Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  Creamer gave a disingenuous laugh—“Poli-sci!”—then drank, squinting in pain.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He shrugged and nodded, though noncommittally. “My fucking teeth.”

  And then, just like that, the straw made sense. “You have a toothache!”

  He didn’t see why I was so gleeful about it. “Something,” he said. “Sensitive as hell.”

  “Have you seen a dentist?”

  “Yeah, no—not much for the dentist,” Creamer said, “even if I had the insurance.”

  I wanted to take him all in, to really see what Burton Kramer looked like. I’d clearly had too much to drink. I said, “So, you’re going to use a straw for the rest of your life?”

  He gave a soft, resigned snort. “Fucking hope not. Pain comes and goes, you know.”

  Creamer’s teeth were just one of those things, I realized: you put it off and put it off until you’re the guy who drinks beer through a straw, and then why bother? Pain comes and goes. The man was the fucking Buddha: all life is impermanence, everything is change.

  Linda and Randall finished their pool game. The Gas Stop was dividing by affiliation: scant Democrats at the bar, god-and-gun lovers by the pool table and jukebox. “They got the entertainment,” Creamer said, “but we hold the booze.” He said it like that Billy Joel Vietnam song: We held the liquor, they held the entertainment. Was Creamer a vet? I wondered.

  On TV, the Carolinas went red, then Virginia. C-SPAN had people phoning in their voting stories—Voices of America—the anchorwoman asking callers about their poll experiences. She was looking for strife, she wanted, I walked uphill both ways through a snowstorm and got told “No niggers allowed,” but people were only grandstanding. Another southern state went red, and a cheer rose from the pool table. Creamer slid off his stool—to punch someone, I figured—took one step left, and plunked himself down beside me, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thrill to it: this man who kept himself so insulated from everyone had removed his armor and moved closer to me. He leaned in and said, “What are you doing here?”

  Flustered, I said, “I don’t have a TV. Where I’m staying.”

  “Not the bar. I mean Prairie,” he said. “Why you’re in Prairie. Get sick of the city?”

  “Oh.” I was the infamous Yoder Mother-in-Law, didn’t everyone know that? “My daughter and her husband . . . he’s a Yoder?” Like half the county. “Silas and Eula?” But Creamer was saying, “I just didn’t know why you were here,” and then I was telling him: “My husband and I split up.” I hadn’t yet spoken that aloud, so plainly. “I had to get out of the house.” It was true, though it sounded, in summary, like a much simpler situation than the one I felt I was in.

  “Bald guy?” Creamer asked.

  “Bald?”

  “Your husband.”

  “No, why?” I asked.

  “The one who was here,” he said. “Bald on top? Here at the bar, talking to Regina?”

  “Lucius?” My surprise was unfeigned.

  Creamer lifted his palms as if to say, I don’t know the guy. He’s your damn husband.

  “No, that’s . . .” What was I supposed to say? That’s my lover?

  “Hey, look, none of my business,” Creamer said. “Sorry, look, never mind, forget I . . .”

  “Look,” I said—why do I adopt the speech patterns of whomever I’m talking to? “Look, no, that’s someone else. My life—is not usually like this. It’s been a very strange time.”

  Creamer shook his head. “None of my business. Really not my fucking business.”

  God, I wanted the night to be over—the election to be over, the semester. I wanted Lucius to take me to bed and fuck me until it was done. That’s what I wanted. But then, as if in a perverse response to my desire, every TV in the Gas Stop was taking us inside a White House living room where the entire Bush clan was photo-opportunistically gathered to watch the returns. Scene designers had them all absurdly positioned, smiling their cheeky, false smiles on white sofas that wrapped the room. They’d even gotten someone to perch on a couch arm, like a contortionist, and managed to smush in a token black, way in a corner, far stage left. I saw her only when Randall began talking loudly to the TV: “How much you pay her to sit there, Dubya? What’d it cost to get her to pretend she don’t know about your people out scaring black voters from the polls, you shitwad?” The camera zoomed right in, then, on the shitwad himself, who was saying, “I believe I will win, thank you very much,” and I laid my head on my arms and watched the TV with one open eye, like a bird who’s smacked into a window and stares up from the ground, unsure whether it’s dead or not. I was still in that position when someone came up behind me to order drinks. Lefties weren’t feeding the juke or shooting pool, but party sequestration hadn’t stopped the right from boozing. The guy waited a few paces back while Regina got his drinks ready. She was passing them over the bar when some state got called for Bush and a buoyant whoo-hoo rang out, and just as the guy took the drinks and turned to go, he leaned in to me, beer breath hot in my ear, and said, “You’re gonna lose, River City bitch.”

