Our Lady of the Prairie Read online

  Perhaps it’s appropriate that we were ultimately done in by a torrential April rain. Classes hit a lull before the last push to semester’s end, and on a nasty, wet Friday night, in a fit of seasonal pique, I took myself to a movie. It should have been no surprise that my instinct toward cushioned seating, passive entertainment, and heavily salted and buttered carbohydrates would be shared by other sentient Ohioans that evening, but this would not dawn on me until I was already downtown, Volvo in a lot, contraband convenience-store candy secreted in my handbag. Lucius had the same instinct that night, and was equally confounded to find the campus triplex sold out for both the seven and nine o’clock shows. We stood in the lobby gazing up at the SOLD OUT signs like travelers who’ve missed their train and can do nothing but stare at the departures board, hoping there’s been some mistake.

  Lucius saw me before I saw him. He did not approach, but I felt eyes on me in that Camplex lobby and turned to spot him, some fifteen feet away. He had his driver’s license in hand, expectant as an undergraduate to be carded for his age, eager to prove himself. I loved him. I loved him already. I hunched my shoulders and constricted my chest muscles to protect the walloping heart inside. I hurt for loving him.

  “Poor planning,” he called to me, rooted where he stood.

  “Speak for yourself.” Was I trying to sass him, show my brassy bravado? I don’t even know; no more came from my mouth. Lucius looked at me helplessly. Nothing mattered: it was over, our struggle futile. We lost hold and gravity got its way, and in that instant our pretending was born.

  “Video rental?” Lucius asked, as if it were the next logical move. I shrugged my concession and went to him as though we’d come to the theater together and I’d only gone to use the ladies’ room. Now, returning to him to find him ticketless, all shows sold out, what option was left us but to rent a film and go home to watch it? We exited the doors of the Camplex as though we’d entered through them together minutes before.

  “My car’s right here,” Lucius said, and I suppose I made a significant choice right then, saying nothing of my own car in the ramp a block away. I simply got in. Mine was unfit for company anyway. Michael and Ginny mocked me for driving a dumpster: my big steel box of trash. I inherited it when my parents died, a late-eighties Volvo, in great shape, its first decade spent in California without snow or salt. My loyalty to it is, admittedly, sentimental, but I’ve never felt their ridicule to be quite fair. Yes, my car collects coffee cups and department mailings and gas receipts and plastic bottles and extra pairs of shoes and umbrellas and emergency Ziplocs of nuts in case I don’t get a chance to eat before class. Would it be nice to drive a clean car? Sure. I’d also love it if my handbag didn’t weigh ten pounds, with forgotten tape measures and Advil bottles and fortunes in loose change. But life is short, and I’m always late for something, grabbing my bag, racing out of the house. Time never slows enough for me to get on top of the accumulation. Once a year something happens to necessitate the dumping and sorting of my handbag, or a sack of potting soil opens in the back seat and I have to get everything out of the car to vacuum, but so help me I’ve never understood (a) how the hell other people manage to keep their cars clean and their handbags efficient, their offices tidy, etc. & etc., and (b) why it’s so unfailingly hilarious that I can’t. Big deal: my car’s a mess! Still, that didn’t mean I wanted Lucius to see it, at least not yet. And in that not yet was, I suppose, an admission that we had a future. And with that thought, we became a we.

  Lucius held open the passenger door of his Honda, and I ducked out of the stinging drizzle and let him close me in. I leaned to unlock the driver’s side, but there was no need. “I never bother,” he said, climbing in. Then he shook his head. “That’s not true. I actively don’t bother. Sometimes I forget I haven’t lived in L.A. for thirty years, and I lock it, and then I come back and unlock it because I think if it’s locked someone’s going to steal something out of spite, like, I’ll give you reason to lock it, buddy. But who’d steal from an unlocked ’87 Civic?”

  We drove down Cuyahoga Street in silence. I flinched as the car swiped a low-hanging branch. Lucius reached to turn on the heat and defrost. “I like the video place in that mini-plaza,” he said. “Tutty’s? Tooty’s? Something like that . . . Tuppy’s?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t seen a movie in more than three months. “Why does it smell like waffles?” The car had filled with a warm syrupy smell, like childhood breakfasts, overly sweet—not real maple syrup but Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth’s, a taste we’ve grown so accustomed to that the real thing doesn’t taste right anymore.

