Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  She was screaming by then, spitting venomous words. Terribly unimaginative words she’d spat at me many times before. Still effective, caustic despite their ubiquity. “Fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you. I won’t do this. I will not do this anymore.” She was almost speaking to herself, like I’d already disappeared from the frame. She’d walled me out, didn’t see me, was contending only with the mother in her mind. She closed her eyes: “Fuck you.” Resolute in her conviction: “Fuck you.” She said it like a mantra, a religious chant that took over when real thought failed, a mantra to protect her from the enemy—me, the meds, the doctors. “Fuck you.” She turned back upstairs and left me alone in the Bush-Cheney–papered family room. A door slammed on the second floor—Ginny loves to slam a door—and a long beat of silence followed. Then the wailing began. It was Oren, startled by the wall-shaking slam, but it was like a return to Ginny’s infancy, when the wailing never stopped, the tornado siren of that horrible wail. I covered my ears. I could not bear it; in a moment I’d start wailing myself. If I didn’t get out of that house I’d be standing there with my eyes pinched shut, hands over my ears, mouth gaped in a gruesome, Munchian, Howard Dean scream.

  I grabbed my handbag and left. At the Gas Stop I bought the Prairie Community News, sat at the booth with a lousy cup of coffee, and opened the classifieds. There were plenty of available rentals—no shortage of vacant farmhouses on a half acre of what used to be the family farm, now with genetically modified corn in rigid rows. I made an appointment for that very afternoon to see a place over past the cheese factory.

  Aldous Bontrager, landlord of 1867553 John C. Wolffson Road, got to the house before me to weed-whack a path to the front door. His trousers were spattered with grass, and when he lifted his cap to resettle it on his head before extending an arm toward me, his hair stuck to his brow in a wet band. The house was surrounded not by lawn but by a bizarrely ordered and organized junkyard: a pile of bicycle parts sat beside a reserve of household appliances; a nearby depression held vacuums, shop vacs, and electric brooms. Broomsticks, yardsticks, trim molding, and other long, skinny things were bundled in twine and stacked against the house like firewood.

  “I own it all.” Bontrager swept his hand, indicating either the farmland or the junk.

  Past the junk piles, the house itself had a dilapidated, Hobbit quality. I thought the front window was boarded up until we approached and I realized it was just filth-caked. Bontrager pushed open the door to reveal a moldering electric wheelchair, and I imagined the home’s resident sitting there, shotgun in lap. Bontrager said, “Needs some airing out is all.”

  I said, “Thanks for your time, Mr. Bontrager,” and turned to leave.

  “You’re the Yoder mother-in-law, aren’t you?” I heard him say, and I spun back around. Bontrager paused, and I steeled myself as the man looked me up and down, then said, “Nice to meet you.” Sarcasm? Utter sincerity? I have no idea. I drove straight to the Gas Stop and asked Donna Presidio to put me in the first thing she had available once the Trekkies left. I reserved a room for my return from France, too. “Welcome back!” Donna said.

  “I still have to survive until tomorrow—don’t welcome me back just yet.”

  Donna looked confused, but said, good-naturedly, “Well, we’re glad to have you.”

  “Getting to be the closest I’ve got to a home.” I meant that the inn gave me comfort, but Donna looked hurt, as if I’d disparaged her business, and I couldn’t think of a way to remedy it.