  I was up, wheeling around on my stool, cursing—“What the fuck?”—before I even laid eyes on the guy, and I must have clipped him as he tried to scuttle away. He stumbled and the drinks leapt from his hands, and then everything took on the slow-motion affect in which all accidents seem to unfurl: the drinks splashed up from their highball glasses, pausing at the apex, ice cubes glinting, limes hovering glossy and ripe, until the glasses decided to follow their contents as if to try and catch up to prevent a spill. Creamer cried out as the liquid hit him, soaking his coveralls. The highball glasses, industrially sturdy, clunked to the floor unharmed, but Creamer jumped to his feet, landing hard in his steel-toed boots, crushing one glass on impact, the other as he stumbled forward. Such a familiar sound—glass breaking underfoot, a classic moment in any Jewish wedding—though it’s a sound always followed by cheers, and their absence felt strange and foreboding. I did a staging years ago of Fiddler on the Roof where it’s the smash of Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding glass that sends the cast into song and dance—into L’Chaim! Rest assured, the Gas Stop Bar and Grill did not burst into musical revue, but the glass-smashing did return us to real time. No cheers of Mazel tov!, just gasps, shouts undulating through the bar. All around me there was flapping, like a flock of frightened birds. From the beating frenzy came shattering echoes as the glass ground underfoot and shot out against metal chair legs. Creamer lunged for the guy who’d heckled me—who’d no doubt expected to drop his insult in my ear and make a getaway with his drinks, fast, like Ginny in the airport with the W-hat woman. Instead he found himself bereft of beverages, flat on the bar floor, and flailing under Creamer’s bulk. With the top of his coveralls down and his sweatshirt tied at his waist, Creamer had four sleeves flapping at his thighs. Even stripped of his layers, he was a big, bearish man, well over six feet, and burly. The heckler was no match for him. Creamer might’ve held him down until he apologized if every other able-bodied man there hadn’t swarmed in to wrench them apart. Each side staggered back; empty floor opened between them. The site of the scuffle was slick-wet, scattered with ice cubes and glass shards and muddled wedges of lime. A pair of eyeglasses lay a yard from my feet. Creamer, restrained by four men, looked plucked and denuded and wrong without his spectacles. I picked them up off the floor.

  Regina rose over the crowd, calling “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” just like Lucius. She stood on the bar in a pair of tiny, ratty tennis sneakers far too demure for a woman so tough, and took charge, yelling, “Creamer, out. Get him out of here.” The men restraining Creamer nodded the way they do at Bluntmore’s to confirm a bid with the auctioneer, and Creamer was led from the Gas Stop. Regina turned on the guy who’d started it. “Bondorf, what the fuck?” she demanded, and he hung his head for the scolding. “Get the hell out of my bar. I don’t want to see you for at least a week, hear me?” Bondorf nodded, was released, and made a walk
of shame out the door. Regina paused to take stock. She looked down at the crowd: “Someone make sure Creamer’s ass gets home safe.” A few men nodded assurances, but I seemed to be saying, aloud, “I’ll do it.” Creamer felt like my responsibility; I had his glasses, after all. I pushed in my stool and was digging in a pocket for cash to lay on the bar when I saw Regina shaking her head at me, an eyebrow cocked in disbelief, her mouth saying “Nuh-uh,” then more emphatically, “Nuh-uh.” I understood that I was supposed to retract my offer, but I didn’t see why. “It’s not necessary,” Regina said as I stood there stupidly, looking up, still digging in my pocket. She spoke as though I were a dog with a squirrel in its jaws. “Drop it,” she ordered. “Just drop it.”

  The crowd began to turn away, and Regina made a surreally graceful dismount from the bar, Linda and Randall supporting either hand like backup dancers. She landed beside me. “You think you can keep from starting any more bar fights, or should I kick you out now, too?”

