by Neta Jackson
I took in the room at a glance—was everyone here tonight? Yo-Yo camped on a floor cushion per usual . . . Adele overflowed a straight-backed chair from the dining room, her arms crossed as if saying, Maybe I’m here, maybe I’m not . . . Hoshi and Nony, our two “internationals,” sat on the couch on either side of Stu . . . Florida . . . Ruth . . . Delores . . . Edesa . . . hmm. Only eleven. Someone was missing.
“But before we begin our praise and prayer,” Avis continued, “we promised last time to answer Yo-Yo’s question about baptism. I think it was, ‘What’s blood got to do with it?’ ” That got a laugh. Even Avis grinned.
“Yeah.” Yo-Yo nodded her spiky hair. “What Florida said about washing in blood. I mean, that is so weird.”
“It’s a good question, and I’m glad you asked.” Avis began with the Old Testament concept of a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of the people. “Sin separates us from God and leads to death,” she explained. “The blood sacrifice of an unblemished lamb was God’s temporary provision, a substitution, making a way for His people to be reconciled with God. Yet it was only temporary. All along He planned to send His Son to be that perfect sacrifice, to take our penalty for sin on His own body. That is what Jesus’ death on the cross was all about—taking the punishment for our sin, so that we can be reconciled with God. He spilled his blood, He died a cruel death—and then God raised Him from the dead!”
Yo-Yo’s brow wrinkled. “What’s that got to do with dunkin’ people in the water—that baptism thing?”
I wasn’t the only one who smiled. Oh God, I love Yo-Yo—I really do. She didn’t let any of us get away with platitudes or pat answers. In fact, her questions made me think. Did I really understand all the truths I took for granted about my faith?
“Jesus died and was buried in the earth; then God raised Him up to new life. That’s what we celebrate in baptism. When we go under the water—like being buried—we show that we have died to our old self, pro-claiming that our sins are washed away by the blood of Jesus.When we come up out of the water—like Christ’s resurrection—we are proclaiming that we have a new life . . . eternal life.”
“I don’t get it.We still die. People dyin’ all over the place.”
“Yes. This I want to know too.” Hoshi leaned for-ward with sudden interest.
Avis’s voice was passionate. “Yes, these bodies will die. But our real selves, our souls, will live forever.”
“With a new body, thank ya, Jesus!” Florida put in. “Tired of this ol’ thang. Mm-hm . . .” She began to hum, then broke out in a song. “Gonna put on my dancin’ shoes . . . down by the riverside . . .”
Adele added her full contralto, then the rest of us joined in—“Down by the riverside!”—and for a few minutes the living room was rocking.
When Florida and Adele settled down once more, Yo-Yo spoke up. “Got one more question. What if you don’t get baptized? I mean, what if some terrorist blew up this house right this minute? What about us who ain’t baptized?”
Avis’s voice was gentle. “It’s not baptism that saves us, Yo-Yo. The thief on the cross who acknowledged Jesus as the Son of God was told, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ Baptism is a matter of obeying the Word of God, which says, ‘Believe and be baptized.’ Even Jesus was baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist, as a testimony, uh . . . a public demonstration of his faith.”
“Huh.” Yo-Yo nodded, her forehead still wrinkled. She had no more questions.
I wanted to ask, “So, do you want to be baptized?” But I caught myself. Don’t keep rushing ahead of the Holy Spirit, Jodi.
Avis shut her Bible. “All right? Why don’t we begin with some praise to the Lamb of God, our Savior.” And true to form, she simply began to murmur words of simple praise, inviting others to join with her.
The praise got pretty loud with Adele back in the group, her voice carrying us along even when others had paused to think or pray silently or just take a breath. Yet I still heard the doorbell . . . ding-dong. The front door.
I looked up—and saw Hoshi’s almond eyes fly open, and her face tighten with fear. Several others too, opened their eyes and looked around uncertainly—memories of that Yada Yada prayer meeting last September suddenly aroused, when a knife-wielding burglar had been innocently announced by that same ding-dong. I heard Avis say, “Sisters, God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and a sound mind. Let Jodi take care of it . . .” And she continued to pray.
