I moved through that evening in a bubble of amazing peace. As the night wore on and my physical numbness wore off, sitting down became uncomfortable, but even that seemed to contribute to my sense of well-being. I stood, claiming car fatigue—“I never want to sit down again!”—and friends nodded in sympathy. The event had all the cheer and falseness and censorious pressure of any family gathering, yet Michael and I struck a balance between internal and external pain that held us in a perfect, suspended equilibrium. We had something to conceal, together, from everyone else: a physical manifestation of our broken life. By some miraculous alchemy that Michael had enacted—I might go so far as to say calculated, engineered—he was upright and functional. He was bantering—a miracle unto itself. We made it through.
When we got home that night, Bernadette beat a hasty retreat to the basement guest room where she claimed to prefer staying when she visited, ostensibly so that her radio wouldn’t disturb anyone. Bernadette decried all news sources as purveyors of propaganda, but kept one or another talk show piping into her ear twenty-four hours a day, as if she needed to know what was being said in order to disdain it. She’d sit in the basement in an old La-Z-Boy we picked up at an auction, her radio propped on the headrest, sewing project in her lap. When she was up above ground she often held the tiny transistor against her ear, as if she were intercepting top-secret exchanges. I suspect she chose the basement not for its privacy but so that she might let slip in casual conversation that at our house she was relegated to the cellar.
Upstairs in the living room Michael poured drinks. In our old life, we would come home from an outing, sip something on the couch, debrief through the evening, head up to bed. Now, the most natural thing in the world made me feel like an impostor in someone else’s existence. Twilight Zone–ish: I looked like Phillipa, had all of Phillipa’s memories, yet somehow we both knew I wasn’t her. But what could we do? We kept playing along, pretending I was who I was and we were who we were, maybe waiting until we just couldn’t do it anymore.
We stayed awake longer than we should have that night for lack of a governing plan. My exhaustion passed into delirium. I sat in one armchair, Michael the other, and I kept dozing off, waking up disoriented, too groggy even to panic over my confusion. Michael was tired too; it’s not as if either of us had really slept the night before. Somewhere in my head I knew I could sleep in Ginny’s old room, now the guest room—for those who didn’t insist on the basement—but that would make a statement to Michael, and I didn’t feel ready for declarations. We’d spent plenty of time apart in the course of our marriage, but I was hard-pressed to think of a night we spent in our River City home that we did not sleep together in our room, in our bed. Granted, we had spent nights with our backs to one another, tensed in postures of sleep but clenching our bodies in fury, fuming in self-righteous anger—but in the same bed. We had no precedent for sleeping separately in that house. I did not know how I could rise from the living room, climb the stairs, and turn right, instead of left, down the hall.
The thing that solved the problem—or doomed us, depending on your perspective—was toothpaste. Our bathroom was off our bedroom, and my toiletry bag was still in there from the afternoon’s shower. In my haze of exhaustion I followed an illusive logic, by which I imagined I would go to our bathroom, brush my teeth, wash my face, and the next steps would reveal themselves. Perhaps Michael would stay downstairs, leaving the decision to me as to where I’d lay my head. Perhaps he’d follow me upstairs and make his desires known. I very much wanted to do what he wanted. I know: I protest too much. I know my actions may appear to defy my intentions, but I swear: I wanted to make it easier for him, not to cause more pain.
