Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  It was weird to see the Vandersons in church after that. They always looked so proper, so perfect. He wore such elegant clothes—tweed suits with vests, silk ties, and everyone, even the minister, treated him with such respect. For a while I lived in fear that some Sunday I’d jump up in the middle of a sermon and yell, “Mr. Vanderson, how dare you look so perfect when you’re really such a creep, trying to have an affair with my mother, making her cry!” But I don’t know, after a while Mother got involved with someone else, and it all just faded in importance. Now when I see the Vandersons, I think nothing much except “Well, there are the Vandersons.” Of course, now I also think of Mrs. Vanderson laughing and trying to look seductive at Mrs. Halstead’s party with the male stripper. People are so strange.

  Liza Howard is another one. It’s like having a cheetah lounging over there in the pew, some sleek cat who doesn’t belong in church. When I was little, I used to wish I were the most beautiful woman in the world. But after seeing Liza Howard, I wonder if amazing beauty isn’t a kind of curse. At least it must be a responsibility; she must feel she has to make use of her beauty in some way. She doesn’t seem to be interested in politics or feminism or art or a career or the town or anything except the way she looks. And the few times I’ve seen her in town she’s always been doing something like vamping the UPS man. I think she’s trapped by her beauty. There’s no way she could ever live like a normal person, because she gets treated the way celebrities must—when people are confronted with her, they get tongue-tied and act silly. She is so absolutely beautiful that she makes everyone else feel inferior, and embarrassed as if we chose the looks we were born with. So we are dazzled and inept in her presence, and furious at her when released from that presence.

  Most beautiful people—fashion models, movie stars—give us hope, because they are human, and we think, well, maybe if I had my hair cut that way, or wore that shade of lipstick, I could be beautiful, too. I think that trying to be beautiful is not just vanity, it’s a celebration of existence. We are fluffing up our feathers against the cold of life, we are shining as brightly as we can while we can. I love seeing people at Mother’s cocktail parties, or the people I babysit for when they are dressed up to go out for an evening. They are not dressing to show off or attract; they are dressing up in order to make their existence gleam, as a sculptor will polish stone to make the surface shine. They must be thinking: Here I am. I’m alive, a unique reality in this world. And in this way we encourage others, because being human is usually such a difficult task, and we are so fragile and transient. Every human being who shines warms us, and makes us feel the glitter of being alive.

  But Liza Howard’s beauty is not generous in that way. It is demanding, obsessive, extreme. I think that absolute beauty is as terrible as absolute ugliness, just as great wealth is as destructive to a person’s soul as great poverty. Liza Howard is a person who has been gifted or cursed with an extravagance, and like any person who stands outside the bounds of normal society, she is an outcast, and deserves to be.

  And yet—and yet. I sometimes feel that with my sculpting I am also standing at the brink of a life that would be demanding, obsessive, and extreme. If I turn to art with the devotion I know it needs, will I be making myself an outcast? Is this why Mother worries that I might be an artist?

  Mother and I watched Liza Howard enter church this morning, and I leaned to Mother and said, “Why does she keep coming to church? She doesn’t belong here.”

  Mother said, “Oh, leave the poor woman alone. We’re all orphans in this world, all struggling to pretend we’ve found a home.”

