But then, unaccountably, came another moment of clarity, another brightening. She saw herself as one of seven young people standing just over the property line of First Reformed. Carol Pinella and Darra Jernigan and Kim Perkins were giggling uncontrollably. David Goya and Laura Dobrinsky were discussing different grades of pot. Sally Perkins, indisputably the prettiest girl in her graduating class, three years ahead of Becky, was staring at Becky with narrowed eyes.
“It was you,” Sally said.
“What?”
“Last night, in Tanner’s van. That was you. Wasn’t it.”
Becky tried to answer, but all she produced was a fatuously guilty grin. It seemed to spread through her entire body. Kim and Carol and Darra were still engaged in their gigglefest, but Tanner’s name had attracted Laura’s attention.
“I saw Tanner last night at the Grove,” Sally explained. “There was somebody in his van with a blanket over her head. She looked totally busted. And you know who it was?”
“The Grove is Becky’s workplace,” David affably remarked.
“It was you,” Sally said.
“I don’t think so,” Becky croaked, aflame with guilt.
“No, I’m sure of it. You were sitting there trying to hide from me.”
There followed a wordless moment. The giggling had stopped.
“You think I’m surprised?” Laura said, her voice flat.
Becky’s gaze had become glued to the stone flank of the church. Everything she was hearing, including I don’t think so, was staying in her head, but in a jumble. She tried to latch on to the words and arrange them in a sequence, but they just spiraled around a central pit of horribleness.
“Hey, you,” Laura said. “Prom Queen. I asked you a question. Do you think I’m surprised?”
The sound of landing snowflakes was oceanic. Every eye was on Becky, even the eyes in the house behind the shrub, the eyes in the trees above it, the eyes in the sky. Anything she could say would be catastrophically revealing.
“What a fucking family,” Laura muttered, jumping down from the ledge.
“Hey, now,” David said. “That’s not cool.”
Some interval of time later, there were still six of them in the snow. Becky found herself consumed by a feeling of intolerable exposure and impending punishment, but each direction she considered turning was the wrong one. Her mind was damaged, she’d messed with its chemistry, and, oh, how she regretted it. She bent forward as if to vomit but instead put her hands on the edge of the ledge and awkwardly, sort of sideways, whoopsie, rolled off it and righted herself. She hurried through the fire door, which Laura Dobrinsky had left wide open.
To her right lurked a hall full of eyes, so she ran up the stairs to the church attic. For a while, in the dark, after the door had fallen shut behind her, she groped along a wall for a light switch, but then she forgot about doing this, only to remember and be struck by having forgotten—it’s because I am horribly stoned. She groped forward sideways, whimpering, an arm stretched out ahead of her. She collided with something sharp and metallic, a music stand, but nothing crashed. In the distance was a glimmer of bluish light. She tried to navigate by it but lost sight of it and questioned its reality. The next thing she encountered was cool and edgeless, extensive, hollow-sounding. It ended in a curving tapered tube. Apparently a hollow horned cow. It proved to be quite an impediment to her progress. An incalculably huge amount of time had passed since she entered the attic, and she had the sudden, clear insight that time couldn’t be measured without light. This seemed to her a crucial realization. She made a mental note to remember it, although she’d already lost her grip on what it meant. If she could just remember the words time can’t be measured without light, she might recapture their meaning later. But into her mind’s eye came an image of quicksand, a hideously vivid image of sand crumbling and sucking itself downward, the instability and insolidity of thinking. Terrified again, she shoved past the hollow cow and thought she was free until it caught her from behind, one of its horns snagging on the pocket of her beautiful merino coat and audibly ripping a seam. Fuck oh fuck oh fuck. She stumbled over a smaller hollow animal, got a lungful of dust, and dropped to her hands and knees. The bluish glimmer had reappeared. It was coming from beneath a door, and she crawled toward it.