Michael entered the bathroom as I was brushing my teeth. He took his toothbrush from the cup, dipped it under the running water, reached past me for the paste, then sat on the closed toilet to brush. The configuration was more than familiar. I’m a speedier brusher—Michael’s thorough, methodical, and has fewer fillings—but I wash my face before bed and he doesn’t, so we usually finished our ablutions in unison. As we stood at the sink—Michael replacing his brush in the cup, me patting my face dry—we ended up looking at ourselves, and each other, in the mirror. We stood and looked in the mirror as if waiting to see what these people might do next. They were a perfectly presentable couple—tired, yes, and showing it, but handsome in a nice-looking-older-people sort of way: he a good six inches taller than she, both of them with full heads of hair, gray dominating the brown, but not unattractively so, hers wavy to the shoulder, pulled back in a barrette, his a little shaggy, in need of a trim. The man wears a button-down—pale blue and white checks, open at the neck—and dark chinos, belted low, accommodating the slight belly a sixty-year-old man must accommodate. It’s not unbecoming. His wife—his patronizing, neglectful, traitorous wife—is slender, but not without a bit of belly herself; may God bless the linen shift dresses of Eileen Fisher and the outlet malls that render such garments remotely affordable to mere mortals. This woman in the mirror spent a bit too much time in the sun as a girl and her freckles have turned to spots, but what can you do? There are crow’s-feet and laugh lines, but the choices that begat them were made long ago and cannot be unmade. Standing there on the eve of their daughter’s wedding, they watch as the man lifts an arm and places it lightly on his wife’s hip, and begins to turn her away from the mirror toward their bedroom. She allows herself to be drawn, exhausted but willing. At the foot of the bed, the man turns his wife to him, takes hold of her dress and slip together, and lifts them over her head. Beneath she wears only underpants, and he takes hold of these at the waist and pulls them down. Lifting one leg and then the other, she acquiesces as he turns her slightly so he can see her from behind. He’s hesitant, eyes squinted like he’s ready to shut them quickly if he can’t bear what he sees. There’s a tiny gasp—his—an intake of air acknowledging what he’s done, and as he places his palm tenderly over the hand marks—his hand marks—he is taking responsibility. He is sorry. It’s a strange moment, as it’s she who has so much to be sorry for, yet he’s the one apologizing with every gesture. He lifts the quilt and sheet and helps his wife gently into bed, tucks her in, then rounds to his own side, sheds pants and belt in one sweep, undoes his shirt buttons, slips out of the shirt, and lays it on a chair. His watch, unbuckled, goes to the bedside table—how many times has she watched this ritual unfold? how many thousands of times?—and his boxer shorts slide from his waist. He steps free, leaves them, uncharacteristically, on the floor, and slides into the bed beside her, his wife.
In their bed, that night, they make love. Not passionately, but kindly, practically in their sleep, and, at the time, it does not feel wrong. At the time, it doesn’t even feel confusing, for what is one more time in the context of countless times?
When I was in Ohio with Lucius I did not feel conflicted. I felt guilty, yes—guilty and bewildered by this strange turn of my life—but the pull toward Lucius was an undeniable force. In Ohio with Lucius I felt no pull toward Michael at all; my faraway husband felt like a vestigial limb that in time would fall away, dissolve. But then I returned to Iowa and, lo and behold, my living, breathing, feeling, autonomous husband received me not by confirming his obsolescence but by demonstrating he had more in him than I’d known. The spanking—which, in its conception and enactment, struck me as ridiculous and sad and which I performed only out of duty—had begun to seem like a very deft move on Michael’s part.
The spanking made me look at Michael differently, but I should qualify the character of this difference. I fear that Michael felt we’d transcended something, that from the rift in our marriage we were creating something new, opening another era. More than half asleep as we made love that night, I feared Michael thought we were repairing what was broken. I felt something new toward him, yes, but it wasn’t about us; it was about what lay ahead for him, beyond me. I was seeing Michael in a fresh light, but I was no longer the lover taking him in with awe and insp
iration. I was the friend, the sister, the mother, building him up after the fall: slapping his back, massaging his shoulders, the boxing coach in the corner of the ring, saying, Get back in there, slugger! But he didn’t know I wasn’t headed back into the ring behind him. I was sending him out there to take on others. I had someplace else to be, and as we made love that night, those were the terms in my mind, and I was aware they might not be the terms in his.
I blame my exhaustion and general state of confusion for what I did not think about that night: namely, Lucius. Not that he didn’t cross my mind, but I didn’t stop to think what my being with Michael might mean to him. In Ohio, Michael’d been nearly obliterated from my consciousness. Now, in Iowa, he crowded out everything else. Until I recrossed the threshold into my life with Michael, Lucius was the world—gorgeous, terrifying, a Technicolor world where I’d been too enraptured to think about home. Now, back in black and white with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, there were cows to be milked and pigs to be slopped and no one cared to hear about my pretty dream. They drew me into the fold and baked me a black-and-white apple pie to say welcome home—because there’s no place like it, right?
