Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  He seemed amused. “Why? Inviting me over with the family?”

  “I’m not—I won’t—I’m not going to be there. I’m—”

  “Spending it with your sweetie?” he asked, a snideness in his tone. Then, before I could respond, he retracted it: “Look, not my business. I’m sorry. Really, none of my business.”

  “I don’t know where I’ll be,” I told him. “I’m supposed to go to Ohio, but . . .” An idea crossed my mind. “Hey, you know, if you don’t have someplace, you should go to the Yoders’. There’ll be a crowd, and I’m sure they’d be happy to have you join—”

  “You’re inviting me to where you won’t be, with people I don’t know?”

  Then I was confused. “I thought you did know them. The Yoders and Ginny—”

  “I mean, I know about them—everyone does—but I don’t, like, know them. I’m going to the Spendlers’, anyway. Angel made me an invitation.” He held up one hand, fingers spread, and traced it in the air. “Those pictures the kids make in school—make a turkey out of their hand?” He waggled his fingers, as if the shape he’d drawn might come to life and reveal its turkeyhood.

  “Well, that’s nice,” I told him.

  “Yeah, we’ll see,” he said. “Might be a microwave Thanksgiving if Jaycee’s cooking.”

  “What about your mother? Will she come?”

  Total incomprehension on Creamer’s face. “She hasn’t left the house since last spring.”

  “Oh, I didn’t—”

  “Agoraphobic-like, you know?”

  “Oh, I didn’t—”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “What happened last spring?” I asked. “Did something happen that made her . . . ?”

  “No, you know, just decided, enough. Hard to blame her. Probably headed there myself.”

  “But you’re . . .” I stammered. “You like this place too much!”

  “Yeah,” Creamer said, resigned. “Yeah, well, maybe I do.”

  THANKSGIVING CAME, AND I couldn’t go to Ohio. The logistics were nuts and my hickey wasn’t totally gone. I told everyone in Iowa I was going to Ohio, told Lucius I couldn’t leave Iowa, and after rehearsal on Wednesday I drove an hour north to a Waterloo motel, where I paid cash for a room just in case Michael looked at the credit card statement. On the drive up I stopped, God help me, at a 24-hour Walmart thrumming with last-minute shoppers collecting preselected dinner fixings. They were laid out so you could go down the aisle, remove a box or can or bag from each shelf, and assemble a meal. Stuffing mix: check. Canned cranberry sauce: check. Instant mashed potatoes: check. Mrs. Smith’s frozen pumpkin pie: check, just heat and serve. An enormous crate overflowed with yams the size of fireplace logs. Beside it, an entire wall had been devoted to marshmallows, from mini to super-colossal, star-shaped, pumpkin-shaped, tiny marshmallow Pilgrims and tiny marshmallow Indians ready to congeal in a great American marshmallow melting pot. When I entered, a group of Mennonite women stood at the display, engaged in periodic consultation, removing a bag from the shelf to consider more closely before replacing it. I wandered a long while—time in Walmart is very mercurial—but when I checked out, the Mennonites were still at the marshmallows, their contemplation perhaps more religious than culinary. I left with a bottle of wine, snacks, a facial mask kit, a Tae Bo exercise DVD I thought would play on my computer, a compendium of New York Times crossword puzzles, a mesh sack of “odor-absorbing and neutralizing” volcanic rocks, an industrial-sized box of granola bars for tech weekend, a case of super-cheap champagne for opening night, and, on sale for $59.99, a probably crappy espresso maker. I was in a weakened, vulnerable state, like everyone else at Walmart on Thanksgiving Eve. Also, I bought a new bottle for Travis Spendler.

  My night consisted of not drinking wine (no corkscrew, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask at the desk) and sleeping poorly. A Thanksgiving sun was just rising as I walked to IHOP for breakfast. I watched TV in my room until checkout time, then sat out the afternoon in a Hobbit movie at a second-run cinema in a half-abandoned strip mall. I took slow back roads toward home, listening to Company for company. Every house I passed was awash in Kinkade Glow, chimneys streaming woodsmoke, children waiting on outdoor swing sets to be called to dinner, grown men with football jerseys stretched over their beer guts tossing balls in the gathering dark.

