Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  The stranger was already speaking as I opened it, smiling as he lifted his knife-wielding hand. I jerked involuntarily, muscles clenched, ready to fling my scalding pot at him. But then he seemed to be lifting the knife toward himself. I had the crazy thought that maybe this was a thing: knocking on a stranger’s door to slit your own throat for an audience. He lifted his arm, pushed back his hood, and then—incongruously, disorientingly—seemed to be talking about fruit. “Evening, ma’am. Drove by on my way, Prairie to Hills, saw your light on, figured I’d stop. Florida grapefruits today, drove all night right out the citrus groves—nothing like Florida citrus with winter coming on.” He shifted his stance and, in a move that looked choreographed—a swirling sweep of his arm—he produced the grapefruit, as if he’d conjured it from the autumn air. A sudden kamikaze Benihana swishing of hands and blade, and a punch of citrus hit the air. My salivary glands flared. Another flourish and I was presented with a wedge, still attached to an impossibly twisted segment of rind he held between his fingers. I was clearly meant to sample this grapefruit, but I didn’t have a hand to take it, although hands might not’ve been required; I had the sense I was supposed to snatch it up with my teeth. The man seemed oddly unprepared for any hesitation—did other people gobble it right up? I lifted my hands—teakettle, keys—to display my inability to accept, then heard myself say, “I just brushed my teeth.” He softened, let out his breath, relieved by this apparently reasonable explanation as to how a lone Iowa matron could conceivably refuse a taste of fresh grapefruit in the October dusk. “Some for later, then? Keep well. Though . . .” He stepped too close, peering around me and inside. “Don’t got much storage, do you? Ought to get you a ’frigerated chest for the basement. For items what could go bad. These’d keep good in a root cellar.” He said “root” like it rhymed with “foot.”

  “I have to go,” I said, and his expression went funny. I thought, He is going to kill me. Then something snapped, and I said, “I can’t buy your frut, okay?” I was imagining what would happen if he knocked on the ghost lady’s door: he’d peer through her Windexed porthole and give her a heart attack. Norma Kramer, no question, would’ve heaved the kettle and sent Frutman to the ER with third-degree burns. All those doors I’d knocked on in the name of John Kerry, and any one of them could’ve been answered by someone as insane as I was right then, a lunatic ready to hurl a kettle of boiling water, and with nothing to shield me but a clipboard of DNC flyers. My voice cracked as I opened my mouth and yelled—screamed—at this man: “You can’t just walk up to someone’s door with a knife drawn and ask them to buy grapefrut!”

  The man on my porch, knife-speared grapefruit and sample wedge in his hands, looked at me as if I was the craziest fucking person he’d ever encountered, and he backed up slow, like he didn’t want to get hurt. Eyes narrow, he almost sounded sarcastic—which is nearly unheard of around here—as he said, “You have a nice rest of the evening, ma’am.”