  I stayed away from the farmhouse until they’d all left to go campaigning at Trek Fest that evening. KLINGONS FOR KERRY! Though Trek Fest’s better attended than, say, the Marion Bar-B-Que Rendezvous or even Solon Beef Days—especially by out-of-staters with prosthetic Vulcan ears—it’s really just a town fair: fried dough, lemonade shake-ups, live local music at the bandstand. And while Ginny, Silas, Eula, Oren, Linda, and Randall were out riding bumper cars and persuading Starfleet to vote Kerry, I crept back to the house, went to sleep, and was gone Sunday morning before I had to see anyone but Eula. “Back to the Gas Stop,” I told her. She’d obviously heard some version of events from Ginny, and nodded, her forehead creased in sympathy. I kissed Oren’s peach-fuzzed crown and fled. One more week at the Gas Stop and I’d be gone to another land. My last class was Thursday, July 1—Final essay topic: How One Professor Managed to Make Musical Theater More Boring Than Statistics—and I was scheduled to fly out of Cedar Rapids on the Fourth, Independence Day. That was the best available flight, and it was a relief to escape the festivities: when the president’s a diabolical moron, British colonization doesn’t sound so bad. I’ve never been a huge fireworks fan. We always went because Michael loves them, and I suspect his enthusiasm for zooming, flaring explosives has a lot to do with Bernadette’s abhorrence of them; she loathed fireworks like someone who’d lived through the Blitz. Ginny never liked them much either, and when she was small she’d stay with Bernadette on the Fourth while I went with Michael to City Park. The thought of being in an airplane, literally above it all, was comforting, which is saying a lot, as I get no kick in a plane. I don’t refuse to fly, but I don’t like it. I concede to the ways of this warp-speed world.

  MY TRIP TO FRANCE took place in a dream bubble. Mornings, I’d wake beside this beautiful man on hotel-crisp sheets, my arm across his warm back, a breeze lapping through floor-to-ceiling windows. We’d shower together at the pension, then amble down cobbled streets to the pâtisserie for butter croissants and café au lait so creamy and strong it made me hum with energy. Then we’d set off on our own: Lucius to his collaborationists at their family home on rue des Brebis—the Street of Sheep—and I to wander the town. Down a tiny side street I found a used bookshop; a plaque on the door read LIBRAIRIE BRUNO BLUM, and there was a big, old-fashioned knocker that I lifted on instinct and tapped. A click sounded within, the door unlocked, and I pushed inside, where the sweet dust of old pages and powdery leather enveloped me. A large old man with a bald pate and wiry gray hair tendriling down to his collar hunched behind a great battered wood desk, books piled around him like fortifications. He peered up at me over tiny reading glasses. The same wiry gray hair sprouted from his ears and sprang from his nose, and he’d’ve been terrifying—a child’s vision of a human monster—if he hadn’t just then flashed me a tremendous smile and, removing his glasses and sweeping them about him in a gesture of expansive welcome, said in heavily German-accented English, “Welcome to my kingdom!” I thought of a story my grandparents told about a friend of theirs in Dresden, a storekeeper, maybe a bookshop or a music shop? A quiet man who kept to himself, no family anyone knew of. And then one day, my grandparents said—and they heard it from other friends and relatives, for it was the early ’40s when this happened, and Bubbie and Zadie had been in California for years already—one day the shopkeeper was gone. His store, empty. No one saw anything go, just suddenly empty, proprietor gone. That’s how it went: the Nazis arrived and people disappeared, never to be heard from again. I had a pang of missing them—my grandparents—both gone since I was a teenager, and my parents, then, too—a pang like a hole in my heart. And probably to soothe myself, to fill that unfillable gap, I bought from Bruno Blum, to bring home for Oren, an ungodly expensive 1979 translation of Maurice Sendak’s One Was Johnny—“Mon premier s’appelle Jeannot; tout tranquille il lit sur un escabeau . . .” Because that’s what my parents would have done.

