I left the Yoders’ as soon as Eula got home, and when Lucius’s call finally came, I’d been sitting in my car on the side of the road for an hour, desperate and fuming. Travel-weary, Lucius was distracted, preoccupied, just checking in to let me know he was home. I was exhausted and distracted too, and also envious: I wanted to be in my own living room, having a drink, nothing more to do than sort junk mail. Would that I had a living room! I had a Bush-Cheney–papered Amish den. I ached to be with Lucius, and it killed me that he was probably very happy, just then, to be alone. We had our first real fight that night on the phone. I told him what I’d gone through, waiting for him to call, driving back and forth to be in cell phone range, and he suggested—quite innocently, I know—that I could go to the mall and buy a new phone, get whatever plan Silas had, and be able to talk from the comfort of my own bed. However innocuous his intention, I blew. I didn’t know what cell plan I had! Michael took care of it; he still paid the goddamn bill. “I don’t have my own bed,” I told Lucius. “I sleep in the discarded single bed of an Amish child. And I don’t have time to go to the mall because I’m babysitting my vomiting daughter, and I have to teach in four days, and direct a fucking show and—” I drew a breath. Lucius was saying, “Whoa,” trying to talk me down, “whoa, whoa,” but his comfort was no comfort to me now. “I’m not a horse!” I yelled—yelled into my phone on the side of a rural highway. “I can’t whoa. There’s no whoa. Nothing stops. I can’t just gallop to the mall for a new phone!”
“Jesus Christ, Phillipa.” He started to say whoa again, but stopped for a long moment to reassess, recalibrate. I saw myself becoming someone he’d look back on, one more ex among the wives and lovers. The thought came at me like a knife, so well hidden I never saw it flash, so sharp I didn’t know I was stabbed until I was dying. “It’s okay, Phil,” he was saying, “it’s okay.”
Apparently I’d apologized. If you don’t remember your apology, does it still count? Was I indeed sorry? I was certainly filled with sorrow. I could have wailed and keened with sorrow! But is that sorry? Yeah, I imagined my undergrads saying, that’s seriously sorry. I tried again: “I’m sorry.” I meant it all: I am sorrowful, I’m a sorry excuse for a person, and I apologize.
“It’s okay, Phil.” He didn’t sound like himself; he sounded like the Lucius other people knew, and I didn’t want their Lucius. I wanted mine. I felt like Michael: Undo it. Make it like it was before. “I’m sorry,” Lucius said, placating and diplomatic. “I don’t mean to minimize what you’re going through.” Then he said all the things I should’ve wanted to hear—that he missed me, felt far away, selfishly wanted me to himself—but it buzzed like filler in my ears. I felt eviscerated. In a juvenile stroke of retaliation I wish were beneath me, I told him I’d be unable to visit that weekend—a meeting I just couldn’t miss. Far from stricken, he sounded relieved.
That night was such a low—a low of lows. Back at Eula’s everyone was asleep, Linda and Randall not yet home from Ames. I crawled into bed—Eula’s childhood bed, and Silas’s before her, and probably that of half the children of Prairie. The Yoders weren’t the only ones making use of the Highway 1 Mennonite thrift shop. All I wanted in the world was to call Lucius back, say “I’m sorry” again, and try to get it right this time. I wanted to hear his “I’m sorry,” and his “It’s okay,” and believe them. I went so far as to go downstairs and look for Silas’s cell phone—God help me, I went through his pockets. Back in bed, crying indulgent, self-pitying tears, I heard the creak of a door, footsteps, and Ginny’s heave, and pulled the pillow over my ears.
ON THURSDAY, August 19, Linda and Randall both had to work. I said I had a meeting at school, so Michael stayed with Ginny, but I actually went to the Prairie View Mall, which is neither near Prairie nor in view of a prairie, except in the sense that the interstate and condo development, industrial park, municipal airport, and county landfill were all once prairie, long ago, when the strip mall was grassland. At the cell phone kiosk, I was humiliatingly lectured on incomprehensible details regarding texting surcharges and cancellation penalties. What I grasped was that parole from my current contract would incur mind-boggling costs. Such things must be covered in divorce settlements these days: parties agree to remain on existing cell plan until expiration or death. I left with a “prepaid disposable phone,” which did not mean I could throw it out. What it did mean, I had no idea.