  My hands were still shaking when I got in the car to drive to rehearsal. My face was numb, and I couldn’t feel my fingertips. It was stupid to drive like that, but I did anyway. Coffee no longer necessary—I had so much adrenaline coursing through me I’d probably never sleep again—heart hammering in my chest cavity, I drove under the speed limit. Passing the monstrous W barn on 26, I wanted to drive up onto the grass, get out of my car, and hammer on the door, shouting “How do you live with yourselves? Why not put up an I’m a Greedy Bigot sign? What’s the difference?” Then I thought: I’m a Sloganator, a living, breathing Sloganator, no different from my lunatic daughter accosting that stupid woman in her stupid W hat. I am her, and she is me, and there’s only so much sanity to go around. I kept her alive all those years, no life of my own, my existence devoted to keeping my death-bent daughter alive, and now—wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles—she’s still here and planning to stick around. So do I finally get to live my own goddamn life? No. I get to lose my fucking mind! And, of course, my goddamn brain—ever coursing with the lyrics of every musical ever written—my fucking brain kicks in with the voice of Drood’s John Jasper. Inside my head: a raving, opium-addicted madman, bellowing ferociously—stage lights picking up every speck of spittle that flies from his mouth—bellowing, “A man could go quite mad!” Because in this stupid fucking world, a man can go quite mad. A man can lose his mind and buy his Corvette and fuck his undergrads and spit across the stage. But I am not a man! I am not a man, and I’m going stark fucking mad! If I drove up to the W barn and got out carrying a knife like the Frutman, those fetus-festishizing, W-loving, white-is-might-is-right motherfuckers inside could pull one of the guns they so adore and shoot me dead without a second’s thought. And maybe that’s the difference between us and them: we don’t come with knives. We come with words, spitting and spewing our furious, self-righteous, sanctimonious words, and they come with their guns, and they kill us. And if I were black—if I were the African orderly from East Prairie out knocking on doors, canvassing for Kerry—they’d’ve shot me already, because that’s the world we live in: where a burly white asshole can march up to my door with a blade in his hand and treat me like I’m the one who’s crazy to be afraid when, if he were black and I were a Republican gun-toting lunatic, I could kill him without so much as a ripple of repercussion in this miserable, pathetic, reprehensible, justice-starved world. The world into which we’d just convinced Ginny it was okay to bring a child. The miserable world into which I brought my own miserable child, now a miserable adult, fully aware and sickened to the marrow of her bones by the injustice of this godforsaken place, and as wholly incapable as her pathetic mother to do a goddamn thing about it. About anything. How does anyone with a conscience—anyone with any moral sense at all—do anything but cry, all day every day, navigating this godforsaken world? And I know they think the same thing about us. I know they weep over our slaughtered, butchered babies, wring their hands and tear their hair over a world where we can rip children from our wombs and call it a choice. I know. If it were just the abortion people, I think I could manage some sympathy. Empathy, even. But why are they also the gun lovers? Why are they the conversion therapists and gay bashers? The ones lobbying to drill Alaska, pave paradise, put up a parking lot, and give a tax break to the zillionaire? If they’d put down their fucking guns and take off their white hoods, I’d be willing to talk about fetal rights until the goddamn cows come home! And I know—I know—they’re saying the same thing: if we’d just stop murdering babies, they’d be willing to talk about letting our beloved faggots wed each other, letting our beloved darkies walk to the store without fear of being shot. How’s there any hope at all for a country like ours, like this, a country stolen from its people—a people we killed as deftly as Hitler killed the Jews? We: the imperialist whites who sailed across an ocean, stomped ashore, and took what we wanted. We stole this country. Stole it and whipped our slaves into building it up to suit us. Senator Obama called for participation in a politics of hope, but where is it? Where in this miserable country can we find that hope? Where does he possibly find that hope? It’s not a choice between hope and cynicism, Senator. This isn’t cynicism; this is despair. This is unremitting, fathomless despair.

  My body was shaking uncontrollably. I couldn’t keep my foot on the gas pedal. I pulled over and sat in my car, crying in the dark on the side of the road, thinking: How does Ginny do it? How does she rise from this? Because this is my daughter’s life, this unrelenting cognizance of that which is intolerable in our world. What does she ever grab hold of to pull herself up?

  Shadows, I remembered. Shadows. Shadows cast by a flickering sun on the farmhouse wall. But it was dark out; everything was shadow. I sat in my car and wept.

  By the time I thought I might be able to drive, I was so late for the rehearsal it seemed pointless, but the alternative was turning around and driving back past the W barn, and the idea of being home alone felt inconceivable. I drove to campus and sat another long while in the car before I could collect
myself enough to rise and enter the auditorium. They’d started long before without me, and the house lights were blessedly low. I scurried to a rear seat, sank in, and burrowed down in my coat, clutched to my body as though it might protect me. I wished I had a flask of Jasper’s laudanum wine, or a drag from Princess Puffer’s opium pipe. I’d’ve liked to smoke myself into an opium coma, Puffer crooning over me a woeful tale of the man who’d been her demise. It was a man who led her down the garden path to hell. Hell, where I now resided. And where I hadn’t been led by anyone: I’d plowed this path all on my own.

  I DIDN’T SPEAK to Lucius until a few days later, when I called him from my car in the Gas Stop parking lot. The sky went dark as we talked, staying on the line as if the length of our phone call could make up for the lingering awkwardness between us. We were too formal and cautious, both of us tired, and longing, and tired of longing. We wanted to be together, and beyond stating that, again and again until it felt stupid, what else was there? When we hung up I was worn low, and weak from hunger, and well aware that whatever I got at the Gas Stop would just perpetuate the downward drift. Fill up on fried breadiness, wash it down with a big cup o’ carbs, and head to sleep! What I wouldn’t have done for a salad, some steamed broccoli . . . Well, apparently what I wouldn’t do was drive to River City. I didn’t have it in me, probably because for days I’d had only fried crap, beer, and coffee. It was a cycle, and it was vicious.