  I was so embarrassed and cowed, I only managed to squeak out a lame little “Sorry.”

  Regina nodded once, as if to say You should be, and stalked off to the kitchen.

  I stared at the TV’s scrolling closed captions. C-SPAN’s correspondent took a call from Bloomfield, New Mexico. “Hi,” said a young woman. “This is actually my first time to vote, so, yeah, pretty proud to vote for President Bush because I believe we have a lot of the same agreement on morals like partial-birth abortion and, you know, stuff like that.”

  “Partial-birth abortion is a moral?” Apparently, I said this aloud. Randall sat on a nearby barstool. Now I addressed him: “I didn’t start it,” I said, and maybe he didn’t hear, or was looking across the room at another TV, or maybe his silence meant: But you did, Phillipa. Just by being where you don’t belong, you did start it. I didn’t belong, and it wasn’t about red or blue; I was the only person in that place who didn’t work for an hourly wage.

  I stuck two twenties on the bar—too much, no matter how many beers I’d had—said good night to whoever might hear, and left. No one tried to stop me. I was too drunk to drive, too drunk to bring Creamer his glasses at the shack behind Norma’s, which was what I’d imagined doing. Instead I crossed the parking lot to get a room at the Gas Stop. Henk Presidio’s not a talker, and he had the desk, for which I was grateful. He didn’t ask what brought me back—probably didn’t care. I was a guest; we came and went. He put me in a new room, not 116, though it had all the same accoutrements, just in a different arrangement. This compounded my disorientation, but I didn’t really feel my drunkenness until I sank down in a La-Z-Boy that turned out not to be under me. I lurched to the opposite corner of the room and tipped myself into the actual chair. I wanted, and didn’t want, to turn on the TV, so I called Lucius, who didn’t answer, which was just as well, since the thought of telling him what had happened made me recoil. He’d side with Regina and make me feel worse. Or was it Michael who’d’ve done that?

  My humiliation burned. For this night, and for all the others—a radiating, retroactive embarrassment—I’d sat at the Gas Stop bar, sipping beer and dipping fried nuggets, people around me sniggering at my every bourgeois move, sneering silently as Lucius and I held hands between the stools, rolling their eyes as I bantered with Regina—Regina, whom I’d vainly, ignorantly, arrogantly imagined to like me. I’d enjoyed the delusion that she was happy to converse with an intelligent woman her own age, that it pleased her to talk with someone other than meat-headed meatpackers or meth-headed roofers. But really, Bondorf had only expressed what everyone there had wanted to say for months: Go back where you belong, bitch.

  In the La-Z-Boy, I stared at the ceiling. Parking lot light edged through a crack in the curtain. My eyeballs felt swollen, my brain buzzed, and my heart hammered with beer. I don’t remember closing my eyes, but my phone startled me awake. “Hey.” Lucius’s voice was heavy.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked—too quickly, on instinct. Then I remembered: everything.

  I heard him force a puff of air out his nostrils, the exhausted imitation of a laugh.

  “I got kicked out of the Gas Stop,” I told him. It felt true enough.

  “Oh, Phil . . .” he said, but I couldn’t tell if it was a sympathetic Oh, Phil, or a chiding one, or just something to say. I hadn’t wanted to tell him what happened until he seemed not to want to hear it, and then I did want to tell him, and to bring Creamer into it, to threaten Lucius into claiming me, or declaring something. None of this, I know, excuses my behavior.

  “I’m drunk,” I said, and that seemed to make it all the more true.

  “Don’t,” he began, “you’re not . . .” and I don’t know what he was going to say, because he never finished. “Where are you?” He wanted to know I was safe, but it made me feel judged, not loved. Yes, I’m aware of the juvenile nature of my reactions. I’m ashamed that I wanted to tell him I’d started a bar brawl, that a man—a rival suitor—had defended me. I wanted him jealous, wanted to see if I could provoke it, see what it did to him. Lucius is not a jealous man—I don’t want a jealous man—but that night I was desperate for something I couldn’t name, and stabbing blindly for it. Lucius said, “I can’t watch anymore,” and this is what I lashed at.

  “You don’t know?” I asked, galled—or sounding galled. Was my television on?