Ginny sat propped on the family room couch, looking better. She always did after I’d been away. “I let Daddy go home,” she said by way of greeting, her affect visibly shifting as I approached: posture sinking, color fading, jaw slackening. “Silas’ll be home soon. Eula’s here. I thought you didn’t need another encounter.” On the subject of her impending abortion: nada.
“Your dad and I are dealing with things, Gin. No need to police us. Really, we’re fine.”
She looked out the window, at Eula’s sunflowers bowing their enormous heads. “Right,” Ginny murmured. “Of course.” Then she said something else I couldn’t hear.
“Excuse me?”
She turned on me. “Do you really think the first person plural is appropriate? I’m sorry, I just—maybe he’d like to speak for himself. You can’t just decide someone’s fine to make it true.”
“Why is it, Ginny, that you’re so compelled to state the obvious to me?”
She gave a puff of futile laughter. “Maybe because you never seem to get it.”
“Great to see you feeling better, Gin.” I left before she could say anything more.
Upstairs in my tiny room, I tried my new phone and got a screen message that said service was unavailable: Press any button to accept roaming charges. I hurled it at the wall. It didn’t make much noise, just a hard, plastic clatter, but one beat later came the cry of the baby and Eula’s quick tread along the hall. “I’m sorry,” I said to the air. I lay on my bed and cried.
That evening, Silas gave Ginny a bath while I helped Eula with dinner. All the windows were open, fans blowing to keep the smells from reaching Ginny. Eula gave me beans to trim, and I took the bowl to the back steps, tossing ends into the grass. At the stove on the other side of the screen door, Eula stirred a cast-iron pan of onions and tended pots of beets and potatoes. The screen had torn in several places, but Eula’d sewn and patched them: meticulous, artful repairs in this ridiculous, disposable world. “Your Frankenstein screens are so beautiful,” I told her.
“Frank and Stein screens?” she asked.
“Oh—” I apologized. “Frank-en-stein? It’s a book. People mostly know the movies, though. There’s a sort of mad doctor who’s builds a man in his laboratory and brings it to life.”
Eula listened intently, but was understandably confused. “And the screens . . . ?”
“The monster’s stitched together, like your screens, but he’s hideous, patched from dead bodies, I think, dead people sewn together—” Eula looked horrified. I backpedaled. “But your screens are beautiful! They’re stitched, and so was the monster. And he’s actually very sweet, but huge, and doesn’t know his own strength. He hurts people without meaning to—he doesn’t understand they’re fragile. And people are afraid since he’s so ugly. It’s a scary story—like for Halloween? In fall, when kids dress up and knock on doors . . . ? Trick-or-treating, for candy? Ghosts, witches . . . and a big, green, blockheaded guy with bolts on either side of his neck. His skin’s like a clumsy crazy quilt, crude stitching—which is not at all what your screens look like! But if something’s stitched together, people say it’s like Frankenstein.” I was ludicrous, a blithering, blockheaded oaf.
Eula nodded uncertainly. Oren, who was crawling now, clambered at her calves, whining to come up until he exhausted himself, curled around her feet, and fell asleep on the floor. One by one, Eula shut off the flames under her pots, and stood there, embarrassed of her idle hands, but not wanting to wake him. Through the screen, she said, “Is everything all right, Phillipa?”
Is anything all right?, I wanted
to say. I arched my neck, closed my eyes.
Eula revised her question: “Are things all right between you and your—your friend?” It’s the way my grandparents spoke of my boyfriends as a teenager: your friend.
“I don’t know.” My voice broke. “It’s hard to know.”
“I am coming to understand,” Eula said, “that if your child isn’t well, everything becomes very difficult.” She peered at me. “May I . . . ? Would it offend if I told something to you that I have noticed? About you and Ginny?” Of course I felt nervous, but stronger than fear was a nearly carnal desire to hear her observation, and I urged her on. “In the time I have known your family, Ginny has often been ill, but sick as she’s been, it always seems when someone comes around—someone from outside the family, but from inside as well—Michael, Bernadette, Linda and Randall, even Silas. When they’re present, Ginny acts as if she’s better, though there’s a cost to this, and, after, she is worse. But with you she doesn’t pretend. She’s just as she is.”
I laughed ruefully. “Well, I can tell you that from my end, it feels like everyone else brightens Ginny’s mood and all I ever do is make her more miserable.”
