Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  “I don’t sound like that.”

  “I don’t sound like that,” says Tracy, sounding more like me than I care for.

  “Girl,” Cecil Goode calls from his seat.

  “She don’t want to talk to you,” Tracy says. “She don’t want to talk to nobody on this bus.”

  I open A Wrinkle in Time. I am halfway through it the second time, and if I could, I would tesser myself right off the bus. I stare at the page like I’m reading, but it’s impossible to read with Tracy glowering at the side of my face.

  “She just wants to read her prissy book,” says Tracy, ducking her head to look at the cover. “Wrinkle Dinkle.”

  The road curves upward, the bus chugging into gear like something settling into place far beneath me, like a reminder. Not praying. Not praying. I am as bad as the vestal virgins, whose only job was to stay awake and wait for the bridegroom, and they couldn’t even do that much. Inhabit me, O Lord God, I whisper to myself.

  “You’re not supposed to do that,” Tracy says. “Read with your lips moving. I thought you were smart.”

  Mrs. Teaderman says we are transcribing, through freewriting, a record of our movement from the prison of the unconscious to a prism of the unconscious. She writes both prison and prism on the board, with a big arrow to indicate the right direction.

  After freewriting, if you are called upon to share what you wrote, you may say “Pass” and it won’t hurt your grade. You may also write DO NOT READ at the top of your entry if you have written something you don’t want even Mrs. Teaderman to read when she collects them. She says that the movement from prison to prism can sometimes be very private, which makes the boys snicker.

  Phoebe is fine, I write to my father, though I know he has seen her briefly in and around his sleeping. We are fine down at the river. I think I am going to see you very soon. Once everything is okay with the medication. How is the medication going?

  As we write, Mrs. Teaderman patrols the rows on her long legs. Today she wears the red slacks with a billowy pink top, and she looks like a flamingo, the way she steps and stops, steps and stops. “The truth can set you free,” she says from somewhere behind me. “But it can also bind your hands. Inventiveness can be a ray of light in the prison of the unconscious.”

  I think about Seth and the play he’s doing with Dr. Osborne, and then I am writing, inventively, that I’m the one who will be in a new play. I pick Ruth, for its strong female lead. I have to sit at the feet of Naomi and receive her wise counsel, I write. Boaz and Naomi haven’t been cast yet. I can see the whole thing—myself in Old Testament dress, acting out the motions of collecting leftover wheat on the threshing-room floor.

  In activity, Kelly-Lynn measures my tiny ponytail with her fingers. “Better,” she says. “Maybe next you should think about cutting out junk food and pop. Your clothes are tight.”

  “I never drink pop,” I say. Before I can stop myself, I say what Phoebe says about pop: “We can’t afford it.” I wish I hadn’t said it, but it doesn’t matter, anyway. Everything you say to Kelly-Lynn passes over her and disappears, like a flock of migrating birds.

  “What’s the matter with your nose?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I say, touching the scab. Down on the gym floor a dodge-ball game is going on, more than fifty kids on each half of the basketball court. I spy Tracy’s red hair just as she hurls the rubber ball hard into a girl’s knee.

  “We used to be poor, too,” says Kelly-Lynn. “We lived in an apartment before my mom met my stepdad. Then again in between my stepdad and Rob. And my dad was poor, he said, because he had to send us money for the apartment. I had to wear my mom’s pre-diet fat clothes. Everything hung off me.”

  “My mother knows how to take things in,” I say. “She sews a lot. Or she used to.” Below, Tracy slams the ball into the feet of another girl. Then she takes out a boy who doesn’t see it coming. Then someone else beans the ball right back at Tracy, catching her on the shoulder, and she slinks back toward the bleachers and disappears into the crowd.

  “The trick is to stay away from anything salty or sweet,” Kelly-Lynn says. “Salty and sweet food just makes you want to eat more. I’m only eating cucumbers and carrot sticks until cheerleading tryouts. You have to think, what do you want more, to not be fat or to eat? Or, for me, to be a cheerleader or to eat?”

  This is what I ask myself after school, when Daze offers me a Ding Dong in her apartment at the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center.

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “How about some RC Cola and peanuts?”

