“Knew what, Phillipa? What the—? I’m a little taken aback here, okay? I’d been expecting, I don’t know—I wasn’t surprised you called, but I thought you might say something before . . . what? Gossiping? What are you asking? Without any mention at all of last night?”
“Last night? I don’t know what happened last night, Michael. You stormed out—no, you didn’t—you got up and left, but you didn’t explain. How am I supposed to—?”
“How? How could you . . . ? Well, Phil, you could ask. You know, you could ask.”
“Ask what? Ask what’s wrong? I’m sorry—I’m sorry I didn’t ask. I thought I knew what was wrong. Your mother died. Our marriage is falling apart. Our daughter’s off her meds, vomiting and acting like a lunatic! I’m sorry I didn’t ask—did I really not ask what was wrong? Last night? Or now? When I called just now? I was supposed to start by asking what was wrong? I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I forgot! I forget where we are in time sometimes, I forget for a second—”
“How nice for you,” Michael cut in, “to be able to forget.”
“Michael, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I don’t know how to do this! I was trying to stop thinking everything was about me. I was trying to let you do what you needed to do.”
“Don’t treat me like a tantruming child, Phillipa. Don’t.” He was still angry, but calmer. These were familiar lines, familiar ground. How many times over the years had Michael told me to stop treating him like a tantruming child? I should’ve stopped already.
“I’m sorry.” Sometimes it seems like the only thing I say. Is it irony that there was a time, when Ginny was two or three, when “sorry” was the thing she could not say? If she did anything—even totally accidentally—that called for apology, she’d freak out. She’d curl up, bury her head and limbs into her stomach, and wail in horror or shame at having made a mistake she couldn’t undo. To apologize was to admit wrongdoing, and consent to living with that imperfect and unretractable wrongness, and that was intolerable to her. She’d tantrum, but she could not apologize. Then something clicked and she figured out that if she always apologized, for everything, constantly, and atoned for wrongdoing before she could do wrong, then she could maybe live with herself. So suddenly everything was “sorry.” You’d say, “Good morning,” and Ginny’d say, “Sorry, hi.” “How’d you sleep, Gin?” “Good, sorry.” “Hungry?” “Sorry, yes, sorry.” Like a tic, it came as if involuntarily, yet sounded blithe and utterly insincere. We tried to explain that “sorry” lost its meaning when repeated so often, that words grew dysfunctional with overuse, that crying “Sorry!” was like crying “Wolf!” and one day—when there really was a wolf, or she really was sorry—no one would believe her. Now, twenty years later, I’d become the perpetually sorry one, overusing my apology words.
Michael sighed deeply.
I took a breath and said, “Do you want to talk about last night?”
He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Not really,” he admitted, then laughed again, but more kindly. “I just couldn’t be there, with you, in that place—the same—” He broke off. When he spoke again, a false jollity masked the hurt: “A little too far down memory lane. Not the trip for me just now, thanks. Anyway, so, what were you asking? About Randall and Linda?”
I told him. “Did you know they were a couple?” They had their own places: Randall lived in a trailer park, in a mobile home he owned outright via some complicated provenance of drug dealers and jail stints, debts owed and claimed. Linda had lived in a halfway house for a while, but for the past few years she’d shared a crappy apartment in town with some other former addicts.
Michael said, “I guess I assumed if they were that close they were probably sleeping together.” Then he asked after Gin, and I suppose I might’ve said something simple like, She’s okay. Or, I’m not sure. Or, You know, up and down. But I was all too eager to switch topics, and for twenty-five years Ginny was the subject we shared, so I launched in: “She said today she wants to miscarry. Or abort. That any child she had would be depressive and suicidal, and that she wanted to die, but wouldn’t kill herself. She talked about your mother, too, about her depression. She’s worried that with her own suicidal impulse, and now Bernadette’s, too . . .” I’d like to think that had we been face-to-face, I’d’ve seen Michael’s reaction and shut up sooner, but as it was, I didn’t know until too late that I should have already stopped talking.
“Jesus Christ, Phillipa,” he said, “you never fucking stop! Ginny’s grandmother’s dead—she’s trying to deal with that—and all you can do is harp on this idea that she died just to piss you off!” I tried to break in, but Michael wouldn’t let me. “It’s that hard to get past your own egotistical notion that my mother OD’d to interrupt your European tryst? That she took her own life just to inconvenience you? Your self-absorption is downright pathological sometimes.”