  In another shop, I splurged on a pair of gorgeous red leather shoes—though God knows when I’d wear them in Iowa—but that was the extent of my extravagance. Most days, I found myself a lunch spot and ate while reading Blood Will Have Blood: The Occupiers and the Occupied, France 1940–1944, by Lucius Bocelli, PhD. Or I’d be walking and the taste buds at the back of my tongue would flare and swell, drawing me down a side street to a charcuterie, saucissons strung from hooks like bunting. I’d buy a baguette, some cheese, and sliced jambon, and plunk down in a plaza by a fountain, or at the edge of a pasture, to eat my picn
ic and watch the cows flick their tails at flies. Lucius and I met up in the late afternoon for a glass of wine at a sidewalk café, then we’d go back to nap and make love, the early-evening breeze lapping at the window curtains. We’d shower again, dress, and stroll out to find dinner, over which Lucius would tell me about his day with the collaborationists. They were good people, Lucius felt, who’d grown up in a time and place that turned their lives into mind-boggling survival stories. Lucius sat with them and talked, hour after hour. Then he came to me and unfurled the stories they’d spooled upon him, and we drank wine, filled ourselves with gorgeous, rich food, and then walked the streets, hands entwined, practically skipping, like lovers in a movie musical about to burst into song, bellies full, heads lofty with wine, hearts beating with joy. I have never been so happy in my life.

  It lasted five days. My sixth morning at the Pension Hébert, Lucius and I went downstairs and there was a message at the front desk. It was from Michael, asking me to call home. I’d left the number just in case, not expecting anyone would use it, and my first response was, of course, panic. Ginny. It would be past one in the morning in Iowa, but I had the concierge place the call, dial all the international codes. Lucius stood by as I waited, my mind tripping through horror scenarios.

  Michael’s “hello” was withered and dry. He didn’t sound as though he’d been asleep.

  “Michael, it’s me. What’s going on?”

  “Phil.” The relief in his voice surprised me; I didn’t know I could provide that for him anymore. A small pause, a breath, and then he said, “My mother died.”

  I gasped. That may sound like the sort of melodrama of which my daughter accuses me, but when one is taken by surprise, one may very naturally gasp. I’d probably already been holding my breath in fear of what Michael might say, and what came was shocking, but not what I’d anticipated. I gasped, and Lucius stiffened beside me. “Michael—what . . . what happened?” I felt Lucius relax: he could hear that the calamity was Michael’s, not mine. Not Ginny’s.

  “The day before yesterday . . .” He was remembering, placing things in time. “She didn’t come up for breakfast. She was in bed.” He choked, then regained himself. “They don’t know exactly . . . I thought stroke, or heart attack, but they don’t . . . all those meds. At the home she got help . . . They say it happens: old people get confused.” He was bitterly parroting some doctor or paramedic. “They get confused and simply OD—simply . . .” He choked up, and didn’t continue.

  “Oh, Michael, you should have called sooner. Is there . . . What can I . . . ?”

  “I wouldn’t bother you—it’s all arranged—but I wanted you to know.” The bitterness in his tone now seemed leveled at me. “There’s no funeral. She didn’t want one. Just cremation, no service. I don’t expect you’d come home because a woman you couldn’t stand—”

  “That’s not fair,” I cut in. “I’d—”

  Michael kept on: “—but Ginny’s having a hard time.” He paused. I felt his exhaustion. “A really hard time. I always knew this would be rough on her, when my mother . . . but now, off meds, she’s not coping, she can’t. She’s way off. I don’t—” He recalibrated again. “I don’t expect you to come home. Neither does she, I don’t think. But I wanted you to know—”

  I didn’t let him continue. “I’ll call when I have a ticket. Should I call her? Or just come?”

  “She’s just fetal, crying. Silas can’t . . . She won’t come to the phone. Not even for Linda. I drove out . . . yesterday . . . ?”

  I interrupted again. I said: “I’m coming.”

