“She doesn’t do that,” Trey whispered angrily.
“I mean, we’d have a lot more fun.” Jock butted his head against my arm at that.
“I guess they don’t sing ‘Ring Around the Rosy Rag’ at camp, do they?”
“No, ma’am,” Trey said. “We do archery and canoeing and tennis and overnight horseback trips and—” He faltered, searching for what else there was.
Mine were already doing team sports even then, even in the young grades, even if it was only kickball. I wondered whether that was the difference between boys and girls, or something more subtle, a class distinction. Boys debating Princeton and Baylor at their age were learning individual sports. “Swimming,” I supplied. “Diving.”
“Sure, we do those. I can do a half-gainer.”
“Have you seen Ruth and Martha?”
“At the corn-on-the-cob booth—” Jock said.
“The one where the corn comes on sticks,” Trey explained.
“—they were with a bunch of big kids.”
“They are a bunch of big kids,” I told them.
They looked embarrassed that I’d said it, but laughed.
“I’ll try to find your dad. Do you have watches?” Silly question, Drew’s children. They showed me their fat black waterproof campers’ watches. “I told the girls I’d meet them at four on the dot at the Vlasek Kolache stand. That’s the big one right in the middle, with a sausage booth on each side of it. Can you remember that?”
“Our dad said to come back to the tent in an hour.” Trey hated a change in plans.
“Look for us at the Vlasek Kolache stand first. I’ll get you both a couple of apricot jumbos.”
“If you ever do open a camp—” Jock said, looking back as he was dragged away by his older brother.
Drew wasn’t hard to find. First, he was tall, but mostly it was because he wasn’t one of a thousand Czech men in costume, and because he sent off vibrations that waved at me like flowers hollering for bees in the sunshine.
I walked up behind him, pushing my way through a double ring of watchers, and hooked two fingers in his belt.
Without turning, he said, “Where you been?”
“Powdering my nose.”
“You missed a waltz.”
Then he turned and we just put our arms around each other right there and moved out on the dance floor without missing a beat. The exhibition polkas weren’t until sundown, and it was country music for everybody with a general admission ticket until then.
It was like no time at all had gone by. Nothing was different. Maybe we got a little more winded sooner, but it didn’t seem that way.
“God,” Drew said.
“Lord.” I tucked my head under his chin.
“What’ve we been doing all these years?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I love you to pieces.”
“I miss the sawdust on the floors.”
“We were crazy to let it go. Crazy to wax that car with my backside when we could have been doing what we ought to have been doing.”
“I know.”
“I want it now.”
“Me, too.”
“Right here, at the fair, in the parking lot. In my pickup.”
“Don’t be nuts. The kids are going to be waiting for us in”—I checked my watch—“thirty minutes.”
“I told mine to come back here.” He looked at his Oyster.
“I saw the boys. Change of plans.”
“In thirty minutes I could come six times.”
“Aren’t you the braggart?”
“How about you?”
“I don’t even have to leave the dance floor.”
He pulled me so tight I thought his belt buckle would crack a rib, and we danced like that until the band shook loose with “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille,” and then we waltzed around the edge of the crowd, around and around the tent, cooling down, looking at each other.
When we went to get the kids, we didn’t even make any plans. He didn’t say, I’ll call. I didn’t say, We can’t do this. We didn’t go through any of that. We were just trying to stay upright and not go nuts with four youngsters following us around, hitting us up for more corn, more potato pancakes, more sweet pastries, more cider. We loaded them up, drugging them on food, trying not to touch each other.
“The last dance,” Drew said, as it finally got dusk and began to cool off. The kids had each had two ciders and two lemonades, been to the mob-filled bathrooms overflowing with sweaty beer drinkers, and were dragging behind us. Even my two, who’d started out with half a dozen friends, were running down, steaming in their bandanna halters and cutoffs, their damp hair tied up with yarn to give their necks a breeze.
“The last,” I said.
We settled the children at the edge of the tent, outside, with one last round of sticky peach kolaches. The band was about to call it an afternoon; the polka crew was already getting set up for the evening’s exhibition. The final number was a Willie Nelson, and their hearts weren’t in it. It didn’t matter; ours were.
“We’re going to do it, aren’t we?” Drew asked.
“We are. I hope we are. Don’t glue yourself to me like that; we’ve got four sets of eyes on us.”
“They can’t see in.”
“Because I’m going to come right here if you don’t stop.”
“Give me some tongue.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Come on.”
We deep kissed once and then pulled back and finished the number eighteen inches apart.
Gathering myself back under control, getting ready to herd the girls into the car, I remember thinking that the Baptists sure knew what they were talking about, banning hug dancing.
I’D GROWN UP with opposition of a different sort to dancing, from a different source: my mother. (Recalling her now, tall, full-bosomed, with the thick brows and full lips of my daughters, I realized that in a few weeks I’d be replaying arguments with a parent younger than I.)
