Limbo

by A. Manette Ansay

  I believe there is a relationship, much like that between parent and child, between the physical, or external, landscape we call home and the spiritual, or internal, landscape that becomes the human soul. I was the offspring of manicured lawns, of perfectly rectangular ranch houses laid out on perfectly rectangular lots, of streets that met at right angles. Following directions, there was never any question which way was left, which way right, which way straight ahead. The roads leading out of town parted the flat fields neatly, cutting more rectangles, precise as stained glass: gold and green in the summertime; white and dun in winter, black when the land was freshly cultivated, speckled with seagulls like smooth, gray stones. Lake Michigan edged the horizon like the bright, blue border on a quilt. A place for everything; everything in its place, I was told, and the landscape bore witness to those words. You could see the truth of it laid out for miles. Faith was clean-cut as a corn row or a fence line, direct as a county highway. God was the hawk, high overhead, overlooking us all. We were the rabbits, trying to blend in, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.

  This is just the way things are. If you don’t like it, take it up with God.

  Summers, restless, I’d get on my bike and ride out of town as far as I could. After an hour or so, I’d coast to a stop and wait for the lake breeze to cool me. Around me, the fields would be planted in soybeans, field corn and sweet corn, oats, wheat. In the distance there’d be a little white farmhouse beside a red barn, a windmill in the courtyard slowly turning. Perhaps I’d see a herd of Holsteins taking their shade beneath a single stand of hickory trees. A frenzy of black-eyed susans in the run-off ditches. An orange housecat, bright as a button, stalking something in the weeds. After catching my breath, I’d get back on my bike and, again, I’d ride and ride until my hot breath burned my upper lip and the pavement seemed to rise and fall with each pump of my knees. At last, I’d coast to a stop, look around…

  …and the fields would be planted in soybeans, field corn and sweet corn, oats, wheat. Once again, there’d be that little white farmhouse beside its red barn, a windmill in the courtyard slowly turning. Another herd of Holsteins, larger perhaps. A meadow lark balancing on a telephone line. A ragged cluster of purple-headed thistles, day lilies rising around it in a fiery cloud.

  This was not a landscape that encouraged individual interpretations, diverse opinions, conflict. The Catholic God we worshipped was a God who did not permit negotiations, a God who came and went like the seasons, a God who moved in mysterious ways. There was no mention of anything like a personal relationship with Christ. There were rules, there were beliefs, and you could like them or lump them but you had to obey. The madder you got, the harder you smiled.

  If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

  You did what you were told. You believed what you were taught. Dear Senator, I wrote with the other members of my catechism class. Please stop the murder of helpless unborn babies. Dear Senator, Homosexuality is a perversion of God’s most sacred laws.

  Dear Senator. Dear God. It terrifies me, now. I would have written anything, believed anything. Absolutely anything at all.

  God was Love, yes, but the icy stream that fed this love was Fear. When storms blew in off Lake Michigan, turning the sky an almost supernatural green, where did the lightning strike? Not the fields or the roads. Not the low-lying houses and milk sheds, the chicken coops and corn cribs. No, it struck the windmills, the power lines, the stands of hickory trees. It scorched whatever dared to stand up, stand out, stand alone.

  “What should you do,” my mother drilled my brother and me, “if you ever get caught out in the open during a storm?”

  But we already knew the answer. It was something we learned in school.

  Lie down. Keep still. Wait for the thunder to pass.

  Each time I left Grandma Krier’s house, she pressed her faith firmly into my hands, like lunch money, like a map should I ever get lost. Her Catholicism reflected the view she saw every day from her kitchen windows: few shadows. Straight lines. A precise, uncomplicated horizon.

  Her name, until her marriage, was Margaret Catherine Jacoby; her birth certificate, which I learned of after her death, read Margaretta Katarina Jacobi. She loved to tell the story of how my grandfather’s parents, who owned the adjacent farm, had carried him, a babe in arms, to the wedding of her mother and father. “We made the boy,” they said. “Now you two make the girl.”

  And her mother and father did.

