Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  Laughter burst from the nurses. I wanted to slap them. They sobered; one said, “Reglan.”

  “Reglan. Fine.” God, I’ve dealt with so many nurses. It was a god-awful flashback, the recurring nightmare of Ginny. Will some concoction render her functional? A few milligrams of this, a tablet of that. Pinch of mugwort, sprig of chirping cherrybark. It’s sorcery! I said, “My daughter has a long history at this hospital.” Mental illness was all over her charts, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it; they had the files. “She tapered off her psych meds”—I didn’t even know what she took anymore—“to try to get pregnant, which she managed, apparently. Then her grandmother died.” I sounded like my undergrads with their countless grandparents all dying every semester. “She can’t handle paranoiac side effects.” The nurses’ eyes glazed over, a look I knew all too well, reserved for ranting mothers, always so sure they know what’s best for their babies.

  Unsurprisingly, I got nowhere. Someone refilled Ginny’s water. Then came a shift change: the scrubs remained, the bodies—the heads atop the V-necks, the badges—changed. We got new Kims, different Melissas and Debbies, Lawanda became Renée. Silas got Ginny quieted. She was off the Reglan drip, just on fluids, and the panic had dulled. She’d stopped gagging, managed to sleep. I stood staring at the blank television screen in the corner. TVs everywhere in these places—as if television ever made anyone feel better about anything.

  I called Michael with the news, then dozed in a lounger for the hours it took Ginny’s IVs to drain. When she was discharged that afternoon, I drove behind Silas’s Festiva to Walgreens for an antinausea prescription and waited, listening to “Anything Goes” on my car stereo—The world has gone mad today, and good’s bad today—parked between two defunct storefronts, both now churches, and proud rivals in the Great American Church Signboard Bad-Pun-Off. River City Church of God: COME ON IN FOR A FAITH LIFT! Iowa Calvary: JOIN OUR PROPHET-SHARING PROGRAM! Pray tell, who exactly do such signs hope to draw?

  On the strip out of town, Silas signaled and I followed them to a McDonald’s drive-thru where he bought Ginny a shake she apparently imagined being able to keep down. Milkshakes were a fixture of teenage Ginny’s diet when we needed to ply her with calories. If we got one into her, and kept her in sight while she digested it, we’d made a modicum of progress—although milkshakes are also easy to coax back up, appealing to the bulimic, who takes such matters into account. These are things in which I am, so help me, an unintentional expert. Five minutes past Mickey D’s, Silas pulled to the shoulder, hazards blinking, for Ginny to vomit milkshake out the passenger door. We idled, Ginny vomited—sometimes that felt like the story of our lives.

  That night was a long one. Ginny couldn’t lie beside Silas—food smells trapped in his beard, hospital smells on his skin. He bathed and shaved at two a.m., but the soap scent made her heave; he lay on the floor by the bed so he’d be able to help her to the bathroom, which she finally refused to leave. She curled up on the floor, her cheek against the tub’s cool claw foot. I got up to pee and found Silas asleep in the hall. In the bathroom, I got a wet washcloth and squatted beside Ginny, offering the compress. She only moaned. I brushed back her bangs and laid the cool cloth on her forehead. Softly, I stroked her skin. She groaned, “Don’t—” and I jerked away. That’s us: she rebukes, I retreat. “No,” she choked, straining against the nausea, “the cool. Is nice. Just don’t move.” I left the cloth on her forehead and didn’t touch her again. I sat perfectly still; air movement sickened her. The moon shone in through a tiny window above the toilet, and a patch of white enamel bathtub glowed in its light like polished bone. Ginny’s face was shaded by the tub’s overhang, but the light would find her as the moon crossed the sky. I thought: I’ll sit here all night and shield my daughter from the moon. Then Eula got up to pee, and when she was done I went to resume my vigil but found the room dark: ever resourceful, and far more sensible than I, Eula’d fashioned a curtain from a hand towel and some straight pins.

  Silas returned to work early the following day. He’d already taken a month off, and the tornado had plowed a steady stream of jobs for construction-carpenter types like him. Silas had to grab work when it came and hope it kept coming. I was the one to call the Sheibel nursery to explain why Ginny couldn’t work. The Sheibels would be fine. Like every River City business, they had college kids lined up, desperate for summer jobs, but Ginny felt she’d let everyone down: the Sheibels and their staff, and then on out to the DNC, John Kerry, and America at large. “Ginny,” I said, “the U.S. presidency is not riding on your ninety-two-pound frame.”

