Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  After the bridge, the road drops into steep switchbacks that sink you deeper and deeper into the gorge until you hit the bottom. Then it straightens out again to run along the river. Folks live spread out on both sides of the blacktop, but everyone on our side, near the riverbank, built their houses on stilts for when the river overflows. Everyone except us, since our place is really just the old RV that my grandfather used to travel around the country in, evangelizing. After he died, and Daze said she didn’t care if she ever saw the inside of the RV again, my father parked it on the river lot and raised it onto a stone foundation that’s supposed to hold through all but the very worst flooding. “The wise man builds his house upon the rock,” he’d said. Then he built up log walls around the door, windows, and all the sewer and electrical hookups. He did most of this with the nervous energy fasting brings on. Some of it he did during a dark night of the soul that lasted pretty much one whole summer. Now the RV looks like a real cabin, sort of. There’s even a tin roof with just a little pitch to it, like on a lean-to, so the water runs off when it rains and collects in our cistern.

  We pull into the short gravel drive, and Phoebe cuts the engine. She’s out of the car first, standing and looking helplessly out to the river, which is brown and swift from the rains, then up to the bridge, which straddles the cliffs high above like an ancient, complicated skeleton, and finally to our cabin. My father’s robe catches on the car door, and I wait while he struggles with it, then I push myself up and out of the back seat.

  “Here we are.” My father spreads his arms to take in the air, the green vegetation. In college, before the Lord made him choose between becoming a park ranger or a man of God, my father learned a lot about nature. He can name almost every tree around, from the blue ash and squat chinquapin oaks to the yellowwood with its smooth, gray bark. The river is high enough today that the old sycamores down the bank dip their lowest branches into the water. You can hear our tiny dock, just out of sight, straining its ropes, knocking against one of the trees. That’s how strong the current is.

  “This grass needs cutting,” says Phoebe. “And the garden’s a mess. I’ve come down for vegetables but I haven’t done much weeding.”

  “Those are prayerful tasks that will serve me well during this time,” says my father, but she’s already heading off through the tall, wet grass down toward the small garden closer to the river. I follow my father to the shed on the side of the cabin and stand there, helpfully, because I have a feeling he might have forgotten the combination, which is 1-06-76, my birthday. But he hasn’t, and the lock springs open against his hand.

  “It’s quiet down here,” I say as he opens the door of the shed and begins wrestling with the mower. “Easier to hear the voice of God.”

  “Interior barriers to God’s voice can be much more of a problem than exterior,” says my father. He rolls the push mower to the side of the cabin and props it there, then crouches down over the reel and runs his finger over one of the blades, testing for sharpness.

  “I bet you could write some interesting stories about your trip, down here,” I say. “Or about the ministry of the Apostle Paul. Or how to pray without ceasing.” These all seem like good ideas, ideas that fit both his vision and Phoebe’s practical concerns without my having to bring them up.

  My father, still crouching, rolls the mower back and forth, making it squeak. He rises and returns to the shed without looking at me. When he comes back with a small bottle of oil, his lips are moving.

  “Dad,” I say. “Did you hear me?”

  He squirts oil onto the axle of the reel and rolls the mower back and forth again to work it in.

  “Dad?”

  “Internal barriers to God’s voice include worry,” my father says, speaking down into the blades.

  “I’m not worried, though,” I say, and my voice is chirping, chirping, as if it hasn’t even entered my mind how we’re going to keep on without any money coming in. “I just think you have a lot of interesting things to write about.”

  My father frowns at me over his shoulder. “You disappoint me, Charmaine. At least your mother acknowledges what she feels even as she allows it to come in between her and the Lord’s work. At least she is not hiding her own thoughts from herself. At least she is not walking in total darkness.” He shakes his head like I, myself, am a bad thought he’s trying to clear himself of, and turns back to the mower.

  I swallow hard. “I’m not walking in darkness.”

  “It is very difficult to retain a childlike faith as one grows older,” says my father. He sounds more neutral now, less disgusted, like he’s speaking to the mower because he’s given up on me.

