Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  He cut me off—“Okay”—stood, tossed his cup in the trash, and gave the TV a last pitiful glance. Then he took my arm like I was his daughter caught out after curfew and led me out of one Gas Stop and into another. Three in one evening, a personal record. I keyed open my room.

  Inside, I gave Creamer his glasses, which he took absently and soon set down on the bureau. I turned on the TV, offered him the La-Z-Boy, and began to make coffee. He refused the recliner and instead took the wooden desk chair, in which he looked like a grown-up at the kindergarten table. He sat very close to the TV; I reminded him of his glasses.

  “Oh, I don’t really need ’em,” he said, a little hangdog.

  “You don’t?”

  “Nah, I just . . .”

  “But they’re so thick, I assumed—”

  “Yeah, it’s just easier sometimes.”

  Sometimes? I’d never seen him without them. I walked to the bureau, removed my own glasses, slipped his on. They were dirty, scratched, and off-kilter, everything blurry and foggy, but that’s how the world looks to me without glasses. I wished I had bought beer; I was just drunk enough to wish I were drunker.

  Creamer took up the remote and chose ABC, Peter Jennings, which somehow gave me license to blurt, “Did you—growing up, did you have a relationship with your father?” I hoped he didn’t think I was asking if he’d been molested. The coffeemaker burbled and spat steam. I envisioned a past in which a lovely, wartless Norma Kramer, with her own teeth and hair, was married to a dashing Peter Jennings. Creamer sighed deeply. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I . . . My husband doesn’t have a father. Or didn’t . . . you know, beyond conception. He never knew him.”

  “Your husband,” Creamer said. “Not the bald one.”

  “Right,” I said. “Not.”

  “Might be better that way. I had something to miss, you know? Had one till I was like fifteen, and then just had a falling-apart mother, so, yeah. Your husband’s done a little better than me, even with his disadvantages.” I didn’t say anything, which should be a lesson to me: when I didn’t talk, Creamer did.

  “I went to the U, you know?” he said.

  “You did? When?”

  “Not for long,” he said. “Wasn’t suited to it.”

  On the TV, Peter Jennings announced that ABC was relinquishing Arizona to Bush. An electoral graphic flashed: Bush 210, Kerry 188. Creamer changed the channel. When the coffee was ready, I carried him a cup. CNN’s take on Bush’s lead was more palatable.

  “You got a straw-thing?” Creamer mimed a stir. I went to the coffee tray. “Or something to put in it?”

  I thumbed through a basket. “Sugar, Sweet’N Low, nondairy—that whitener stuff.”

  He was shaking his head, glancing around. “There a minibar?”

  “I thought you were sobering up?”

  “When I was going home, I was.” But now he had reason to drink again, it seemed, and I will attempt to say this without shame: I went soft inside at the thought. I’d say wet, but that’s not entirely true—not wet, but liquidy. If it sounds unlikely, go to menopausechitchat.com or redhotmamas.org and read about perimenopausal women whose “symptoms” aren’t decreased libido but exactly the opposite. Maybe I was sick—with drink or anxiety—or maybe I wanted to fuck this man. Maybe I was about to vomit. I’m not sure I knew the difference that night.

  Creamer stuck a steel-toed boot at the mini-fridge beneath the TV, and the square door rattled open to reveal a full-stocked array of tiny bottles. Room 116 hadn’t had a minibar. Rising, Creamer set his coffee on the desk and crouched down to inspect. I heard my father’s voice in my head, lecturing on the ludicrous markup on in-room drinks. And Michael’s voice, telling little Ginny why we don’t drink from hotel fridges. I’m sure Creamer figured a person who sprang for spur-of-the-moment hotel rooms didn’t think twice about minibar costs. Squatting, he reached in blindly and removed a dark bottle, stood, cracked off the tiny cap with two fingers, and poured a splash into his coffee. He held out the bottle. I took it—Kahlúa—and emptied it into my cup, then sat on the edge of the bed in the primmest posture I could affect. Creamer took the La-Z-Boy. It was ten p.m. Iowa’s polls had been closed for an hour, but CNN wasn’t venturing guesses. They called California for Kerry, then someone was saying something about Florida.

  “Fuck me!” Creamer slammed his fist to the desk and started flipping channels. On CBS, Dan Rather said he wasn’t calling Florida because, after 2000, he’d rather be last than wrong.

