Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  “Phillipa? Hello?” Lucius’s tenor had changed; now he was annoyed, and in reaction I swung violently back to regret, with a fervent imperative to mend this rift. Then, just as instantly, I was asking myself what kind of self-respecting fifty-year-old woman goes clambering and groveling back to a man, needing him this desperately because she’s never been without a man. Eula Yoder, age eighteen, was more of a woman than I’d ever been, probably ever would be. I hated myself. I drew a ragged breath, and the sob that emerged from my throat was so like a beast’s it frightened me. I gulped for a breath, swallowed wrong, and started coughing. When I regained myself and put the phone back to my ear, I was prepared for Lucius to have hung up, prepared for the sound of my aloneness in the world. But he was still there, saying, “Phil? Phillipa?” The care was back in his voice, and I broke into sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . .” Lucius shushed me calm, and I was too tired to fight his comfort.

  When I stopped crying enough to speak, I said, “Is this it? Is it over? Are we nothing but a brief and unreal affair?” I spat the word. “A fling? Is this unsustainable in real life?”

  Lucius sighed, slow to speak. “I wish,” he began, then reconsidered, started again: “If we . . .” He stopped, returned to his original opening: “I wish you didn’t see it as an all-or-nothing proposition. This is real life. I’m not trying to be difficult, but I don’t see why it’s real or unreal. Enduring or over. True or false. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  I wanted to tell him: Life isn’t fair. Instead I said, “You don’t think we’re over?”

  “I hope not. I’m frustrated, angry—I was really angry last night. But I’m not washing my hands. Yesterday was bad, today’s not so great either, but not I’m done bad . . . Are you done? With me?” He was turning it around. I tried to protest, but he kept on: “Last spring was glorious—fraught, but glorious. And unsustainable. Summer—France—was glorious. And fleeting—no test of sustainability. Now here we are: jobs in different states, students, families. You’re in the midst of tremendous upheaval—you don’t need me to tell you that. Do I wish your daughter weren’t in crisis? Of course. Do I wish the election had gone differently? That we were independently wealthy, no responsibilities, could up and quit and move to France? Sure!” He paused. When he continued, his voice was less belligerent. “I care for you very deeply, Phillipa Maakestad. It guarantees nothing, but I hope it counts for something. I hope we last, Phil. I hardly feel done. I’m here. I’ve signed on. When you sign on for joy, you sign on, too—unspoken, unacknowledged, maybe—you sign on for pain, too. We will, inevitably, cause one another pain.” This was the same logic I’d presented to Michael. “You sign on for love, and you’ve signed on for heartbreak. We signed. And you’re breaking my heart with this—”

  “But you’re breaking my heart!” I cut in at last.

  “I think—and this is based on three marriages—I think if we’re breaking each other’s hearts, we’re okay.”

  I can’t say I wholly understood the logic, but I wanted to believe, so I did. And I think that is what some people call faith.

  “When we started,” I said, “my life was relatively stable. You were an upheaval, but one I could afford; everything else was calm. This sounds idiotic, I know, but I didn’t see the intricacy of the balance, how altering one part can send the whole system into chaos.”

  “So you can’t afford me? That’s the point? Now I’m an indulgence you can’t afford?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Phillipa, are you even talking about yourself? Your life isn’t some house of cards. What can you not handle? What is this ‘fragile flower’ idea? What’s in chaos? You’ve been managing the collapse of your marriage—you moved out in May. You were gone long before. And you’ve been okay: you have a place, you’re helping with Ginny, Eula’s baby, teaching, directing—”

  “In absentia!” I cried. “You don’t need to pep-talk me. I wasn’t looking for—”

  “But you’re managing. Your life is not a house of cards. What’s collapsed? The country? Bush was president when we met; he’s still the goddamn president. That horror card-house is still standing, God help us. But until Ginny got sick, Bush wasn’t even your fight. She took that on; you inherited it. Ginny might be having trouble—that doesn’t mean you are falling apart.”

  “But I am!” I cried, but my thoughts had gotten snagged on Ginny, some kind of alarm going off: my Ginny alarm. Whatever had been holding back my worry that day gave way, the dam breached, and it seemed suddenly, glaringly probable that right now, in the wake of the election, the Yoder house was a crime scene: the drive cordoned with yellow tape, sirens blaring, lights flashing, and upstairs, in a bathtub of blood, my daughter lay dead, finally free.