“My self-absorption?” The opportunity for defense had passed. So, too, apparently, had my empathy for Bernadette. “Your mother didn’t spend five minutes of her life thinking of anyone but herself. Pathological self-absorption? Pathological self-absorption is what it takes to kill yourself. Did she think about Ginny? Did she even think what it would do to—”
Now Michael was shouting over me. “My mother didn’t do anything to Ginny. She died. You’ve decided she killed herself. You decided it. That doesn’t make it reality. She just died.”
“She did kill herself. That’s not even a question—you told me yourself. She swallowed the pills. Accidentally? In confusion? Did she seem confused to you? Really?”
“What do you think?” he demanded. “You think showing you the ‘family album’ was her last worldly act? She came clean, to you, and then offed herself? Is that—”
“That album’s bullshit, Michael. Not a picture in it has anything to do with—”
“The woman is dead, Phillipa. My mother is dead. I am not having . . . I cannot . . .” His tone was changing, his words slower, deliberate, his anger palpable. “You don’t get to decide what’s true. You don’t get to ferret out some truth-at-any-cost just to satisfy your own need for it. My mother’s life was harder than yours will ever be, than we can even conceive.”
“She never allowed us to conceive—never told us one true—”
“Stop,” Michael commanded. “Stop it. Now. She is dead. She’s dead. She is dead.” Then he broke completely: a gasp, a wrenched sob, and everything got muffled. He must have been holding the phone against his chest or a sofa cushion to mute his breakdown.
I felt broken, too. I spoke softly into the phone. “I’m sorry, Michael. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I repeated it, hoping he’d hear, hoping there was still something left in the word.
I hung up and drove to the nearest Wi-Fi, stopping at a Burger King drive-thru for a chocolate shake. I hadn’t had one in years. It tasted like liquefied marshmallows and I drank it greedily, slurping the dregs as I pulled into a spot. The Calvary Church signboard read: BE CAREFUL WHO YOU HATE IT COULD BE SOMEONE YOU LOVE. In my in-box was a brief, unsatisfying email from Lucius, but what did I want? Epic, elegiac declarations of ardent longing? I was tired of longing. When I was young, before Michael, longing was exactly what I wanted: the ecstasy of yearning, that insatiable, orgiastic reaching. Now I didn’t want to want, I just wanted Lucius, and I couldn’t have him. I was mad with longing. I know sometimes only madness preserves us, but I’m not Virginie, steeled inside madness to survive a war, or Ginny, whose existence has been ruled by it. I’ve led a good and easy life. My madness—if I can call it that—was first-world, American-made, white bourgeois madness. It was roller coaster, carnival madness, and I’d bought my own ticket. I’d asked for it all.
I STAYED ON at the farmhouse, taking care of Ginny while Silas was at work. Late at night I’d hear them argue: Ginny crying, “I shouldn’t be pregnant,” and Silas saying, “Intense illness can be a sign of a strong pregnancy, Gin. Your body’s fighting to keep the fetus safe.” She’d snap at him, then, in a tone I th
ought she reserved for me: “It’s not a fetus, it’s a parasite.” If it were me, a screaming match would have ensued, the two of us shrieking back and forth: “Fetus!” “Parasite!” “Fetus!” “Parasite!” With Silas, Ginny just wept. “I don’t feel anything I should, no instinct to protect it. It’s poisonous. I want it out. It’s like it’s Bush, and I’m America, and this thing took over. I want it out like I want him out. I hate what I am—what our life’s reduced to.” And then the wailing gave way to vomiting, which was almost a relief. To me, at least.
Late July, the Democratic convention: a tiny yet bold ray of hope arrived in the form of a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. A candidate for the U.S. Senate, he gave the keynote speech, and people were talking rising star of the Democratic Party, etc. At Ginny’s request, I brought a radio to the bedroom. We turned up the volume to compete with the fans required to blow Silas’s and my human odors away from her, but in her farmhouse sickroom—wind machines howling, crickets sending out their high-pitched drone, dim kerosene lamp on the bureau, the crackling radio blaring a solitary voice interrupted every few seconds by thunderous crashes of applause—we listened. “Do we participate,” Senator Obama asked, “in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?” We listened as this black son of a single mother took the national stage and raised goosebumps on our bodies despite the thick prairie heat. He spoke and I wanted to denounce every cynical thing to ever come from my wiseass mouth. Why wasn’t this man running for president? Kerry was middle-of-the-road; Obama was audacious. Audacity was what we needed.