  I’ll have to ask her sometime if she thinks that statement is true of the Bennetts. There they sit, the perfect Bennetts, except that dumpy Cynthia’s off at college, winning honors so she can be written up in the local paper. A great deal of my childhood was spent wishing that I had Mrs. Bennett for a mother instead of my own. Now I’m beginning to appreciate Mother and be grateful to her for the way she raised me, but for years I’ve longed for Mrs. Bennett. Mrs. Bennett is perfect; she’s just like someone from a magazine ad. She always looks serene, organized, gentle, and quiet. Mother, even when she’s sitting perfectly still, looks noisy. When you look at Mrs. Bennett, you can tell just by watching her sit that she doesn’t even own a pair of ripped underpants. I’ll bet her underwear is folded up neatly in her dresser drawer with a bag of fresh sachet tucked alongside. I’ll bet her shoes are lined up in her closet instead of tossed in, and the good ones are carefully tucked into a quilted shoe bag. I can imagine her bedside table: it is surely not cluttered, but neither is it dull. I’ll bet she has a clock, a lamp, a Wedgwood dish, and a leather-bound book on her bedside table. I can’t imagine her sitting the way my mother does, surrounded by books, magazines, letters, pillboxes, photographs, memo pads, pens, telephone books, tissue boxes, ashtrays and cigarettes and matches … Mother always has two or three liqueur glasses sitting on her nightstand with a residue of sticky liquid coating the bottom of the glass and filling the air with the smell of crème de cacao or Baileys Irish Cream. Mrs. Bennett undoubtedly takes her nightcap in the living room with her husband and rinses out the glass and puts it in the dishwasher before going to bed.

  Now I’m learning to appreciate Mother, but still the sight of Mrs. Bennett and her family brings out a yearning in my soul, like the sight of autumn leaves or spring flowers. Mrs. Bennett just seems like such a normal mother, and she and Mr. Bennett seem to be really a couple.

  I’m glad Mother and Dad are divorced. It happened a long time ago, and I think it was the right thing for both of them. When I sit very still, trying to summon up in my mind a picture of Mother and Daddy together, when they were still married, I find myself becoming nervous, because all I can remember are the times when they fought. Perhaps they always fought, were always fighting. In my memories, that’s how it was. It was like living in the middle of a penny arcade: potshots were flying everywhere, tilt lights were flashing, were ringing, it was all noise and speed and cheap danger, but never any prize. Now Dad’s remarried, and he’s nice to Irene, and they get along fine. Dad and Irene seem like a real couple. I can’t imagine why Dad and Mother ever married in the first place.

  Well, yes, I can, of course. They must have fallen in love. There’s no controlling love, and it’s almost a miracle when the proper people fall in love with each other.

  Just look at John Bennett and Sarah Stafford. He’s as handsome as a movie star, as charming as a prince, and she’s got the personality and beauty of a brick. What can he possibly see in her? And forget the looks, John Bennett is a good-time boy, and I don’t think Sarah Stafford knows how to spell the word “fun.” What he sees in her I’ll never know. They must have fallen madly in love, I can’t imagine what else could have happened.

  At least he is officially engaged at last. He’s twenty-three, five years older than I am, but I’ve had a crush on him all my life. Every time I saw him at church or just walking down the street, I used to get hot all over. My knees went weak, I’d grin like a lunatic, and invariably do something gawky, simply because he was there. Well, I suppose half the girls in this town have been lurking around secretly hoping that the miracle would happen and gorgeous John Bennett would suddenly see one of us and fall in love. It’s funny, now, though, because John Bennett doesn’t seem very attractive to me anymore. He seems kind of slight. I think this must be because I know Michael now, and anyone compared with Michael seems pale, vague, and boring.

  Still, I envy the Bennetts; I envy them, and the Wilsons, and the Moyers—all those people who live here, who have found or made a home. They’re settled. They have ended up in this town; I was only begun here. I feel a part of Londonton, yet I know I must leave. It is as if Londonton were a spinning rock, more faceted than a prism, and each facet an individual; together we make a whole. I must hew my shape, my particular self, from the massive refuge of this town—but how? How will I transplant myself? I’ll probably have to teach art in a publi
c school to support myself. It is almost certain that I won’t be able to return to Londonton for good. Do all the young people of a town leave it with the speedy free-falling ease of pebbles in a rockslide? It is an amazing thing to think of, how we are all spinning helplessly through the space of life.

  Spinning. This morning I cannot keep the idea of motion from my mind. My head is full of spinning globes, and I wish I were at the studio at school because I can almost see what kind of sculpture I would produce if I could get my hands on clay. Several smooth globes protruding at various spaces from a rough rock—I can see it in my mind. What a trick it would be to capture such self-assured motion in a static form!