  I had no plan, only a desire not to go to White Rabbit and be alone, and as I drove into Prairie I saw Carrie the cow and thought to stop at Jaycee’s to drop off the bottle for Travis. The house was dark, but I pulled up and crossed the yard anyway. Around back, I thought I saw a TV glimmer, and though it was probably Jaycee and the kids, I couldn’t shake the idea of Jaycee and Creamer, naked under ratty blankets, sharing a joint, exhaling into the stale bedroom air.

  I went back to my car, stuck the bottle in the cup holder, and drove off. When I passed the Gas Stop and saw lights inside, my heart sped up, a kind of relief flooding my veins like physical warmth. I pulled into the lot, where six or seven other cars were parked. Climbing the steps, I felt like an alcoholic, craving my drink, my barstool, the dim, forgiving light. Two guys at the pool table, a few couples in booths, lone men at the bar, Creamer in his seat, Regina perched on the counter. Gray, pigtailed head tilted back against the bar mirror, she was posed like a pinup, having a beer herself. I sank onto the stool beside Creamer’s. “I just went by Jaycee’s,” I told them.

  “We ate early,” Creamer said. “Jaycee had to work the nine-to-five.”

  “Oh?” I hear “nine-to-five” and think, Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen . . . and it took me a second to get that he meant nine p.m. to five a.m. It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it. I assumed Jaycee worked at the dairy, and I don’t guess the cows get Turkey Day off. I also realized that it was Angel watching TV in Jaycee’s bed, Travis asleep beside her, the small room warm with electric heat. They were home alone. Jaycee couldn’t afford a sitter—it’s why they lived next to the dairy. Angel babysat, and Jaycee could be home in two minutes if she had to. Their vulnerability hit me hard.

  “How’s Ohio?” Creamer asked. I couldn’t read his tone. I checked Regina’s face for a clue, but she was drawing deep on a cigarette, willing her shriveled, blackened lungs to inhale.

  “Fine.” I ran a hand through my hair, slouched into the bar. “Long drive,” I said, like I’d just pulled in. I drank my beer, then got ready to go; rehearsal was called for eight a.m. I offered Creamer a lift, but he waved me on, “I’m good,” and excused himself to the men’s room.

  “Is he okay?” I asked Regina.

  She looked at me hard. “Just ’cause he doesn’t drop everything when you say boo, don’t mean he’s not okay. That man’s closest I got to a son. He’s not used to women like you.”

  “Women like me?”

  “Just don’t fuck with him, okay? You’re from another world, honey.” She ground out her cigarette and slid off the counter. “You’re only slumming it here and you know it.”

  “Is that a threat?” I was so affronted I almost laughed. “What kind of average, ordinary woman are you looking for for Creamer? I’ll be sure to keep an eye out.”

  Wholly unflappable, Regina practically seemed game. “You know,” she leaned in conspiratorially, “I always thought Eula Yoder’d make him a nice wife.”

  “She’s eighteen!” I felt desperate. Regina said nothing. “And probably gay,” I added.

  Regina stared for one beat, then threw her head back and hooted with laughter. When she fixed on me again, her eyes shone. “You really do have the worst gaydar around, don’t you? This old dyke’s a straight girl, and Eula Yoder’s chomping pussy?” Her head shook, astonished. “Honey, you need some help.” She spoke with a measure of kindness, but my tears came fast, and I’m pretty sure I said, “Do you think I don’t know that?” before I ran from the bar.

  I spent the following day in dark auditorium recesses, blocking sound and lighting cues. Midafternoon, Michael dropped off some new gels for t
he strip lights, then came to squat by my auditorium seat and confirm a few tech details. We didn’t speak of Thanksgiving. I realized it had been the first without his mother. He stood, patted the back of my seat, good horsie, and stalked away.

  Sunday we worked until three a.m. Act 2’s a bitch of a tech—multiple alternate endings, depending on an audience vote during the performance—and it took forever. I was so tired I didn’t go back to Prairie; I slept on a borrowed yoga mat in my office—our office. Michael and I shared a position and everything that went with it. To divvy our joint acquisitions would be absurdly complicated and involve department administrators, secretaries, maintenance guys, Buildings and Grounds. Truly, it might not be the heartbreak of divorce that wrecks a person, but the logistics, the endless sorting of amassed crap: every Bank One pen and appliance manual, every takeout pack of soy sauce, unmarked key, and green-grime-covered penny, every weightless leg of every fly that ever died inside the airless tomb of the junk drawer we call marriage.

  AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER, Drood went up in early December. The musical, based on Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, stops dead halfway through the second act, mid–song-and-dance. The performance stalls, actors stagger about, confused, and the MC announces, “It was here Mr. Dickens laid down his pen forever.” We’re to imagine old Charles keeling over atop the manuscript. It’s supposed to be funny. And the great innovation of Rupert Holmes’s script is that when we come to that point in the show after which Dickens wrote no more, the MC solicits an audience vote to determine the play’s outcome. In our production, from the curtain’s very rise, the show was rife with so many glitches that when things broke down in act 2, it was impossible for the audience to understand that these interruptions were really part of the script and not just further foibles in a pathetic production. I think our audience experienced such collective relief at the news that Dickens had written no more, that to then learn they’d be subjected to participate in an enactment of the democratic process, and have to sit through three more musical numbers, was to discover a theatrical innovation they’d have been happy to forgo. A better teacher would have found a way to use it all—plenty of instruction in failure—but what would such analysis have uncovered? To ensure quality, do not employ a director whose life is falling apart. And I am, I fear, a mediocre teacher at best. Sometimes I worry I’m actually a terrible teacher who’d never have been a teacher at all but for Michael and the position his position afforded me. Used to be, you could say I was a perfectly competent director, but I think Drood proved otherwise. Lousy director, lousy wife, mother, nursemaid, daughter-in-law, and an incontrovertible failure as a political activist. At times I am hard-pressed to justify my existence.

  Though Drood went unfinished, I’ve no doubt that if he’d lived, Dickens would have tied every last dangling plot thread into the sort of neat novel package for which he is known. Once upon a time, I wasn’t so bothered by neatness—gathered strings and a quote-unquote satisfying ending—but just then, tacking false musical endings onto an incomplete work felt like a worthless sham. To leave the musical unfinished—end the show mid–cancan kick and send everyone home—might’ve been the most honest thing we could have done.

  But a musical theater audience does not seek honesty. Someone dies—say, Edwin Drood is murdered, or Bernadette Maakestad fails to awaken one morning, an empty pill bottle beside her—and though there’s no sense to be made of that death, or that life, we still attempt—perpetually, eternally, unrepentantly—to reconcile the pieces left us, to connect the most far-flung of stars into a constellation we recognize. Edwin Drood was pushed into the river by none other than . . . John Jasper! Drood was killed by—drumroll, please—Princess Puffer! We can’t bear to let a mystery go unsolved, a life unexplained, stars unclustered into bulls or spoons or bow-shooting archers. We cannot stand for those stars to simply float free, infinite and random, long dead, their stories ended an eternity ago. Unfinished, The Mystery of Edwin Drood might’ve been the only honest thing Charles Dickens ever wrote.

  WINTER BREAK IS usually especially nice in River City: no underage drinkers stumbling home at two a.m., the town quiet and echoey and a little solemn, like an empty nest, a particular quality of sadness hovering in the wake of the students’ departure. I’ve always found it poignant and satisfying. I missed it entirely that year, for I no longer lived in River City. I was a commuter: zip in, park my car for hours in a U lot, move through the stations of my teaching life, then zip back out, preferably under cover of darkness, show tunes blaring on the car stereo.

  Some decorations went up on Highway 1, and Salvation Army Santa took up his post outside Dollar General. Bible Baptist on 26 changed its signboard—WEATHER FORECAST: GOD REIGNS—and Regina decked the Gas Stop with boughs of Hobby Lobby holly, plastic berries poking out like poisoned temptations. The Presidios strung up lights at the inn and erected an artificial tree, pre-baubled with miniature tractors and fake candy canes tied with tractor-print bows. One of the Gas Stop cocoa taps dispensed peppermint mochas.

  I played my Jew card. No one cared; who could have wanted me around? December 21, I turned in grades and wrapped up paperwork. December 22, I went shopping, i.e., pushed a bum-wheeled cart through the antiques mall. I collected fabric for Eula—1940s kitchen aprons, printed sugar and flour and feed sacks, bolts of bordello-burgundy chintz and pale jadeite green—but one of the great glories of Eula’s quilts is how everything comes from someone and somewhere, every scrap an anecdote in the quilt’s story. I put the anonymous fabrics back where I’d found them. There was a fabulous vintage aqua Melmac full dinner service with a matching child’s set that I wanted to get for Silas and Ginny, but I can’t buy gifts for an unborn baby without fear of killing it with a kinahora, and melamine probably causes cancer anyway. I gathered old Democratic campaign paraphernalia for Randall and Linda, but the Dukakis ’88 button, Mondale/Ferraro bumper sticker, and Dean ’04 flag in my cart looked like testaments to failure. I’d give them the Walmart espresso maker. Everyone else would have to take a check.