  From her bed she looked up and it seemed she was going to hurl until I realized she was giving me a look I knew all too well: the if-you’re-not-joking-you’re-an-even-bigger-idiot-than-I-thought look. When I didn’t respond, she summoned strength and said—excruciatingly slowly, her eyes closed, as if looking at me was more than she could bear: “I haven’t weighed ninety-two pounds.” Pause. “Since high school.” She wasn’t done. “Not less. Than a hundred. Since the shock.” Her eyes opened. “Why. Must everything. Be the most. Dramatic story. Possible? I’d be so grateful. For a boring. Story that was. True.” Her voice hung in the air. I felt like she’d kicked me in the stomach. And like I’d been completely had. You can’t argue with someone in Ginny’s condition, but I couldn’t trust her: she’d lied to us so often about her weight, about everything. The opposite of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Ginny was The Girl Who Cried I’m Fine. A fairy tale for a new age: The Girl Who Yelled Leave Me the Fuck Alone. We hadn’t discussed her weight in years, but I could see how I’d seized on ninety-two as a number that captured Ginny’s tininess without raising instant alarm. You say your adult child weighs sixty-eight pounds—which has been true, believe me—and you’re saying: My daughter is Karen Carpenter. My baby is dying. But ninety-two captured Ginny’s tininess without signaling clear, immediate danger. Ninety-two had served me well. That day at the Yoders’, though, I choked everything down and said simply, “I’m sorry, Gin. I only said it as a figure of speech. I didn’t mean anything. I’m sorry.”

  Ginny absorbed this, inhaled deeply, and said, “Me too,” and we stayed there together, in our sorrow and our sorriness, until Ginny rallied to speak again. “Ma, I need. To ask something.” Her eyes were closed, and I shut mine—easier for us both somehow. Haltingly, she said, “You think. Grandma Ma. Killed herself?” It was the first she’d spoken of Bernadette.

  I chose my words carefully, opening my eyes to see how I was affecting her. “Bernadette wasn’t senile.” I felt so kindly toward the woman then, proud of her for her strength, or fortitude, or something. “She didn’t suffer spells of confusion. It’s hard to imagine anything befalling her that she didn’t orchestrate.” Tears seeped from Ginny’s eyes and into her matted hair. “Maybe she was ready?” I started to choke up, too. “Maybe she felt it was time?”

  Ginny let out a cry, turned her head to vomit, but only dry-heaved, then lay there panting. When the nausea passed, her tears flowed again and she spoke in a voice both plaintive and terrified. “How can I. Have a baby? How can I. Inflict life. On someone?” Then she wept. I had things to say, but they would’ve been no comfort. I couldn’t even hold her while she cried. I could do nothing, and that impotence is the most miserably familiar feeling I know.

  That evening when Silas came home, I went out, just to drive around. A shredded truck tire on the shoulder of Highway 1 reminded me of the apple skins Bernadette used to peel with a paring knife in one long spiral and bounce up and down like a Slinky to charm Ginny. Passing a farm where big white plastic rolls of silage lay fermenting at the edge of the field, I remembered little Ginny saying they looked like giant tubes of refrigerator cookie dough. Beside a Century Farm plaque was one of those black-and-white scripture signs framed in white PVC that are everywhere out here, probably all from the same evangelical mail-order catalog. This one said something that ended in GOD IS NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS. ACTS 10:34. People are supposed
to read that and go rush to worship? I do not for a minute understand humanity.

  I wound up in River City, so I went to the co-op, then sat in the parking lot trying to call Lucius, to hell with international charges. But I was thwarted, of course, by my damn cell phone. Fifty, and I’m already that old person, flapping anxiously in the face of technology as my students roll their eyes. Before I went back to Prairie, I stopped by the house—our house?—to pick up a book, but really to see Michael, who’d calmed me through years of Ginny-conflict. To go to him was instinctual, yes, but also, his mother had just died, and I’d discovered for her a compassion I wanted to share with him.

  Michael was out back watering his perennials. In our division of garden labor, he did flowers, I did food. Thus, no vegetable garden that year, only a fenced patch of thriving weeds. Like a neighborly Iowan, I sidled up and said, “Hollyhocks look good.”