Let Jodi take care of it . . . great. At least we kept the door locked now during meetings. I headed for the front door and was relieved to see Denny coming down the hall in his slippers—he’d heard the doorbell too. He peeked through the peephole that allowed us to see someone standing on the front porch . . . and grinned at me.
“Just Chanda,” he whispered, giving me a peck on the cheek before disappearing.
I unlocked the door and pulled it open. “ ’Bout time you lettin’ me in!” Chanda protested, darting into our entry as she waved a taxi away. “It be only t’ree degrees out dere!” She was grinning as she peeled off her winter jacket and tossed it on the coat tree. “All de sistahs here? Ooo girl, ’cause I gots some hot news.”
A taxi? That wasn’t like Chanda, who lived close to the bone on her earnings cleaning houses on the North Shore. Guilt nibbled at the edges of my mind—should we have picked her up? But she didn’t call or anything . . .
Chanda made a beeline for the living room. Avis was wrapping up the praise time with a closing prayer, and Chanda danced on her feet, hardly able to wait for the “amen.” As the Yada Yada sisters lifted their heads, she blurted out, “I won! I won big!” And she jiggled her feet and turned around in a little victory dance.
All of us just stared at her. Finally, practical Ruth snorted. “Won what, Chanda George?”
Chanda stopped bouncing, but her grin threatened to knock off both ears. “De lottery—dat’s wot! Don’t you all be watchin’ de news ever’ night? No takers for de big pot, come now weeks and weeks. It be growin’ an’ growin,’ jess waitin’ for dat lucky number—till today.” She thrust up her arms, holding her fingers in a victory salute like a politician on election night. “Hal-le-lu-jah!”
I could tell others in the group were having a hard time believing her. I wanted to ask, but it was Yo-Yo who gave voice to our collective thought. “Okay. How much did you win?”
Chanda wiggled her eyebrows. “Don’t know yet—dey gotta take out dey taxes an’ all dat stuff. But . . . it gonna be a lot o’ dem zeros!”
15
Could anything be worse than Chanda George actually winning the lottery? Which is exactly what I said to Denny after the last Yada Yada sister had left and we were shutting down the house for the night. “She’s not exactly responsible with the money she does have,” I fussed, “buying lottery tickets every week with money she can’t afford to spend.” I opened the back door long enough to push Willie Wonka out for his last pee and shut it quickly before my face froze solid. “I mean, I like Chanda—she’s got a good heart. I’ll be eternally grateful to her for the day she hauled all her cleaning supplies over here and cleaned house for me after my accident. But—aack! Now she’s going to think gambling is her ticket out of poverty.”
Denny opened his mouth to say something, but frantic scratching on the back door interrupted the conversation, and Willie Wonka scuttled in, giving us both reproachful looks as he held up first one paw, then the other. I knelt down and warmed up his pads one by one. “Poor Wonka. It’s tough being a dog.” I looked up at Denny. “You were gonna say?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know what to say. It’s mind-boggling! But admit it, Jodi, haven’t you ever played ‘what if ’? ‘If I had a million dollars, I’d . . .’ ”
I made a face at him. “Yeah, but that’s different. I haven’t spent hundreds of dollars—maybe thousands—trying to make that wish come true.”
“So, how did the Yada Yada sisters respond?” Denny locked the back door, turned off
the kitchen light, then headed through the house, turning off lights. I trailed behind him with Willie Wonka close on my heels like a four-legged caboose.
“Huh! Most of us didn’t know what to say either! I think she was a little offended that we didn’t go whooping and hollering for joy. Told us we were just jealous. What do you say to that? We’ve never really challenged her about playing the lottery. Avis once said something to me about ‘picking our battles’—guess that wasn’t at the top of her priorities. Maybe that was a mistake, though.”
“Maybe.” Denny started turning off lamps in the living room. “I don’t like the lottery either. It preys on poor people.Yet if someone is gonna win the lottery, who needs it more than Chanda?” He reached for the last light. “She just better get a good law—”
“Wait a sec.” I snatched up a piece of paper from our seen-better-days coffee table. “Don’t want to lose Becky Wallace’s letter. Stu suggested another visit to the prison—she wants to go next time, so it depends on how soon she hears if Becky put her on the approved visitors list. Maybe the second Saturday in February.”