  “I think the antifreeze is leaking. Or the AC coolant or something. Someone called Car Talk a few months ago about French toast in his heater. It’s got to be the same thing.”

  We pulled into the parking area of a corner-lot office park whose unlikely entrance banner read: REBEL PLAZA. I thought maybe he’d chosen this place so we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew; there was a Blockbuster much closer to the neighborhood where he lived and where I was subletting. Turned out he feels about Blockbuster the way I feel about McDonald’s.

  We pushed through the door of the family-owned video rental, on which the name Alice’s was neatly scripted in lavender. “Tuppy’s?” I asked.

  Lucius waved his hands, abdicating from all activities involving coherent thought.

  Students crammed the narrow aisles of the store I will now always think of as Tuppy’s. We stood before a wall of swarming box covers; I could not focus on a single title.

  “Prof Bocelli, hey.” A dreadlocked young white man strode up wearing one of those thick hoodies that either smell like llama or always get worn by people who smell like llama.

  Lucius greeted him, then said, “Do you know Professor Maakestad, on loan to us from Iowa, in Theater?” I shook hands with the student, who jostled my arm with buoyant enthusiasm. He did not offer his name or any other words, yet I had the sense that he thought nothing of seeing two professors at the video store together on a Friday night. It’s likely he was too stoned to think at all—the pot aura around him nearly obscured the scent of llama—but what was there to think of two professors at the video store together on a Friday night? We’d run into each other, both squeezed from a sold-out movie. There was no reason to imagine our evening would involve anything beyond watching a film and consuming microwave popcorn. This thought made me both sick and emboldened at the same time. The idea of sitting alone in a room with Lucius and not touching him felt physically impossible, but a staunch defiance accompanied my own entitled outrage: how dare anyone assume anything about us! We’d stand firm on our moral high tundra and laugh at their base suspicions.

  The student drifted away and Lucius and I were left to gaze at the wall of movies. Every title seemed either inauspiciously prophetic or indecorous or both: In the Bedroom, The Last Seduction, My Life Without Me, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Le Divorce, Crash, Titanic. In the end we opted for arguably the unsexiest movie in the store—Mr. Death, an Errol Morris documentary about a Holocaust-denying execution device designer—and left quite pleased with ourselves. Who rents Mr. Death to try and get someone into bed?

  We made it as far as microwaving the popcorn. Lucius took out a ceramic bowl, but as he broke the bag’s seal it released a bubble of fake-butter steam and his gumption seemed to fizzle. He looked up at me, face long, and ran a hand over his bald, scraggled head before he set down the bowl and leaned on the counter like he needed support to say what he was going to say. “I don’t know what to do, Phillipa. I’ve steered clear. I don’t want to be a homewrecker. An anything wrecker. Do you want to be here? Maybe you should leave?”

  My head whirred, no thought staying long enough for recognition. Something propelled me, for I seemed to be moving toward him, though I didn’t realize it until I saw him shrink back and hunch as if to protect his vital organs. I must have imagined him picking up the still-empty popcorn bowl in a last-ditch effort to put something between us,
because he did not actually lift that pale blue ceramic bowl to him like a shield. It sat plump and benign on the counter and did not come between us. He put up no defense as I moved toward him, and when I got there nothing was between us but our sweaters and shirts and my bra, and we couldn’t burrow past those fast enough. We needed to feel each other’s flesh, pulse to pulse, heartbeat against heartbeat. His skin’s softness defied everything I ever knew as soft. I felt that I could melt into his flesh, or as if, in touching him, I already had. We were inside each other’s clothing, cocooned in wool and cotton and nylon/poly blend, entwined already by the time our lips met. They almost couldn’t meet: my jaw was trembling, and his kept locking every time his body seized in a gasp. He kept gasping. We both kept gasping; we couldn’t breathe right, or remember to breathe, or we were trying to breathe each other instead of air. His body convulsed against mine, breath coming out in spasms, and not just him, but us, quaking together. I don’t know how long we stood in his kitchen, but it was a long time, gripping each other, grasping like it was the only thing we knew how to do. We didn’t know how we’d move forward, though there was no question that we would. We had come together and could not now break apart. We hadn’t knotted; we’d fused.