  In some ways I wish I hadn’t come home. If I were at college, I could go to the studio right now … But if I hadn’t come home, I would not have this idea in my mind.

  It was last night that brought me this idea.

  It was after midnight, and Mother was asleep. I had put on my old fuzzy pajamas which I’ve worn since I was fourteen. They’re too short in the arms and legs now and would never do for college, but it was nice finding them here at home. Wearing them made me feel childlike. I opened the window to let the cool night air in, and lay snuggled under my comforter, waiting to go to sleep. Instead, I hallucinated.

  When I was a little girl, I used to be both terrified and exhilarated by summer nights. My parents would leave the windows open, and kiss my forehead, and go far away downstairs, leaving me at the mercy of the summer creatures who urgently whispered their secrets to me through the open window. I would clutch my bed for fear that otherwise I would float right up and out the window into the blinking night—they wanted me to come, the crickets, birds, bats, and ghosts. For I was just as much a part of them as I was a part of the daylight human world, and they were no more frightening and mysterious than my parents and the human world they moved in. They wanted me, they needed me, they called to me. “Come, come come come,” or “See, see see see.”

  Sometimes if I got up the courage, I’d jump out of bed, race over to the window and slam it down, shutting out the night noises. Then I’d fall asleep, although Mother would always make a fuss the next morning: why had I shut the window, did I want to suffocate? I could never explain. Other times I would burrow under my pillow and cling tightly to my bed until at last the sounds ebbed away and I slept.

  All those feelings returned to me last night, perhaps because I was back home after an absence, perhaps because I was in my childhood pajamas, perhaps because the window was open—I don’t know. I lay there, prepared to fall asleep, and instead I was in a flash wide awake, keenly aware of myself, my bed, the open window, the black October night air, which was more chilling and silent than the air of summer. Then began that sinking feeling in my stomach, a lightness in all my limbs, as if I were being lifted up in a current of air. And all at once, without warning, while I was still gripping the sheets of the bed, I was also slipping with marvelous ease out the opened window.

  Once outside, the night brightened and I could see everything clearly, although the mums which leaned against the house beneath my window were drained of color. Everything was a shade of radiant gray. I had no control at all over the speed or direction in which I floated, so I lay passively, breathing quietly, while beneath me the house and its familiar boundaries slid away. I was flying, or floating, effortlessly around the curve of the world. The yards and rooftops of the neighbors passed beneath me, and I lost all fear. I was overwhelmed with love and something close to pity to see the way we humans have tried to subdue the wild world with lines. As I looked down at Londonton, I could see so many right angles in our structures, posed against the sweeping curves of the natural world: houses, churches, intersecting roads, all in such careful order, guarded, gilded with right angles and bright trim, as if our points and apexes could defend us by puncturing the spherical truths of nature that persist in descending on our lives with the regularity of rain.

  At the edge of town, I saw beckoning the silver and blue flash of light advertising the Blue Moon Dance Hall. I longed to reach down and touch it, bright bauble that it is, but the moment I moved my arm I found myself propelled with even greater speed up and off into the night.

  The world spun one way, I spun the other. Wind rushed by me, murmuring, gushing, until I felt like a scarf rippling out. The earth spun steadily past me. I could see grass flowing into mountains, mountains melting into oceans, oceans rising to sand beaches, marshland climbing into pastures, and all that land dappled with angular shapes built by humans—their towns and cities.

  At last I rose, or fell, up even higher, so that I saw only green and blue, glittering light and black, jungle and glacier alternating as the world whirled relentlessly by, a majestic merry-go-round.

  This was far enough. I did not want to go any farther, to see any more, to know any more profoundly. I grabbed my pillow and put it over my head and bit into it as I had when I was a child trying to stop nightmares. I did not want the Dreadful Thing to happen; I did not want to run into God.

