Limbo (5 page)

“I've already told you everything I know,” my mother said, evenly. “Sweetheart, he's been dead for over ten years.”

One day, I begged her to make up the answers, and when she refused, I stomped up the stairs to my room and slammed the door so hard that the framed needlepoints fell off the wall. I'd always assumed that every question, large or small, would have its corresponding answer. But Irwin was, and would remain, an open-ended question, a mystery my mother refused to illuminate with a lie. Lying was a sin.
Telling stories that weren't true, even if everybody
knew
they weren't true, was the same thing, only said differently. There was right and there was wrong. There was good and there was bad. Mine was a world of black and white; there was nothing in between.

I believe there is a relationship, much like that between parent and child, between the physical, or external, landscape we call
home
and the spiritual, or internal, landscape that becomes the human soul. I was the offspring of manicured lawns, of perfectly rectangular ranch houses laid out on perfectly rectangular lots, of streets that met at right angles. Following directions, there was never any question which way was left, which way right, which way straight ahead. The roads leading out of town parted the flat fields neatly, cutting more rectangles, precise as stained glass: gold and green in the summertime; white and dun in winter, black when the land was freshly cultivated, speckled with seagulls like smooth, gray stones. Lake Michigan edged the horizon like the bright, blue border on a quilt.
A place for everything; everything in its place
, I was told, and the landscape bore witness to those words. You could see the truth of it laid out for miles. Faith was clean-cut as a corn row or a fence line, direct as a county highway. God was the hawk, high overhead, overlooking us all. We were the rabbits, trying to blend in, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.

This is just the way things are. If you don't like it, take it up with God
.

Summers, restless, I'd get on my bike and ride out of town as far as I could. After an hour or so, I'd coast to a stop and wait for the lake breeze to cool me. Around me, the fields would be planted in soybeans, field corn and sweet corn, oats, wheat. In the distance there'd be a little white farmhouse beside a red barn, a windmill in the courtyard slowly turning. Perhaps I'd see a herd of Holsteins taking their shade beneath a single stand of hickory trees. A frenzy of black-eyed susans in the run-off ditches. An orange housecat, bright as a button, stalking something in the weeds. After catching my breath, I'd get back on my bike and, again, I'd ride and ride until my hot breath burned my upper lip and the pavement seemed to rise and fall with each pump of my knees. At last, I'd coast to a stop, look around…

…and the fields would be planted in soybeans, field corn and sweet corn, oats, wheat. Once again, there'd be that little white farmhouse beside its red barn, a windmill in the courtyard slowly turning. Another herd of Holsteins, larger perhaps. A meadow lark balancing on a telephone line. A ragged cluster of purple-headed thistles, day lilies rising around it in a fiery cloud.

This was not a landscape that encouraged individual interpretations, diverse opinions, conflict. The Catholic
God we worshipped was a God who did not permit negotiations, a God who came and went like the seasons, a God who moved in mysterious ways. There was no mention of anything like
a personal relationship with Christ
. There were rules, there were beliefs, and you could like them or lump them but you had to obey. The madder you got, the harder you smiled.

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all
.

You did what you were told. You believed what you were taught.
Dear Senator
, I wrote with the other members of my catechism class.
Please stop the murder of helpless unborn babies. Dear Senator, Homosexuality is a perversion of God's most sacred laws
.

Dear Senator. Dear God
. It terrifies me, now. I would have written anything, believed anything. Absolutely anything at all.

God was Love, yes, but the icy stream that fed this love was Fear. When storms blew in off Lake Michigan, turning the sky an almost supernatural green, where did the lightning strike? Not the fields or the roads. Not the low-lying houses and milk sheds, the chicken coops and corn cribs. No, it struck the windmills, the power lines, the stands of hickory trees. It scorched whatever dared to stand up, stand out, stand alone.

“What should you do,” my mother drilled my brother and me, “if you ever get caught out in the open during a storm?”

But we already knew the answer. It was something we learned in school.

Lie down. Keep still. Wait for the thunder to pass.