  “Do you have any Tab?”

  Daze gives me a hard look. “What happened to your nose?” When I shrug, she sighs. “You’re not getting fat, sweet pea. You’re just developing a figure. The less you fight your shape, the better. Your bosom still hurt?”

  “A little,” I say.

  “It’s growing, then. You’re turning into an hourglass.” Daze hands me one of her slinky robes, and I change out of my clothes in her bathroom. Her whole apartment smells like the Pine-Sol and Windex she uses to chase away the “vapors of death,” which is what she calls the odor of old people trying to cover up their smells with potpourri. In the living room I hand over my clothes. Daze has her own stackable washer and dryer, and she loves to use them. Back in the day, she says, she had to wash everything on a washboard and wring it on a wringer and then hang it up to dry and take it back down and iron it. Now everything in her apartment, every towel and every piece of clothing, has just been washed and dried.

  “I wish I was skinny like you,” I say.

  “I’m skinny all right. And spent my whole life pining for an hourglass figure.” She pours detergent into the washer, then turns and makes wavy motions like she’s moving her hands over breasts and hips. “Your mother, she’s always been an unfortunate pear. Only she’s so thin now, you can’t hardly tell.”

  “What’s Daddy?”

  “Your father is a man after God’s own heart,” says Daze, “any way you look at it. But I take your meaning. Men are short or skinny or tall. Your father’s on the tall side, like his father, but not too tall.”

  “Is he still a man after God’s own heart?”

  “Of course he is. Who said he wasn’t—your mother? Once a man after God’s own heart, always a man after God’s own heart.” Then Daze draws each of us a footbath, with bath beads, and turns on her small black-and-white television set. Daze loves soap operas, which she calls “the stories,” and I’m not supposed to tell anyone, because they are all secular. Except for Ryan’s Hope, which has a priest character, which is better than nothing, she says.

  In the prime spot over Daze’s television hangs a framed black-and-white picture of my grandfather. It’s a famous shot. The Good Word still runs it during camp-meeting season, and my father keeps a yellowed clipping of it from the Lexington Herald-Leader in his Bible. It was taken during the “Great Revival,” and shows my grandfather standing under the water tower. He wears a thin tie and wire-rimmed glasses. One hand points to the audience, and the other grasps the pulpit so tightly that his knuckles bulge big as golf balls. His specialty was father-and-son sermons, which start out with stories about modern-day fathers who have to choose between saving their sons and saving lots of people they don’t know. The situations are complicated—bridges that hold only so much weight, viruses so strong and spreading so fast that doctors’ own sons must be experimented on, burning buildings where hundreds of crippled senior citizens make their homes. There is always a moment when the father and son look at each other above the syringe or across the flames, and each understands the decision and feels the love and pain. I never heard my grandfather preach, but I’ve read the reprints in The Good Word. Even though I already know the outcome of every sermon, it is still hard not to hope that one of these fathers, just one of them, one time, will choose not to sacrifice his son, even in order to save the rest of the world. But the world is always in luck.

  When the buzzer on
the dryer sounds, I change back into my jeans and T-shirt—even tighter now—and we head down to the lobby. Phoebe is already there, using the front-desk phone to call Ron’s Towing. She wears her black bespoke pants and blue blouse, and she looks pretty. I sometimes forget she can look that way until I see her in public. None other than Dr. Osborne himself stands tall behind her. He is the only grown man I know with hair long enough for a braid that rests between his shoulders. He wears a necklace, too—a large cross made of two entwined iron nails, like those that pierced the palms of Jesus, strung on a leather cord. I feel like I’ve conjured him by making up the play about Naomi and Ruth in freewriting.

  “Let me give you a lift,” he says to Phoebe after she hangs up.

  Over the front desk looms a large color print of the same revival picture of my grandfather in a gold frame. Phoebe glances at it uneasily.

  “You’re down at the river these days,” says Dr. Osborne. “Am I right?”

  “Doctor Osborne likes to keep up,” Daze says crisply. “He’s a regular around here, visiting shut-ins.”

  “Daze,” says Phoebe.

  “I’m not so old and infirm that I can’t take my own daughter-in-law home,” says Daze. “I still have the Buick.”