She’d refused me dance classes when I was small; later, had turned a deaf ear to my happy accounts of spending the evening waltzing my feet off in a Round Rock dance hall. If it’s the arts you want, she’d said more than once—pained, disappointed, her mind obsessed with the welfare of the world—there are other fields. A book has a text to show for itself, a play a script, a movie a film, a painting a canvas. But dance? She shook her head, not comprehending. What wasted motion.
Her attitude was not uncommon: Once danced the dance is gone. The dancer turns, the swan dies and it is over. The houselights rise, the audience leaves and the moment is forever lost. But this is the spectator’s view. I knew even at seventeen that for the dying ballerina, making one last time the grand moves of a lifetime (seen by the watching nurse and kin as a few distracted departing twitches), all was still present in bone and sinew.
Knew that for the dancer, the dance once danced remains as long as breath.
PALM SUNDAY rose bright and blue, a stunning sunny April day. On the steps of the church, the children, mine included, made double rows, waving palm fronds for the congregation to walk beneath. “Hosanna,” I said to them. Hosanna to everyone, the word rising from my lips, borne by happiness. I knew the word had originally meant save us now, but that was not out of order, either, as we climbed together toward the message of the morning.
I always liked to listen to the crowd murmuring in the pews before the service started. They, the parishioners, and Eben were like two variations on a single theme: the paradox of free will and determinism.
Behind me, where I sat on the front row, a group of elderly ladies and old thin-chested men began the refrain, women with lace at their collars and heavy dark slips under their silk dresses, men with handkerchiefs in their breast pockets and parts in their slicked dark hair.
“I say when a cold’s got your name on it, there’s nothing you can do to ward it off. Dristan, Novahistine, Nyquil, Robitussin, it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s not a bit true. If you see one coming you can double your vitamin C and drink fresh-squeezed juice.”
“When a cough’s going to cough, it coughs. There’s no stopping it. When trouble’s got your number, the phone’s going to ring.”
“It’s the truth, some people can stand out in the rain, never wear anything on their heads, never get sick a day in their lives. This woman I know, people can sneeze right in her face, she never gets a germ.”
“Young people know about nutrition.”
“It’s like a tornado is heading for your house. You think eating an orange crate of oranges is going to make it change its course?”
“You can open the windows; you can get under the table.”
“You can say your prayers.”
“Hush, here comes the choir.”
It pleased me to listen to them, setting forth the strains that would soon come from the pulpit. The king of another world arriving on the donkey’s colt; the congregation riding mortality in an earthly city.
It didn’t matter the title of Eben’s sermon of the week (“The Archaic King at the Crossroads,” “The Freedom to Disobey,” “Lead Us Not into Temptation”), the matter he explored never varied. What does it mean to act if God has foreknowledge of our actions? Today, the lesson of Palm Sunday turned not on whether the crowd on the road to Jerusalem was wrong in wanting a different kind of king, for being fickle in their reception of Jesus, but rather whether either the crowd or the Son of God had any choice in the matter. Could He not have come into the city as had been prophesied? Could they not have waved their branches and lifted their voices in praise? Were both reading scripts in a Passion play that neither had written? And then, of course, the foreshadowing of Easter and the larger question of the crucifixion. Did Jesus have a choice? Did that matter? Today, in choosing Matthew 21 for his reading, I knew Eben would end his sermon, as he did, with the passage in which Jesus says that if you have faith you can move mountains. What, the pastor asked us, did this mean? If the mountain truly moves, does it matter that the moving was foreordained?
After the sermon had been considered and received by all of us, we stood to sing: “All glory, laud and honor, To Thee, Redeemer, King! To whom the lips of children, Made sweet hosannas ring.” Then the old woman who had to blow her nose did, and the ones who didn’t sang loud and clear, full-throated and rejoicing in their immunity.
Seated again, for the prayers of intercession—the pause in the service when anyone may mention a loved one in the hospital or nursing home, grieve aloud over the loss of someone dear, or request help for a troubled friend—I was thinking that I was going to miss this church a lot when it was no longer possible for me to be here. Thinking back to the days when the girls were little and sat up front with me, rather than in the rear with their Sunday School friends. Back to when they had to be poked to keep from squirming. Then, older, when they’d wanted to know why it had to be their daddy every week up there and not someone else’s. Their amazement and interest when they learned it could even be someone’s mother up there. It pleased me how they had grown to be a part of the church through the years. Preachers’ kids were known for acting out, for rebelling, making waves, but mine, natural competitors, had become team players even here: partisan Presbyterians against the Baptists in a Baptist town. At least I had not failed in my duty in this regard; my children were firmly in the fold.
Then, all at once, I became aware of Eben speaking from the pulpit.
“This is the last Sunday,” he said in an even tone to the sea of bowed heads, “that my wife, Cile, and I will be here with you as a couple. Please know that there will be no loss of love within our community because we have reached this mutual decision to go our separate ways.” He paused, then, after a moment of silence, raised his voice in the benediction: “And now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.”
Shaking with anger at his making our news public without forewarning me, without a word to me, I kept my eyes straight ahead as Eben in his robes strode rapidly past me up the aisle. “You always like Palm Sunday,” he’d said slyly the night I told him I was leaving. Making plans no doubt even then to spring this surprise on me; to scoop me in my own infidelity. To orchestrate my faithlessness as if it was merely a part of his own composition.