  MY JOURNEY HOME was beset by so many delays and trials I might as well have crossed the Atlantic by steamer ship. Technical troubles grounded the flight in Paris, but not before we’d sat five hours on the runway, eating peanut packs and breathing each other’s stale breath. After hour two, the drinks were free, but plastic-bottled Chardonnay did not, wonder of wonders, radically improve my mood. Perhaps I should have been drinking rum and Cokes like the three American dudes in the row behind me, who, by the time the crew finally started to unherd us from that plane, were so wasted that one of them flicked the clasp on the overhead luggage compartment and let it slam open into the back of my head. Arms laden with carry-ons, my knees buckled—it was a hell of a hard thwack—and I’d’ve fallen if there’d been anywhere to fall. Instead I partially collapsed into the seats and the crush of bodies around me, my stagger causing others to waver and catch themselves. If they’d opened the aircraft door just then and created another foot of clear space, we’d’ve all gone over like dominos. I was fine, if a little mortified, though I developed quite an egg on my head as I sat another six hours in the airport while our plane got fixed. Or maybe they procured us another one. I don’t even know. I wanted desperately to sleep, but had the idea that I might have a concussion and shouldn’t doze off. With no one to watch my carry-ons, I couldn’t get up and move around, and I wasn’t about to hump it all with me, so I felt bound to my seat. My head ached and I had no Advil, nor any more euros. It didn’t matter: the airport shops had closed for the night. To stay awake, I tried to read. The book I had with me was Lucius’s Give Me Your Watch and I’ll Tell You the Time: The French Under Nazi Occupation, but I don’t think anything could have engaged me enough to keep my eyes open. I’d read a passage, drift off, head lolling, wake with a jerk, try to refocus my streaming eyes on the page, and read another few incomprehensible lines before dropping off again. At some point I must have become incapable of rousing, for I fell asleep and didn’t startle myself awake. I came to, groggily, some time later, neck cricked, hot drool down my cheek and chin. An announcement was coming over the PA, people around me moving and gathering things. The middle of the night, and apparently we were boarding for Chicago. I was alive, which I thought probably meant I didn’t have a concussion.

  On board, I fell asleep before we left the ground, then woke to a putrid stench—a young Frenchman diagonally across the aisle vomited during takeoff, and no one could do much of anything about it until we reached cruising altitude and it was safe to move about the cabin. I found a ChapStick in my bag and held it under my nose with the airline blanket tented over my head and tried not to retch. An announcement came, “possible tornadic systems near O’Hare,” and I lifted the blanket to hear the flight attendant say we’d see how things were looking once we’d crossed “the pond.” If we had to make a landing elsewhere before our final destination, we’d do so, because their first concern was, of course, our safety.