  “Are you?” Lucius asked, but I’d forgotten what we were saying, consumed now by the image of Ginny and her unborn baby dead in the bathtub.

  “I have to go,” I told Lucius.

  “What?”

  I’d already started the car. I couldn’t hold the phone, the wheel, and the gearshift all at once. “I’ll call later. I have to get to Ginny.” I tossed the phone to the passenger seat with my discarded burrito, peeled out of the lot with a screech of rubber, and nearly jumped the median.

  THE YODER FARMHOUSE was so uncommonly lovely as it came into view that it seemed impossible for anything awful to have ever taken place there. Against a blue-black sky, the house glowed, its kitchen windows lamplit—kerosene, or one of the battery-powered ones they had. It looked so peaceful I wanted to pick up my little White Rabbit house and plunk it down in the field beyond Randall’s trailer, live right there, close at hand, like the Amish elders do. I feared, though, that night, that the peacefulness was an illusion. Like those creepy paintings by Thomas Kinkade—country landscapes and fairy-tale cottages that look lit from within. That “Kinkade Glow” could as easily emanate from a flaming meth lab bathtub as from a blazing hearth. The sleepy duck pond beside the gingerbread cottage, all aglimmer, is really a scum-mucked swamp, razor wire penning in the hissing fowl. At times, the whole world feels like an optical illusion: with a slight tilt of the frame, American Gothic becomes American Ghoul. Disney’s castle is really Count Dracula’s, not in Mickey’s Magic Kingdom but perched on a Transylvanian peak. Our blood-red apples, wicked delicious, Monsanto Delicious, like Kinkade’s paintings, are too delicious to be true. On November 3, I feared the Yoder house was aglow because my daughter had set herself on fire like a Buddhist monk, a great, grand finale of pregnant self-immolation. Ginny stars in her very own staging of Pippin: she steps into the flame, is engulfed by the flame, becomes flame itself, and—at last!—for one moment, shines.

  The scene at the Yoders’ was actually far simpler. There was fire, yes: in the woodstove, and in the kitchen, under the kettle. Eula was making tea. I looked cold, they said. “Take off your scarf, sit.” Was I outside for long? they asked. Was I all right? I couldn’t take my scarf off; I had a hickey the size of a black walnut. And I couldn’t get my mind around their calm, thoughtful questions. Weren’t those the questions I had come to ask them? I sank to the plaid couch. The Sloganator wallpaper was gone, the pamphlets and yard signs, too. The room felt safe again, like Orah and Obadiah’s family room, and I sat there with my family, drinking herbal tea on a very sad night in America. The strangest thing was the calm; we talked of commonplace things.

  “How’s the show?” Ginny asked.

  “Drood?” I sighed. “It’ll go on.”

  “It must.” What crossed her face might’ve been a shadow of a smile. “When’s it go up?”

  “After Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanksgiving,” she repeated, and I feared she might turn her head to barf just at the mention, but she went on in that weird, calm way. “We should figure out what to do . . .”

  Suddenly all I wanted was sleep. Lucius and I had talked of having Thanksgiving in Ohio, just us, but that was before I had a hideous purple suck-spot on my neck I’d neglected to tell him ab
out. Thanksgiving weekend was also tech weekend for Drood, which didn’t leave me a lot of time for anything. “I can’t talk logistics tonight, Gin.”

  I made my excuses and drove the nighttime roads home, my cold burrito lying uneaten on the passenger seat. I had no appetite, for it or for Thanksgiving. When your parents are dead, you’re not close to your extended family, you’ve recently and indecorously left your husband, and you’re not thankful to live in the land of George W., you might not feel inclined toward the customary national slaughter-feast. My own parents so abhorred the “family holidays” that on many a Thanksgiving of my childhood we told each set of grandparents we were with the other, then stayed home and ordered in Chinese.

  My breath hung in the air as I stoked the woodstove in my frigid little house. As the room warmed, I crawled into bed. The thing about a woodstove is that you have to keep feeding it, and the thing about lies is that once you’re wrapped in one, it doesn’t matter how many logs you put on the fire, because you’re impervious to warmth. I called Lucius. “Ginny’s okay,” I told him.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “Are you?”