“Oh, no!” Eula cried. “No, that’s not it at all! I’ve watched. You give a gift to Ginny—” I was shaking my head at how absolutely untrue it all felt. “For you, Ginny does not pretend. That is a gift. I never had that gift from my mother, though this perhaps is more than I ought say.”
My eyes welled. I looked at Oren on the kitchen floor, curled at Eula’s bare feet around the cuffs of Obadiah’s droopy overalls, and I prayed right then—to Murphy, or whoever it is I address when I beg things of the universe: Let Oren be well. Let Oren be well, and let Eula know love. Let her know great love. Let Eula have a love like Lucius. A love like Michael. For I have known two great loves in my life, and that’s more than most people get. I prayed for Eula to do better than Bernadette, with her lifetime of secrecy, devotion to a son born of a union void of love—but then realized I was thinking of Bernadette Armond, the Bernadette of my imagination. I had no idea if Bernadette Maakestad knew love. Maybe her story was true and there had in fact lived, and died, one David Maakestad, whose death closed Bernadette to all other loves except her son—and, later, that son’s lone daughter—for the rest of her life, until—old and bitter, ousted from her umpteenth nursing home, a festering annoyance to all but those two blood relations—she gave up and swallowed a handful of pills, as if to say: For this I survived the Nazis? Of course, that’s not Bernadette’s voice in my head. It’s my own grandmother’s German-accented English with which I’ve turned Bernadette Maakestad into Bena Armond, the conniving Jewess of rue des Brebis.
ON FRIDAY, August 20, less than an hour before her appointment, Ginny canceled the abortion. Always the last minute, these stays: final supper eaten, appeals exhausted, relatives flown in, lethal injection poised . . . But wait! Randall dashed to the trailer, returned with a bottle of Asti Spumante, and popped the cork with celebratory gusto. Cheap champagne frothed onto Eula’s kitchen floor, everyone cheered, and we sipped bubbly from jelly jars, toasting to Ginny’s health and the health of the Yoder-Maakestad-to-be. Gin was upstairs, exhausted, and it felt strange to rejoice in her absence. Silas looked beat but relieved, and Eula looked like she’d been granted her own stay of execution. Linda appeared to be reeling as Randall lifted his jar, clearing his throat dramatically. We hushed. He looked to Linda, and she must have wordlessly agreed. “Me and Linda” he said, “we wanted you-all to know—” He grinned wildly, eyes brimming, laughing and weeping, both. “We wanted to let you-all know that I’m maybe the happiest man in the world, since a couple weeks ago we snuck off to city hall while no one was looking and we got married. So I just want to say—” Randall sucked in a breath, held back his tears, and thrust up his glass, nearly hitting the ceiling. “To my beautiful wife!” We all whooped, jars raised to Linda. She’d set hers down to hide her face, but behind her hands, she too was smiling.
In the flush of the morning’s news, I felt decisive myself. I wasn’t going to Ohio, but instead would do the responsible thing, attend my Drood meeting that afternoon and spend the weekend finding myself a place to live. Meanwhile, I took a room at the Gas Stop again. I called Lucius, who was relieved for the continued gestational life of my fetal grandchild and seemed genuinely disappointed that I wasn’t coming to Ohio. We plotted some logistics and, in the end, Lucius promised to drive to Iowa to see me the third weekend in September. “Maybe I’ll have a home by then,” I said, “though I know you’re fond of the Gas Stop.”
“I am fond of wherever you are,” he said, then added, “I’m glad you’ll be phonable.”
I perused the Gas Stop bulletin board, circled every mildly promising rental in the Prairie Community News, and set off on Prairie’s back roads. I could take money from home equity if need be and pay it off once we sold River City. We’d make money on the house, no question. I was not destitute, begging for a job at the Gas Stop. When the house sold, we’d be fine. And no longer a we. Financially, Michael and I would be okay. I just had to tell him that I wasn’t coming home.
A few miles out of town I passed John C. Wolffson Road and was remembering the crumbling stone house and Aldous Bontrager when I came around a bend on White Rabbit and nearly missed the hand-lettered FOR SALE BY OWNER sign in front of a tiny, abandoned-looking cottage. White paint peeled off in scrolls, and the porch was so canted I mistook it for a wheelchair ramp. It sat closer to the road than I’d’ve wanted, but was perched on a little bluff-like rise, so if cars took the turn too fast they’d crash into the hill, not the living room. The sign also said: OWNER FINANCING AVAILABLE. The area code was Des Moines. I drove toward Prairie until I got a signal and reached Brent Furman at his Ankeny law office. His father, the former occupant of 16524 White Rabbit Road, had moved to East Prairie Elder Living—did I know it? he asked. White Rabbit had been vacant for some months. He drove out that afternoon to show it to me.
