by Lorraine Ray
Churches far on the east side of town caught the picaresque desert feel and were striking on early Easter Sunday mornings when shrubs and smaller cacti might be blooming. Hoards of parishioners also drove to isolated desert canyons for special Easter services amid saguaro cacti and boulders, the children hiking the dusty trails wearing new slacks and dresses, purses and bow ties, and squirming throughout the sermon and devout outdoor singing.
Our relationship with our church went deeper than Easter Sunday, though. Easter was only a single morning's torment; we attended church every single week, though my mother ruled, idiosyncratically, that if any child didn't want to go to church they would be allowed to stay home with our father (who never went) and listen to folk music recordings and read the Sunday morning cartoons. I rarely took her up on the offer.
See our church, oh, communists especially! This fond, obsessive wish formed in my mind shortly after Meredith explained in her dry, inimitable style the simple facts about the communists' hatred and scorn of all the world's religions. I listened to her claim that the communists were not going to be easily converted, but I felt that if our simple service could be beamed into the cold heart of the Soviet republic, Reverend Sheldon's sermon couldn't fail to bring a tear to Khrushchev's jaded eye. Then, in some vague scene, he would fall to his knees and praise Jesus Christ and release Eastern Europe from their bondage! I had such faith in the power of the Congregationalist church's piety, as instructed by Reverend Sheldon, that I believed even a short part of the sermon, before it could be jammed by those evil communists, especially of the sermon for the children, which was actually the only one I had any familiarity with, would convince a communist of the awe-inspiring power of God. I was not so sanguine about any of the other branches of my Protestant faith. No, Methodists, Lutherans, or Friends would succeed the way Congregationalists would! Not that I actually paid any attention to the characters of the Bible, nor the details of the Congregationalist creed, as my mother had explained to the ladies of the church in our ride out to the Cactus Monument. The Bible stories routinely bored me, and I found the names of the characters in the Old Testament exceedingly annoying, but I still felt communists needed to share in the activity that I found so very irritating.
And I wondered if the strange modern architecture of our little church-which inscribed on the desert sky an enormous white A, and formed inside a series of pine A's in lockstep-could beam out a message, and send the communist heart thumping as mine did when my eyes lifted to the apex of that wonderful A? The two sides of the church had long windows that stretched down as far as the floor and ended at the top when the piney ceiling beams angled toward the steep zenith. These A's made of pine beams were shooting magically through the glass windows and were bolted to concrete outside. Beneath each beam long modernist lights hung on wires. The overall affect was something like melting chewing gum blobs drooping from the ceiling of a sauna.
Our church had no marble walls or marble floors to look down on either, only dull gray concrete. A dark red carpet ran up the center aisle, and it was slightly frayed at the edges, as I recall. The minister spoke from behind a plain wooden pulpit, and an ordinary table, like that in every school, served as an altar, though the floor of the altar area, also of concrete and on the eastern end of the hall, rose a foot higher than the rest of the church. We had no tombs, statuary, or effigies, no decorated wood of any sort. Even the oak cross was modernistic, just stark wood without a hint that Jesus had been nailed to it. For floral effects, we had to be satisfied with a small arrangement in a glass vase on the school table.
No comfortable pews with the names of great families engraved on them graced our pittance of a church; we were too poor as a congregation to add any permanent seating and for decades, until the new church was built, nothing resembling pews was ever constructed. There were only rows of carefully placed tan metal folding chairs, chairs with cold shiny seats, like the face of the smooth, uncompromising Calvinists who founded our Congregationalist church. These folding chairs made the congregation resemble the monthly meeting of a small town, a gathering to hear the tedious results of a study by a planning commission, perhaps. I wonder if God was bored by us, too? The legs of the folding chairs were where we girls wound our feet, rubbing our white anklets against the cold metal and squeaking the black patent leather (shine them with Vaseline) of our shoes. When the hall was needed for a large fellowship pot luck or a youth event, the chairs were removed. Afterwards, the chairs were carefully returned, like some continuous, unavoidable infection.