  Phoebe puts her fingers to her temples. “That Pinto,” she says. “It made it to the hospital, then here, then it just sputtered out. I don’t know what to do with that car.”

  “You’ll get it fixed, the way the rest of us do,” says Daze. “Let me get my jacket.”

  “Ms. Peake?” Dr. Osborne dips his body from the waist in Daze’s direction. “I don’t want you to miss dining hall.”

  “Very often I prepare my own meals,” Daze says, even as Phoebe is saying to Dr. Osborne, “If it’s really no trouble.”

  Whatever Daze is thinking, she will not make a family scene under the watchful eyes of the receptionist, or even in front of Dr. Osborne. “If it’s no trouble, then,” she echoes Phoebe, then squeezes me extra long, as if I’m supposed to take meaning from it.

  In the parking lot, I open the back door to Dr. Osborne’s Toyota to see the seat and floor covered with books.

  “Let me move some of those,” he says behind me, but when I step aside to let him, Phoebe says, “She can squinch in there just fine, Doctor Osborne.”

  “Morris,” says Dr. Osborne.

  He holds Phoebe’s door while she climbs in, leaving me to push one sliding stack of books across the back seat and into a big pile. Under my feet are more books, and I nudge at them until I can feel the car mat beneath my shoes.

  “My, what a lot of books,” Phoebe says as Dr. Osborne slides behind the wheel.

  Dr. Osborne shakes his head and peers with her into the back seat. “I always check out more than I have time for,” he says, “and soon as I know it, they’re overdue and I haven’t even finished reading them.”

  Through the window I watch the tow truck pull our Pinto backward out of the lot. We follow it to the garage, and when Phoebe gets out to speak to Ron Deeds, Dr. Osborne gets out, too, and stands beside her like it’s as much his business as it is hers. Ours. When they come back he opens and closes the car door for her with extra care, like he’s acting out the word gentleness.

  The pile of books on the seat beside me shifts.

  “Don’t bother Doctor Osborne’s books,” Phoebe hisses.

  “I’m not,” I say, and when Dr. Osborne gets behind the wheel again, I ask him, as if I couldn’t look for myself, if any of the books are plays.

  “No,” says Dr. Osborne. “I’m working strictly from biblical inspiration these days. ‘A Series of Spiritual Scenes’ I’m calling it.”

  “Fascinating,” says Phoebe.

  “Naomi and Ruth are inspiring to me,” I say, because why not?

  “The mother figure,” says Dr. Osborne, “if not the actual mother.” He smiles at Phoebe. “I can see how that would be inspiring.”

  Then he does something different with his voice, not whispering, but dropping into a kind of private tone, which excludes me, to ask Phoebe about my father. David.

  Phoebe starts nodding before she speaks. I prepare for her standard, public response, which is “Better, fine, just overtired and under stress, getting some much-needed rest.” But after she opens her mouth she just closes it and nods some more.

  “It must be hard,” Dr. Osborne says. “I’ve known David since we were kids.”

  “Of course,” Phoebe says. “Doctor Osborne—”

  “Morris.”

  “Morris. It’s hard.” Which is not something she should say, because it is discussing family outside family. Then he starts nodding with her, and a tear slips down the side of Phoebe’s face.

  I poke my head in between the driver’s and passenger seats. “He’s been under a strain,” I say. “He’s getting some much-needed rest. He’s exhausted from his work. And his traveling.”

  Neither of them respond to me. They just keep nodding together, like they know each other much better than they really do. After a time, like I’m not even there, Phoebe says, “It’s hard on Charmaine.”

  “It’s not hard on me,” I say.

  “You’re a tough cookie,” Dr. Osborne says, keeping his eyes on the road. It could be a compliment.

  “She’s a tough cookie, all right,” says Phoebe, making it sound less complimentary. They both laugh. Then they are talking about the car again, Dr. Osborne asking about future rides needed, Phoebe explaining that she can catch the children’s school bus to East Winder Elementary, where she will be subbing for the rest of the week.