 

Each time I
left Grandma Krier's house, she pressed her faith firmly into my hands, like lunch money, like a map should I ever get lost. Her Catholicism reflected the view she saw every day from her kitchen windows: few shadows. Straight lines. A precise, uncomplicated horizon.

Her name, until her marriage, was Margaret Catherine Jacoby; her birth certificate, which I learned of after her death, read
Margaretta Katarina Jacobi
. She loved to tell the story of how my grandfather's parents, who owned the adjacent farm, had carried him, a babe in arms, to the wedding of her mother and father. “We made the boy,” they said. “Now you two make the girl.”

And her mother and father did.

From the time she was born, in 1899, it was understood by everyone that my grandmother would grow up to marry Otto Krier. Even as children, they'd loved each other. My grandmother followed him everywhere, like an adoring younger sister. At school, my grandfather made sure the other boys included her in their games. When the first world war threatened overseas, and speaking anything but English was forbidden, they stood side by side in the schoolyard, scratching notes to each other in the dirt.
Neither of them knew English very well at that time; they spoke Luxemburg with their families, German with neighbors and friends. Both would end their formal educations after finishing eighth grade. There was too much work to be done at home. Advanced education was a luxury.

Grandma Krier was never one to voice regrets, but several times, when I was growing up, she said she wished she'd gone to high school. “So I would be smart,” was how she put it, her tone flat, without self-pity. And yet, she'd continued to educate herself by reading the English dictionary, which she kept pushed to the center of the kitchen table, in easy reach. She also read the Bible, the newspaper, the almanac, in addition to a number of religious publications. She spoke and wrote Luxemburg and German, as well as English, and could carry on a conversation in Dutch. At ninety, she still beat nearly everyone at Scrabble. At ninety-five, furious, she phoned my mother with a list of words:
Internet, cyberspace, modem
. My mother defined them one by one, but my grandmother wasn't appeased. “They shouldn't be allowed to have words that aren't in the dictionary,” she said.

I see her now as she pulls a steaming pan of chicken from the oven. She strides impatiently into the center of the thickest raspberry patch, ignoring the thorns that tug and tear at the loose skin on her arms. Winters, she walks out to the barn through the drifts wearing only a short-
sleeved dress, ladies' shoes from J C Penney's, hose striped with runs. If one of the geese forgets itself and hisses, she snatches it up by the neck and swings it forward and back.

“Mind your manners,” she says, then lets it sail.

She never raises her voice to her grandchildren. She doesn't have to. When my brother refuses to eat his liver and onions, she offers to fix him a ground glass sandwich instead. We know she isn't joking. My brother cleans his plate. I take a second helping, just to be safe.

My father calls her
Big Mama
—but never to her face.

Even the bull knows enough to leave her alone.

She tells us the story of
going to get her tonsils yanked
. It was 1908. Her father hitched the horses to the wagon and took her into “town,” which would have meant Random Lake. A nurse held her mouth open as Doctor reached down her throat with a long-handled scissors. There was no anesthetic, not even a piece of ice to suck. Her father paid the bill, then drove her back home.

“Did you cry?” I want to know.

“What good would that have done?” she says, and she's right.

Sundays after Mass, we cross the street to the cemetery, where she tidies my grandfather's grave. I long to know more about his death, but my grandmother deflects my questions, pretends she doesn't hear. I have only the facts from my mother, who was too young to remember him,
who knows no more than this: that he lost his balance and fell off a wagon, landing on a pitchfork. That he didn't die right away. That the night of his wake, the aurora borealis appeared, and no one could remember having ever seen it so bright. People believed it was my grandfather's message from heaven, his good-bye.

Walking back to the car, my grandmother spots a thistle growing in the lawn. Without warning, she jackknifes at the waist, jerks it up. “Toss this in the field,” she says. I accept it like a crown of thorns. Her own hands are so callused that the prickers don't stick. She brushes them off like flour.

 

There is strength
in my family, and then there is weakness.