There was no great art on any walls, there was no art at all, and only windows that showed the desert sky, dirt to the north, and planters to the south. How many Sundays did I stare out at those southern planters, filled with black earth and stunted shrubs, which stayed perpetually wet in the shaded nook?
Pink brick formed the outside of our church, and although the main hall had dramatic architecture, the effect was ruined by two additional pink brick buildings, they were called annexes, one on each side of the main hall, which ran like twin strip-mall shopping centers. With the main hall, the whole church complex formed a giant U, open to the west. A shaded sidewalk rimmed a Bermuda lawn in front of the A and between these low shopping centers. Poles, spaced in even intervals, supported a porch roof in front of the buildings, pole after pole painted a powdery pastel pink, which was popular in the early sixties. The south walk was shady and the north sunny. At the southern edge of the church property, a hedge of oleander bushes did an ineffective job of hiding the concrete masonry units, otherwise known as slump blocks, which formed the slab back of Save-Co, where an assortment of broken cardboard boxes, pallets and dumpsters littered the loading bays.
Metal folding chairs. Concrete floors with a thin carpet runner. The back-of-a-store dump next door! My church, potential inspiration to Christ-less communists, was pathetic!
Behind the altar, the secret realm of the church kitchen lurked. This nerve center bustled with activity and if a certain door near the pulpit gaped until the last minute before the service began, you could see busy, busty women and beer-bellied men roaming about the kitchen like peculiar fish in an aquarium, arguing and laughing, scooping coffee for a large aluminum urn and chatting, even during service. Apparently they didn't have to attend the actual sermon, those lucky, happy people. The morning light flowed freely into this kitchen like a welcoming flood, especially in midwinter, and I used to like to see the last light in there when the door swung open and then closed, and Reverend Sheldon entered, springing from this hidden kitchen, discarding a paper cup of water at the last minute before he stepped behind the pulpit and addressed the congregation.
Spreading his hands at the Invocation, we rose and intoned mightily together: "Almighty God, Father everlasting, who has set us in the fellowship of thy son Jesus Christ, be near to us in this time of meditation and communion. May our hearts be open to every sacred memory and serious impression. Let a portion of the spirit which led our Savior to the Cross descend upon us and fill our hearts with the love of God and man. Here and now may every selfish passion and desire be stilled, and may the peace of God which goes beyond all understanding keep out thoughts in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Our Father?"
Upon entering our church, you would notice a paper program on your metal seat, usually colored pale blue on the edges and showing folded praying hands, along with the offerings envelope for a weekly monetary contribution, and hymn books dropped on every other seat. In our years at Rincon Congregational, I rarely sat with the main body of the church in that big mass of folding chairs. Instead, we always took seats in the back alcove on the right of the entrance where two rows were set for latecomers and for the minister's family. Four of those chairs in the back row corner were meant for Mother, Shirley Sheldon, Jack and me. Meredith sang in the choir.
Shirley was the mentally retarded daughter of Reverend Sheldon and Mrs. Sheldon, and she was nearly thirty years old when I met her first. For some unexplained reason, I had been drafted as Shirle
y's chaperone at church. Mrs. Sheldon would take a moment from greeting church-goers to bring her daughter in and seat her beside me, with Mother on my other side. I could leave for Sunday school during the second stanza of the hymn after the children's sermon and before the adult sermon. A seat was left vacant on the other side of Shirley and as soon as Mrs. Sheldon would have greeted every latecomer outside, she would take the other seat beside Shirley and I was relieved of duty, as it were, and did not have to worry about Shirley's behavior. But only relieved temporarily. At the end of services, Mrs. Sheldon was again posted at the exit with her minister husband, shaking hands and greeting old church goers and potential new members, and I was supposed to rush out of church school and join Shirley on the Bermuda lawn. My job was to try and calm her. I believe my mother had volunteered my services, using me the way a stable pony calms a thoroughbred.