  “Glad or okay?” I wasn’t trying to be funny, I was just exhausted. I answered myself, “Yes, both,” then realized I’d wasted the chance to say, No, I’m not okay, and tell him about the thing he couldn’t see: my purple-black hickey. Unfair as this may be, his ignorance made him seem foolish. My knowledge, and his lack of it, put me in a position of power. It was just what I’d done to Michael: dropped firebombs while he slept, then woke him to tell him his bed was in flames. I tried to confess, but only managed to ask, “Are we okay? Will we be okay?” as if Lucius were the one with something to disclose. And, ignorant, he kept saying, “We’re okay, Phil. I think we’re okay. Nothing we can do about Bush—that’s over. But we’re not, okay? Is that what you need me to say? That we’re not over? We’re not over—I’m not over you.”

  Creamer’s purple bruise burned at the side of my neck. I said nothing, only wept. A cheater and a liar, I’d wind up alone like the rest of my pathetic kind.

  A COMMITTEE MEETING got me up and out early. In my passenger seat lay last night’s burrito, bean juice leaking into the cracked seat leather. I shoved the whole thing into its bag, drove toward River City, and threw it in the first trash barrel I passed. That afternoon I had to Ginny-sit at the Yoders’, and when Silas came home to relieve me, I drove to the Gas Stop and called Lucius from the lot, one hand self-consciously at my neck. “I’m afraid to go in,” I told him.

  “As if that’s the worst that’s gone down in that place,” he chided. “You’re unfamiliar with bar rules, Phil: every day’s a new day. No one’s accountable.”

  “I’m just another drunk who’ll be forgiven by the rest of the drunks?”

  “You are but a small part of a great whole.”

  “Who are you quoting?”

  “I think it’s a step,” Lucius said.

  “You’re preaching AA?”

  He laughed. “Get in there, have Regina pour you a beer, and stop feeling so alone.”

  “I think that’s enabling.”

  “Fine,” he said, “I’m enabling. Get thee to the bar.”

  Law & Order had resumed its ubiquitous place on the TVs, closed captions scrolling by, turning reruns into breaking news. Regina wasn’t working. The guy tending bar tapped my beer almost without acknowledging my existence; I am, after all, a woman of fifty, mostly invisible to men. But Burton Kramer was not most men. At his end of the bar he sat, bespectacled, hooded, hunched over his beer, soda straw sticking out. I felt as embarrassed as if we had spent election night fucking our brains out, but I took my beer and moved to sit beside him. I said, “Hi.”

  “Oh.” He gave a show of surprise, as if he hadn’t noticed me. “Hey.”

  I tried to make him meet my eyes. “Could you take off the glasses? Jig’s up—I see you.”

  Slowly, Creamer took off and folded the plastic glasses. He placed them on the bar.

  “Did you get home okay?” I asked.

  Creamer nodded, pursing his lips as if trying to recall what I might be speaking about.

  “Five miles home, drunk, three o’clock in the morning? Remember?”

  He shook his head. “Oh! I crashed at Regina and Sally’s.” I must’ve looked confused; he backtracked. “It’s fine. I stay there if it’s late or I’m drunk. It’s fine. I have a key.”

  “Regina and who?”

  “Sally?” he said.

  “Who’s Sally?”

  “Sally. Her . . . wife . . . girlfriend-person. Sally.”

  “Regina’s . . . ?”

  “You never met Sally?” Creamer said.

  “Regina’s gay?”

  Creamer sat there looking at me, as though my question could not possibly be complete.

  “But . . .” I cocked my head, shook it, and cocked it to the other side in an attempt to rearrange the pieces into some kind of sense. “But, didn’t you . . . ? And Regina . . . ? I thought something . . .”

  Creamer actually looked amused. “Regina’s practically my mother,” he said. “I’m sorry if you worried. They’re just . . .” He gestured as if to say they lived nearby.

  “You want to be sorry for something?” I said. “I have something you can be sorry about.” I leaned in and lowered my voice. I felt ridiculous, like I belonged on Law & Order. Hand to my neck, I said softly, “You left an enormous hickey on me.”

