Maybe that’s when a shout of greeting comes from the fields—Linda and Randall striding toward us. The farmhouse door slams, and out toddles Oren, Eula close on his pudgy heels, hands out to catch him if he falls. He’s wearing overalls with baggy knees so mended and darned it’s as if they’ve been purposefully padded to protect him from his tumbles on the craggy paths. Eula has found her real home here in France. This cradle of the Amish movement is also, it seems, the country’s quilting capital, meeting place of the Carrefour Européen du Patchwork, the crossroads of European fabric arts. Here Eula has found her vocation and her people.
It’s lunchtime, and on a cracked-brick patio behind the farmhouse a great wood table is laid with quilted placemats, red and cobalt and gold, florals Eula collects on trips south to Provence. The farmhouse’s screen door opens and out comes Creamer with a tray of plates and baskets, rounds of white, creamy cheese, a misshapen rustic loaf—Eula is teaching Ginny to bake. Creamer, no longer under cover of insulated Carhartts, wears a T-shirt and carpenter pants. He tends the dairy cows. Eula calls him Burton, and we all learn to do the same. She’s pregnant again, their first together. Norma for a girl, Norman if it’s a boy, even though Creamer’s mom’s not dead. She’s here, too, Norma, living down the lane in the old gardener’s quarters, there, past that blossoming dogwood. Creamer couldn’t just leave her in Prairie, alone with her swans. So he’s brought her to live out her final years in France, and she’s mellowed remarkably here, among family.
You know what would be so nice? To have Bernadette live with her, let her share Norma’s little house. If Bernadette had held out, she could have returned to the land of her birth, returned with her dear Ginny. This place—it’s her family’s farm, her true homestead. Neither a French Jew nor a Nazi collaborationist, perhaps Bernadette is French Amish, fled from this battle-torn place like so many others in the 1940s, sent abroad, to brethren in Iowa—Prairie, Iowa. A teenage girl, alone in a new world, she’s promptly knocked up—or maybe it happens on the ship, on the way over, and she arrives, pregnant, in America. And if you think the Amish are rough on the fallen now, imagine how it might have gone down in ’45. She’d have been shunned, ostracized, and done whatever was necessary to survive: made her way to a place where she might find work—River City—and use her skills to make a life of some kind for herself and her son. All those years . . . But now, at long last, she’s back in her homeland. And she and Norma Kramer, unknown to one another in Iowa, are housemates en France. And these two are peas in a pod, bugs in a rug, thick as thieves, stuck together like glue—they’re a cliché of companionability! No one knows, quite, if it’s sort of a Boston marriage, if they’re merely companions, or if they’re wink-wink, nudge-nudge, quote-unquote companions. Who even cares? They’re two old ladies who’ve discovered some happiness, so help them.
If it’s spring break, maybe Michael will be here for a visit, too—with a girlfriend, a grad student, of course, but maybe not so young as all that. Anyway, they seem happy, and I can let them have their happiness, can’t I? Pull up a seat, an old fruit crate, pass the saucisson, the pâté de campagne. Some more wine? The more the merrier! Maybe we could pull up another two chairs while we’re at it. Have Orah and Obadiah leave Prairie before the SUV hits their buggy, or let them get hit, but survive, thanks to Modern medical miracles, and when Ginny and Silas flee the States with Obie in the wake of Bush’s second inauguration, Orah and Obadiah follow, along with everyone else—Eula and Oren and Burton, and Randall and Linda—because there’s a better life to be lived, here in the land where the Amish began, among the lapsed, among family. Here, where Lucius and I will settle eventually, as soon as we can afford to retire. Because where else on this maybe-not-so-godforsaken earth could we possibly want to be?
God, I am such an American: on a highway headed west, dreaming of the lives we all might-could lead.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When you work on a book for fourteen years, you run the risk of forgetting places you’ve been and missing folks who helped out along the way. So, firstly and foremostly, to all the people I’m surely and egregiously forgetting to thank: I’m sorry—and THANK YOU!!! Then: tremendous thanks to Vinnie Wilhelm and Katie Hubert, who generously and enthusiastically read and talked with me about very early incarnations of this project. To Allison Amend and Erin Ergenbright, who read the 823-page incarnation and deserve to be sainted. To Eric Simonoff, who’s heroically read thousands of pages of this book alone and—blessedly!—hasn’t given up on me yet. I am very, very, very lucky to have him on my side. To Lauren Wein, who took a chance on Our Lady, and without whom this book would not be a book—in its current form or any other. I am indebted to her in more ways than I can express, for her super-smarts and her intensive, devoted, and inspired work. Lauren, you are everything a writer dreams an editor could possibly be. And to Pilar Garcia-Brown—thank you! To Larry Cooper, whose patience, care, and good humor—and great fortitude in putting up with so many em-dash clauses and ubiquitous Nazis and entirely excessive adverbiage and utterly unnecessary italicization, not to mention overzealous exclamation(!) and, apparently, undue apparentlys, and disproportionate use of . . . ellipses!—made the copyediting process flat-out fun. To Nelly Reifler and the good people at Pratt’s Friday Forum, and to Joanna Parzakonis and Derek Molitor (and Kirsten Jennings!) of Bookbug (www.bookbugkalamazoo.com), for inviting me to read from this work in progress and making me feel like it wasn’t totally crazy to keep going. To Malena Watrous and the editors and Stegner Fellow guest editors of Story Quarterly, for publishing “The Church of the Fellowship of Something,” my first attempted entry into the world of this book. To the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo, for the glorious residencies where I was able to get out early drafts of Phillipa’s story, and to the wonderful artists and writers I met there who listened to bits of what I was working on and offered insight, feedback, and encouragement. So much gratitude to you all. I’m profoundly thankful to Stephen King and the Haven Foundation, for their support and the miracle of a Freelance Artists Assistance Grant during a time when hyperemesis gravidarum made it impossible for me to earn my own keep. Likewise, to the PEN Writers’ Emergency Fund for a generous grant, and the Authors League Fund for the emergency no-strings/no-interest loan that helped get us through that rough stretch. To Myra Nissen, who helps through all the bad stretches, and the good ones, too, and whose support in all ways has been lifelong, constant, and sustaining—thank you, Mama, for everything. And to Tony Nissen, who made so much possible—during his life, and after. I wish you were here, Papa, to enjoy the fruits of all your years of work. We are all so grateful to you in so very many ways. To Jacqueline Massey, my invaluable resource for all things French—merci, merci beaucoup to Jacqueline and Annick Davies, who channeled their best French schoolgirl penmanship for me. To Michelle Forman, to whom I dedicate chapter 3, with huge love (and huge apology). To Sonne, who’s been patient—no joke; it can’t be easy having parents who need so much time quiet and alone with their words—and who’s the bunskiest Bunski ever to bunski! And, lastly and mostly, to Jay. I tell my students: when you meet someone who reads and understands you like you most deeply hope to be read and understood, and whose edits of your work make you make sense to yourself, you should probably marry them. To Jay, without whom: nothing. And from whom, for whom, and with whom: everything. We’re doing it, together. Life.
About the Author
THISBE NISSEN is the author of the story collection Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night and the novels The Good People of New York and Osprey Island. Her fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review and the American Scholar, among other publications, and her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue and Glamour. She teaches at Western Michigan University and lives in Battle Creek, Michigan, with her husband, writer Jay Baron Nicorvo, and their son.
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