  My hickey was barely a pale shadow by December 23 when I left White Rabbit predawn and drove to Ohio. Lucius and I were invited to a party that evening at Anthea Lingafelter’s, and I didn’t want to rush in, change my clothes, and race off for what amounted to our coming-out party before we’d had any time alone. As a couple, a we, we seemed so far fallen.

  Ten hours in the car, yet I turned onto Lucius’s street still unsure what to tell him. I’d listened to all of Celebration, Jerry’s Girls, The Fantasticks, and Company, but hadn’t figured what to say about my hickey. Snow swirled in the air, not yet sticking, as I parked behind his Honda and mounted the front steps of his Sears Craftsman bungalow. He’d been there since his last divorce fifteen years before. The porch smelled of leaves and woodsmoke, and the warmth of the yellow window light was glorious—Kinkade Glow be damned. I’d spent no more than a week’s worth of nights there, yet when Lucius opened the door, the emanating smells—fire in the fireplace, Murphy Oil on the floors, sherry on his lips, Barbasol in his beard—I felt as if I were home. Except I had no home. White Rabbit was more like a squat in an empty art studio, and I was like a desperate orphan, ready to leap into any open arms. Lucius poured my favorite wine—cold, cold Sauvignon Blanc, dry and grapefruity, with a hint of cat piss. He topped his sherry and drew me to the couch. I was bleary and tingling with nerves as we lifted our glasses to each other, then to our lips, and sat looking into the fire. He reached behind me, a hand under my sweater to touch skin. I opened a button on his shirt and reached my fingers through, and we sat and watched the logs crackle and collapse. He said, “I don’t want to let you leave the house.”

  “But the party?” He’d been intent on going, out of some obligation I didn’t quite get.

  “After the party,” he clarified. “Is that okay?”

  I don’t know what sort of confirmation he wanted, but my response, issuing forth without intent or premeditation, indicated dire okayles
sness. “What is it with this party?” I cried. “Why are you so intent on this party, with these people? Who I hardly know, and you’ve known so long—who’ve known you so long, through God knows how many women. Anthea . . . who else? How many of them have you had relationships with? How many women there have slept in your bed? Is this what you do every few years? Do they all know I’m just the latest dupe? Am I as foolish as they must think? Am I that person? Am I even the person you think I am? You don’t even know the person you’d be showing up with to that party!” Nearly two months since the election, and a day alone in the car to decide how to phrase a confession, and that’s what I said.

  Lucius looked perplexed. “I’m not under . . . Phil, what’s wrong?”

  Of all the replies he may have anticipated, he couldn’t have expected this: “Remember the man at the Gas Stop? Drinking beer with a straw?” Lucius nodded slowly, comprehension dawning. Then I saw his rage rise and realized where he could take this. “No! No—not that!”

  “Oh, I think it’s exactly that.” His voice was caustic.

  “No,” I tried to assure him, “you couldn’t think of this. It’s too bizarre,” and he backed off, and I told him the story of election night and the tremendous hickey.

  “He did it while you were passed out?” Lucius looked horrified, but I shook my head.

  “It happened before. I had my head on his shoulder, his chest, hiding myself from the news, and his face was by my hair. I wasn’t aware of it then—I’m not even sure he knew he was doing it. But in that tension? Bracing against what was on TV? It doesn’t make sense, but it’s what happened. It wasn’t sexual—it wasn’t anything. Or maybe it was, for him; I don’t know. That’s what happened. He had no idea he’d done it. We’d drunk way too much, clinging to each other just to hold on to something. And I came away with . . . this. I should have told you then, but it was such a horrible time. We’d fought on the phone, and everything felt so miserable. I kept trying—I couldn’t make myself tell you. I thought I’d see you Thanksgiving . . .” And yes, I’d omitted and glossed over things, but essentially that was it: I’d confessed.