  From the time she was born, in 1899, it was understood by everyone that my grandmother would grow up to marry Otto Krier. Even as children, they’d loved each other. My grandmother followed him everywhere, like an adoring younger sister. At school, my grandfather made sure the other boys included her in their games. When the first world war threatened overseas, and speaking anything but English was forbidden, they stood side by side in the schoolyard, scratching notes to each other in the dirt. Neither of them knew English very well at that time; they spoke Luxemburg with their families, German with neighbors and friends. Both would end their formal educations after finishing eighth grade. There was too much work to be done at home. Advanced education was a luxury.

  Grandma Krier was never one to voice regrets, but several times, when I was growing up, she said she wished she’d gone to high school. “So I would be smart,” was how she put it, her tone flat, without self-pity. And yet, she’d continued to educate herself by reading the English dictionary, which she kept pushed to the center of the kitchen table, in easy reach. She also read the Bible, the newspaper, the almanac, in addition to a number of religious publications. She spoke and wrote Luxemburg and German, as well as English, and could carry on a conversation in Dutch. At ninety, she still beat nearly everyone at Scrabble. At ninety-five, furious, she phoned my mother with a list of words: Internet, cyberspace, modem. My mother defined them one by one, but my grandmother wasn’t appeased. “They shouldn’t be allowed to have words that aren’t in the dictionary,” she said.

  I see her now as she pulls a steaming pan of chicken from the oven. She strides impatiently into the center of the thickest raspberry patch, ignoring the thorns that tug and tear at the loose skin on her arms. Winters, she walks out to the barn through the drifts wearing only a short-sleeved dress, ladies’ shoes from J C Penney’s, hose striped with runs. If one of the geese forgets itself and hisses, she snatches it up by the neck and swings it forward and back.

  “Mind your manners,” she says, then lets it sail.

  She never raises her voice to her grandchildren. She doesn’t have to. When my brother refuses to eat his liver and onions, she offers to fix him a ground glass sandwich instead. We know she isn’t joking. My brother cleans his plate. I take a second helping, just to be safe.

  My father calls her Big Mama—but never to her face.

  Even the bull knows enough to leave her alone.

  She tells us the story of going to get her tonsils yanked. It was 1908. Her father hitched the horses to the wagon and took her into “town,” which would have meant Random Lake. A nurse held her mouth open as Doctor reached down her throat with a long-handled scissors. There was no anesthetic, not even a piece of ice to suck. Her father paid the bill, then drove her back home.

  “Did you cry?” I want to know.

  “What good would that have done?” she says, and she’s right.

  Sundays after Mass, we cross the street to the cemetery, where she tidies my grandfather’s grave. I long to know more about his death, but my grandmother deflects my questions, pretends she doesn’t hear. I have only the facts from my mother, who was too young to remember him, who knows no more than this: that he lost his balance and fell off a wagon, landing on a pitchfork. That he didn’t die right away. That the night of his wake, the aurora borealis appeared, and no one could remember having ever seen it so bright. People believed it was my grandfather’s message from heaven, his good-bye.

  Walking back to the car, my grandmother spots a thist
le growing in the lawn. Without warning, she jackknifes at the waist, jerks it up. “Toss this in the field,” she says. I accept it like a crown of thorns. Her own hands are so callused that the prickers don’t stick. She brushes them off like flour.

  There is strength in my family, and then there is weakness.

  My other grandmother, my father’s mother, doesn’t like me any better than she did when I was five, though she’s awfully fond of my brother. My mother says I shouldn’t take it personally. Grandma Ansay, she says, is old-fashioned, and old-fashioned people like boys better than girls. It isn’t fair, but it can’t be helped.

  Grandma Ansay tries to wheedle my brother away from my mother whenever she can. Sometimes she pulls him aside and gives him a gift. It could be a quarter, or a brand-new watch, or a savings bond. By now, she’s had her stroke—that’s what we call it, as if it’s something she’s selected for herself, like a peculiar hat—and she walks with a cane, dragging one leg. Her speech is slurred. She often cries. But then, she’s been sickly all her life, always complaining: this ache, that pain. My father doesn’t call her Big Mama or Mom or Ma or anything else, although he says Mother when he’s speaking about her in the third person, as in Mother never came with us to the fields and Pa always said that Mother bought shoes to fit her head and not her feet.