  Slow night at the Gas Stop: pigtailed Regina tending bar, Toni Braxton on the juke, a couple of little kids slamming pool balls around like tabletop shuffleboard, parents pleading with them to come eat another chicken strip. I took a seat, ordered a beer, and felt like a regular.

  “How’s that cutie?” Regina asked, and my train of thought was so herky-jerky I started saying Ginny wasn’t due for quite a while, but then wondered how Regina even knew Ginny. Then I understood she was talking about Oren, and began to say he wasn’t technically mine, but then realized the “cutie” she meant was Lucius, and I gasped. He didn’t feel like mine at all. My eyes welled and my throat closed, and Regina saw it all, fast, like the longtime bartender she is.

  “Trouble in paradise.” She nodded. “Say no more.”

  I nearly protested, galled to be that cliché, but I let it go. I ordered a seafood combo with a side of jalapeño poppers as my green. Someone passed behind me, returning to the bar from the restroom, and Regina began tapping a beer. The figure slunk into my peripheral vision, and I saw it was Creamer—Burton Kramer. He took his seat. No words were spoken. Regina slid him his Bud. He unwrapped a straw. And a moment later, I heard him speak for the first time, though I didn’t realize who he was talking to until he’d had to repeat himself several times, and I looked over to see who was ignoring him.

  Apparently, I was. “I’m sorry?” I asked, frazzled.

  “You were looking for me.” His voice was garbled, like he had rocks in his mouth.

  “Oh! I . . . and your mom . . . the DNC list. I didn’t . . . Kramer, Creamer. I talked to her.”

  The lenses of his spectacles were so thick they bugged his eyes out. “I know.” He held his lips oddly pursed, as if attempting to move them as little as possible, maybe so as not to reveal bad or missing teeth. He said something then that sounded like “Do not capitulate.”

  I waited for sense to coalesce around the words, but it didn’t. “Excuse me? I don’t . . .”

  “The DNC,” Creamer said, leading.

  “Oh! Oh, it’s the Democratic National Comm—”

  “I know what it stands for,” he said, and I felt like a jerk. He kept nodding, though I didn’t know what at, then said something like “Beinsta Bows,” the sounds of which I couldn’t reconfigure into something comprehensible—Bynes Da Bows, Pines To Poes.

  “Excuse me?” I finally said. “Buy insta—?”

  “Pints,” he said slowly, lifting his glass. “To. Polls.” I must’ve looked uncomprehending. “Just Randall’s thing, I guess.” Creamer snorted, shook his head. “Kind of genius, really. Pints to polls—guy’s buying beer for anyone who’ll vote for Kerry.”

  “Is that legal?” It was the first thing that came into my mind.

  “Who cares? Hey, you get my mom to vote, I’ll buy you a pitcher. Hell, a keg!”

  I sipped at my beer, swallowing clumsily and gulping air. I began to say, “Does your mom—” but a burp rose up out of me. When it passed, I finished: “—need a ride to the polls? ’Scuse me.” I patted my sternum. Creamer didn’t exactly smile, but something shifted, like he’d taken a gratifying bong hit, and he regarded me approvingly, and I relaxed. “Do you need a ride to the polls?” His pleasure disappeared. He mumbled, “Under control,” and hid his head under his arm. Regina was watching. Like an idiot, I pressed on. “We’re giving rides on Election Day.” Creamer grunted inaudibly, sucked up his beer dregs, then slid off his stool and out the door.

  Regina leaned in. “Creamer don’t got a car. Gets embarrassed.”

  “But we’ve got rides!”

  Regina kept shaking her head. “Norma needs the para-van, for the wheelchair and all.”

  “But we have all kinds of accommodations. I’m sure we could get them to the polls.”

  The look Regina gave me was like Ginny’s when she’s waiting for me to realize what a moron I am. Go ahead and chop the man’s balls off, why don’t you. Then someone ordered a drink and she turned away.

