“But he’s okay?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he cried. “Oh, yes!”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And does he think he’ll be able to get here?”
“Oh, no! No no no no no. The roads are impassable. Impassable. Oh, no, certainly not.”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course, I’m sorry.”
“He’s been in a ditch! In a tornado!”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
He inhaled, as if preparing to sing a difficult high note, but then his breath fizzled and he deflated, eyes closed. His chin dropped to his chest. For a moment I suspected narcolepsy.
I reached out to touch him, but stopped. “I’ll let the bride and groom know.”
Without lifting his head, the junior pastor nodded sleepily.
Humans do not cease to confound me.
I spotted Ginny, Silas, Randall, and Linda by the scrap heap of Randall’s van and brought to them what the junior pastor had told me. All eyes went expectantly to Randall, who rose from his crouch with a look like For real? “I am what-do-you-call-it?” he said.
“Ordained,” Linda told him.
“Right,” Randall said. “Online. Church of the Fellowship of Something. Legal as a priest, swear to God.” He held up three fingers. “By the power vested in me by cyberspace—”
“You got ordained by an online church?” I asked.
“Yeah. Of the Brotherhood of the Fellowship of the Something.”
I just said, “Why?”
“Married some folks at NA last weekend, but I’m good all month. I’m no priest, but—”
“Thank God,” I said.
Randall laughed and looked to Ginny and Silas. “You do got everybody here and all.”
Silas and Ginny faced each other. I don’t know if they spoke, but I imagine her eyes asking him if he could abide, how his folks would have felt, if they’d been here. And I imagine Silas saying: This is how it is. Everything happens for a reason. This is where we are and what we’re faced with. I imagine him saying: I love you, Ginny Maakestad. I pledged my life to you long ago. Let’s let Randall make it official. Really, who better to marry us?
Randall piped in, “I still got the words here”—he gestured to the wreck—“if I can get to them. From Corinna and David’s, the whole what-you-say thing.” A crowbar appeared, and Randall set to prying open the van’s back doors.
“Where’s Daddy?” Ginny asked me. “How do we tell everyone?”
At that moment Randall burst the jammed doors apart, propped them open with fallen tree limbs, reached in, and procured a gigantic bullhorn. He switched it on. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he boomed, “thanks for being so cool during that little tornado there. Now come on gather here and we’ll have ourselves a wedding!”
I found Michael still in the basement, futzing with the radio, tracking the storm. “They’re going to do their vows, Michael. Randall’s e-ordained!” It was absurd enough to be glorious.
Michael looked at me with unwavering blankness.
“Michael—”
He opened his mouth and warbled a few notes: “One-nine-six-five at Orinciqua . . .”
It was my old Camp Orinciqua song. I don’t think I said anything, just stared.
“You must remember,” he said.
“Of course I remember.”
Michael seemed lost in time. He looked to the radio like it was a periscope, a link to the outside. He must have felt so peripheral—to my life, to Ginny’s, to his own as he’d known it. He probably couldn’t imagine we’d notice his absence. “What a stoic you’ve become,” he said.
I bristled. “This is for Ginny! Why did we go through all of that? This isn’t me being unfeeling. I’m holding it together. For today, for Ginny—Jesus!”
“I meant about tornadoes,” Michael said. “You were so frightened that first time.”
I felt humbled and cowed, but of course that’s not how I sounded. “I wasn’t frightened, I’d never been through one. You grew up with them. There aren’t tornadoes in California.”