  Michael scowled. My alarm surged until he spoke and I realized his anger wasn’t at me. “Something’s at them. Tiny green caterpillar. I smash every damn one—next day they’re back.”

  “And the slugs?” Married twenty-six years and chatting like garden club acquaintances.

  “They’re okay.” He sounded defeated, by the garden pests or me, I didn’t know. He made as if to set down the hose, but didn’t, just stood holding the nozzle limply. “How’s Gin?”

  I lifted my eyebrows, my shoulders, and shrugged to say, Who the hell knows?

  Michael nodded, his mouth a grim line. A moment later he said, “You need something?”

  I lifted my book, my paltry excuse. “Michael, if there’s anything I can . . . help you deal with her things . . . ?” We’d done this together twice already; both my parents were dead.

  Michael inhaled—I feared he might blow—but he said, “There’s surprisingly little. We did most of it getting her out of Carpathia. It’s all in the attic boxes there. I’ll get some students to help. There’s still her East Prairie boxes here . . .” On impulse, and unchecked, I laid my hand on Michael’s forearm, and he did not flinch. He lifted his own free hand, placing it over mine as if in appreciation, and we stood there in the garden, our arms crisscrossed like we might begin a promenade. We stayed longer than was comfortable, but his hand was on top and I didn’t want to be the one to pull away. Finally, Michael spoke. “Bring something to Gin, would you? My mother’s sewing basket. It’s inside.” And he lifted his moist hand from mine to sweep it toward the house, as if I might not know this “inside” of which he spoke. “Hall table. Needlework stuff. Maybe Gin’d like it, something to do while she’s laid up.”

  “Aren’t you taking her to tomorrow’s OB appointment? Give it to her then . . . ?”

  Michael shook his head, and I had the impression he’d thought this all through. I’d removed my hand from his arm, but didn’t quite know what to do with it, so I fiddled, passing my book from hand to hand, then wrapped my arms around it at my chest like a Bye Bye Birdie schoolgirl.

  “Maybe it’s time to sell Carpathia?” Michael shrugged, talking mostly to himself, a conversation he’d been having for days. “It was for Ginny. She won’t need it now. They’re set. Or will be, in the straw bale.” He paused then, turning to address me. “That’s you, Phil. That’s all you.” He was nodding to acknowledge the truth of something, or to concede a point to me.

  “Wait, what is?” My heart raced. I needed to formulate a defense, fast, and didn’t yet know the crime of which I’d been accused.

  “Gin. Living a life. Married . . .” he marveled. “You were a pain in the fucking ass,” he said, “but it’s what got her here, to this. You got her to this.”

  “We did, Michael. We all did. I’m hardly—”

  Uncharacteristically, Michael cut me off. “You did, Phil. I’m too nice a Midwesterner to have gotten results like that, to push her, and the doctors, the way you did.”

  “Bring in the pushy Jew when you want results, they always say.”

  But again Michael was shaking his head, not willing to let me deflect this praise. “Don’t do it, Phil,” he said. “She’s really good, and she’s got you to thank for a whole lot of that.”

  I couldn’t reply or I’d’ve sobbed, so I only stood there, trying to thank him with my eyes. Michael returned to the debate he’d been having with himself about the house on Carpathia, now taking up his own rebuttal: “The tenants have it through the new year, so I guess we’ve got till 2005 to figure it out.” He gestured, then, as if into the future, and the hose nozzle, leaky for years, sent out a spray. I yelped, jumping back, but a splash caught me. Michael dropped the hose—“Shit, I’m sorry”—and took the book from my hands to inspect for water damage. It was Joan Didion’s The White Album, which I had no reason to suddenly need; I thought he’d surely see I’d fabricated the excuse to come by. But the book didn’t seem to register except as a thing he’d accidentally wetted, and he laid it over the vegetable garden fence as if to save the place, saying, “Sun’ll dry it in a minute.” A minute—a minute to look over my sad vegetable garden, its towering green fuzz of asparagus gone to flower. I wondered if Michael’d eaten any that spring or let it run riot. Probably zillions of dill and cilantro volunteers in there, tomatoes reseeding themselves, peppers, melon sprouts, squash, cucumbers. No telling what thrived under cover of all those lamb’s-quarters. I found the latch and stepped in, and Michael said, “I just haven’t . . .” He shook his head at the mess, as if he were to blame for its disarray.