During services, Shirley and I shared a hymn book. Sometimes I studied her profile and fought off my hatred of her. She wore old fashioned dresses with narrow belts and wide skirts, perhaps only a few different ones. Her hair was dark brown, and it was always brushed and contained in a tight, old-fashioned perm around and above her ears, though I don't believe it was often clean. She wore pointy cat glasses like Meredith's with jewels on the hinges of the frames, and her pale face was extraordinarily long. Large, long-limbed and terribly thin, her shoulders hunched slightly, and she carried a purse full of handkerchiefs that she wouldn't use unless her mother made her. In the winter and spring she wore bulky cardigan sweaters that had been poorly knitted out of cheap thick yarns colored red, yellow, blue and black. Her eyes appeared normal; she wasn't Down's syndrome, but only a normal child deprived of oxygen at birth. There were so many pimples erupting around her mouth every week that it was impossible, though several times during the boring sermons I had tried, to number the glistening white heads. It was terrible to see each pimple sharply peaked and ringed with bright red and purple skin. Her mental retardation showed itself most obviously in her mouth which was always slack and her teeth which were grotesquely malformed. Unable to control her lips, her speech was more damaged, more slurred than mine, and she drooled during the entire sermon.
I heard it claimed that she had developed to the age of an eight year old, but this was rather vague, and I can attest that a child didn't get anything out of her company. Shirley's conversation consisted of repeated, unintelligible phrases, muffled by her thick tongue and crooked yellow teeth. Strangely, her words sounded as though she were drowning under them. Her wrists were cocked at crazy angles, and her arms flew around, tugging at her sweaters and touching her decorative pins and clip-on earrings.
During the hymn, Shirley sometimes wailed. None of the actual words of the song emerged. Oh, she let out loud shrieks and bellows that approximated the sounds of the words. She even hit the right notes, occasionally, but she never said what the hymns said.
But her bad singing was not the vital issue that I was to concern myself with. The real problem with Shirley was that after the invocation and the first hymn, when her father began the children's sermon, she would sometimes start a low groan or moan, a growling sort of a gurgle which she would keep up no matter what soothing sounds I, or my nervous mother, made no matter how we urged her not to do it or shook our heads at her or shushed her. Sometimes well-meaning ladies would decide, I suppose, that we were derelict in our duty by not stopping her outburst or that I in particular was not good enough at helping to stop Shirley, and these ladies would bend over Shirley and explain in a whisper that she ought to understand that it was her father who was addressing the entire congregation and that Shirley ought to know better. This sometimes improved Shirley's mood and sometimes made it worse, but it always made me angry that someone was usurping my job and they would look so kindly and well-meaning when they did, all the time looking at me as though to say, "yes, I saw that you were only a child and that your mother was wrong to give you this important job."
I thought Mother was wrong to give me that job, but after I had done it for several years I was jealous of anyone else, especially some random church member, who might want to take my burden away from me. I didn't want the job taken because someone thought I was incompetent. I wanted to slap those silly women and nothing made me happier than to have Shirley start up screaming when one of them began to whisper to her, though there was no reliable way to make her do that. Her groaning was clearly not any particular word or phrase that she wanted to impart, but a sort of communion with her father, the minister, or else her Holy Father, who knows. Sometimes this low groan or growl would evolve into something more violent and louder and at times Shirley even resorted to shrieking or wailing when her father spoke. Then a lot of the congregation would wheel around and stare at us and whisper, especially newcomers who had no idea that the person screaming was the minister's very own daughter. Mrs. Sheldon, if she was outside, would rush in quickly and yank Shirley outside. Sometimes Shirley didn't return.
So I hated her dumb profile. When I looked at her sideways, I hated her vehemently; I resented being chosen to sit next to her and wondered if other kids were laughing at me for having to sit there. I never once joined the body of the church, and I often wondered what that would be like. I sit at the back of all halls now, at the back, always nearest the exit.
Sometimes, when I felt especially self-righteously saintly and chosen, I wondered if other people, especially children, in the church studied me as I sat demurely on my metal folding chair beside the minister's retarded daughter and I wondered if they were jealous of me for getting such an important job which I preformed every week at great expense to my peace of mind. I supposed some of the people staring thought I was Shirley's family. I wondered when their eyes searched my face whether they were looking for a family resemblance. I supposed what they thought, but couldn't fix upon much of it. I imagined that I was an important person in the church. As distasteful as it might be, this position of importance was almost a recompense for the unpleasant aspects of sitting beside Shirley, but not really. Because I found taking care of Shirley to be exasperating.