Michael smiled, like he’d forgotten we weren’t at home, in our own basement, looking at reel-to-reels, reminiscing, indulging in nostalgia’s guilty gluttony. “Right, Phil, you’re right, you weren’t scared at all.” He nearly grinned, his voice warm and lifelike again, and for a moment we were what we had once been: Michael, the wise professor, and Phillipa, the ambitious young grad student. All of which was silly even then—professor!—he was thirty-two years old. As for wisdom, the man’s lived his entire life in the same Iowa university town. I grew up in Berkeley, a family of Jewish intellectuals, a teenager there, so near to San Francisco, in the late sixties. But we balanced out somehow: his expertise, extraordinary technical proficiency, the professorship at such a young age, the confidence of a smart, good-looking man, sure of his trade and of himself. I was younger, yes, but more worldly, a city girl, a Jew—the exoticism of it in Iowa in the 1970s! Through Midwestern eyes, I was practically a hippie. When we married the university hired me, a spousal appointment; that’s the way it was done. It carried an onus, of course, kept me a little behind and below him. Which seemed appropriate then, good for the balance—it kept us even. And by the time the equilibrium might have begun to erode, Ginny arrived, and kept us busy, and worried, and ever occupied. Michael and I were good for each other through Ginny’s troubles—which is to say, approximately the first twenty-three years of her life. Over those years, Michael and I had both spent semesters away—he did a year in London, I had several summers at the StrawHat Guild in Vermont—but neither of us ever had an affair. I’m certain Michael has been honest about that. It’s impossible to say whether I’d have fallen in love with Lucius if I’d met him at another point in my life, but, likewise, I can’t help but wonder if there were men I would have loved, had circumstances been different. There was a man in the company one summer in Vermont—they brought him in to play Tevye, a giant wallop of a man. We’d become fast friends, inseparable, but he was married, and I was married, and neither of us quite had room for outside possibilities. Maybe it’s a testament to a time in my relationship with Michael when I couldn’t imagine giving up the life we made together. By the time I met Lucius, I was willing. Whether I was willing and then along came Lucius, or along came Lucius and thus I was willing, I can’t know. Is Lucius a better man than Michael? Probably not. Any better for me? Who knows? Ginny would probably say that things had gotten too calm for her drama-queen mother, so I’d had to go and summon a tornado. But tornadoes aren’t parties; you don’t throw a tornado. Tornadoes, like tantrums, do the throwing themselves.
The first tornado I lived through hit in July of my first year in Iowa, 1976. Though my degree program at the U was an MFA in playwriting, I was taking Michael’s sound design course that summer—to learn sound design, yes, and because it was taught by the attractive young professor. We became friends—a cup of coffee here, a beer there—and had made plans to visit opening evening at the Prairie County Fair. This was before Doppler, before satellites and advance-warning systems, back when word of an approaching tornado came because someone spotted a twister coming across a field and called it in to the local radio station.
Poor, starving graduate student that I was, I didn’t have a telephone. Michael was to pick me up, early evening, in his truck. The storm hit midafternoon, and the fair didn’t open that night—it took some clearing and rehab before it opened at all—but Michael arrived as promised and found me in the basement. The house where I lived was subdivided into apartments; I was the only resident home for the storm. I’d brought my cat, Maude, with me to the basement, along with an electric radio, which obviously did me no good whatsoever. The power was out, and I had no way of knowing if and when the tornado had passed. I had some vague notion of a tornado’s calm center eye whose peaceful aura might give the illusion that the storm was over, while in reality the eye could suck you up and spit you out
like a centrifuge. I could hear the way they’d talk about me, idiot grad student from California: Girl had enough sense to get to the basement, not enough to stay there. I’d poke my head out the cellar door, Maudie under my arm, fur blowing like Toto’s, and we’d be whisked into the funnel, which had been hovering conveniently over the storm door of my student rental just waiting for a silly girl like me to mistake the eye for the end. So I stayed put on the basement floor of that old house on North Dodge and sang Maudie the entire libretto of Pirates of Penzance to pass the time. When Michael showed up I had moved on to camp songs. Imagine him approaching my house, suddenly catching wind of a tune, a lone voice rising from underground. “One-nine-six-five at Orinciqua, no other year the same. Sunshine and joy all summer through . . .” You can imagine the ensuing mockery I endured, but it served its purpose: a vehicle for the flirtation we were clearly going to engage in, appropriate or otherwise. I suppose you could say Michael and I began and ended in a tornado, but maybe beginnings and endings always feel like a whirlwind: love snatches you up where you live and plunks you down somewhere in Oz.