  “There’s nothing more I can do.” He sounded exhausted, but I was not kind.

  “Maybe you should’ve done more when you had the chance,” I spat.

  “Please, Phil,” he said, calmly, rationally, soberly. “Not now. Not about this. Please?” And like the tantruming child I am, I hung up on him. Just like Ginny slams doors on me, I hung up on Lucius. I sat a long time afterward, phone in hand. He did not try to call back.

  Which is what propelled me to the Gas Stop convenience store. I think I intended to buy cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked since college, but if I were ever to take it up again, that was the night. Maybe I’d buy junk food, chips to soak up the beer in my belly, though I kept thinking about more beer, too, imagined getting wrecked, by myself, in my hotel room, the election washing boozily over me. In reality, I’d probably take two sips and fall asleep in the La-Z-Boy.

  I pushed in through the chiming front door, and there, seated at the single booth, nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee through a straw and staring—near blind, I figured—at the television, was Creamer. He looked at me like I was the last person he’d’ve expected, but also as if things had gotten so weird that night it almost made sense. And he appeared to be seeing just fine, not at all like someone who’d lost his thick glasses. “You didn’t go home,” I said.

  “No TV. And crap radio reception.” He laughed ruefully into his coffee. “I’m sobering up,” he declared, and lifted the cup in cheers.

  At the beverage station I splashed scaldingly hot, pale brown coffee into a cup and added five tubs of half-and-half just to occupy my hands. To Creamer I said, “I have your glasses.”

  “Oh? Thanks,” and he lifted a hand to accept their return.

  “Oh—not here. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’d . . . I left them in my room. I got a room, at the inn.” I gestured in its direction. “I couldn’t keep sitting there. At the bar.” Creamer was nodding. “Do you want your glasses? I could get them.” But he’d gone back to the television and seemed to only dimly register my words. I asked, “Are you staying here till it’s over?”

  “Over?” he said, like he didn’t believe it ever would be. “She loves kicking me out.”

  “Regina?” I gestured vaguely. “I have a TV. Your glasses . . . you could watch with me . . .”

  Creamer looked at me hard. He buried his hands in his sweatshirt pockets and hunched his shoulders, eyes jittering in confusion, or pain. “You’re asking me to your hotel room?”

  I lost it: “Why does everyone think I’m trying to lure you into bed?”

  Creamer’s eyes went to his cup, and he stared into it a long time. I got nervous, set down my coffee
, and searched my pockets for some imaginary lost ChapStick or hair band. I feared he might not respond at all and started to say, “Never mind—” but he put out a hand as if asking me to wait for his answer, so I waited. The door chimed, and a young guy came in. He and Creamer exchanged nods, and he squeezed past me, filled a cup, then waited at the register for the clerk. All this lent Creamer some time. I sipped my coffee—which was either repulsively flavored or I’d accidentally added something like fake Irish Cream—and studied the bulletin board business cards. Tawney Laffler, MA, LMHC, Specializing in self-discovery and compassionate connection. Bart Yoder—Free Standing Timber. Sigourney Gahl, Intuitive Gardening Coach—call for prices. Prairie is close to Fairfield and its Maharishi University of Management and Transcendental Meditation, where things tend to float toward the New Age.

  The customer paid and left, the clerk retreated, and Creamer lifted his eyes, saying, “I’m sorry if I made things—” I started to protest, but he shushed me. “This is a small town. I . . .” He paused and looked up at me, questioning. “We?” he asked, but I didn’t understand the question. “We live in a small town. A small town where nice-looking ladies don’t—”

  “Creamer!” I protested, embarrassed.

  “What?” He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “You’re a nice-looking woman.”

  My insides went watery. I felt deranged. Something was very wrong with me. I’m mortified that what I said was “Well, if you’re used to Regina!”

  Creamer squinted in disappointment. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t. That’s beneath you.”

  “Beneath me? How do you have any idea what’s beneath me?” My voice was too loud, I couldn’t help it.

  Behind the register, the backroom door swung open and the clerk, who could obviously hear everything we said, gave a melodramatic ahem to announce his entrance.

  Creamer lowered his voice. “Maybe we could talk somewhere more . . . private?”

  “Well, I invited you to a more private place, but apparently that was too shocking to—”