by Rob Mclean
Maddie buried her face against John’s chest.
“I think we all get a bit shy with new people,” Angela said with a smile of understanding to David. “Actually, I’m feeling a bit shy right now.”
“Are you?” John asked. Angela could tell that he thought she might be serious.
“Oh yes,” Angela said, playing it up a bit when she saw Madison’s eyes peer open with curiosity. “I’m a bit scared of that girl.” She pointed at Madison and moved to hide behind John.
Madison leaned around to follow Angela, and it soon became a game of peek-a-boo with Angela gasping in mock horror and darting back behind John every time Madison ‘found’ her. Soon they were both giggling and laughing.
“I’m not scary,” Maddie said.
“Hey, I’m not either,” Angela said acting surprised, as though she had just worked it out herself. Maddie reached over with both arms outstretched for Angela to hold her.
She took her from John, and then groaned, “You’re not as light as I thought.” John had picked up and carried the girl like she was made of polystyrene. She supposed those broad shoulders helped in that department. Angela put her down, and Maddie happily held hands as they returned to the kitchen.
“You’re a bit of a natural,” John said as they sat at the kitchen table. Maddie had placed herself between Angela and John. “You don’t have any children of your own I don’t know about, do you?”
“No,” she laughed. “But I have done lots of crèche duty at church though.”
“Church?” Shelley asked.
Angela stiffened as she heard the aggressive tone to the question.
John looked as though he had been caught out hiding girlie magazines under his bed. “Mom, I should have told you before,” he said. “Angela’s a Christian.”
“Oh, Hell no.”
Angela felt betrayed, as if John had led her into an ambush. She sat at a table full of unbelievers and felt very much alone. She pursed her lips shut, lest she say something ungracious and took a deep calming breath.
“At least that explains the Doris Day outfit,” Shelley looking Angela up and down.
John spoke up in her defence. “Hey, last time I checked, we still live in a free country. We have religious freedom, so if she wants to be a Christian, that’s her problem.”
“Problem?” Angela asked. She quickly saw that to these people, it could well be a hindrance to their worldly lifestyle.
“It would be your problem too, Johnny, if you two ever had children,” Shelley said. Her huge arms unfolded as she wagged a stubby finger at Angela and John. “I’ve known people who have taken their children away rather than let the other partner bring them up wrong.”
Angela remembered her own mother’s talk about her future children and the same problem. Were all these potential grandmothers the same, each striving to keep their future dynasties under their control?
John awkwardly mumbled something about it being far too early in their relationship. Angela was amazed. We’ve only just met and already they’re talking about grandkids. No talk about marriage though, she noted. She took another calming breath and remembered Pastor Greg’s words about how you shouldn’t expect non-Christians to behave like Christians and how you should forgive them for their un-Christian behaviours. She also remembered something he also said about how you should then keep away from them.
She sighed. That would happen when Zeke got back to her, if he ever did. She hated the way things had worked out for her so far. This was all her mother’s fault. It was her plan and Angela hated the way it had gotten her into this smelly, dysfunctional bunch of trashy misfits. She especially hated the way John had gotten into her life and how his slightest smile made her heart race. She smiled ruefully at her predicament.
“Are you an angel?” Maddie asked, abruptly bringing Angela’s thoughts back to reality.
Shelley barked out a laugh, echoed by David. “She says the darnest things sometimes,” David said with a paternal fondness.
“No,” Angela answered gently. She felt quite the opposite with what she had done with Zeke and how she was now playing with John.
“Why did you ask her that Maddie?” John asked. “Does she look like one to you too?”
“Oh, please,” groaned Jarred. He lifted his T-shirt up over his mouth and pretended to vomit inside. “We’re having lunch soon.”
John ignored his brother’s jibe and raised a questioning eyebrow at Maddie.
“Because her name sounds like Angel…”
“My mother once told me that she did call me Angela because when I was born she was so happy and thought I looked like a little angel. She didn’t think it right to name someone Angel though.”