My other grandmother, my father's mother, doesn't like me any better than she did when I was five, though she's awfully fond of my brother. My mother says I shouldn't take it personally. Grandma Ansay, she says, is
old-fashioned
, and
old-fashioned
people like boys better than girls. It isn't fair, but it can't be helped.

Grandma Ansay tries to wheedle my brother away from my mother whenever she can. Sometimes she pulls him aside and gives him a gift. It could be a quarter, or a brand-new watch, or a savings bond. By now, she's had
her stroke
—that's what we call it, as if it's something she's selected for herself, like a peculiar hat—and she walks with
a cane, dragging one leg. Her speech is slurred. She often cries. But then, she's been sickly all her life, always complaining: this ache, that pain. My father doesn't call her Big Mama or Mom or Ma or anything else, although he says
Mother
when he's speaking about her in the third person, as in
Mother never came with us to the fields
and
Pa always said that Mother bought shoes to fit her head and not her feet
.

Twice a month, we have dinner at this grandmother's house. “Dinner” means a meal that is eaten at noon. Grandma Ansay keeps the thermostat set at eighty-five Her enema bottle hangs behind the bathroom door, and the house smells of Ben-Gay and a terrible, unnamed sadness. She pokes at my flat chest to see if I'm developing. She tries to look up my dress, then laughs when I slap it down.

At the dinner table, she and my grandfather bicker until Grandpa says, “That's enough out of you!” Then they fight in earnest, speaking their own venomous mix of Luxemburg, English, and German, while my mother and father and brother and I keep eating, as if nothing whatsoever is wrong. Please pass the peas. Please pass the bread. Nothing has changed since the brief time we lived with them.

“I'll tell them everything, if that's what you want,” Grandpa finally says. “I'll tell them all about you!”

Tell us
what
? Personally, I am dying to know. I figure it must have to do with either sex or money, the Twin Taboos, the two things nice people never talk about. But Grandma's
tongue is tired and cannot shape the words. She gives up, stops arguing. Instead, she stares at her hands, chained together by the rosary in her lap. After the meal, she lies face down on the daybed, weeping quietly, furiously. I watch her from the doorway. In catechism, our teacher—the mother of one of my friends—explains that if we only have faith the size of a mustard seed, God will work miracles in our lives and grant us any request. She even passes around a tiny yellowish husk, so we can see for ourselves that this isn't so much to ask. Then she tells us, in graphic detail, about her miscarriages, how everybody told her she'd never carry a child to term, but look—here's her daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who sits among us smiling like the Gift from God she is. We can reach out and touch Mary Elizabeth, the way Doubting Thomas touched Jesus. We can see for ourselves the power of faith.

I love my religion classes, which are held in our teacher's home. Mrs. T. always pulls the shades and lights tall, white candles. It's better than ghost stories at camp. We hold hands and chant Hail Marys. Once, as we're talking about Saint Benedict, we all see Satan circling us in the form of a small blue light. But because we're each wearing a Saint Benedict medal, blessed by the Pope himself, Satan can't do a thing to us and eventually the light winks out. That night, Mrs. T. holds a special ceremony in which we each vow to wear our medals until our deaths. I keep mine
pinned to my underwear; when I shower, I hold it in my mouth. I will wear it until I'm in college. I'll have nightmares when I finally take it off.

Grandma Ansay prays all the time, but clearly, she's doing something wrong. Why else wouldn't God make her better? And why would God give her a stroke in the first place, if it wasn't something she deserved? At Mass on Sundays, we pray for the intentions of particular people who are sick, and some of them get better, and some of them don't. Either way, there must be a reason, and that reason is implied by every Bible story we read, every sermon that we hear. The good are rewarded. The bad are punished. When someone gets better and returns to church, everybody congratulates them, shakes their hands. When somebody doesn't get better, well, it's always a little bit awkward. The priest speaks of
mystery
, and we say the Our Father:
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
. God wants some people to suffer, like it or lump it, and He isn't saying why. But it isn't just luck. There is a Master Plan.