One evening in early August, I took an email outing to the strip, and returned—sucking down a Subway pop, flipping off BUSH-CHENEY signs (with a particularly stiff bird for a lawn sign on 490th: WHOREMONGERS AND ADULTERERS GOD WILL JUDGE. HEB. 13:4)—to encounter a situation at the Yoders’. When I’d left, Eula and Oren were still at market, and Linda was looking after Ginny until Silas got home. I came up the drive and saw something was wrong: Silas’s car was there, and, beside it, a big humanish shape was rocking back and forth like a davening rabbi. It almost looked like two people having sex against the car, but I got closer and saw it was Eula with Oren clutched to her chest. They rocked, halting and jerking, Oren’s limbs flailing. Something had happened to him—he was choking, or having a seizure, or anaphylaxing. I leapt from my car. I heard him screaming, which eased my fear a bit, but still I rushed to them, now imagining spurting blood, mangled limbs, skin sliced unstanchably deep. There’s a certain hysteria specific to parents of mortally sick or injured children, and Eula was in that kind of distress. Market crates at her feet, she sobbed, wrenching against Oren’s thrashing.
When she saw me, Eula froze, then let out a cry that twisted her face, and from some primal resource I didn’t know I possessed, I tapped skills unexercised in a quarter-century. I scooped Oren from her arms, assessed him for damage, and, finding none, swung him onto my hip and began thumping my hand to his back—good, solid, resounding whacks, like when a ball hits a tennis racket just right. I may have appeared, just then, like someone “good with babies,” and though I am not, Oren calmed some, laid his head on my chest, jerked, switched cheeks, rested, switched again. He was flailing from exhaustion, overdue for a nap that was being prevented for a reason I now understood: Ginny and Silas were inside, quarreling.
“I can’t go in.” Eula batted a hand at her face. “I’m so ashamed.” Beautiful even then: those wide cheekbones, skin unblemished as a cherub’s, her strong jaw even more striking without the long hair to soften it. I’d pieced together the story of her haircut: she’d fallen asleep in the bathtub, homemade candles burning on a shelf over her head. Unpeeling her wax-bound mane from the porcelain tub was easy enough, and so was finding her sewing scissors and styling an emergency, impromptu pixie cut. She looked like someone’s Amish lesbian dream girl.
I bounced Oren, who wasn’t yet asleep but was nearly out of fight. “You’re ashamed to go inside, Eula? I don’t understand.” Bobbing, I felt the muscle memory of it, the isometrics of baby-mothering.
Eula tried to collect herself. “I know it’s for Ginny to choose . . .” Instantly I understood: Ginny was going to abort the baby. “She’s so sick. I cannot blame her for wanting it to end.” Eula struggled to render her feelings in language. “In my head I know, but in my heart—” She sobbed. “In my heart, it’s pain. Pain I can’t—” She scowled, raised her hand as if to slap her own face, but let it fall limp against her thigh. “Oh, I’m stupid—I can’t bear—so stupid!” She drew a choppy breath and placed a palm against the back of her own neck as though she had to be two people in one, the comforter and the comforted. “Ginny says it’s nothing—fluff, cells, not viable. She says it’s not a baby. But it could be. I think of my parents, unable to have more children after my birth—the joy they’d take in a baby of Ginny and Silas, and my heart—” The anguish in Eula’s face—I didn’t know how Ginny could see it and not crack. Then I realized Ginny hadn’t seen it; Eula’d hidden it from her. Of course she had.
Standing by the car, Eula seemed determined to make sense of something. “My parents’ death was an accident. No one meant them harm. That is—it’s one thing.” She drew air. “I am trying to understand how Ginny—Ginny, that I love—how Ginny can bear—and I—” She tried to pull it together again. “I am ashamed of myself, too stupid to understand. And making like my feelings matter. Making a . . . a . . .” She searched. “A fuss!” She swatted the air dismissively. “I’m a stupid girl. I know nothing. But all that will be lost—it is the loss of my parents over again.”