“And because she’s so pretty…” Maddie still directed her answer to John.
Angela blushed at the child’s sudden, naïve openness. People had told her before how good she looked, but they always had motives, especially Zeke. The child’s simple honesty meant more to her. “Well, thank you, Maddie. You’re a pretty girl too, you know.”
“And because you go to church.”
“Now, where did she learn about Angels and church and all that stuff?” asked David.
“Dunno, she watches a lot of TV. Maybe one of those rotten televangelists has gotten into her head,” Shelley said. “You should be more careful what she watches.”
Angela just shook her head in dismay. She couldn’t understand why these people were so determined to be so anti-God, especially that Shelley woman. They don’t look like they care what she watches, as long as she’s quiet and out of the way. John sheepishly shrugged a silent apology.
Maddie ignored her parent’s speculations and repeated her question, “Are you? An angel?”
“No, Maddie,” Angela said with a solemn smile, “but I’m working on it.”
Madison whispered as if sharing a secret, “I think you are.”
Angela felt her throat tighten and she gave Maddie a hug. It gave her time to calm her emotions. She felt the beauty of the girl’s simple words, but it was wrought with the sadness from her own awareness of how far she fell short that enlightened state of being.
“Like I said before,” Shelley said with definitive aplomb, “she’s retarded.”
Angela felt her words like a slap to her face. Shelley was looking directly at her; was it a warning not to mess with her authority over her family or challenge?
“She seems perfectly fine to me,” Angela said as sweetly as she could. Even if she never had to see this nasty woman again–that depended on Zeke-she wasn’t going to let her tell her what to think.
“Honey, you haven’t seen her tantrums. Don’t you go thinking she’s always this cute.” Shelley made sure she had the last word on the subject by starting to serve up dinner.
“That’s when Maddie gets really scary,” John winked. He was trying to be nice and lighten the mood, but Angela had to grind her teeth together to stop herself from saying something like, ‘Probably gets that from her mother.’ She then chided herself for her ungracious thought before another one popped into her head. ‘That’s what you get from hanging with heathens.’
Shirley then went on to serve up a whole mountain range of food, apparently forgetting how nasty she had just been. Plates of pasta tuna-bake, lasagne, chicken drumsticks and pizza were jostled onto the table. Buttered white bread, meatloaf and sausages followed. Angela noted a distinct lack of salad or vegetables, but it looked like nobody else missed them as plates were passed around and loaded generously.
Out of a lifetime of habit, Angela found herself waiting for David, being the man of the house, to say grace, but the sounds of munching and clunking of cutlery reminded her where she was.
“What’s wrong with you two?” Shelly asked with a mouth stuffed full of food. “Why haven’t you started? Something wrong?”
Angela saw that John hadn’t started his meal either. Surely he wasn’t saying his own silent grace?
“Just waiting for our
guest,” John said with mock politeness.
“You aren’t suddenly saying grace just to impress your new girly-friend?” Shelley spat out the unpalatable words while chewing her food with a cement mixer mouth.
“And what if I was?” John answered with an exaggerated carelessness.
Shirley stopped grinding her food mid chomp. She raised her fork to make a pointed reply, but David beat her to it. “Geez, the things a guy will do to get his leg over.”
John smiled. Angela had a feeling that what he was going to say next wouldn’t go down well in this house.
“I won’t be doing any of that either,” he said, still smiling. Then, seeing their uncomprehending faces, he went on to explain, “We have a chastity vow.”
Jarred spluttered the food he was eating. Shelley lowered her fork silently. Angela’s heart swelled.
“What’s a chastity?” Maddie chirped. David sighed and shook his head.
Shelley ignored the question. Her attention was fixed on John. “Just what the hell is the point of that?”
“We have promised each other and her parents that there will be no…” he glanced at Maddie, “um, horizontal folk dancing, until we’re married.”