Beyond the door, lighted by a round stained-glass window, was a staircase narrowed by stacks of hymnals. She followed it down to a wood-paneled space behind the sanctuary altar. As she pushed open the “secret” door behind the pulpit, she experienced another insight: the sanctuary was a sanctuary. A single warm light illuminated the hanging brass cross, and all the other doors were locked—she knew this.
With a shudder of deliverance, she traversed the altar and sat down in the first row of pews. Safe for the moment, she shut her eyes and surrendered to the waves of awfulness welling up in the blackness of her head. Between each of them was a space for regretting what she’d done and wishing it could be undone. But the waves kept coming. They wore her down until her only recourse was crying.
Please make it stop, please make it stop …
She was praying, but nobody was listening. After the next wave of stonedness, she addressed her plea more specifically.
Please, God. Please make it stop.
There was no answer. When she returned to herself again, she thought she saw the reason why.
I’m sorry, she prayed. God? Please? I’m sorry I did what I did. It was an evil thing and I shouldn’t have done it. If you make it stop, I promise I’ll never do it again. Please, God. Can you help me?
Still no answer.
God? I love you. I love you. Please have mercy on me.
When the next evil wave welled up in her head, she peered down and saw, beneath it, not a bottomless blackness but a kind of golden light. The wave was transparent, the evil insubstantial. The golden light was the real, substantial thing. The more deeply she peered into it, the brighter it got. She saw that she’d been looking outside herself for God, not understanding that God was in her. God was pure goodness, and the goodness had been there all along. She’d glimpsed it in the early morning, in her feeling of goodwill, and then more intensely in Perry’s kindness to her, the glow of forgiveness she’d felt. Goodness was the best thing in the universe, and she was capable of moving toward it—and yet how utterly awful she’d been! Mean to her mother, uncharitable to Perry, competitive with Laura, greedy with her inheritance, sneering with Clem at other people’s faith, conceited, selfish, God-denying, awful. With a sob more like a paroxysm, an ecstasy, she opened her eyes to the cross above the altar.
Christ had died for her sins.
And could she do it? Could she cast aside the evil in her, cast aside her vanity and her fear of other people’s opinions, and humble herself before the Lord? This had always seemed impossible to her, an onerous expectation with no upside. Only now did she understand that it could bring her deeper into the golden light.
She ran up to the cross, dropped to her knees on the altar carpeting, closed her eyes again, and put her hands together prayerfully.
Please, God. Please, Jesus. I’ve been a bad person. I’ve always thought so highly of myself, I’ve wanted popularity, and money, and social standing, and I’ve had so many cruel thoughts about other people. All my life, I’ve been selfish and inconsiderate. I’ve been the most disgusting sinner, and I am so, so sorry. Can you forgive me? If I promise to be a better and more humble person? If I promise to serve you cheerfully? I’ll take the worst kind of jobs to earn hours. I’ll be more loving to my enemies and more open with my family, I’ll share everything I have, I’ll live a clean life and not care what other people think of me, if only you’ll forgive me …
She hoped for a clear answer, Jesus speaking to her in her heart, but there was nothing; the golden light had faded. But she also felt delivered from her stonedness, at peace again. She’d glimpsed the light of God, if only for a moment, and her prayers had been answered.
The public libr
ary was a tall-windowed brick building, built in the twenties and seated on a lawn enclosed by dog-proof hedges. It stayed open until nine on weeknights, but it was desolate at the dinner hour, a single librarian holding down the circulation desk amid the silence of books waiting to be wanted.
Into it, through its little-used front door—most patrons arrived by car and parked in the rear—walked a disturbed person stinking of wet gabardine and cigarettes. Her face was shiny, her hair matted with melting snow. She shook herself and stamped her feet on an industrial rug that had been rolled out for the storm. From numberless hours of waiting for her kids to choose their books, she knew exactly where to go. In the reference room, behind the circulation desk, was a cabinet that housed the White Pages of major American cities and minor Illinoisan ones. Tax dollars at work, the phonebooks were all more or less current.