EARLY IN THE MORNING, Ginny and Silas arrived from Prairie, where they were living temporarily with Silas’s sister, Eula, and her five-month-old baby, Oren. Born in December, shortly before I left for Ohio, Oren had been conceived the preceding March just after Orah and Obadiah were killed. No one in this world save Eula knows who Oren’s father is. After the Yoders’ accident, Eula went to stay with Silas in River City, and when he went to work, she was left to herself, in town, for the first time in her life. Scarcely seventeen, she’d not yet taken the adult baptism into the church that follows an Amish teen’s rumspringa, that time in Amish life when some degree of experimentation is expected. No one would be surprised if a regular American teenager who’d lost her parents, suddenly and violently, sought solace or escape in sexual activity—sex and death are so often conjoined. And maybe that was true for Eula, too, although in her case it seems more likely that she simply decided it was time to have a baby and set about the task. I’ve never known someone so profoundly accepting of the human life cycle. Perhaps I just don’t know enough Amish, or perhaps my incapacity to grasp their understanding of God—or any notion of any god, for that matter—renders me a lost cause. I’m no Jew but for my need to question everything, and that’s just neurotic, not divine. That Eula and I get along as well as we do is curious: me with my anxious nihilism, and Eula with her patient and tremendous love.
The morning of the wedding, Ginny and Silas dropped off Eula and Oren at our place. Bride and groom had lots to deal with, but before they dashed away we all stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, chatting while Eula took the baby upstairs to nurse. Into this scene entered Bernadette, reissuing the severe meteorological warnings she’d been hearing on her radio. Then the doorbell rang—exit Ginny stage left, reenter Ginny stage left moments later, the maid of honor on her arm. Enter Linda, wearing her usual size 50 carpenter pants and a hooded sweatshirt too warm for the season, lumbering in bearing enough Donutland donuts to feed an NA convention. Ginny gets everyone set up at the table for a wedding-day breakfast. They look like kids sitting down to an after-school snack. Bernadette scowls at her powdered pastry, though not necessarily in displeasure; a scowl is Bernadette’s resting facial expression. Hard to imagine a child simply being born that way, disposition stamped into the structure of her face, and I might have guessed Bernadette’s scowl had come to her later in life if not for one photograph—a photo half charred by her own hand, I’ll note—that I have come to suspect is one of the sole artifacts of Bernadette’s genuine identity.
After wedding-day donuts, Randall—whom I knew then only as Linda’s NA sponsor—swung by for Linda in his poor Chevy Caravan, unaware that it was in the last hours of its automotive life, and the two of them headed off for an NA coffee klatch to prepare for the long day of non-narcotic-buffered socializing ahead. I don’t know a ton about addiction—Ginny’s problems, though drugs got involved, were never rooted there; drugs were just one of many means she tried to quell her demons. My sense, however, is that Randall and Linda had been drug addicts qua drug addicts. I remember wondering if all sponsor-sponsee relationships were as close as theirs, sobriety reliant on NA meetings, but also very heavily on each other. They seemed as addicted to togetherness as they may have once been to whatever it was they snorted or smoked or mainlined—I’ve never learned what they’d done, if they had the same habit, or just the same cure. I suppose it’s true that you’re always an addict; you just hope to find something benign, or less fatal, to be addicted to. People don’t change, my father, a cynical clinical psychologist, used to say, they just find different ways to be themselves.
We all went our separate ways with plans to reconvene at the church at three, an hour before the ceremony. Ginny and Silas ran around doing last-minute God-knows-what, Bernadette retreated to her basement, and Eula got Oren down for a nap and was able to trim Michael’s hair at the kitchen sink and spiff him up a bit. I went upstairs, ostensibly to lie down.