An apologetic and accommodating country lawyer, Brent Furman was so pleased by my interest in the house it was clear no one had ever inquired about it before. The place was filthy, a ramshackle one-bedroom with only a woodstove for heat, but it had electricity and running water and telephone wires came out that far; I could get a landline. He wanted nineteen thousand for the house and the half acre it sat on. I explained my situation and asked if he’d consider a rent-to-own thing. He looked ready to weep with gratitude. He said, “We might-could work that out.”
“When would I be able to move in?” I asked, using great effort to refrain from asking when I might-could move in. What a glorious phrase! Like things are changing as you speak: I might—no, I could! I wanted right then to become a might-could kind of a gal: America, We Still Might-Could! I wanted a bumper sticker: Kerry-Edwards Might-Could!
“Still got a few things of Dad’s to clear out the basement. Might-could bring the trailer tomorrow, do some cleaning.” I pictured him with his wife and kids, mops, brooms, Swiffers, sprayers. “How’s September first? Make it easy—what’s that? Wednesday?” And I’ll admit this, with embarrassment, but it’s true: before I let Brent Furman get back in his car, I hugged him.
I ditched Sweeney Todd, which had been in the tape deck too morbidly long, and put on Jones and Schmidt’s Celebration (critical flop, fabulous show) to drive to the Yoders’ to get my things. Belting “Somebody,” I passed Bontrager’s junk house: the piles had been pushed away from the house, which sat like an island in a mown-grass moat. The front-door window looked as if it had been squirted with Windex, a small porthole rubbed clean, and as I passed I saw, framed in that circle, the face of a pale, white-haired woman. I could almost swear she lifted one skeletal hand to wave as I went by. I remembered peering in at the wheelchair, and suddenly I didn’t know if I’d just seen a woman or conjured her. I could see my life on White Rabbit Road: one more old lady rotting alive, farmhouse decaying around her. The canvassers and evangelists, the Mormons and door-to
-door Oreck salesmen would wonder how I’d come to be a toothless, lonely specter. At the bar, people would say: You know she was once a professor? Then there was the buggy wreck, and some other business—affair, tornado, suicide, pregnancy. Now she lives on Jell-O. Only one ever visits is that shunned Amish girl, kooky quilter with the bastard son. Queer bunch, that family. Even so, in my mind my new home took on a glow. Brent Furman would descend like a fairy godmother with sprites and industrious woodland helpers, and they’d scour and scrub until the little house shone with the promise of a new life.
At the Yoders’, Ginny was propped on pillows like a consumptive Victorian heroine, her skin the color of skim milk. I could barely stand to look at her. She probably did weigh ninety-two pounds after those weeks of vomiting. We hadn’t spoken since our nasty exchange the night before, but I felt suffused with new energy, that I could be magnanimous for once. I apologized, said I was proud of the hard decision she’d made. She took it in, her equilibrium so bad she couldn’t even nod. I told her about White Rabbit, how I’d be nearby, but without crowding them.
Ginny was gearing up to speak. “It’s going—” She broke off, drew a breath, then continued, “To be. So close. In Iowa.” She was weak with fatigue, purple under her eyes, lips cracked white. I didn’t know what she was talking about: what was going to be close? My mind was on rural real estate. “Please. Help,” Ginny pleaded, and I moved closer to do whatever she asked, get her water, a bucket, ice chips . . . She took a breath and spoke again. “The campaign,” she said. “They need. Everyone. Whatever you can. Especially. If you’re going . . . to live . . . in Prairie. Don’t just . . . sit here with me. It’s not like”—she tried to smile—“I’m going anywhere.”
I’d be lying if I claimed I wasn’t holding my tongue, but all I actually said was “Okay, Gin.” I felt manipulated. She was asking this of me on the very day when she’d complied and done what we’d all asked of her. I said, “I’ll do what I can,” because I would, in the end—and the middle, and the beginning—do anything in the world for her. Any godforsaken thing in this godforsaken world, including going door to door to convince the good people of Prairie, Iowa, that nothing had ever been so important as getting to the polls on November 2 to vote John Kerry for president.
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 28
