and she seemed to like the attention we attracted as our entourage moved toward the voting “booths,” a row of folding podiums with bright blue privacy screens. Angel trailed behind us, collecting drool cloths and chew toys in our wake. In a rickety booth, Jaycee slapped down her ballot, circling her pencil hand above it. I balanced baby Travis against me and drew the line with my finger. “Connect those,” I instructed, “arrow tail to tip,” so she did. One pencil line—Felons for Kerry!—and then everything went warp speed again, Jaycee flailing her ballot at the Parkinson’s man who—arm quivering like someone had a gun to his head—pointed her to a ballot-counting contraption. Jaycee let the machine’s mouth suck in her card, the analog counter clicked to 416, and she was done. Of those 416 votes, how many were for the hell we already knew? How many of these poll workers had drawn their own shaky lines for the plain-talking rancher they just really related to? Did they, too, feel misunderestimated? As we flew toward the exit, I cursed elderly right-wingers at large: May your quavering pencil marks be too faint to count. May your chads forever hang!

  Back at 499½, Jaycee struggled to extract Travis from the car. “Can’t believe I’m forty and voted for the first time!” And I chirped back like a public-service ad, “Now that you know how good it feels, maybe you’ll be back!” They went up the walk—me waving, them waving, Angel yelling, “Bye!” Me yelling, “Bye, Angel! Travis! Jaycee, thank you!” And then they were in and I was driving away, daylight dying, headed for the Gas Stop, very ready for a beer.

  Halfway down the hill, cruising on the great success of the Spendler outing, I thought of Norma Kramer and imagined swinging by the swan house to spirit her off to Arnold J. Stoltzfus. It went Disney in my mind: Norma’s wheelchair hitched to the pair of harnessed swans, honking triumphantly as they took flight. I drove by the house, but no lights were on. I thought briefly of driving to John C. Wolffson to see if my ghost lady wanted a ride to the polls, but in the end I drove to the bar, listening to NPR’s heartening news that Kerry was ahead in the electoral count, 77 to 66, but scared to let myself hope.

  Regina slid me my pint, saying, “That asshole wins, I don’t even know what,” her gray eyes cool behind beige plastic grandma glasses. In that moment I questioned everything, seized with sudden horror that I’d read Regina all wrong: far from being an old leftie, was she actually a back-of-a-Harley chick, skinny arms wrapped around some Libertarian’s barrel belly? I stared, paralyzed, until her face broke in a grand, crooked smile. “What? I done my bit.” She thrust her bony pelvis toward me to show the I VOTED sticker on her belt buckle. “Creamer’d’ve had my hide!”

  Linda and Randall arrived soon thereafter in buoyant good humor, fresh from NA, where consensus said Bush was out—and that was mixed company: drug addiction crossed the aisle freely. “A round of shots on me for everyone,” Randall proclaimed, “even Republicans!”

  “Of what, honey?” Regina asked, and he cried, “Make ’em red-white-and-blue!” Regina concocted something that looked like a lava lamp in a shot glass, and I tried to wave mine away, but Randall was insistent. I went zero to sixty in about one second, boiling mad, ready to yell, What the fuck kind of NA sponsor shoves alcohol on people? He hovered, like he might force the shot down my throat, and I cowered as its colors blurred to a purple bruise. Then Linda came into focus beside Randall, and she was laughing, and I saw Randall was laughing too, and then, slowly, I understood: he was acting the part of a bullying peer-pressurer. It was parody. Parody, but I couldn’t laugh. Everything was too raw-edged, my nerves frayed. When the president’s straight out of National Lampoon, his vice from central casting, and Mennonites are drinking Bud Light and feeding Bon Jovi to the jukebox, parody and reality have become one.

  Randall dropped the act. “Whaddya like, Phillipa? You name it. On me,” and I felt too frazzled and drained to do anything but accept. I gestured to my glass, and Regina whisked it off to tap me a new one. A night to get drunk if ever there was one. “It’s too early to celebrate,” I said, “to count our chickens. My grandmother would’ve said we were giving it a kinehora.”

  “Can-a-horror?” Randall said it like Cannes-aux-horreur, which sounded like an upscale slasher film festival, but I didn’t really know how to pronounce it myself.

  “It’s Yiddish, or Hebrew, I think,” I told him. “You say something’s good, it goes bad.”

  “What, you going Amish out here?” Randall laughed. I tried to join in.

