sempre libera
by Eleanor Ball
When we met, she was ninety years old. She grew up on a South Dakota farm in the 1940s, and it was as you would expect: outhouses, a one-room schoolhouse, no electricity. “We ate our pets,” she often told me. Once you knew that, you were well on your way to understanding her.
Every Sunday afternoon, she would listen to the Metropolitan Opera live. Sprawled across the living room rug, she craved the vibrations of the songs in her teeth, the way they burrowed to the back of her brain. She dreamed of becoming an opera singer. She perfumed herself with arias and cadenzas. Hummed Sempre libera in the kitchen until she boarded it up. For the rest of her life, she ate like a bird. She knew she was born for New York: sipping cocktails on wrought-iron balconies, sunglasses low on her nose, cherry trees perfuming the air. It was many years before she understood she had never had the voice for the Met.
—
She married her high school sweetheart. She told me little of him except that he won second place in the South Dakota High School Debate Tournament, and she won first; that she dropped out of college for him; and that five years later, when he held a gun to her head, she packed her lipstick and sheet music and three dollars and left. As the train rattled out of Deadwood, she hummed Sempre libera. She was surprised she still knew the tune. But she had done it: broken out of the heat and howl of South Dakota, blood between her teeth like a bandit. Like a woman.
She spat out the world so she could see how it worked. She needed to understand her grandmother, who had folded under the weight of the South Dakota sky; her aunt, an open secret hanging from a tree behind the barn; and her husband. She re-enrolled, studying Pavlov and Skinner. She found that her problems could be conditioned away, or, failing that, wrung by the neck and devoured.
She remarried. She had three sons. “How lucky you are!” smiled the church women, petting the animals who squealed in her arms like lambs she once butchered. “This will be the best time of your life.” Every week, she drove to the strip mall to buy placemats, party favors, pickle chips, or some other detestable thing. She was born for New York, but her work brought them to Iowa: cornfields and cracked concrete, winters that chapped her delicate skin. Still, she sang Sempre libera.
Yes, she cared. But not about the things a woman should care about. She liked her career too much, her in-laws too little. Soon her children had children. The retirement party loomed.
You must understand: She had never gotten anywhere by compromising.
—
Her husband was diagnosed with dementia.
In the doctor’s office, she felt nothing but the dizzying heat of the overhead lights. Dust in her mouth. The ghost of a gun at her head. She patted her hair, hands trembling, but nothing was there.
When they arrived home, he unceremoniously dropped the Retire in Brooklyn! pamphlet in the trash. She understood: It would not be possible now to move so far away from everyone they knew. She watched him stroll out to the garden and light a cigar. Then, she plucked a small glass swan from the top of the piano and snapped its neck.
Sinking down on a rug by the radio, it hit her like the old train that had carried her out of Deadwood forty years before. She would never make it to New York, and perhaps she never could have. She crushed the swan’s head in her fist, panting. She felt like a runner approaching the finish line. Realizing she could not remember what it was like to stand still. Realizing she never had.
The next day, they were eating lunch on the porch and he choked on a cherry tomato, just like that. She dropped her teacup, rushing barefoot through the shards to administer the Heimlich, thrusting in time with Sempre libera. The tomato flew out, sticky and red. Splat on the window. As she wiped it up, hands shaking, she swore she heard the wail of a train whistle. Fainter and fainter, as it chugged away to the east.
Years later, she told me, “I have no idea why I saved him. It would have been far better for both of us if I had let him choke.”
Eleanor Ball is a librarian and assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa. She serves as an editor for fifth wheel press; previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress and a Nonfiction Fellow at Abode Press. Her work appears in Barnstorm Journal, Strange Horizons, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. Come say hi at eleanorball.bsky.social and eleanor-ball.com.