Or did they pity me? I endured Shirley's wails close up, and they could almost burst your eardrums, and I breathed her foul breath, the stench was terrible, and watched long silver streams of drool fall out of her mouth and onto her hands, hands that I had to hold when I escorted her to our car and then took her to her side gate at home. Did they notice how close I had to sit to the minister's wife and pity me the mission, as Mrs. Sheldon was no one's favorite? I couldn't joke around, because Shirley didn't understand any jokes. I couldn't act silly because I had no one to act silly with and I was too close to Mrs. Sheldon. It felt very good when the time came for the children to be dismissed to Sunday school. I always wanted Shirley to act like she missed me when I went, but she never obliged; she stared into space whenever I left her side. I suppose that's why I wasn't ever sentimental about her when the time came for me to stop sitting beside her. When it was time to collect her and leave I became increasingly humiliated by standing anywhere near her. Were people noticing that I was with a mentally retarded grown-up?
Would I be storing up good works in God's book, I wondered? Would I be storing up memories for my own good book? Did God see the long stream of Sundays I spent at Shirley's side when I might have been happier elsewhere? Was he sick of my monotonous plot? Tired of hearing so much about me? Did he know how much I disliked Shirley and her awful drool and pimply face, even if I only thought that and never wrote it in a book? Was I cursed forever because Shirley made me sick? I didn't feel very sorry for her. She wasn't the type of messed up person you could build up a lot of feeling for. The real Shirley didn't seem to be there. She was kinda a blank, actually. I'm not even sure she was really there; I always thought Jesus had her with him and this was a fake Shirley. And could I still be storing up these good deeds in God's thoughts if at the same time I was quite annoyed by having to be the one to sit beside Shirley, and if I couldn't help observing
carefully the more distasteful aspects of Shirley such as her foul breath and tiny pimples? Did I have to be having a good time at my good deed in order for it to count? Or was it even more of a good deed if I hated it? That was a cheerful thought.
As I said, after services, Shirley became our responsibility again. Reverend Sheldon and his wife stayed on for hours talking with the parishioners and attending to church business and it somehow had fallen on us to drive Shirley Sheldon home. She could be left in the house alone for the amount of time it took Mrs. Sheldon to come home with someone else. We were to take her to her home, the home the church let them have which was on the same street as ours but as far as you could go toward the church.
I always buckled her seat belt. She was proud of her watch and a bracelet and various clip-on earrings, and those pins.
Reverend Sheldon's home was built of yellow bricks and had two fat palm trees and another semi-circular gravel drive in front. An oleander hedge shielded the home from the main street where the church lay across a turning island. The front wall had pyracantha bushes espaliered against the bricks beside the window and wrapping around the corner of the house. One of the garden walls had pyracantha bushes also. The sparrows wheeled around in the bushes in a drunken orgy eating those berries.
From the car whenever we drove up to her house, we could see her little brown and black dachshund who was watching at the big picture window, standing on the back of the living room sofa. This dog yapped and jumped up and down as we drove around the semicircular drive and parked between the two stout palms. The little dog kept sliding down the back of the sofa and crashing into the small round colorful throw pillows. After he slid down, he came bounding back up to the glass, yapping and yapping as our car slowly rounded the little palm trees in the center of the drive.
The one who had to wait and see that she was in safe was me. I always walked with her around the side of the house to the gate, holding an umbrella in the winter if it rained, or sweating in the summer, beside the pyracantha bushes espaliered against the bricks. She could reach her awkward white hand over, with her wrist bare from a sweater that ended halfway up her forearm, an old odd style, and unlatch it, often leaving it to bang back on me. She went to the open sliding glass door where the dachshund barked and I felt like I was let into a little secret by seeing the authentic backyard of a minister, which was after all rather uninteresting and barren. White gravel and a few potted cacti. Shirley let herself in, the door had been left unlocked, but sometimes it took quite a bit of pleading to get her to do that instead of wandering around in the backyard. And when she went inside she was to wave at the front window, but she wouldn't remember that even, and we would sometimes have to wait and wait on the drive for her to remember. Often I was sent back to ring the doorbell and she blundered surprised to the door to see us again, and then I would wait until she remembered to close and lock the door.