I couldn’t hug her with the baby on me, so just wrapped an arm awkwardly around her shoulders. Eula dropped her head toward me but lifted it again, uncomfortable, and we stood as if we’d happened to come outside to lean on the car and enjoy the sunset. The words thrumming through my head would only have confused Eula more, and I had no right, so I just stood there, my arm around her, crying and thinking, Jesus Christ, I’ve gone pro-life.
What I could glean from Eula was that when the Wingers dropped her off after market, Silas was already home, and Eula’d started inside with Oren but heard the arguing, understood its subject, and retreated. She’d been standing at the car ever since, unwilling to go in and let them know she’d witnessed the fight, or let them see her reaction. Her own tears, she felt, were inappropriate, and she refused to inflict them on Ginny and Silas. The logic didn’t totally track, but she was adamant, and in her conviction she reminded me of no one so much as my daughter.
Oren was asleep for now, but we had no idea how long Ginny and Silas would fight. It was unprecedented. I did the only thing I could think of and had Eula load Oren in my car. We drove until I got cell service, and called Michael. “I know you’re upset with me,” I said when he answered the phone—he had answered it, even with my name on the caller ID. “And I’m sorry, but . . .” I described the gist of the situation. “I need to bring Eula and Oren to River City. I’ll put them in the basement, so they have space. I’ll take Ginny’s room. It’s only for the night.”
Michael sounded resigned. “I’ll make sure there’re sheets on the bed down there.” I wondered if he’d been in the basement since he found his mother dead in it.
I called Silas’s cell next, blessedly got his voicemail, and left a message as to where we were. Eula didn’t speak on the ride. When we pulled up and began to gather ourselves, I realized she might be hungry and wondered aloud if Michael might have anything or if I should go pick something up, but Eula shook her head. “No, Phillipa, please. We’ll go right to bed. Please.”
I knocked, Michael called that the door was open, and we went in. He waved a somber hello from the living room. Eula waved back and I made a sleep gesture and led mother and child to the basement. When I came up, Michael was still in the living room, having a drink. He lifted it at me as I entered, as if in greeting, but there was something in the gesture that made it clear he was commenting on the absurdity
of lifting a glass in cheer to the woman who was making his life miserable. He couldn’t get rid of me, and I was the one who’d left him! It was ludicrous. I stood in the door gauging the situation, watching him resign himself: Well, she’s here, might as well talk to her . . .
“So,” he said, “no grandkids after all.” He was a little drunk. At another time I might have flared at him for his flippancy, but I only shrugged. “Did something do it,” he asked, “or just . . . everything?” He’s not an eloquent drinker, Michael.
“You know, she talks about Bush, the state of the world,” I said, “but maybe it just lends her legitimacy.” I didn’t know if he was listening. “Is a ‘politically imperative’ abortion easier to justify? Surrender George or I’ll abort!” I was talking like I’d had a few too many. I couldn’t seem to stop. “Maybe she thinks she’s like a Jew in the ghetto—Nazis breaking down the door, smothering her baby to save it from Treblinka.”
Michael stared at me in astonishment. “There are times,” he said levelly, “when it makes no sense that she is your child.” He stood—not very steadily—set down his drink, pushed past me, and climbed the stairs. My mind spun. I couldn’t process his comment, so instead I drained his drink—ice-watery whiskey—and went upstairs to sleep in Ginny’s old room, under the ticking gaze of the shifty-eyed cat clock.
When I woke, I knew it was early by the hazy light, and I was still the last one up. Slipping on shorts and shrugging back into my bra, I caught a whiff of myself, T-shirt sour with sleep and yesterday’s dried sweat. I pulled my fingers through my hair on the way downstairs, splashed water on my face in the kitchen, and poured coffee. All my mugs sat in the cabinet—Michael chose cups by their handle grips, I liked whatever held the most coffee. How awful it would be to go through that cabinet, sorting them: mine, yours. When couples split they should take turns smashing every piece of crockery and glassware until there’s nothing to divide but a pile of shards, and they should walk across those barefoot so they have physical wounds to nurse along with the psychic ones. I’d rather tweeze ceramic splinters from my feet than go through the kitchen cabinets telling Michael which pieces of CorningWare I considered to be rightfully mine.
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 26