  Twice a month, we have dinner at this grandmother’s house. “Dinner” means a meal that is eaten at noon. Grandma Ansay keeps the thermostat set at eighty-five Her enema bottle hangs behind the bathroom door, and the house smells of Ben-Gay and a terrible, unnamed sadness. She pokes at my flat chest to see if I’m developing. She tries to look up my dress, then laughs when I slap it down.

  At the dinner table, she and my grandfather bicker until Grandpa says, “That’s enough out of you!” Then they fight in earnest, speaking their own venomous mix of Luxemburg, English, and German, while my mother and father and brother and I keep eating, as if nothing whatsoever is wrong. Please pass the peas. Please pass the bread. Nothing has changed since the brief time we lived with them.

  “I’ll tell them everything, if that’s what you want,” Grandpa finally says. “I’ll tell them all about you!”

  Tell us what? Personally, I am dying to know. I figure it must have to do with either sex or money, the Twin Taboos, the two things nice people never talk about. But Grandma’s tongue is tired and cannot shape the words. She gives up, stops arguing. Instead, she stares at her hands, chained together by the rosary in her lap. After the meal, she lies face down on the daybed, weeping quietly, furiously. I watch her from the doorway. In catechism, our teacher—the mother of one of my friends—explains that if we only have faith the size of a mustard seed, God will work miracles in our lives and grant us any request. She even passes around a tiny yellowish husk, so we can see for ourselves that this isn’t so much to ask. Then she tells us, in graphic detail, about her miscarriages, how everybody told her she’d never carry a child to term, but look—here’s her daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who sits among us smiling like the Gift from God she is. We can reach out and touch Mary Elizabeth, the way Doubting Thomas touched Jesus. We can see for ourselves the power of faith.

  I love my religion classes, which are held in our teacher’s home. Mrs. T. always pulls the shades and lights tall, white candles. It’s better than ghost stories at camp. We hold hands and chant Hail Marys. Once, as we’re talking about Saint Benedict, we all see Satan circling us in the form of a small blue light. But because we’re each wearing a Saint Benedict medal, blessed by the Pope himself, Satan can’t do a thing to us and eventually the light winks out. That night, Mrs. T. holds a special ceremony in which we each vow to wear our medals until our deaths. I keep mine pinned to my underwear; when I shower, I hold it in my mouth. I will wear it until I’m in college. I’ll have nightmares when I finally take it off.

  Grandma Ansay prays all the time, but clearly, she’s doing something wrong. Why else wouldn’t God make her better? And why would God give her a stroke in the first place, if it wasn’t something she deserved? At Mass on Sundays, we pray for the intentions of particular people who are sick, and some of them get better, and some of them don’t. Either way, there must be a reason, and that reason is implied by every Bible story we read, every sermon that we hear. The good are rewarded. The bad are punished. When someone gets better and returns to church, everybody congratulates them, shakes their hands. When somebody doesn’t get better, well, it’s always a little bit awkward. The priest speaks of mystery, and we say the Our Father: thy kingdom come, thy will be done. God wants some people to suffer, like it or lump it, and He isn’t saying why. But it isn’t just luck. There is a Master Plan.

  Certainly, no one who gets better ever thinks it’s just dumb luck.

  “Your grandmother used to sing, and play the organ. She loved to dance,” my mother says. “Imagine how frustrating it would be if you couldn’t do the things you loved.”

  But I don’t imagine, because I know I’d never let something like that happen to me.

  At twenty-one, on medical leave, I receive a letter from a college friend. By now, mail seldom arrives for me, unless it contains a bill from a hospital or clinic. I take the letter from the kitchen, where my mother has handed it to me, and head toward the privacy of my bedroom. Crutching across the house leaves my arms and legs feeling as if the muscles are being pulled from the bone. It’s winter, but I’m wearing shorts because the scrape of fabric is unbearable against my shins. My mother has strategically placed a dining room chair in the hall, and I decide to stop and read the letter here, instead of taking the next fifteen steps to my bedroom, just in case I need those steps to get to the bathroom later. My days are divided up this way, a sequence of bargains and rationings. Do I shower in the morning and then rest until lunch time, or do I shower in the evening, when I can go directly to bed afterward? If I answer the phone in the kitchen, will I be stranded for an hour, for an afternoon?