“Married?” Jarred scoffed. “You’ll die of hypothermia first.” John gave him a quizzical look. “From all the cold showers you’ll be needing,” Jarred explained to everyone’s amusement. Angela smiled at John’s discomfort, but she admired his up-front honesty. He was prepared to brave his family’s ridicule for her.
“If you ask me,” David said, “chastity comes naturally enough once you have kids and get older.” He risked a glance at Shelley, who just nodded and rolled her eyes. “You should enjoy yourselves while you’re still young.” Angela had no trouble imagining him being celibate around that repulsive Shelley woman.
“It’s important to Angela’s parents…” John began.
“But why?” Shelley persisted. “You have to find out if you’re compatible before you commit your life to someone. Compatibility in the sack is part of that. You don’t want to marry her if she’ll only let you do it missionary, under the sheets with the lights out. And then only to have babies. That’s what they’re like. You’ll be under her thumb with blue balls and wet dreams. Trust me, I know.”
“How do you know?” Jarred asked, ever inquisitive.
Shelley gave him a force-ten death stare. “Trust me,” she repeated, her words heavy with implications, “I know.”
“I figure you’ll be wanting to be married as soon as possible then,” David said brightly. “I think we’re free next weekend.” John rewarded his attempt at humour with a half smile.
“It won’t work,” were Shelley’s final words on the subject before she and everyone else went back to their meals in stony silence.
Angela felt that she may well be right. Their differences were huge. Who knows how many girlfriends John had plundered and how many diseases he had collected with that sort of parental moral compass? Hundreds, if that cute smile of his worked anywhere as well on other girls. If only he wasn’t so adorably gorgeous… Maybe his charm was a result of years of experience with strings of worldly wanton women. Somehow though, he didn’t give her that impression. She made a mental note to ask him about his previous girlfriends later.
“I hate to admit it,” Jarred said, interrupting Angela’s speculations, “but I think the old girl’s right.”
Shelley snorted at the reference.
“Is that so?” John asked.
“Yeah, you’re battling biology, trying to nullify nature.”
“Does he always talk like that?” Angela asked.
“Always and he doesn’t come with a subtitles option.”
Jarred shook his head dismissively. “What I meant was that celibacy goes right against the natural order of things, the biological imperative.”
David suggested it was a good time for himself and Maddie to clear the dishes from the table. Shelley helped herself to one of John’s beers.
“You’re saying that we’ll have to struggle to curb our basic animal desires,” Angela said, and then looking over at John’s masculine profile, “I think we already know this.”
“The whole purpose of living organisms is to reproduce and make more living organisms. That’s the way it is,” Jarred shrugged, “so celibacy is…”
“It ain’t natural,” Shelley waved her beer at Angela to make her point, slopping some of it on the table.
“But we aren’t animals,” Angela countered, forcing herself not to add ‘present company excluded.’
“Excuse me,” Shelley said banging her beer down on the tabletop, “didn’t you just eat that food? And won’t you dump it out in a few hours time? Or are you special?”
Angela felt the full force of Shelley’s glare. She wondered if this is how this woman always argued or if she was being especially feisty just for her visit today? Judging by the reactions of the rest of the family, she’d have to say it was an everyday occurrence. That made her feel a little better.
“Mom, could you try not being so…” John said.
Shelley turned on John “So… what, exactly?”
“Rude,” John said, “Would you be like this if Angela were not a Christian?”
“What do you mean ‘rude’? Instead of saying ‘dump’, I would have normally said ‘shit.’”
John’s ears burned. He dismissed his mother with a swat of his hand through the air and a disparaging grunt.
“No, it’s okay, John,” Angela said, putting a calming hand on his arm. “We’re just having a lively talk.” She smiled reassuringly at him, before returning her attention to Shelley. “It’s true, I will ‘shit,’” She said the word as if she had surgical gloves on and was handling a medical specimen with tweezers, “but that doesn’t mean that we are the same as animals. We have some things in common, but we are different in that God gave us a soul.”