  “I do have a childlike faith,” I say, but the words come out high and thin. I hope Phoebe hasn’t told him about my period.

  My father rises with his back to me. The hem of his brown robe looks damp. He pushes the mower several feet, right up to the edge of the cabin and back, and the blades quickly become clotted with wet grass.

  “I’m just at an age of transition,” I say, moving up behind him. “My faith is still childlike. It is. Dad. Dad.” All I want is for him to turn around and see me. Even if he’s mad.

  The prayer has come to his lips again, and I’ve already stopped mine. I say it twice quickly to myself, as he works the mower over the same patch of grass, forcing it through the tangled growth. Before I know what I’m doing, I reach out and grab a handful of his robe. That’s when the reel locks up. The mower skids forward with all my father’s weight behind it, so that my yank is hard, harder than I mean it to be. We rebound into each other, his back slamming into my front, where my chest already hurts most of the time.

  When he whirls around, the back of his hand catches my chin. It takes me a second to understand that this is not an accident. I let go of his robe. My hand goes to my face, as if my fingers have their own curiosity about what happened there.

  My father has never hit me before. He nods at me like he’s confirming something, and I feel him see right through me, through my pretend-innocent suggestions. It’s true that I don’t have enough faith. That I am afraid. That I have been hiding my thoughts from my own self. I wish I could disappear, which is probably how Cain felt, running away after killing his brother, trying to hide from God.

  I pick my way back through the wet grass to the Pinto, holding my throbbing jawbone. My eyes feel hot and dry. I didn’t know that becoming a woman would do anything to my childlike faith. I didn’t even realize there was anything special about it the whole time I had it. But I understand that when a lack of faith obstructs God’s will, my father cannot let himself be bound by mere human attachment. “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” also means “Who is my daughter?” If you love anyone, even people in your family, more than you love Christ, then you are unworthy of Him.

  I wait in the passenger seat of the Pinto. Tiny, flat green grass bugs have collected around my ankles like confetti, and when I try to brush them away with my fingertips, they smear across my skin and die. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and try to shake off the rest. It occurs to me, slowly, that maybe my father would not be disappointed enough to strike me if he did not still consider me capable of faith. That if he did not think me capable he would treat me more like he treats Phoebe, like some things are simply too much to expect.

  He has told me about the prayer without ceasing, after all, though of course I have already ceased again. “Inhabit me, O Lord God,” I whisper now, breathing in and breathing out, keeping my eyes on the palisades that rise steeply across the river in front of me. Soon my eyes are burning a little less. The limestone walls, crowned by a ridgeline of deep green trees, seem like they’re growing toward the sky with every exhale, lifting the old bridge above me even higher.

  Phoebe climbs up the riverbank carrying tomatoes in her T-shirt. She pauses behind the cabin, says something to my father, then approaches the Pinto and lays the tomatoes carefully on the back seat. She missed the whole thing. We drive wordlessl
y up out of the gorge, jerking through the gears until we finally reach the top and the road levels off again. She checks her pocketbook, then asks me to scour the seats and floor of the car for change. Together we come up with a dollar thirty-eight, and she drives straight through East Winder and out the city side, then turns west toward Clay’s Corner, where I’ll be starting at the county junior high in a week. Clay’s Corner put in a McDonald’s last year, and when Phoebe is feeling really terrible, it’s the only thing that can help.

  “One hamburger each,” she says on the way in. “No French fries. Water to drink. Unless tax has gone up, we’ll be fine.”

  Phoebe waits in line, and I head down the short hall to the ladies’ restroom. In the stall I am shocked to see that even though I feel none of the cramping from yesterday, I have continued to bleed since I changed my supplies this morning. Blood has stained my underpants and the inside of my shorts, though it has not yet leaked through to the outside. When I join Phoebe in line, I whisper that I need a quarter.

  “What for?” she says, not whispering back. A man in front of us is getting ready to order.

  “I need it,” I whisper.

  “We don’t have it.”

  “Please?”