Denny threw up his hands. “Good grief, Jodi! If it’s not one thing, it’s another. You Yadas keep my life busier than working two jobs!” He snapped off the light, leaving us in a chilly darkness, warmed only by faint street-light filtering in through the curtains.
“Huh! Did I say anything about you? I can drive. You don’t have to go.” I sure wasn’t going to admit that I’d been on the verge of asking him.
“Really?” His voice trailed after me as I clomped down the hall toward our bedroom. “That’d be great. Because I really can’t go the next few Saturdays, even if I wanted to—I’ve got two games scheduled.” His voice took on a tender note. “You up for that long a drive? It’s been six months now . . .”
I didn’t know. I hadn’t planned on driving down-state till he started fussing. I drove all over the city now, but I still hadn’t done a road trip since the accident. I didn’t want to be mad at Denny, though. Usually he was a trooper when it came to Yada Yada fallout—look at all the work he and the kids had done to move Stu, not to mention a zillion other bumps that had turned our life inside out since I’d first met these women at that conference.
I turned suddenly at our bedroom door, blocking his entry. “Okay, this is the deal.” I dropped my voice to a whisper, given that both Amanda’s and Josh’s bedroom doors were mere feet away. “All Yada Yada talk, persons, and problems prohibited beyond this point. Only one man and one woman allowed. We could even try kicking out the dog.”
By this time he was chuckling.Without another word he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me inside the door, shutting it right in Willie Wonka’s face.
THE TEMPERATURE HIT SEVEN below zero the next day, and it warmed up just enough on Tuesday to dump nearly three inches of snow on Chicago. So much for our mild winter. But even the weather took a backseat to the national and international news that week. The TV was on all day in the teachers’ lounge at school, and Denny and Josh parked themselves in front of the TV every evening at home. Everybody was following the reports from the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq and keeping an eye on the national election in Israel. On Tuesday night, even Amanda gave up the phone long enough to watch the president’s State of the Union address.
“Are we going to war with Iraq?” she asked, alarm pinching her pretty features.
“Looks like it,” Josh muttered. His face was dark. Unreadable.
I shared Amanda’s alarm. Real war? I’d been barely older than she was when the Vietnam War ended. Both my brothers had been drafted, but the war was over before they got out of boot camp. The world had been plenty rocky during my adult life—the Iran hostage crisis . . . the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . Desert Storm . . . the Oklahoma City bombing . . . and then 9/11—the day of terror. Just not all-out war—not with a son who was now eighteen.
Stu didn’t start her new job till the following week, so we heard her working upstairs a lot, getting her new apartment in shape. She came downstairs at least once a day to borrow stuff—a wrench to fix a leaky faucet, a plunger to unstop the toilet, vinegar for some recipe or other, and fabric softener for her laundry till she could get to the store.
“It’s not that I mind her borrowing stuff,” I told Denny as we loaded the dishwasher after the latest request for any extra hangers we had “just lying around.” “But what in the world did she do for vinegar and hangers when she didn’t live on top of us?”
Denny lined up the dirty plates in the rack. “She’s just lonely.”
Was he joking? No, he had that innocent look he got whenever he said something simple and obvious.
“Well, fine. I want to be friendly neighbors. We’ve simply seen more of Stu in one week than we saw our last neighbors in a year and a half! I mean, couldn’t we shoot for a happy medium?”
Denny snorted. “Has anything been a ‘happy medium’ in our life since you women started this Yada Yada thing?” He snapped my behind with a dishtowel and scuttled out of the kitchen before I could retaliate.
What he said lingered in the air as I poured soap in the dishwasher cups and set the dial to on. It was true. Nothing much had been a “happy medium” in the past nine months. Seemed like everything had been a big, sticky blend of trauma and deep joy. Funny mix. Whatever. One thing for sure—my New Year’s prayer for a few months of “dull and boring” must’ve taken a detour.
AVIS ASKED ME TO stop in her office after school on Friday to talk about counseling for Hakim. I’d been looking forward to getting home and claiming the tub for a nice, long soak—maybe even going out with Denny to a movie if he didn’t get home too late. But I dutifully presented myself in Avis’s office and collapsed in a padded chair till she got off the phone.