Michael and I climbed from Our Lady’s bomb shelter, up the ramp and the stairs, toward the light of the vestibule, and out to the slapped, strewn, disheveled churchyard. The shattered trunk of the willow had been transformed into an altar while I was underground, and Randall, the master of ceremonies, stood there shuffling a stack of crumpled papers like he was cramming for a final. Stuck in the splintered willow trunk was the memorial bouquet for Orah and Obadiah. Someone had fetched it from the chancel. Someone had also retrieved the dresses; Ginny and Linda were no longer in their skivvies, as my grandfather used to say. Eula had removed her Hefty bag garb and knelt on it now, rebraiding the Bontrager girls’ pigtails. Bernadette sat, magisterial in her wheelchair—had she been carried in it up the stairs? Among the bags and purses, she looked smugly satisfied by the weather’s corroboration of her morning forecast.
Silas stood, handsome and collected, Ginny beside him. As Michael and I emerged from the bomb shelter, she looked both ways, fast, as if someone was going to catch her, and then, with great gumption, hiked up her bridal skirts and dashed toward us across the church lot, running like it was the last sprint of her childhood, and goddamn she’d make it a good one. She was a streak of white, a flash of lightning, luminous in that strangely bleary, still afternoon. The light was like an eclipse—depths blurred, outlines stark—the air perfectly clear. Everything seemed unreal and startlingly real at the same time, as though what we’d known as light had been redefined, and now we saw this—ah! this!—and knew it was what we’d meant by light all along.
When she reached us—breathing hard, flushed, the veins and muscles in her thin arms pulsed out and corded with the effort of gripping her skirts to free her legs for the run—all the energy and attention of the crowd was beamed where we stood. At the makeshift altar there was a shuffling, then a calm, and then the clear, baby-soprano voices of the Bontrager girls rang out alongside Eula’s powerful alto, deep and alarmingly sexy.
Ginny dropped her skirts, stepped between her father and me, and took our arms in hers, and we walked down that aisle like it was the goddamn yellow brick road, making our way to Ginny’s best friend in the world, waiting there at the altar, Randall at her side and ready to deliver vows cribbed from weddingsRus.com, to invoke the power vested in him by the Church of the Fellowship of Who the Hell Even Cares—by the Church of the Fellowship of Everything That Is Good and Right and Truly Deserved in This World—to pronounce Silas Yoder and Virginia Maakestad husband and wife.
2
* * *
THE STORIES
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.
—Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
THAT GINNY AND SILAS were married outside the church—near, but not in it—made a symbolic sense we couldn’t have engineered any better. And the Mennonite Festival Barn reception took place without electricity, the way Silas was raised, which felt like a beautiful, if unintentional, gesture of respect for Orah and Obadiah. There was lantern-lit dancing to improvised jigs: a friend of Silas’s happened to have a lap steel guitar in his truck, and he was joined by Randall on harmonica and the maid of honor on a borrowed fiddle. Who knew Linda fiddled? Not I. She changed out of her dress into a T-shirt and gym shorts, tucked that instrument under her neck, and played like she was raised in an Appalachian shack by bluegrass virtuosos. You learn a lot about people when the power goes out.
I was leaning against a barn post, looking out at the dancers, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Ginny had gone to a Montessori preschool where to get an adult’s attention the kids placed a hand on the grown-up, registering their presence and desire to speak. The teacher’d be standing there sometimes with eight, ten kids laying on hands. Ginny never lost the habit. I felt her hand on my shoulder at the reception and reached to cover it with my own. “It’s perfect, Gin.”