  She points to the marquee sign above the counter, where all the prices are listed. “How much are hamburgers?”

  “Sixty-two cents.”

  “How much is sixty-two times two?”

  “One twenty-four.”

  “Plus tax,” Phoebe says. “How much money do we have?”

  “A dollar thirty-eight.”

  The man grabs his tray, and Phoebe, satisfied that she has explained herself to me, begins to order from the high school girl behind the register.

  I creep back to the bathroom and sponge up what I can with toilet paper. I roll more toilet paper around my hand, and when it feels as thick as a pad, I add it to the top of the other one, then I wind toilet paper around the whole thing, including the crotch of my underpants. I try to pull it all as tightly against myself as I can, and I manage to button my shorts and waddle out of the restroom and down the hall to the dining room, where Phoebe has taken a table for two by the plate-glass window and already unwrapped her hamburger.

  “Let’s pray,” she says, and bows her head. “Oh, Lord, for what we are about to eat, make us truly grateful. Amen.” Then she pops open her eyes. “What did you need the quarter for?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Phoebe bites into her hamburger and chews it reverently. Her pointy chin moves up and down. “There’s nothing in the world that tastes like this,” she says, placing her fingers over her lips since she is talking with her mouth full.

  I unwrap my hamburger, too.

  “Tell me what you needed the quarter for,” she says.

  “My period,” I say as quietly as I can.

  Phoebe swallows and frowns at me. “Part of being a woman, Charmaine, is thinking about that kind of thing before you leave the house.”

  “I know.”

  “With a new body comes new responsibilities. You can’t be caught out just anywhere without supplies. Where’s your purse?”

  I shrug. Phoebe sewed me a purse from a pair of brown corduroys that I outgrew. The rear pockets of the pants decorate the front of the purse, which is cute as an idea, but in real life the material still bags out in the shape of my bottom.

  “You’re talking about the machines in the bathroom?” Phoebe says. “That’s what you needed the quarter for? Those are tampon dispensers, Charmaine. Do you know what tampons are?”

  “It’s not just tampons in there,” I hiss, glancing at two women at the next table, willing Phoebe to lower her voice.

  “You’re too young for tampons, anyway,” Phoebe says. She takes another big bite of her burger, which is going fast, and nods toward the remaining half on my wrapper. “Does yours taste funny?”

  “No. Does yours?”

  “No. But if yours did, and you took the rest of it up to the counter, they’d probably give you another one.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “Because mine tastes fine, too,” she says in a small voice. “It tastes great.” She finishes the burger off and wipes her mouth with a napkin. “Listen, Charmaine, I’m not like some folks in East Winder who think tampons compromise your virginity.”

  The women at the next table stop talking to each other and turn toward us.

  “Phoebe,” I say. “Please.”

  “Oh, relax. As if this particular matter is the biggest thing we have to worry about in the grand scheme of things. However, it should be said that someday you will want to get married to a good Christian man, and you will want to give him the precious gift of your virginity, and the issue is not do we believe tampons compromise that, but whether or not the man you marry will have been raised to believe that. It’s a good idea to honor that possibility.”

  Now the women at the next table are staring deep into each other’s eyes, holding their breath, daring themselves not to laugh.

  “What happened to your face?” Phoebe points to where my father caught me on the chin. “You’re a little flushed there. Does something hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Listen. You need to consider what I said about tampons.”

  “If you say tampons one more time, I’m going to die,” I say under my breath. “I hate my period.”

  “One day you’ll have the joy of your own children,” Phoebe says. “In the meantime, don’t be melodramatic.”

  I stuff the rest of my burger into my mouth and chew miserably over the thought of these imaginary future children. I would sacrifice them in a heartbeat if it meant I could get rid of my period.

  “We simply don’t have quarters to go squandering on tampons. Not when we have perfectly good supplies at home. Especially now that your father has thrown us a curve ball.” Phoebe crumples the wrapper of her hamburger. “We don’t have money for this, either,” she says. “That was our last hamburger for a long, long time. Sixty-two cents is sixty-two cents. Times two. Plus tax. Not to mention what it took in gas.”