What possible use was a person like Shirley, I wondered? What earthly good did she do anyone? Was she a source of joy to her joyless mother or her dachshund? Reverend Sheldon at least seemed a supremely happy man, perfectly at peace with the God who gave him only one child and that child with a defective mind.
On occasion Shirley rode home in another church goers' car. I never knew how the decision was made-it was one of those mysterious adult arrangements-but Shirley would disappear before I had crossed the lawn, clutching my Sunday school papers, proud of the artful manner with which I had swiped crayon color over the breasts of lambs and shepherds. Then my mother would invariably linger, an excruciatingly long time it seemed to me, at the mysterious, Dutch door of a certain cluttered church office in the northeast corner of the U-shaped church complex. I would run back to say goodbye to my friend Elaine and stumble toward Mother over the lawn and around the clutches of talking and laughing adults. There she held a long, rambling conversation with another one of these Midwestern refugees, a white-haired, dapper old lady named Molly C., the church treasurer, the denizen of this dark den, who rarely came out of the small church office and never stopped her work, after church service, of briskly ripping open the tops of white church offering envelopes. Each envelope had a devotional message printed in purple on them. "'Is our love only lip-service or 'tip-service'? Do we answer with our whole being? Our offering of money for Our Christian World Mission is an expression of our love for Christ.' Mrs. Richard Vitz, Lima, Ohio," read the back of one such envelope. The speed with which she ripped them apart made it seem as though the money inside had to be given air, even though the envelopes had small holes in them. She ripped them apart with a wrist movement almost as though they were crisp green bean pods and she were wearing an apron and sitting in a chair on her front porch at home in Ohio, snapping them into a bowl for her families' supper. When the envelope ripped open and she dumped the coins in the basket, she used her hand to spread them out and plucked out any bills.
There, on the lid of the Dutch door, my mother would stand, interminably it seemed, gossiping about their families and the weather. They discussed everything, in their remote, vague manner, through the open door even on the coolest winter mornings, when the desert had winds whipping through from the Pacific and the thermometer reached freezing, when the dormant Bermuda lawn, which was yellow in the winter, was covered with a frost you could slide on. One of their favorite topics were various storm systems which were about to sweep through western Ohio. My mother might be chirping on about how the storm had already downed telephone poles and caused wrecks in Wabash, Huntington, or South Bend, Indiana just the day before, Saturday, when she would have spoken by telephone to one of her sisters. Molly would proclaim in a wavering, nasal farmer wife's voice: "Looks like the folks are going to face a hard winter this year, Juney."
I grew to hate that voice and its concern for the weather affecting people who lived so far away in Indiana; I hated the way it whipped up sympathy in my mother who was so obdurate in the face of my continuous and orchestrated attempts to get sympathy from her. I might rip my knee open in a terribly fall and she would examine it with true indifference. Why, I was her own flesh and blood and she didn't give a darn, she would rather talk to stupid old Molly C.?
Why, I wondered, didn't Molly or my mother notice me outside the church office and pay attention to my evident needs? I, the pitifully cute little girl, the person who was suffering now because of their selfish need to talk to each other, desperately wanted to go home and play with my dolls and change out of my scratchy slip and my Sunday dress and tight black patent leather shoes, polished with Vaseline. I, who was left spinning around the long line of painted porch poles down the open hallways, suffered. The adults spoke mysteriously about scary things like the death of people. While I was around! Suffering!