  I said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Creamer rose, then squatted down, opened the mini-fridge, and reached in for a bottle. “Guess that means you don’t want another shot?” He upturned another tiny flask into his cup.

  “I don’t think I’m really going to be sick. Metaphorically sick, I think.”

  He held out the bottle: Bailey’s. On ice, I thought, I could stomach it, so I grabbed the bucket, and Creamer said, “Oh, shit, for real?”

  I stopped. “For real. I’m going to get ice. Yes, for real.”

  “Oh, I thought . . .” he stammered, and I left him there with Tom Brokaw or Wolf Blitzer and went into the too-bright hall, geometric shapes rising and hovering a few inches above the wall-to-wall industrial carpet, quivering in the fluorescent shimmy. A whoop came from behind a closed door, sexual or electoral, I couldn’t tell. I steadied myself against the wall and pitched toward the ice machine alcove. I remember thinking if I got drunk enough I might not be responsible for what I did. I’d entered the mindset of an Iowa sorority girl out on a Saturday night in the middle of the winter, shivering bare-limbed in platform heels and halter top, waiting for something to swoop in and take her away—a boy, a shot, a car, a roofie, a tornado—anything that might pluck her from her frigid reality and deposit her someplace else. I thought of Eula wandering River City in the wake of her parents’ death, of Bena under her rabbit-skin quilt on rue des Brebis. Sometimes you don’t care what happens so long as something does. I wondered if there existed a vantage point from which I didn’t appear to be having a midlife crisis. I don’t remember filling the ice bucket; I do remember reentering the room, finding it unchanged, and realizing I’d expected it to be—for Creamer to be gone, or to be naked in the bed. But there he was in the La-Z-Boy, hair phosphorescent in the TV glow. He said, “Florida’s gone,” and I pictured Florida detaching and drifting into the ocean, that little penis of a state falling off, gone. George Bush has taken the penis of America. May it float like a boat full of Cuban refugees until some good Democrat rows out, tosses a line, and tows it home.

  I sat on the bed. Every anchor had the same thing to say: Florida has been taken, I repeat, Florida has been taken—like it had been seized. When, finally, Dan Rather called it, I knew Florida was truly gone, and it started to seem like the election had to have been rigged. A woman on Fox—Fox!—was saying, “Either the exit polls by and large are completely wrong, or George Bush loses.” And there’s Dubya sitting cucumber-cool in the White House because he already knows how it’s going down: he’s paid, and he’s collecting. If Creamer’d said right then, Let’s leave. Go. Anywhere: Ecuador. Honduras . . . I’d’ve said yes, left everything—Lucius, Ginny, everything—run away, a refugee, to sleep on the beach, roam and beg, toothless, among goats and street dogs. Get malaria. Typhoid. AIDS. Die. “You got to stop looking at me,” Creamer said. I was watching the TV light in his hair. When I burst into tears, he cried, “Jesus!” and it sounded like an appeal.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered.

  “I’ll go.” He set down his cup, and the remote, and put his hands on his thighs to stand.

  “Where . . . ?”

  He stood. “Wherever. It’s fine. I should go. You should . . .” But he decided against whatever he was going to say. I was ready to beg: Please, tell me what I should!

  Peter Jennings loomed onscreen: “Let’s go back to reality—” Yes! Reality! But then: “The electoral vote of reality here: Mr. Bush, 237; Kerry, 188.�
�� Creamer looked like he wanted to reclaim the remote and blip Jennings away, so I stood and grabbed his arm. He backed down, left the remote where it was, and we stood there together before the TV. I clung to his arm with both hands as Jennings called Oregon for Kerry; then the numbers looked a little better. Creamer lifted a hand, I thought to take mine, but he was only prying my nails from his skin. Our eyes didn’t leave the screen. He uncurled my talons gently and held my two hands, protected in his one. New information got piped into Jennings’s ear. Graphics flashed: Bush 246, Kerry 195. “Colorado, battleground state as late as October, goes to Mr. Bush.” Off camera, a voice said, “The states continue to pile up,” and I was grateful they were treating it like a tragedy: states amassing like Allied bodies on Normandy’s shores. When Creamer’s free hand joined our other three, we must’ve looked like square dancers on some bizarre promenade.