  His eyes bugged. “What? I what?”

  I made to pull down my scarf. “Like to see?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I mean, I, but . . . not here. Are you sure?” he asked, as if what he called a hickey and what I called a hickey might be different things.

  “I know a hickey on my own neck.”

  “Look, I’m really sorry,” he offered. “I never . . . I . . . Do you bruise easy or something?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought of Michael’s handprints on my ass. “I don’t know,” I said again. We drank our beers, watched Law & Order. There’s a reason people like network TV, with its promise of resolution: give us an hour and we’ll reconcile the irreconcilable.

  Later that night, when I got in the car to go home, I caught a whiff of something unpleasant, remembered the leaky burrito, and cursed myself and my forgetful slovenliness.

  The next afternoon when I got back into the car—late, rushing to school—the autumn sun had been shining down for many hours, and little doubt remained that something was rotting in my car. After my class, it positively reeked—like blue cheese, Stilton. There’d been sour cream on the burrito, but I couldn’t understand how it possibly smelled as bad as it did. Sitting in the theater parking lot, I bent to sniff the passenger seat. It smelled okay—or as okay as a fifteen-year-old ass cushion can. I sniffed again: the stink didn’t seem to be coming from the seat, but I wasn’t sure. The driver of a Caddy parked beside me strode up to get into his car just as I rose, and he looked like he’d caught me sucking off my passenger.

  Over the next few days, we had freakishly warm weather; Saturday after the election, the temperature hit 70 degrees. Randall and Linda carried the Yoders’ plaid sofa into the yard, and Silas carried Ginny out to it. I sat with her as she finished a snack of cottage cheese and corn chips. The sun emboldened me, as if even Ginny and I wouldn’t clash in its warmth. “Gin,” I began, “given things with me and Daddy, I think, for Thanksgiving, maybe I should just be absent, you know? I don’t . . . are you . . . do you think you’ll really be up for it?”

  Eyes closed, face serenely tilted to the sky, Ginny said, “Silas and Eula and I’ve been talking. I think with drugs to gird me, I might be okay with the meal itself. We thought Eula and Linda and Randall might do the cooking in town, at Daddy’s, and then all come out here to eat. We figured maybe you’d go to Ohio?”

  “That sounds good, Gin,” I said. “That sounds like a good plan.”

  The weather remained warm. Silas, Linda, and Randall got some work done on the st
raw bale, and I was able to drive with my car windows open until real November weather arrived midmonth. One evening the temperature went down to the twenties and I had to resort to car heat. The stench got so foul I sprayed a full bottle of Febreze on the passenger seat. It took days to dry, but once the chemical stink subsided, the fetid rot reared again. Finally, I went to one of those coin-op car-vacuum places and pulled out every insert, yanked up all the rugs and mats, and found, between the passenger seat and the door, wedged deep in the crevice, Travis Spendler’s pale pink baby bottle, nipple side down, the formula curdled and leaking.

  I threw the rancid sludge in a dumpster, bought more Febreze, which I poured directly on the spot, let it pool in the seat track and bubble on the carpet. Until the snow came a few weeks later, I left my car windows open at night. I bought essential oil for the dashboard and burned incense until I trailed aromatic drifts of patchouli through the university halls like a hippie undergrad. The stench was undefeatable, which felt perversely appropriate.

  One evening I went to get dinner at the Gas Stop. Creamer—at his usual spot, in his usual garb—removed his glasses without prompting when I sat down. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  I nodded, shrugging: It goes. He understood, or pretended to.

  “How’s the . . .” He patted the side of his insulated hood, around where his neck might be.

  “Turning yellow,” I told him.

  He winced. “Look, I really am sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, and it felt true. His apology was wholly genuine, and right there, right then, it all felt okay. In that moment, Creamer might’ve known me most fully, hickey and all. And this, I thought, is why people take up residence on barstools: because right here everything’s forgiven and it all feels okay. I could imagine us, dec-ades from now, perched on our Gas Stop stools, an old couple with a joint bar tab. On TV, a camera lingered lasciviously over a golden-plump turkey breast, and I asked Creamer if he had holiday plans.