  I pick up a book called The Cost of Discipleship and flip through it, snapping the pages loudly. In the index I search for Ruth or Naomi, but neither is there. Prayer is there, but not pray without ceasing, which of course I have stopped. I force myself to think the prayer in my head now, even though I’m angry. Lust is in the index, and I look up the passage, which I find underlined lightly in pencil:

  Both eye and hand are less than Christ, and when they are used as the instruments of lust and hinder the whole body from the purity of discipleship, they must be sacrificed for the sake of him.

  Sacrifice of eye or hand. This is what Seth will have to do if he slips up and looks at me with lust, even while practicing not to. And if Dr. Osborne looks at Phoebe with lust, he will have to do the same, though perhaps as the man who has never known a woman, he has conquered the desires of his eye and hand.

  Up front, Phoebe is laughing, and when we pull up to the cabin, she tells me to go inside first and she’ll be right along.

  I close the door to Dr. Osborne’s car harder than I have to.

  “What a nice man,” Phoebe says when she comes in a few minutes later. “What a thoughtful person.”

  I push past her and settle myself in the passenger seat.

  “We had the nicest conversation.” When I don’t ask what they talked about, Phoebe sighs. Then she starts humming “My Favorite Things.”

  “Homework,” I say, and the humming stops. We are late getting home, and it’s already dusk. High above, a slow, heavy train slides over Tate’s Bridge with a rumbling that ricochets deeply through the gorge. I watch it through what used to be the RV’s dashboard, now a picture window of sorts. The trains run all night, and the sound used to wake me, but it’s getting more familiar. Most nights I sleep right through.

  Down by the trees, I spot Titus making his way up from the riverbank. Phoebe lets him in, and he jumps into my lap, on top of the social studies book, right under the warm gooseneck lamp. “I love you,” I whisper into his velvety ear, and he purrs and pushes his head into the crook of my elbow. Behind me, the humming starts again as Phoebe runs the faucet to begin boiling something for dinner. She keeps it quiet, but the sound runs beneath everything else the way I wish my prayer would—like something that comes so naturally to her she can’t help it.

  Chapter 8

  PASTOR CHICK IS NOT your run-of-the-mill youth minister. He’s a leading expert on the
subject who teaches at the seminary with Dr. Osborne. He recruits his team from among his students. Like Conley, a tall Texan guitar player. To kick off the first meeting of fall, Conley bounds through where we’ve all gathered in the Upper Room, plants himself in front of the marker board, and starts strumming hard to an up-tempo song we all know called “The Horse and Rider.” It’s from the Old Testament, the part where Moses and the Israelites sing their thanks to God for parting the Red Sea and drowning the horse and rider, AKA the Egyptians, behind them. Conley’s voice rises high on the song, then skims just over the surface of the other voices, like a hunting bird on the river. Someone in back starts clapping, and soon the music rolls through the room until everyone is keeping time, and when we get to the end of the chorus, Conley changes up the chords and launches us right into “I’ll Fly Away.” Mary-Kate and Karen have allowed me to perch on their best-friends beanbag, and we sit at the edge of the room, just underneath the row of windows that looks down on the sanctuary. We try to do the harmony part, all three of us together. Even Seth, sitting a few feet away, is singing, and it’s easy to feel like everyone’s on the same side, the Lord’s side. I’m concentrating so hard that I don’t even see Pastor Chick and his bald head in the doorway. Then he starts making his way to the front, weaving around kids sitting Indian-style. A few of the high schoolers stick their legs out as if to trip him, and he laughs and pretends to fall, waving his arms and staggering to recover.

  Pastor Chick is stocky as a bulldog. He wears his old plaid shirt tucked into faded jeans like a lot of the county kids do, but his shoes are rich brown leather with heavy rubber soles. Expensive shoes. Daze says the Collinses, Pastor Chick’s family in Tennessee, are “old money.” Daze’s own family used to be old money, generations back. Custer Peake came from old money, too, before the honorable Peake ancestor took a stand against growing tobacco. Daze says money’s not important, though. She says you couldn’t pay her enough to drive around in a Cadillac like a dime-store millionaire. Pastor Chick drives a beat-up Ford pickup truck like it’s all he can afford, which is just the way old money behaves, Daze says.