  On the news, as they’d been saying all along, it would all come down to Ohio. My anger at Lucius surged: he hadn’t done enough. He’d spent the fall thinking about his Nazi collaborators, his French sister and brother on rue des Brebis, putting energy into ferreting out details of their catastrophe while a new one unfolded in his backyard. He should’ve been registering voters, like Creamer. Confused, ferocious, I clutched Creamer’s hands. Washington State went to Kerry; Bush took Alaska. Some RNC dipshit told ABC that Fox had called Ohio for Bush. “I believe others will follow suit,” he said, but Jennings held strong: “We have not projected Ohio.”

  When I finally broke away to grab another bottle from the fridge, Creamer snapped up the remote to change channels, but the maps were all red no matter the network. He sank to the bed. I filled a cup with ice, dumped in the contents of the bottle, and sat beside him, and we slugged frigid Stoli Vanil, passing the cup between us, Creamer tossing it back in his throat to avoid his teeth. I got up and refilled with plain vodka, Absolut. My hangover loomed, jeering at me from tomorrow; it had George Bush’s face, his tiny teetotaling eyes.

  Dan Rather looked terrible: puffy and toady and miserable. The map was a hideous red blob with tufts of blue in the upper corners, a Bozo the Clown grotesque of a country. A few white patches still gleamed out, zones of possibility where everything would be decided. Just north of Hawaii’s displaced white archipelago were a few white western states, and glowing stage left was white Iowa, below white Wisconsin. On NBC, Brokaw gave up on Ohio—“This race is all but over”—but Ohio was still Rather’s last white hope on CBS. Creamer and I sat at the edge of the bed on the plasticized spread, its nylon quilt stitches unraveling beneath us. Washed in gaudy TV light, voices rushing at us, I rested my head on his shoulder, and when it slid down to his chest I didn’t right myself. He held me, and I was grateful to be in his gigantic embrace, his beard pressed to my neck, face buried in my hair. I didn’t want to be fucked anymore, didn’t want the complication of any more feeling. I wanted this: his arms around me, breath in my hair, face in my neck. We stayed there and held each other. I fell asleep.

  I remember the disorientation of coming to: Creamer disentangling, extricating himself, laying me back on the awful bedspread. He stood and watched John Edwards address a crowd: “Every vote will count and every vote will be counted!” It was 2000 all over again. I felt a desperate hope, the last stage of denial before misery. Creamer hit Power; the TV sizzled off. He said nothing, just put the remote on the dresser, paused, his gaze leveled at me, then turned and left. The door latch clicked. For some minutes I waited, thinking he’d return, then remembered he had no key. Too late, I also remembered that he lived five miles away and had no car, and it was the middle of the night. At least he’d taken his glasses.

  In the shadow and buzz of that roadside hotel, I squirmed to get under the covers, but a wave of nausea caught me and I lunged for the bathroom, where I swayed over the toilet bowl, disinfectant burning my nostrils. I wanted badly to vomit. I contracted my throat, straining to belch, then thought of my daughter and stuck a finger down my throat as far as I could reach. I gagged and tried again, flinched and pulled away. And then, like I’d found a secret panel to spring a hidden door, my throat dilated. A plash of liquid—chunky and hot—soaked my hand and splattered into the bowl. My eyes streamed, throat burning. I did it again. And again, until nothing more came up and I was only gagging, empty and exhausted. I flushed the toilet, splashed my mouth and face at the sink, and fell out the bathroom door into the bed, onto that disgusting, glossy quilt, and I entered a strange and distorted haze. I was floating, ensconced in a weird capsule of remove, outside everything, the world and my body. And that is how—amid the roiling muck of America and the tangled mess of my life—I fell asleep on that terrible election night in an odd and serene bubble of peace.

  7

  * * *

  LET HOPE AND SORROW NOW UNITE

  But since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness.