She crouched down in front of them, pulled out the thickest of them, and opened it on the floor. After the Gordons and Gowans, before the many Greens, was a short column of Grants. She was prepared to be disappointed, called back to reason, but her state of mind was so intense that the world seemed likely to fall in line with it. Sure enough, beside a drop of snowmelt that had hit the page and puckered it, was one of the most erotic things she’d ever laid eyes on.
Grant B. 2607 Via Rivera.….….……962–3504
She produced a kind of humming sigh, like the first note of a cello that had sat for decades in an attic. How much a phonebook entry could suggest! The hours and days and years of being B. Grant, alive in a specific house on a specific street, reachable by anyone who knew his dear number. She couldn’t be sure it was Bradley, but there was no reason it couldn’t be. All the weekly visits to the library, all the idle browsing of its shelves, and she’d never once thought to look for him. A key to her heart had been hidden in plain sight.
She took a pencil and a card from a wooden tray, copied the address and the number, and put the card in her coat pocket with her cigarettes. In her rush to escape the dental office, after three-plus hours with Sophie Serafimides, she’d neglected to hand over her twenty-dollar bill. The money, ill-gotten in any case, had come in handy when she passed the town drugstore and recalled a more effective means of losing weight and managing anxiety. She’d procured the means, and now she had a motive, too. In her mind, she’d already lost thirty pounds and was writing a chatty, warm letter to Bradley, letting him know that she was very well, telling him something specific and vivid about each of her four children, tacitly assuring him that she’d made the fullest of recoveries, had built an ordinary good life for herself, was no longer a person he had to be afraid of hearing from. And you? Do you still write poetry? How is Isabelle? How are your boys? They must have families of their own now …
Outside the library’s rear entrance, on a patch of snow made mangy by unevenly scattered salt, she lit another cigarette. It turned out that she’d been wanting one for thirty years. Making her confession to Sophie had rolled the stone from a tomb of emotion, inside which, miraculously intact, she’d found her obsession with Bradley Grant. Describing it to Sophie in proper detail, reliving the sins she’d committed in its grip, had brought her back into contact with its contours, and she’d remembered how perfectly they fit the shape of who she was. If anything, her desire for Bradley felt stronger for the thirty-year rest she’d given it, stronger than any over-flogged sentiment she had for Russ. Bradley had excited her at levels deeper than Russ ever could or ever would, because only with Bradley had she been her entire, crazy, sinning self. Standing in the snow behind the library, inhaling smoke on a cold Midwestern night, she was carried back to rainy Los Angeles. She was a mother of four with a twenty-year-old’s heart.
As she’d recounted to Sophie the events leading up to her destruction of the unborn life in her, the filthy bargain she’d struck with Isabelle Washburn’s former landlord, she’d had a growing sense of dumpling–patient disconnect. She might have imagined her story emerging with much guilty gasping, much reaching for Kleenexes, but confessing her worst sins to a psychiatrist was nothing like her Catholic confessions. There was no terror of God’s judgment on her puny self, no pity for her sweet Lord’s suffering on the cross for what she’d done. With Sophie, a female layperson, a maternal Greek American, she felt more like very naughty. The mental switch she’d flipped as a teenager was still there to be flipped Off. She told her story crisply, her spirits rising with the resurrection of the reckless girl who’d loved Bradley. Sophie’s expression, meanwhile, grew ever sadder, to the point of amusing her. The satisfaction of showing the dumpling how bad she really was recalled the pleasure of taunting her guardian uncle, Roy Collins, with her misbehavior. By the end, as she related how a Los Angeles police officer had been obliged to tackle a raving girl in pouring rain, she went so far as to snicker at the memory.
Perhaps it was the snicker that brought out the dumpling’s frown.
“I’m very sorry for what you went through,” Sophie said. “It explains so much, and it makes me even more impressed with your resilience. But there’s still something I’m not understanding.”
“We both know what that means, don’t we.”
“What does it mean?”
Marion caricatured the therapeutic frown. “You disapprove.”