  “God’s will isn’t a curve ball,” I say.

  Phoebe sighs and turns to the plate-glass window. Outside is a plastic playground, with a high fence so kids can’t run out into the street. A woman sits on a bench, sipping her drink through a straw and watching four blond children tumble around on the slide. You can hear their shrieks, muffled through the glass. Phoebe’s chin has begun to quiver, as though she is about to cry, right here in McDonald’s. She closes her eyes for a quick prayer, and then I realize that I’ve left off the praying without ceasing again, and I start in.

  “Did you say something?” Phoebe says, opening her eyes.

  “No.”

  “Under your breath?”

  I don’t know why I don’t want to tell her about the prayer, but I don’t. “No.”

  She shakes her head slowly. “I hope the teenage years aren’t going to be full of resentment and attitude. But it’s not looking good.”

  “I’m not resentful,” I say, clenching my jaw in pure resentment.

  “It’s not every woman who could be a helpmeet to your father. Hear me? It’s no walk in the park. But the Lord brought us together. So I don’t need a teenage girl telling me about God’s will. I have my own front-row seat, and I’m barely hanging on.”

  I drop my head and keep it low, but I can feel the women behind Phoebe, listening.

  “When someone speaks to you,” Phoebe says, “please respond.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I am at the end of my rope. You get that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “This is hard,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “That this is hard.”

  Phoebe sighs again. “Your tone is unkind.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I say.

  “I don’t want a puppet,” Phoebe s
ays, “but I don’t think a little compassion is too much to ask for.”

  I am trying to think the prayer while I talk, but it stops and starts around the words I say out loud. Still, I like having something private in my head, especially when Phoebe starts in on compassion. I heard her telling Daze, while my father was away, that she worries about my “diminishing capacity” for it. This includes my capacity to understand that the world does not revolve around me, as well as my capacity to imagine what it might feel like to be another person and to imagine what that other person might like to hear in order to feel better. But Phoebe has it wrong, because even though I say I don’t know how she feels or what she wants to hear, it’s not true. I do know. She wants me to tell her how sorry I am that this latest thing with my father is hard on her. She wants me to say that I will start helping her out in little ways around the house. Doing my chores without being asked and taking over some of her chores, too. I know she’d like to hear this because this is the kind of thing I used to be able to say to her when she was overwhelmed or worried, like during the summer of my father’s dark night of the soul. And when I said these things, she would hug me and cry a little harder and tell me I was sweet. I remember what it felt like to want to say these things, too, but whatever made me want to has flipped over inside me into the most intense not-wanting-to that I have ever felt about anything.

  The women who have been listening to us gather their trays and move to the trashcan. One of them sneaks a look back and shakes her head, just barely, in disapproval or disbelief or disgust. First this embarrasses me, but then it makes me mad, more mad than I am at Phoebe, even, and I stare right back at the woman. I keep myself from blinking until she stops shaking her stupid head and turns away. By the time Phoebe turns around to see what I’m looking at, the women are gone, the glass door of McDonald’s already closed behind them.

  Chapter 3

  EVERY SUNDAY, BEFORE THE main service in the sanctuary, my Christian Education class sits in a circle of folding chairs in a cinder-block room of the church basement. Besides me, the teacher, and two adult women, there are these two girls I know, Mary-Kate and Karen, best friends joined at the hip, and now Seth Catterson, the missionary boy back from Ghana. This morning, one of the women, a thin, blond seminary wife, starts us off by saying that in her old church whenever anyone was baptized, they spoke in tongues. “Baptized not just with water,” she says, “but with the Holy Ghost.” The teacher, Connie Bowls, nods so hard that her soft, powdery skin quivers. It’s like she’s agreeing, but she’s not. No one will expect the blond woman to speak in tongues at First Community Church, Connie Bowls explains. In fact, First Community considers tongues to be a private prayer language. To be used in private. The seminary wife writes this down on her notepad.