  —Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics

  I AWOKE AT the Gas Stop on November 3, 2004, disoriented and dehydrated, throat raw, head leaden. On my night table sat the bucket of melted ice. I got it to my lips; it was blessedly cold. Swaying with nausea, I managed to get to the bathroom, where I peed in the dark, head in hands. Unable to bear the vanity light, I flicked on the dim entryway bulb. My ponytail was half undone, and I pulled out the elastic and redid it as I lifted my eyes to the mirror: puffy, tired—I looked like Dan Rather. I tilted my face—a canted profile’s always easier to bear than the straight-on mug shot—and caught sight of a hank of hair at my neck that had escaped the elastic. I swept at it, but grabbed nothing, so I craned toward the mirror. It looked like an ink splotch, as if I’d slept on an open pen. Annoyed, I shut my eyes to switch on the bathroom light, then opened them slowly to discover by my hairline, an inch behind my ear, a dark purple bruise. A hickey. An enormous, blackened hickey, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since high school. I grabbed my crotch, concentrating, trying to discern a physical memory of sex, but I felt nothing—no lingering sensation, no bodily recall. I felt miserable, but not unfathomably miserable, not the kind of miserable I’d imagine follows passed-out-drunk sex. I felt the misery of someone who’d drunk too much, slept too little, and faced another four years of Dubya. The hickey looked like it might last that long; I’d never seen one so bad. Incredulous, I kept checking, and it kept being there. I stood under the fluorescents wondering if Creamer’d intended it, or even knew what he’d done. I pulled the rubber band from my ponytail and chucked it in the trash.

  The light outside was tornado-hazy, like the throat of the sky might open wide. Wearing a scowl to deter the most banal of Midwestern pleasantries, I crossed the parking lot, bought orange juice at the Gas-Mart, and coffee, and a Saran-wrapped bagel-like bun stuffed with half an inch of butter. As I drove off, I couldn’t help turning on the radio. The local NPR anchor was despondent; nine-forty-five a.m. and Kerry hadn’t conceded. What did we think: he wouldn’t? He’d refuse? Every voice delivered the news with thinly masked disbelief. Iowa’s outcome—undetermined, margins too small, the race so tight—might take weeks to calculate. In the end our seven electoral votes would mean nothing. There were vain, desperate hopes: for lawsuits, national recounts, a world where Iowa mattered. If Ohio got contested and turned around, Kerry would need every blue vote there was. That day, the Day After, we awaited revelations of voter fraud, electoral conspiracy. I knew I wasn’t asleep, but still waited to wake from the nightmare. Driving through Prairie, past Creamer’s house, I thought to stop, but what would I do? Knock on Norma’s door? Hi, your son left my room in the middle of the night . . . Back at White Rabbit, no strength to start the woodstove, I fell to the futon, pulled up every quilt I had, and slept.

  That afternoon I drove to River City in a queasy fog and presided miserably over a directing class discussion of stage furniture. After, headed back to Prairie, I stopped at the strip mall for a burrito and took a few bites in the car before I got out my phone to call Lucius. It would be easy t
o explain the hickey as something else—coat-hook run-in, showerhead accident—but I didn’t want to lie, and though it may well have faded by the next time I saw Lucius, that didn’t change anything. Not telling him about it was still a lie. The truth didn’t even sound true: I’d gotten a hickey via an essentially nonsexual encounter. Allegiance to truth had compelled me to tell Michael about Lucius the morning after we first slept together, but maybe I’d lied to myself about my motivation then—maybe it had been a means of forcing a breach in my marriage. If I were willing to lie now, I was treading on very murky moral ground.

  It’s a testament to Lucius’s emotional maturity—and to the three marriages under his belt—that he answered my call. A lesser man might have made me leave a few pathetic messages first. Still, the way he said “Hi, Phil,” he could have been Michael, and annoyance overtook my remorse: one second I was contrite and full of apology, then he said Hi, Phil, and I was irritated and impatient. I imagined they’d formed a club, the Men Wronged by Phillipa Maakestad Club, where they sat in a circle drinking Jim Beam from Dixie cups, commiserating and practicing their Hi, Phils until they could pack into those two words everything they harbored against me. In my mind, a whole throng of them cropped up cancerously: Michael and Lucius circling with the others, like a community rec center NA meeting. There were colleagues I’d snubbed, dumped boyfriends of my youth . . . Oh, look there: Creamer’d made it, too. Had Creamer been wronged? I was the bruised one, though I suppose he could’ve been dead in a ditch for all I knew. Randall and Linda arrived—they’d never miss a meeting—and it was no longer a men’s club but equal-opportunity, come-one-come-all, join Everyone Phillipa’s Ever Wronged! The cast and crew of Drood were there, and all my Ohio students. Bernadette and Ginny sat on a bench, whispering, Eula and Oren beside them, and the mob kept growing, filling the room and beyond: Jaycee and her kids, the polling place cronies, the Gas Stop’s ex-Mennonite laborers, Johns Kerry and Edwards, their campaign staffs, flanked by Democrats, Republicans, and Naderites alike, all of them, everyone, America.