I debated slipping out through the choir room, but that would only take me into the Fellowship Hall, from the frying pan to the covered dishes. Still, I couldn’t bear the thought of heading out the front door where Eben, standing by his daughters, would be greeting his flock as if nothing had happened, shaking each firm hand, bending over each tanned face, accepting their praise for his sermon as his due.
I scanned the sanctuary for signs that anyone at all was shocked, astonished, dismayed by the news. But no. The usual steady hum of good wishes and family gossip fell like a blow on my shoulders. Eben had already told them all.
A polite crowd of the faithful moved around me in a cluster, saying in kindly tones that they would certainly miss me, what a dear thing I’d been, such a good cook, too, they hoped I’d be fine, it had been nice to know me. Bustling around me and then past me, on about their business, having paid their respects as if to a visitor.
No stone thrown; not even a pebble skipped. No curses placed on my head, no muttering among themselves, no sending me to Satan. Rather, it seemed a minor matter: the parson and his wife splitting. As if they’d learned I’d decided to bring potato puffs this week instead of my usual potato bake.
I felt cheated. A heathen, I had assumed that true believers would want to cast me out, to tear, symbolically at least, my garments, to cover my face with ashes. Not merely pat me good-bye, as if I were a college freshman moving her letter to another congregation.
Only Lila Beth, whom I glimpsed through a circle of elders, turned her back on me.
Eben’s three new parishioners, perhaps not knowing any better, took the news seriously. Boyd, the skinny math teacher who’d bought a ring in order to marry himself, put a thin arm around my shoulder and said that being alone didn’t have to mean being lonely. Blanche, the plump widow who’d had the stress reaction to her husband’s death and lost her hair, took off her hat to show me the beginning of beige waves, and offered me the name of her hairdresser. Jae-Moon, the Korean woman who’d fussed at Eben for his sexist sermons, seized my palms in hers and squeezed them fervently. Her tone joyous, she said, “This is good, what you have done.”
I thanked the trio, then stood at the front of the church until the crowd thinned out and the last few slow-moving, hard-of-hearing members began to make their way with canes and walkers up the aisle. One of the women who’d sat behind me caught my arm for support and we brought up the rear.
“I still say,” she croaked hoarsely, “when trouble’s got your number, you can’t hang up the phone.”
“Hosanna,” I said.
DID YOU HAVE to do that?” Eben and I sat at the table over coffee. The girls had fled with the Bledsoes for the afternoon.
“I did. I could not pretend any longer to something that wasn’t true. The congregation is entitled, as long as I am in this job, to full disclosure about any matter that they will hear gossip concerning.”
“I wanted to tell the girls.”
“Have I restrained you?”
“In my own way, at my own time.” I was so angry I could hardly get my breath. “You anticipated me. You jumped the gun. You promised to wait until after Easter.”
“You bargained for that delay; I did not agree to it.” He rose to refill our cups.
“You told Lila Beth, didn’t you? Didn’t you? You sprang it early so you could be the one to tell her.”
“It was your choice to cling to your secret.”
“You went public today so that we couldn’t have Easter Sunday at her house.” I didn’t trust myself to lift the hot cup without hurling it.
“Is that worse
than your intention to prolong the deception at the expense of her family and yours?”
“Yes.” I clenched my hands in my lap. “It is.”
He put his gray suit coat on, pulled tight the knot in his navy tie, lifted his thin hair with his fingers. “I have to check on the shut-ins and the hospital.”
“Eben?”
He waited.
“What else?” I asked.
“I have seen a lawyer.” In a level tone he mentioned a man in the congregation, one of the thin-chested faithful with a ruler-straight part in his dark, sparse hair. “It will be less awkward, there will be less talk, if I file.”
“Had you planned to serve me papers with no notice?”
“You stay here tonight,” he said evenly. “We’ll talk when the girls are asleep about the logistics of your moving out. Does that suit you?”
For him to pick the time and place for us to talk? The time for me to move? For me to talk to my own children? “What do you think?”
“I suppose it’s to be expected that we are having this same fight at this especially painful time. It has always been a problem between us.”
I breathed in and out. Took a large gulp of coffee. Shut my eyes, opened them. He was right: the battleground was studded with losses. The troops were barefoot and ragged. I raised a white flag. “It was a good sermon,” I told him. “One of your best.”
“You always liked Palm Sunday,” he said.
YOU BY YOURSELF?”
“I’m so glad it’s you.”
“I figured the parson’d be visiting the afflicted.”
“He just left. I was wild to talk to you, but I didn’t dare call—”
“I’m not there. I’m not anywhere. I’m at a pay phone, actually.” I could hear him suck in his breath. “She told everybody, I mean everybody. Mary Virginia. Her mom and sister, the boys, Mother. I expect to find my stuff in the driveway already boxed when I come home. I got back yesterday from the meeting in Waxahachie, listening to them raise the price and butter up the deal on the land they’re wanting to tunnel under, and the news was out.”
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