  I slept fitfully, in snatches, barely knowing when I was asleep and when awake. A movie played on the drop-down screens overhead—something moronic, with Adam Sandler, that kept repeating itself, like Groundhog Day, because every time I looked, the same scene was playing out, over and over. When it was finished, finally, they put on that dreadful Donald Trump reality show, and I’d open my eyes and see his bulging red face screaming so violently I could hear it without hearing it. There was turbulence in the black of the night, nothing outside the windows, our teeny tiny plane jouncing through infinite space. A blessing, Bernadette would have said, to be so tired I barely cared if we tumbled out of the sky or hit a twister and swirled into oblivion. Or maybe we had and I was dead already. Dead and drifting through the churning static limbo that is sleep on an airplane. And then I wasn’t on an airplane, but in our River City basement, waiting out a tornado, clutching my dear old dead cat, Maude, who morphed before me into a beast called Chou-Chou, a dog, first, and then a cat. And then I realize I’m in the basement with Bernadette, lying dead on a pull-out couch. But then she’s up, rocking in a chair on the Yoders’ porch, stitching at something in her lap, and then she’s Eula, rocking and stitching, a great quilt spread over her knees and legs, and it’s growing—the quilt—blooming like time-lapse photo flowers, unfurling and spreading down the porch, the steps, out into the fields, a furry quilt of animal skins, and it’s all moving and undulating, and I can see they’re not skins but live animals, cats a
nd rabbits, howling in pain as Eula—no, Bernadette, now, again—weaves her needle in and out of their flesh, the whole quilt—which is the land now, quilted like the land in a Grant Wood painting—the land writhing and rolling and becoming an ocean on which two gray-haired men row by in a dinghy. They see me and wave. I wave back, then realize who they are and stop waving. It’s George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and then I understand they aren’t waving but saluting, arms outstretched, their boat turning so I can see the swastikas on their armbands. Zieg Heil!, they cry, Zieg Heil!, rowing off into the black-black sky as a bicycle comes speeding by, Donald Trump pedaling madly through the night, wicker basket shimmying, dogs barking, his hair swirling tornadic around his head as he morphs into Adolf Hitler, not pedaling an old-lady bicycle but standing in the back seat of a convertible, in a motorcade, greeting the crowds as he’s driven through the streets of the little French town where Lucius is interviewing his old Nazi brother and sister in their house on rue des Brebis. This motorcade isn’t the customary slow processional; Hitler’s car is reckless, speeding and screeching through the town. Driverless now, and unbound by gravity, it’s climbing the building walls like an insect, fast as a video game, Hitler cackling Wicked Witch cackles as he zooms through the streets looking for Lucius. Because Lucius is a Jew, and Hitler’s after him. And there he is—Lucius—with his Nazis, at their table, the three of them eating furry, bloody raw rabbit, ripping flesh from bone with their teeth, blood dripping down their chins. Lucius has to eat a live rabbit sacrifice or else they’ll know he’s a Jew. They’re watching to see if he flinches like a Jew, watching him with their bloody faces, rabbit fur in their teeth and smudged on their cheeks. And then I see they’re not Lucius’s brother-sister Nazis, but Bernadette and her brother, but her brother is Michael, my husband. The Nazi brother and sister are Michael and his mother, and they’re goading Lucius on, sneering with their bloody teeth. Esst, Juden. Esst gesund, Juden. And I dream, and I dream, and I dream, the black sky swirling around me, horrors reeling interminably by, as if the projector’s caught and will spin forever, images upon images fusing, overlapping. I know we should land, but a voice is saying we’ll be circling until the tornado clears. We’ve got plenty of fuel to circle around, around and around. But I want the circling to stop. I want out of this nightmare, its circle and spin. I want to hit the ground with a great thunk, to land, thud, and know the witch is dead, the wicked old witch. But we only circle, never land, the ground keeps not coming and not coming, like it will never come, and all we’ll do is forever turn. And then, thud, there it is, the stillness. And a quiet so quiet it can only be death. Except I’m alive, here in the flaming wreck of the plane, the flaming Technicolor fuselage. I’m alive and everyone else is dead. I know this somehow: that I’m the only survivor. A bright yellow cup is batting me in the face—my oxygen mask!—and there’s a yellow flotation vest at my feet. I know I can pull the red tabs if I need to, or blow in the tubes to inflate it. And, if it’s night, yellow lights on the shoulders will illuminate me, floating in blue water, clutching my purple seat cushion which can be used as a flotation device, but it’s not night and there’s no water. I’m tugging at my blue nylon seat belt to unclasp the silver buckle, and when I stand it’s like I’m spilling from a burst piñata amid rainbows of detritus and debris, like the piles of scraps on Eula’s quilting room floor, shreds of every color and pattern and texture in the world. Here, though, they’re scraps of clothing but with people still attached, in bits, bits of people attached to scraps, and there’s blood everywhere, red, red blood. Could there have been a bomb? In someone’s shoes? In my shoes—my new red shoes? I stagger, barefoot, from the glinting, splintered steel and see the ghoulish red-white-and-blue of the plane’s painted tail, cracked and dangling, flames all around—orange and red and deadly blue—and clouds of gasses, too, blue and vaporous, and I’m pushing through an emergency exit, past its red and white signs, a bright yellow life raft unfurling before me. I’ve left my bag behind like I’m supposed to, but where is my cat? My dog? My Chou-Chou, my Maude? Chou-Chou! But it’s too late. I must jump, jump onto the glowing yellow slide and follow it down. Down. Down into the monochrome world.