“It is,” she said, and we stood there marveling. She seemed better than she had that morning, more in control of herself, sharper, less Advil’d. We’ve been through so many drug cocktails in Ginny’s time—pharmaceutical combinations that worked for a while, and we’d all hold our breath, waiting for the nosedive, the fail—but since the electroshock, or at least since the shock of the shock wore off, she’d been mostly steady. There were dips still, yes, lapses into disquietude, disequilibrium, but for the most part she’d really been okay. I had to swallow tears.
When Ginny spoke again, her voice was earnestly solemn. “Thank you, Ma.”
“You guys did it all, Gin. I hardly—”
“No,” she said, “thank you for getting me to this day, not giving up on me. For making me live long enough to find Silas, keeping me in the world.” She reined back tears; mine spilled. “You’re the squeakiest wheel there is. I know how lucky I am to’ve had you squeaking on my behalf all these years. You’ve been squeaking for me since the day I was—” and there Ginny broke down, too. Through tears, I said, or tried to say, “And we all know it’s the squeaky wheel that gets—” but Ginny broke in before I could finish. “The electroshock!” she cried, and then we were both crying, and laughing, and I’ll say this: to be able to laugh about the horror that is electroconvulsive shock therapy is a pretty good indication of how far we’d come.
When Ginny composed herself, she began again, as if she’d sworn she was going to say these things to me before her wedding day was through: “I would not still be here if not for you, Ma. I know that. Daddy knows that. And you know that. I fought you every fucking step, and you kept fighting—for me. You made me make it—against my own will mostly! For so long I didn’t think I’d ever be okay, and I’m so grateful to be here . . .”
I couldn’t speak, I was crying so hard. I squeezed her hand and we stood there, wet-faced, watching the wedding dancers gallop and twirl. Linda fiddled like a West Virginian Jascha Heifetz, and Randall slapped a tambourine against his knee. On the sidelines, sweet, sweet Silas squatted by Bernadette’s wheelchair, trying to persuade her to dance. She batted his attentions away flirtatiously; she looked as happy as I had ever seen that woman look in twenty-five years.
I glanced around for Michael, finally spotting him against a post just like mine across the barn. He was propped with his feet out in front, a champagne flute in one hand. Ginny had spent months collecting Goodwill glassware for the reception; I held one from the ALPHA PHI WINTER FORMAL, FEBRUARY 26, 1983. Michael appeared relaxed, handsome. Sometimes a few glasses of prosecco can round the edges just enough. Ginny once had a doctor who thought Zoloft should go into the drinking water, like fluoride. Maybe then every day would feel like you’d had a few glasses of bubbly at your daughter’s wedding. I might be unable to complain.
It wa
s close to ten when Michael and I began to say our goodbyes. I found Ginny and Silas with Linda, Randall, and a few other friends sprawled among some hay bales. They looked sleepy and content, like overgrown children at a slumber party. Ginny saw me and pushed herself up, then teetered, but was caught by hands from all sides and set upright on her bare feet. She put a hand out to Silas and pulled him up, and together they scuffed through the hay. Ginny—tiny Ginny, half a foot shorter than me—wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me tight. I held her close. When we parted, Silas was standing by, attentive and patient, and Ginny and I drew him in. They smelled sweaty and grassy and loamy and wonderful.
“We can’t stay much longer either,” Ginny said once we let go. “Our flight’s early. I don’t know why we didn’t plan for a day of recovery. We never even thought of it.”
“You’ll recover on the plane,” I assured them. “It’s going to be great!” I’d pictured them in Paris, strolling in the Tuileries, hand in hand, although, as in a dream, the characters kept shifting: Ginny and Silas were themselves, then they were me and Lucius, then me and Michael. Eras ran together—the past, the soon-to-be present, the dreamed-of future. Sometimes it’s hard to know which life you’re living, which you’ve already lived, and which is someone else’s. Dividing lines are so porous. Unable to express any of this, I said, simply, “France . . .”
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 7