“Prove it,” Jarred said.
“I can’t,” Angela replied. She gave Jarred a sympathetic smile. “It’s something I just know from my own personal experiences. When I pray for help or guidance, I always get answers.”
Shelley snorted her unspoken contempt.
“Subjective, unverifiable observations aren’t considered eligible to be taken as credible evidence in my world,” Jarred said. “Imagine me telling my professor that I felt the presence of a parallel universe. Without independent, reproducible proof, he’d laugh me off campus.”
“All I know is that it works for me.”
“Okay,” Jarred sat himself up straighter, relishing the speculations, “supposing what you say is true, then what about animals? How do you know they don’t have similar soulful experiences?”
“Hey, dogs have dreams,” John suddenly put in, “I’ve seen their legs twitching while they’re asleep.”
“Despite the apparent randomness of my himbo brother’s interjections, he does raise a good point. Does the dreaming process or intelligence in general correlate to the ownership of a soul? Is it the by-product of a higher order mental function, like speech or dreaming?”
No,” Angela answered, “it is something that God gave to us when He created us in his image.”
“But what about the Aliens? Do they have souls like ours? I don’t mean the envoy one that they made using human DNA; I mean the ones we haven’t seen yet inside their spaceship. Do those green, tentacled aliens have a soul?”
“The Pastor at our church, and a lot of other Christian thinkers have a variety of theories. Some think that the body that they come in isn’t important as it was made for their world and they are just like us…”
“But more advanced.”
“More advanced technologically. Maybe not as advanced spiritually. Some think that’s why they have come; to receive the Word from Christ.”
Shelley couldn’t contain her derision. “That’s the biggest load of crap I have ever heard.”
Angela felt her temper flare. She was sure that this offensive w
oman was deliberately baiting her to provoke an un-Christian response. She was determined not to sink to her level.
“Thank you for your unsolicited opinion,” Angela said as pleasantly as she could. Shelley looked blankly back at her. Jarred smiled.
“No, but it is a logical possibility,” Jarred said. “It has to be considered, however unlikely it might be.”
“Still crap,” Shelley said from behind her beer.
“Some other people,” Angela thought uncomfortably of Zeke, “are saying that the Alien is the AntiChrist, come now on the eve of Armageddon.”
“We’ve been about to blow ourselves up for about seventy years now,” Shelley said. “A bit tardy isn’t he?”
“It’s all in God’s plan,” was all Angela would say. She wondered how both Jarred and Shelley both knew about Armageddon and John didn’t. Jarred was probably so smart that he had read the entire Bible one holiday weekend and memorized the whole thing. Shelley, on the other hand… She must have had some bad religious experiences in her past.
“Lookout,” Shelley said, “here it comes.”
“What?” John asked.
“God’s plan. She’ll be telling us all about it any minute now.”
Angela felt she had no other choice. Once Shelley had found out that she was a Christian, she had pushed the issue to the point that Angela could not avoid declaring herself. It was a bit of a pity that it had to be an issue this early in their relationship, but she reasoned that it was best to be up-front and honest about her faith. If they didn’t like it, too bad, their loss, but she wouldn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t.
“It’s true,” Angela agreed. “It has to come up sometime and the sooner the better. The only way to get eternal life is through accepting Jesus into your life as your Saviour.”
Shelley tilted her head to John. “Told ya so,” Shelley said, getting up from the table. “You kids let me know how you get on with that chastity thing. If you want me I’ll be watching out for the Apocalypse on CNN.” She took her beer they watched her dimpled, holey track-suit amble out of the room.
Angela was glad that Shelley had gone. Although she had found her antagonistic and it was easy to be annoyed with her, Angela now felt a genuine sadness and pity for the woman. Shelley would never know the peace that came with accepting Christ, and that, to her, was a tragedy.