Then I might see Reverend Sheldon. His black robes flying like bat wings as he passed over the lawn and the brilliant desert sun beaming off his bald head, he might be arranging a game of basketball at the courts at the back of the church. Reverend Sheldon's hairless skull, shining and red, came to an odd peak at the top, and he walked so quickly that it seemed he was urgently angry at someone. His legs were very long and in his robes, his shoulders looked huge and his arms mighty. There was an energetic way he grasped the hand and the forearm of male newcomers and old friends; he greeted people in a way that contrasted completely with Mrs. Sheldon's cold and detached how-de-do. She was terrifying with a long gray face and heavy lidded eyes, big jowls and a humorless attitude. Mother, as always, knew the state and county where Mrs. Sheldon hailed from. I wouldn't have wanted to remember this place if I could.
I fled back to Mother's protection if some adult should look like they had taken notice of me as I spun the church poles, kicked them with the toe of my dress shoes, over and over, and I thought they might wonder if I needed a 'talking to.' I was terrified of seeing the minister walk by while they talked and talked. I never wanted him to notice me. I don't think he ever did, though I worried about it obsessively. Why didn't they, why didn't my
mother especially, have the good sense to stop talking and take care of my desperate needs?
"This one will do my brother in. His rheumatism's worse," Molly would say.
And the use of the phrase "the folks," on Molly Cameron's part, mystified and then rankled me. How, I wondered, could her folks actually be the same folks as ours, for I was certain that we weren't related to this pleasant, but undereducated, nasal-voiced, penny-counting denizen of the church office who took very little interest in me. As a person. She would say cheerfully, "The folk's will be out here in a week now, Juney," and her voice betrayed the increasing desperation she felt to see 'the folks' come out to Arizona. Living so long on this dry edge of the earth had been a little much for her; and I wonder now what anguish she felt every time her relatives went back to the old farm without her and her little pride with her place in the strange West must have been weak compensation for the loss of friendships and established course of her life, pots of jam at the county fair and known plants and animals, that she felt every time she was left in this strange place called Arizona by them, by "the folks."
I watched as the southern leaning winter sun spun gold on her nylons, turning her thick leg to sparkling joints, tan below her polyester skirt, and I watched her sweater-wrapped elbow as she cranked the arm of an adding machine and slid coins here and there, jotting notes on scrap paper and entering tallies in bookkeeping tables, in great old Congregation Annual Ledgers. She liked to work jigsaw puzzles in her spare time and cook highly inauthentic Mexican dishes using Velveeta cheese.
When was I going to be privy to the jokes of these people? Their banter seemed impossible to follow. I was not Midwestern. I couldn't follow their obscure jokes and serious concerns with chickens.
Had Molly ever attended church services herself? I felt that maybe at Christmas or Easter she would have, did probably step in the doors silently and take a seat, only for a short period of time, that perhaps one of the folding chairs at the back of the church was set aside especially for her. But I had never truly seen her there. Perhaps she did this when children like me were in Sunday school classes? I was dubious about that, though; shouldn't I have seen her once in the fourteen years we attended services; her only god seemed to be the god of counting the change in the envelopes, or the god of jigsaw puzzles, and "the folks." I think I might have glimpsed her in the kitchen area, through the door that opened right before service. Perhaps she slipped in unobserved sometimes. Because she sat with her cup of coffee in the darkened church office tallying the collection and wrapping the change. She knew everyone and they knew her.
Other ladies would sometimes walk by Molly's den. Then my mother and Molly and this new lady would begin again sharing all their news with each other. The additional process agonized me further.
The shrill sound of the voices of the church ladies haunted me, and I was only too conscious of the similar sound in my own speech later. I was deeply ashamed to hear it. But I made a judgment about the way they spoke, their awful nasal twang, the way the said "worsh" instead of "wash"; what utter stupidity, what madness, yet I can still hear them saying that and can hear and do still try to correct myself repeating that sound; my judgment was of the way they spoke words; I damned them for their way of pronouncing words, rather than judging them for their deeds on earth or even the meaning and content of the words, a more important judgment of a person. Would I have hated them if they'd had a Russian accent? After all they were nothing if not friendly, open, and trusting. They were good people.
But they were preoccupied with family trivialities and ignored the big issues of the day. Families shared a limited time on earth and people often died mysterious, sudden deaths.