There was a phone in Ginny’s old bedroom, a room where I never spent much time, amid the nostalgic curios that fill leftover bedrooms of adult children. Fresh paint, a new duvet cover, throw rugs, and toss pillows had rendered it suitable for the occasional guest, yet it remained studded with the artifacts of a time—and a person—past. These relics were mostly functional electronics we couldn’t see fit to discard or replace: the plastic black-cat wall clock, its eyes and tail shifting back and forth to tick away the time; a thirteen-inch, antibiotic-pink television; the stylized 1980s big-button telephone, peeling Duran Duran sticker still half gummed to the receiver. I sat with that ridiculous phone on my lap, realizing I hadn’t been alone since my return to Iowa, except for the five minutes I’d spent in the shower before Michael joined me. The grinning, watchful clock made me feel I still wasn’t alone. I tried to get my head straight. I wanted to call Lucius, but what did I want to say? We hadn’t spoken since I left Ohio—what, thirty-six hours before? It seemed impossible. I’d made love with two men in two days. I was young when I met Michael. I’d had a few boyfriends in college, a couple of lovers, one-night stands, but never in such proximity. Directly after the spanking, I’d felt such an imperative to tell Lucius everything, but the simplicity of that desire hadn’t lasted. Ten hours later everything had changed again. I’d had sex with Michael, sex I somehow thought I could magically extract from time and sequester with all the other sex we’d had over the years, redistribute it from the night before into the past where it belonged. But now that logic only confused me. I sat under the cat’s insipid, shifty gaze as time ticked on. It was ten-fifty-five; I had four hours to shower, dress, and get to the church. Was it enough time to call my lover and tell him that my husband had spanked me, and that we’d made love, but none of it mattered? I’d done what Michael needed, what the situation necessitated, and what our marriage and some respect for its longevity had seemed to call for. Who knew what would happen next? Even if I told Lucius everything, it would still be only a partial story, because the story continued. How do we ever simply tell anyone anything? How are we ever content to explain the way things are, when they’re always inevitably changed by whatever comes next? I sat there flummoxed, clutching the phone beneath the grinning cat. By the time I took note of something other than the cat’s ticking, it was after eleven. I had my dress to iron, nails to trim and paint, legs to shave. There wasn’t time to call Lucius. Michael and I had done all we’d done in order to make it through Ginny’s wedding together, and I couldn’t risk a call embroiling me in my other existence. Squash it down a little longer, I told myself, stay here, in this life.
THAT GINNY HAD to contend with her period during the wedding seems like Murphy’s idea of a joke. Having been too sick and too thin to bleed at all for so long, once Ginny finally did menstruate, it was terrible—and I know how bad the cramping can be, because I know
how bad mine was before I had Ginny, and how bad my mother’s was before she had me. Cramps used to wipe me out, like my entire reproductive system was trying to expel itself from the body cavity. I’d get clumsy from pain, sloppy, dropping things, misjudging distances, as if it took so much energy to contend with the pain there wasn’t enough left to manage other bodily functions. Only monumental quantities of ibuprofen dulled it, and when you swallow that much Advil it dulls everything else, too. On Ginny’s wedding day she was less the “recovered” Ginny I’d been coming to know, and more the way she’d been when she was just home from the final round of shock: slow, dragging, out of step. I had to keep reminding myself where we were in time.
I was impatient with her on her wedding day, I’m afraid. A church is not where I’d have preferred to see my daughter married. Granted, it was the least churchy of churches, a long-deconsecrated Catholic parish inhabited by a series of progressively less Jesus-y Christians, until it fell into the hands of scrap-bag, hippie Unitarian Universalists. The wooden sign outside—painted over many times with the names of many different churches—was always hard to read, and though the Virgin had long ceased to be the specific object of devotion inside, people still called it Our Lady of the Prairie, because nothing else ever stuck.
Frustrated with Ginny for her devotion to ecologically responsible tampons, I wished she’d conceded to old reliable Tampax—a built-in applicator would have been much easier to manage in a wedding dress. But no. In the middle stall of the three in Our Lady of the Prairie’s ladies’ room—with me and Linda standing on the toilet seats of the stalls on either side, holding her dress out of harm’s way—Ginny struggled blindly inside the upsweep of taffeta to insert a tampon without reducing her dress to something out of Carrie. Eula had done a beautiful job on Ginny’s dress, under the circumstances, beset by setbacks one after another. There’d been a vole attack on the tulle, then nail polish remover spilled accidentally across the hem. Ultimately the choice to make it tea length made more sense than starting over entirely.
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 5