  “Michael, please, no.” I waved off his apology. “Hell, there’s probably a salvageable garden in here yet.” Grabbing a stalk of garlic mustard—an invasive as big as a damn sapling—I yanked, and it came free easily. I lobbed it onto the weed pile, got a grip on a massive dandelion, and pulled it up by the root. It’s very satisfying when a weed comes up with the full root intact like that; it made me want to pull another. The hose went back on. Michael continued watering while I weeded. It was like stepping back in time, so vertiginously simple, like pressing Undo. I would rise from the vegetable patch, overgrown zucchini in hand, and say, “Dinner?” and we’d discuss what was in the fridge, then head inside to shower, pour a glass of wine, and slice up the mammoth squash and turn it into a meal. It felt as if we could simply resume, set the needle back on the record, and suffer nothing but a slight strangeness, a déjà vu. Early evening, in the weeds, the whoosh of the hose spray, and beyond that the sounds of our neighborhood—calls, cars, phones, static, the far-off tinkle of the ice cream truck. I pulled lamb’s-quarters from a cluster of dill sprouts and thought how effortlessly I could step back into this life just as I’d left it.

  I BROUGHT BERNADETTE’S sewing basket back to Prairie and gave it to Ginny the next day. Half sitting in bed, she took a breath, picked out a piece of embroidery, and tried to remove a threaded needle from the cloth. It required more strength than she had. Another breath and she was gagging. I rushed over, swapped the basket for the barf bin, and held it while she retched. I thought of Michael the previous evening when he’d said, “You got her here,” and I thought, Great, here, as she gagged and spat. Great. If I’m due any credit at all for her stability, it’s because I’ve taken responsibility for her collapses, too, stood for her when she couldn’t on her own. But I was tired, goddammit, really tired. And I’d thought she was finally making it on her own.

  A few hours later, Michael arrived to take her to the ob-gyn. Eula left for market with Oren. She’d arranged things with a van-driving Mennonite family who worked the same venues, and now the Wingers gave Eula a ride whenever she needed—they even had a spare car seat.

  When Michael and Ginny returned that afternoon, she went right to bed. Michael updated me: her due date was February 25. The morning sickness would improve past the first trimester; she’d made it through eight weeks, the doctor said, what was four more? I hated him already. He prescribed a prenatal vitamin and said to try saltines and ginger ale for the nausea. For that you need a medical degree? He’d also prescribed a new antinausea dr
ug, but Michael hadn’t filled it on the way home, so I said I’d go if he stayed with Ginny. He agreed, and I got my keys while he settled on the porch with a beer. As I passed, I reached out to put a hand to his hair, and we rested there a moment until I let go and moved on.

  When I got back with the drugs, Michael was gone. Silas sat on the porch, looking tired, drinking beer from a can. I poured a glass of wine and sat with him. We didn’t talk, just sipped our drinks, watching a turkey buzzard circle and dive for roadkill. Fireflies were twinkling over the cornfields when Ginny cried out from upstairs. Silas jumped to his feet. I tried to beat him to it, saying, “Stay, enjoy the evening,” but he shook his head. Evening meant little to him without Ginny. She doesn’t exhaust him the way she does me. He was twenty-two years old that summer.

  Silas bid me good night and went to his wife, and I—a fifty-year-old woman with the emotional maturity of an eighth-grader—took my laptop, drove halfway to River City to a strip by a condo complex, got an iced tea at Subway, and sat in my car listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber, writing an email to Lucius. We’d planned to be together; we hadn’t made provisions for overseas phone calls. I didn’t get cell service at the Yoders’ anyway. In the car with my laptop, I wrote quickly, then found a Linksys that wasn’t password protected, and managed to jump on the Wi-Fi. I waited after sending, sucking waxy ice, hoping maybe I’d caught Lucius online and get a response. My car sat in the shadow of the All Souls signboard: GOD ANSWERS KNEEMAIL. At ten, anxious and lonely, I gave up and shut down the computer, but the idea of going back to listen to Ginny heave the night away felt untenable. I thought maybe I’d go sit in a River City bar, stay out all night—or what passes for all night in a town like ours, which is two a.m., when everything closes. I didn’t want to go to a café full of students eating cheesecake, soft jazz piped in like carbon monoxide; I wanted to sit on a barstool, scowling, drinking whiskey, talking to no one. But I don’t actually like whiskey, and my scowl just looks like patrician disdain.