“By your own account,” Sophie said, unamused, “you were seduced by a married man when you were very young. Then you married a man you weren’t allowed to be yourself with. And now you tell me that you were atrociously abused by a sexual predator. Doesn’t it seem—”
“I knew what I was doing,” Marion said proudly. “In every case. I knew it was wrong, and I did it anyway.”
“I’m sorry—what did you do to Russ?”
“I lied to him. And now he’s lying to me. So what?”
“You offered him your life and he took it. Now he’s tired of it and wants something new.”
“I admit I’m not very happy with Russ at the moment. But you’re way out of line if you’re comparing him to that landlord. Russ is like a little boy.”
“I’m not comparing them. That landlord—”
“And you’re even more out of line if you’re comparing Bradley. Bradley was honorable—he wanted the same thing I did. We fell in love, and he never lied to me. It wasn’t his fault I went crazy.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. I hated him when I was falling apart, but as soon as I was sane again I wasn’t angry at him. I was only sorry for what I’d put him through.”
“You felt guilty.”
“Definitely.”
“Why is it that, every time a man injures you, you respond by feeling guilty?”
Marion, flying, was impatient with Sophie’s slowness. “Didn’t I just explain this to you? I’m not a good person. I wanted to kill my baby, and I did it the only way I could. I didn’t even hate that landlord, I was just insanely afraid of him. I mean, yes, he was evil. But I was seeing my own evil nature reflected in him. That’s what made him so frightening.”
Sophie briefly shut her eyes. Evidently the impatience was mutual.
“Try to see what I’m seeing,” she said. “Try to picture a sweet, vulnerable girl not much older than your daughter is now. Think about how frightened and helpless she is. And then imagine a man whose first thought, when he sees a girl like that, is to take out his penis and abuse her. That’s the person you think that girl resembles?”
“Well, I don’t have a penis, so.”
“But your first thought would be to exploit someone vulnerable?”
“You’re forgetting what I did to Bradley’s wife. I went to her house and deliberately hurt her. She was vulnerable, wasn’t she?”
“My understanding is that Bradley was the person you were actually angry with.”
“Only because I was out of my mind.”
“Anger strikes me as quite a reasonable response to how he’d treated you.”
Marion shook her head. No sooner had she refound a treasure than the dump
ling was trying to take it away from her.
“You’ve told me a horrific story,” Sophie said. “In your own words, you met Satan himself. I wouldn’t expect a self-described believer to be so forgiving of Satan.”
“That’s because you’re not a believer. I might as well be angry at the rain for falling on me. I knew perfectly well who he was. I let him into me anyway, and I got the punishment I deserved.”
“You blame yourself, not him.”
“What’s wrong with that? There’s a reason why anger is a deadly sin. I was full of anger when I was young—I felt like murdering people. If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have made better decisions. I know you think it’s sick to blame myself, but spiritually I think it’s healthier.”
“Maybe,” Sophie said. “As long as you’re happy with where it’s gotten you.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning anxious and depressed. Unable to sleep. Hating your body. I have a hard time believing that any religion would condemn an emotion as natural as anger. Think about the civil rights movement. Do you think Dr. King wasn’t angry when his people were murdered by Klansmen? He may have preached nonviolence, but sometimes, when a problem is intractable, only anger can change things.”
“I would never compare my situation to a Black person’s in Alabama. That’s really almost offensive.”
Sophie smiled pleasantly. “I didn’t mean to be offensive.”
“I was lucky to find someone to marry me at all, after what I’d been through. And even then I married him under false pretenses. I can hardly go complaining that I’m oppressed by him now. Even the business with his widow friend—I didn’t blame Bradley for losing interest in his wife. Why should I blame Russ for losing interest in me? I’m a lot older and fatter than Bradley’s wife was.”
“Anger is an emotion,” Sophie said. “It doesn’t have to be logical. Right now, for example, I’m feeling very angry at your abuser. I’m also a little bit angry with you.”
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