  After a while, when I was sure I had settled back down safely in my own bed, I took the pillow off my head, turned on the light, looked around the room. Then I got out of bed and shut the window. I didn’t want God coming into my room, and I didn’t want to hallucinate myself out the window again.

  I think people go to church for many reasons, but one of the main ones surely must be that we don’t want God to come too close—who really wants that? Not me. It’s frightening to think of. It’s a much more bearable arrangement for us to meet Him regularly in one accordant spot, the church, and at one time, Sunday mornings. Mother says she enjoys church because it’s the one place she feels she can really feel His presence. I can’t wait till I’m older and calmer and can feel the way she does. I get tired of shutting Him out of rooms. I’m aware of His presence everywhere. If I even think of doing something wrong, or if I’ve done something bad or bitchy, well of course He’s always there, like a looming shadow. But I don’t mind that as much as I mind His appearance during the good times—when I’m driving my car down the highway, singing along to the car radio, or racing around in the bathroom getting ready for a date. Suddenly there will be a brightness in my chest and in the room or car, as if someone flashed on a light, and the common stuff of life seems suddenly precious, miraculous. I want to stop the car and kiss the yellow dividing lines on the highway, I want to touch the square tiles on the bathroom walls as if they were precious gold. Then I can scarcely move for gratitude, and amazement that out of the black empty void these things were created: my warm flesh, cold white tiles, delineated roadways you can trust to go where they’ve gone before. Sometimes I’m glad for this appearance, and I say, Thanks God, I love it all. But sometimes it’s frightening. Once or twice when I’ve been driving, I’ve gotten so high just thinking about it all that before I know it, I’m going seventy-five miles an hour. That’s great; what will I say when I wreck the car someday: sorry, God got in the car?

  I can’t talk to most people about this. It embarrasses most people to talk about God. I can talk to Michael about God. I can talk with Michael about God, about my work, about my hallucinations, about my art. If I told him about last night and my vision, he would not laugh at me. He would put his arms around me and pull me close to him while I talked. He takes me seriously, and takes care with his answers. He would understand that it is this sort of crazy vision that I need to have now and then in my life if I’m ever going to be a good artist. It’s the sort of thing that I can’t help happening to me, that I want to happen to me, because it opens up new worlds for me to work from. But I also need what Michael gives me: that special sense of being grounded in the earthly present. I could do so much, roam so far artistically, if I knew he was physically there for me to come home to, to bind me to the real.

  I am in love with him. I need him. I want to be with him.

  But how does Michael feel? He hasn’t called or written me these past six weeks. Maybe he’s forgotten
me. Surely not, surely not forgotten—But maybe he doesn’t feel the same way. Even if I do manage to find him today, shall I tell him how I feel—that I love him? Will that embarrass him, frighten him away? Oh, God, if only I had the courage to shape my life as willfully as I shape clay.

  Oh, God, where are You in all this? Are You watching? Do You care? Are You responsible for the way it is between Michael and me? Have You got a message for me here, anywhere? What shall I do?

  Peter Taylor

  The service was almost over, and Peter Taylor was not satisfied. He did not feel it had been a successful morning. Something was in the air.

  There were Sundays when, during a sermon, he could feel the individual attention of each and every person focused so intently on his words that their combined concentration became almost a tangible thing. He often felt this—that he could stretch out his hand with a swift sure move and capture it, then hold it out as a gift to God: the fluttering and wary intelligence of these believers.

  Once, when he had been speaking on the Trinity, he had announced that for him Jesus Christ was as real and actively present in his everyday life as his car or house or family. The congregation as one had been shocked at these words, and their usual colorful quietness had gone white, tense, and electric. He had had one awesome moment of feeling at the center of their fierce and hopeful regard before someone sneezed, someone else shuffled, and the tone of the room dropped back to normal. And of course almost immediately some of the more conservative members of the group began to shift uncomfortably on their pews, obviously anxious lest Peter lapse into some sort of unseemly evangelical spiel.