  I feel compelled to note that I had not made love in some time. I cannot remember when Michael and I had last made love; there was no cause to remember one act amid various permutations of that act across a span of twenty-seven years. Why remember the once when you have no reason to think it will be the last? I can, however, very specifically recall the last time Michael and I had sex in a kitchen. It was not our kitchen but my mother-in-law’s, at her old place on Carpathia, when we were moving her out of the house and into the first of a long string of nursing homes from which she’s been unceremoniously, and justifiably, booted. Something had happened—I can’t recall exactly. It had gotten late and we had just one car there, or we still had packing to do and it wasn’t worth driving home only to drive back in the early morning. Something. So we stayed there, Michael and I, each on a living room sofa. The day had been miserable; Bernadette wasn’t easy to deal with under the best circumstances. Yes, we were moving her from the house she’d lived in for forty-odd years, but everything took exponentially longer than it should have because she’d let us do nothing without supervision. She forbade us to pack so much as the contents of a dresser drawer if she wasn’t in the room to oversee. Granted, we were getting rid of a lot, storing the rest in the attic there on Carpathia, in which she’d likely never again set foot. We planned to rent the house, not sell it. At the time, it had seemed that Ginny might live there someday—a small place, relatively near us, near the hospital. This was a couple of years before Gin’s last round of shock and before the advent of Silas Yoder in her life, back when we still thought we’d be taking care of her the rest of our days, as we’d been doing more or less full-time for all her days on this planet preceding the blessed electroshock, and before she and Silas—acquaintances as kids, growing up—reencountered one another and fell in love.

  Understandably, Bernadette felt protective during the sorting of her life’s accumulations, watchful over the packing, but it was like she feared I’d try to make off with something, or as if there were certain things Michael and I were not to see. Very specific things had to go in very specific boxes with other very specific things. Some boxes we were not permitted to sort, only allowed to take to the attic. If one were inclined to imagine one’s mother-in-law was, say, a Nazi in hiding, and not merely the retired lifelong costume mistress of the university theater, Bernadette did little to refute such fictions of the mind. Her paranoia certainly seemed to justify my suspicions that she was not who she claimed to be, but Michael forgave her everything: the woman had (ostensibly) lost her American soldier-husband in the war against Hitler. How could you blame such a person for harboring fears, however irrational? Well, you know what? If she’d told us anything, we wouldn’t have to make up our own stories. My own father spent his entire life retelling his father’s stories of family and friends lost in the war—you tell their stories, you keep them alive. Bernadette’s family—what family? A great big void. She’d swept it clean, a holocaust of her ancestry. Bernadette hacked down her own family tree and used it for kindling.

  The movers or storage company guys would be coming the next morning, and we hadn’t realized that packing would take as long as it did. Bernadette went to bed early, grudgingly permitting us to box the contents of the kitchen cupboards. When we finished near midnight, well aware she’d be up and raring to go at four-thirty a.m., Michael and I stripped down to shirts and underwear, grabbed sheets and blankets from the Goodwill pile, threw them over the sofas, and tried in vain to get some sleep. Rankled, on edge, I felt infused with Bernadette’s poison. I went to the kitchen and found, in a box of salvageable booze we’d unearthed, some brandy, circa 1952, which I’m sure she’d bought for the tablespoon she needed in a Christmas pudding. In a cartoon-decorated Dixie cup probably left over from Ginny’s childhood, I poured myself a brandy and stood in my underwear at the kitchen counter, willing the liquor to lull me.