  He and Linda went off to play pool at some point. Someone came in and sat down in Creamer’s seat, and I was beer-emboldened enough to think to say, Go find another stool—that one’s reserved, but I only half turned, gave a politely dismissive Midwestern nod without actually seeing at whom, and resumed watching TV. The guy beside me breathed heavily—it was quite off-putting—and Regina set his beer down without a word; he was clearly a regular. As the booze hit the guy’s bloodstream, his panting quieted. Then he said, “Got my vote in,” and I whipped around, confused. It was Creamer. He wore a T-shirt, his sweatshirt tied at his waist. I’d never seen him without a hood, and the effect was disconcerting. I realized I’d imagined him curly-haired. His beard was brown, black, and reddish, woodsman-bushy, but his hair was straight and thick, cowlicked and sticking out in all directions, a lot more salt than pepper. It never dawned on me that Creamer was my age; I’d thought him young enough to make a relationship with Regina unseemly. She had to be sixty-five, and I’d thought Creamer forty, thirty-five. Now I could see he was a good bit older. He was asking me something. “You okay, Mrs. Maakestad?”

  “Mrs. Maakestad?” I was surprised he had any idea who I was.

  “Just being polite.” He seemed very normal. Not Ted Kaczynski–like at all.

  “Phillipa,” I managed to say, but Creamer nodded; he already knew that, too. “Do you prefer Burton or Creamer?” I asked, but he just shrugged. “Regina and Angel call you Creamer.”

  “Angel Spendler?”

  “How do you know her?” I asked.

  “How do I know her?” Creamer said. “How do you know her?”

  “I drove her mother to vote today.” I puffed my chest with childish pride.

  “Nice,” Creamer said.

  “She was already registered,” I told him.

  “Yeah, well, I did that, but voted’s a whole diff— They didn’t give her trouble about . . . ?”

  “Wait, you registered voters?”

  He waved it off. “Just pushed a little in the right direction.” He nudged out an elbow.

  “So how do you know the Spendlers?” I asked.

  “I work at the dairy . . . ?” His tone was odd, like he thought I was trying to trick him. “They live across the street . . . ?” Then, without warning, Creamer sucked down the rest of his beer, pushed away the glass, signaled Regina for a refill, and strode off toward the bathroom.

  When Regina came to collect the empty, I said, “I got his next one.”

  She slanted her eyes. “Bartering himself for beer now?”

  The nastiness of her tone confused me and tied my tongue. “No,” I stammered, “I just . . . he—” She was halfway down the bar before I managed to say, “He registered voters!”

  The look she shot back was of withering skepticism. “Yeah? What else’d he tell you?”

  “What do you mean what else? What else what . . . ? What are we talking about?”

  Regina leaned in to me. “Look, you want to talk about Creamer? Ask me what you want to know.” I feared she’d reach over and wring a question out of me.

  “Okay,” I said, “why does he drink his beer with a straw?”

  Regina straightened. Her face spread in a dopey, chinless grin, and she threw back her head, hooted one big “Ha!” then said, “Because he’s a fucking freak!” and went to tap his beer.

  Creamer returned. He thanked Regina fo
r the drink.

  “Thank your lady friend,” she said. “Or should we all thank her? It on her account we’re seeing your fine form tonight? He don’t strip down for just anyone, you know.”

  Creamer glared. “I ran to the fucking middle school. I got hot, okay? Let it fucking lie.”

  “I’ll say you got hot,” Regina snapped, then pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen.

  I didn’t know if she didn’t believe he’d gotten overheated, or didn’t believe its cause, or if she was calling him sexy, or hot and bothered. You spend a lifetime in student musical theater, every line bolstered with gesture and action to telegraph emotion to the half-deaf, half-dead guy in the last row, and your appreciation for nuance and ambiguity shrinks appreciably.

  Creamer sipped his beer, one eye squinted behind his thick glasses as if he were in pain.

  “You ran to the middle school?” I said. “To vote? That’s miles away.”

  Creamer shrugged.

  “I could have given you a ride. You and your mother.”

  “My mother,” he said flatly, “hasn’t voted since my father left her in 1969.”

  “Your mother stopped voting when your father left her?”

  “Meant too much to him,” Creamer said.

  “Your mother stopped voting because voting meant too much to your father?”

  “She stopped voting,” he said bitterly, “when the man abandoned her, me, his job—fucking tenured, too—to go ‘homestead’ with a nineteen-year-old in fucking Idaho.”

  “He was a professor?”

  “Associate,” Creamer grumbled, nodding at his beer.

  “At U of I?” I asked. “Of what?”