  ELECTION DAY 2004: I taught in the morning, then returned to Prairie to Ginny-sit. Her nausea somewhat abated, she’d risen from her sickbed only to get bitch-slapped back down: a routine ob-gyn check-in got her diagnosed with high blood pressure and—and this is a quote, the clinical name—“an incompetent cervix.” They put her on “modified bed rest,” which meant she could get up only to pee. Noncompliance would land her on “full bed rest,” with attendant bedpan indignities. When I arrived, she had one hand submerged in a bowl of soapy ice water on the nightstand. Swelling, she explained; her wedding ring was cutting off circulation. We wrestled the band from her chafed, throbbing finger. “It was Grandma Ma’s,” she sobbed.

  “You’ll wear it again once the baby’s born, Gin.” I awaited a sarcastic sneer, but the bite never came. I slung the ring over the top of my index finger. “I don’t remember her in a ring . . .”

  “She couldn’t.” Her voice broke. “The arthritis.” Thin, gold, engraved with flowers and vines, like the one Bena pried from dead Mignon’s hand.

  I settled downstairs in the family room, in the shadow of the Sloganator wall, to make last-ditch calls on Ginny’s cell. We’d gotten updated phone lists of registered Dems who might yet be nudged to the polls. Still on it: Norma Kramer and her son, Burton. Strangely excited, I dialed the number, but it just rang and rang. I made other calls, to other people who were not home, or not answering their phones. I certainly wasn’t answering mine.

  Late in the afternoon I called the number of a Jaycee Spendler, who was, according to my printout, an “infrequent voter,” age forty. A woman answered with a faraway hello. I launched in: “Hi, I’m with the Iowa Democrats. If you’re supporting Kerry, we hope you’ll vote today.”

  She gave a hoarse, tired laugh. “You’re all really into this, huh? Going all out?”

  “Well, we’re scared,” I confessed. “Four more years of Bush? That terrifies me.”

  “Anybody but Bush, right? Just not Bush.” She laughed again. “So, it’s only today?”

  “Yup, last chance. I can tell you your polling place . . .”

  “Let me get a—” She held the phone aside. “Angel, where’s that pen at?” Scuffling ensued. “Look, we can’t find the location of that—just tell me it. I could maybe get there.”

  “I can drive you if you need . . .” I said.

  “You know it matters if you have a record?” It took me a second. A record? Vinyl? Voting record? Then I understood: a criminal record.

  “I don’t know,” I told Jaycee, “but I can ask.” I started up the stairs,
calling, “O precinct captain, my precinct captain!” Ginny gave a pained snort to say what sort of a precinct captain she was. In her doorway, I covered my phone. “Rules on voting with a record?”

  Her eyes were slits. “Depends.” She took a deep breath. “Misdemeanor or felony?”

  I don’t know how Jaycee heard her, but cell technology’s a mystery to me. Jaycee’s voice came through the phone: “Felony.” Then louder, as if to really claim the deed: “It’s a felony.”

  Ginny said, “If she’s on the list, it can’t hurt. Might have to do a provisional ballot . . .”

  In my ear, Jaycee said, “I’m just trying to raise my kids, y’know? It was a bad summer.”

  “Jaycee,” I said, “are you still at 499½ Sunset View Way? I could come get you now.”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “Sure, what the hell? Why not, right?”

  I’ll admit to feeling an anxious giddiness as I drove to Jaycee Spendler’s. Adrenaline, the slightly insane rush of doing something I’d never done before, some crazy notion of doing something that might possibly, in a teeny tiny way, matter. Ludicrous, I know, but it’s like an infection, the idea of “making a difference,” and I gave in to it, to that hope.

  Across the street from an abandoned farmhouse, its land long subdivided and sold off, Prairie Dairy’s thirty-foot fiberglass mascot, Carrie, watches over Commerce Drive. I didn’t know this part of town, Prairie’s industrial sector. A scrawled sign in one duct-taped window of an auto body shop: Will work on buggy’s too. A storage facility—part Quonset hut, part cement-block box—with a sign: Call Joe M, no number. Between the farmhouse at 499 Commerce Drive and a badly listing garage cut a dirt alley: Sunset View Way, the view metaphoric. Number 499½, a double-wide behind the farmhouse, must have once housed a day care center. The yard was strewn with crushed mini-trampolines and broken-wheeled exer-saucers, a toppled basketball hoop on a warped plywood backboard. Plastic pastel Easter-egg shards littered the patchy fescue. An enormous stuffed panda lay out on a cement slab like a sacrifice. I knocked and waited on the stoop, staring into a glass storm door etched with mildewed dolphins.