  Michael came in a minute later, assessed the situation, and smiled, slow and tired. I held the cup out to him and he accepted, sipped, and sidled in beside me against the counter in his boxers. I refilled the cup, and we stood in silence in Bernadette’s kitchen passing the brandy between us. My legs were crossed, and Michael handed me the drink, then ran his hand down my thigh. He cleared his throat, let his hand rest just below my hip bone. We were side by side, looking out the kitchen door, through the dining room and into the living room where we should have been sleeping. “You looked rather fetching, standing here,” my husband told me.

  “But now you realize I’m just your same old lady.”

  He rubbed into the cleft of my thighs. “I realized: my old lady, she’s fetching.”

  “You trying to seduce me?”

  “Yes.”

  It felt like role-playing, something you’d learn in a Marriot conference room workshop: Keeping the Flame Alive—Sex and Long-Term Monogamy. But if his proposition was sad, my refusal would have been even sadder. I closed my eyes and drank down the brandy, then leaned into his hand and tried to open myself to it, talk myself into wanting. “You seduce all the girls this way?”

  I felt Michael nodding. “Brandy in a Dixie cup, Mama sleeping up the stairs.”

  “So, once more for old times’ sake before student renters trash the place?”

  “Once more for the Gipper,” he said.

  “Do not bring the Republicans into this.”

  He quieted then, just rubbing. I focused on the warm flood of brandy and extended my hand, blindly reaching for the flap in his shorts. This was back when his underwear was still store-bought, before Eula had come to work for us and converted all his worn button-downs into boxers. I touched Michael’s Fruit of the Looms, felt him hard beneath them, and slipped my hand inside the flap. The angle was awkward, so I turned him toward me and reached to pull his shorts down in back, but they caught in front, so I doubled back and remedied that, pushed them to his knees, and let him wriggle out. He pulled my underwear past my thighs, then held my arms and lifted me onto Bernadette’s kitchen counter. When he pushed inside me, I had the reassuring thought that an orgasm might help me get to sleep, which seemed as good a reason as any to work for one. I could come with Michael; easier with a vibrator, but not undoable without. And if our sex wasn’t passionate, it was reliable, and that gratified my sense of efficiency: the pleasing satisfaction in achieving a sought result. That sounds about as sexy as chem lab instructions, but also as effective, and that seemed enough. If not for Lucius, it would have continued to seem enough. Before him, what I had with Michael was enough. The seemed like only entered with Lucius. Lucius entered, and I made a choice that changed everything. And, at the risk of revealing myself as the hopelessly unrepentant lover of musical theater I am, I will quote the critically disastrous yet oddly compelling Andrew
Lloyd Webber epic Aspects of Love—I directed it one summer for the StrawHat Guild in Vermont—to say this: Love changes everything.

  I LEFT LUCIUS’S early the next morning and walked home to my sublet, where I sat on the bed, my hair vaguely knotted, lips chapped, the skin on my face rubbed raw from Lucius’s beard, and called Michael to confess. Lucius, with dire reluctance, had dragged himself to a seven-thirty a.m. mandatory department meeting, making me swear on the cup of coffee he promised to bring me upon his return that I would not flee before he got back. “An hour,” he told me. “One hour.” I’d begun to dress when I heard the front door close behind him.

  The phone rang once. I pictured Michael at our kitchen table, in his velour bathrobe, reading student papers or leafing through a Hy-Vee circular. The phone rang a second time and he answered. I could not bear to exchange a word before I told him. I could not bear the thought of him, later, replaying the conversation in his head and cursing me for those now-terrible moments of small talk and pleasantries, hearing the empty phrases again, as I inquired about Iowa weather, about Ginny, about anything other than what he would soon know I’d phoned to tell him. There are, I know, people who would call me selfish for telling my husband of my indiscretion at all—people utterly unfathomable to me, I’ll add: to think anyone would prefer to live in ignorance than know the truth. To those people I say this: if my husband was Dresden and I was the firebomber, my explosives were already raining down. Would it have been cruel and unkind and self-serving to warn Dresden’s citizens, to wake its inhabitants from their beds, yelling for them flee before the next wave of incendiaries? Before their city was ignited into a firestorm? Well, fine, then I’m selfish, and callous, and insensitive. Fine. I didn’t do it for commendation as a savior; I did it to try and save something.