She replaced the receiver and lifted a questioning eyebrow. “Things okay in your classroom?”
I snickered. “Define okay. On Monday, LeTisha threw up all over Britny, and now Britny won’t sit next to her—or even close. Kaya and Jade are making some reading progress; hopefully they won’t have to repeat third grade. Hakim wadded up his classwork only three times—half of last week’s quota. And nobody burned down the school, even though a box of matches fell out of D’Angelo’s backpack when he pulled out his take-home folder.Not a book of paper matches, mind you, but a box full of kitchen matches.”
Avis frowned. “You should have reported the matches to the office, Jodi. We take any kind of physical threat very seriously.”
I sighed. “Okay, consider it reported.” Even as I spoke, I knew my response didn’t sound respectful. “I’m sorry, Avis. It’s just that if I reported every little thing that might be a problem, half my class would be in your office every week.”
To her credit, Avis didn’t push it. Instead, she turned to the issue of Hakim seeing the social worker. “I’m having a meeting with Hakim’s mother next week to explain why we think counseling would be a positive thing, and so she can meet Ms. Gray.” She eyed me closely. “Do you want to be in that meeting?”
“Are you giving me a choice?” I noted Avis’s slight shrug. “Um, methinks the question is more like, does Hakim’s mother want me in the meeting?”
This time I got a lopsided smile. “Probably not. Though in a situation like this, the teacher is usually present as well.”
I leaned forward. “Avis, face it. You’ve never had a situation like this before. And I think both she and I would be happy if you made an exception. I think every-one concerned could concentrate on what’s good for Hakim and not be distracted by the tension between his mother and me.”
She tented her fingers and nodded. I stood to go and then turned back. “About you and Peter coming to Sunday lunch . . .”
Her eyes narrowed warily. “Aren’t you rushing things a little?”
I grinned big. “Nope.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “How about a week from Sunday?”
BY THE TIME I got home from school, it was too late for that lo
ng soak. But at least it was Friday. And the last day of January. The school year was half over—that was something to be thankful for.
I peeled off my jersey wool jumper and replaced it with a pair of comfy jeans and a turtleneck. Ahhh. That felt better. Brushing my shoulder-length hair back into a short ponytail, I felt tempted to curl up with a book and a cup of hot tea in the living room recliner, but I knew I should probably figure out something for supper first. In the kitchen, I pulled open the freezer door and assessed the situation: a package of chicken thighs, left-over potatoes au gratin, and a skinned catfish Denny “caught” at Dominick’s on sale.None of it looked interest-ing; all of it looked like work—except the potatoes.What I wouldn’t give for big bucks to take the whole family out for dinner every Friday!
Chanda can—every day if she wants to.
Whoa.Where did that renegade thought come from? I certainly wasn’t jealous of Chanda—was I? Maybe Chanda’s winnings. It was just too easy; it didn’t seem fair. On one hand Denny was right; she could certainly use the money. But so much? It wasn’t fair. Denny and I played by all the rules—got married, then had kids, worked two jobs, paid off all our school loans, tithed to the church, paid our bills, didn’t waste our money on the lottery or foolish schemes—and yet we never really got ahead. The budget noose was just as tight today as twenty years ago.
I shut the freezer door with a whump and chided myself. Jodi Baxter, you’re pitiful. You have absolutely nothing to complain about! And you know good and well you wouldn’t change places with Chanda George for all the chump change in Chicago. I pulled out a hunk of cheddar cheese and looked at it with interest. Maybe I’d make something different for a change—baked cheese soufflé with mushroom sauce. Used to be one of the kids’ favorites.
With a renewed burst of energy that sent Willie Wonka scurrying out of the kitchen in self-defense, I started chopping cheese, onions, and bread cubes and whipped up the necessary eggs. By the time Josh and Amanda got home from school, red-nosed from the nippy walk from the bus, the soufflé was in the oven and sliced fresh mushrooms were sizzling in the frying pan. By the time Denny drove into the garage, I had the table set and was tossing up a nice green salad.