  The letter is short. My friend is angry with me, disgusted. This is the last time she’ll write.

  “How can you let this happen to yourself?” she says.

  I’m the second-fastest kid at Lincoln Elementary—only Jimmy Borganhagen, who can do three hundred sit-ups and seventy-five push-ups, can beat me. In my mind, his ability to do sit-ups and push-ups has married his unbelievable speed, and I start doing sit-ups before I say my bedtime prayers, boy sit-ups, my feet hooked beneath my bed. I do push-ups, too; I can even manage a clap in between. I eat lots of bananas, because I’ve heard this is what weight lifters do.

  “Feel my muscle,” I tell my brother, my mother, my best friend, Tabitha, who I wrestle to the ground every so often, just because I can. In the kitchen, while my mother is at work, my brother and I take turns mixing concoctions of vinegar, baking soda, pickle juice, chocolate syrup—the one who can’t swallow the other’s bitter medicine loses. We judge each other, our friends, our cousins by one standard: toughness. When Mike jumps off the hood of the car, I jump off its roof. When he does the same, I pull the ladder out of the garage, shimmy up the side of the house, and fling myself into the side yard, where the grass is longer, softer. Summer mornings, we both chase after the garbage truck on our bicycles, but I’m the one who gets close enough to high-five the sanitation worker’s outstretched hand. “No fair,” Mike says, and he’s right. I’m two and a half years older. Taller. Stronger.

  “That will change,” my father says, but he’s been saying that since the day my mother brought Mike home from the hospital, his head like an overripe tomato, wrapped in a brilliant blue blanket. I hated the way my father immediately started calling him Tiger. “Call me Tiger,” I insisted, but my nickname was already Pumpkin, which I hated. Pumpkins weren’t tough. Pumpkins got their guts carved out, then sat in people’s windows, rotting slowly, their faces caving in on themselves.

  I’m no pumpkin. At school, Bonnie Adelsky—a big girl with breasts, who has been held back—arranges a wrestling match between me and a junior high school boy
. We meet behind the teacher’s parking lot late in the afternoon. While he’s busy protecting his balls—as if I cared—I throw myself at his ankles, and as soon as I’ve got him on the ground, I clamp his narrow waist between my thighs and squeeze until he shrieks. I love knowing I could snap his spine like a potato chip, and then, when he starts to cry, I love letting him go. We jump to our feet, and our eyes lock, dazzled, before I take off running, slaloming parked cars, his pack of friends just a clenched fist behind as I bolt across the street. We tear though backyard gardens, hurtle sandboxes, dodge swing sets until, one by one, the boys drop out of the chase, curses fizzling like damp fireworks in the sweetness of dusk.

  I love the carefully printed notes he sends me afterward, signed with X’s and O’s, and the twin silver bracelets he steals from his mother’s jewelry box and presents to me, wrapped in toilet paper and Scotch tape. He asks me if I’ll go with him to Fish Day, Port Washington’s annual summer festival. This is early June, and Fish Day isn’t until late July, but that doesn’t matter. My first date! And yet, I’m relieved when my mother says no, I’m too young to have a sweetheart. “Just tell him that July is a long time away,” she suggests, but what I tell him is something I’ve read in a book: Sorry, but your eyes are set too low for such a high fence.

  I love it that I’m not old enough for certain things, and that I’m still young enough for others, like taking my shirt off at Harrington Beach, where my girl-cousins and I, naked to the waist, splash through Lake Michigan’s frigid shallows after schools of little fish. Now and then, we have to hop out and bury our aching feet in warm sand. I love that ache, how it feels worse before it feels better. I love the alewife stink of the beach, and its smooth, gray stones. High overhead, along the edge of the bluff, evergreens grow at terrible angles, like crooked teeth. Each spring, a few more come tumbling down, and another couple inches of Port Washington floats away.