Her father was just her father, people had always called him Doctor, he had always gone to Harvard and discovered new moons and ridden his old black bike to teach each day and run around their backyard twenty times each night still wearing his work shoes. And her mother was just her mother who didn’t work and didn’t drive and didn’t go anywhere or talk to anyone except at church and at the library, where she went twice a week to check out as many books as they would allow her and to place orders for new ones they hadn’t had the foresight to order themselves. This was just the way it was, the way they were and had been and would be forever. Like Polaris, the polestar that always pointed north, so were the five of them together: her father and mother and Grace and then Jory and Frances. The Quanbecks. No matter where Jory went or how she turned or where she was standing in the world, there they still were, unmoving, as the rest of the stars and planets whizzed past under the watchful gaze of God’s bright eye.
“I see you Jory!” Frances’s face was smashed against the back screen door. She licked the metal screen and then made a face. “Yick. It tastes like burned pennies. Come in and do Spanish with us.”
Jory held very still and said nothing.
“Come on. Grace made Spanish milk and Spanish oatmeal and Spanish bread and we have Spanish money to buy them with.” Frances disappeared for a moment, and reappeared holding up a colored bill that she flattened against the screen. “See?”
“Go on, Jory. You can help your sister for once.” Esther Quanbeck rinsed her daughters’ white Keds off with the irrigation hose, squirting each one clean with a blast of water that made the shoes jump and flip across the yard. “Jory,” she said, a little louder this time, “for the love of Pete, go on.”
“I’m tired of being the Mexican heathen woman. I already got baptized and bought groceries. Twice.”
Her mother straightened up. “Jory,” she said, “if you felt seriously about something, Grace would indulge you. Besides, you’re not doing anything important anyway.” Her mother turned and went back to the shoes, pinning them down with her bare long-nailed toe as she sprayed.
Jory let the back door slam shut behind her. Inside the garage—what used to be the garage—was the raised platform of the bomb shelter’s ton-heavy door, an upright piano painted white that her mother had won at a church raffle for checking out the most missionary books, a large chalkboard, and several old-style wooden school desks, their metal legs all welded together in a row. Resting against the wall and strewn across the cement floor were Grace’s ten-speed bike, a pogo stick, three Hula-Hoops, a box of dress-up clothes, an old baby stroller, a hamster cage with Jory’s pet rat Ratfink inside, and several messy stacks of Sky and Planet, Christianity Today, and Der Spiegel. Frances was already seated in one of the school desks. “Sit by me,” Frances whispered, as if they really were in school, patting the wooden lid of the desk behind her. Jory slid into the desk and glared toward the front wall, where Grace was writing “el pan” in her careful up-and-down printing on the blackboard. With her back to them, Grace seemed like a tall dark-haired stranger—someone both regal and authoritative—not like anyone related to Jory at all.
Unlike Grace’s coffee-colored crop of hair, Jory’s was a golden blond, lighter on top and darker underneath. “Like winter wheat waving,” her mother had once said. Jory cherished this phrase since it was one of the few favorable things her mother had ever said about Jory’s appearance. Her eyes were not a deep brown like her mother’s. Frances had inherited those. Jory’s were the same mild sea blue as her father’s, while seventeen-year-old Grace seemed to have received an eye color from some far-distant relative—an uncle or cousin with eyes the color of steely gray marbles that seemed capable of sending out X-rays or purest radiation.
Grace turned and beamed at both of them. “Buen día y recepción a la sala de clase española,” she said. “Now, who can tell me what this is?” Grace held up the empty milk carton their mother had rinsed out and saved from the garbage for this very purpose. “¿Cuál es éste?”
Frances waved her hand wildly. “Two percent!” she shrieked.
Grace’s smile wavered only slightly. “Jory, how about you? ¿Qué es?”
“La leche,” Jory muttered, slumping low in her seat.
“Excellente.” Grace placed the cardboard carton onto Jory’s desk. It wobbled emptily for a second and then tipped over. Before she could right it, a thin trickle of whitish liquid ran across Jory’s desk and onto the floor. “Oh, shoot,” said Grace.
“No problemo,” said Jory, scrubbing at the wetness with her bare foot.
“Hey, that was Spanish,” said Frances, turning around to view the drippage.
Grace smiled. “Pretty close, Frances. And because you knew that, you get to go and get the paper towels.”
“Good grief—I’m not a complete moron, you know.” Frances stood up and marched inside.
Grace began to line up the other cans and cartons and boxes of foodstuffs on their card table. The week before, Grace had borrowed their father’s label maker and had carefully printed out a Spanish label for every box of spaghetti and powdered milk and can of chili and Campbell’s soup and Chicken of the Sea tuna. Even the pieces of fruit their mother had let Grace “borrow” were labeled with their new Spanish names. Each manzanita and limón had a sticky red label carefully applied to its skin. Jory picked up the can of Del Monte fruit cocktail. “What’s the word for marshmallow?”
Grace glanced up from her organizing. A tiny knot formed between her dark eyebrows. “How strange,” she said. “I’m not sure.” She stood still, thinking. “Maybe it’s la mechoca. Oh,” she said, after a second, “I don’t know it.”
Frances slammed the door between the laundry room and the garage. “Here,” she said, thrusting the roll of paper towels at Jory.
“You probably won’t need to know it anyway.” Jory wiped at the sticky spot on her desk. “It’s probably el marsh-a-mellow or something.”
“No. I’m sure there’s a word for it. There’s a word for everything.” Grace stood perfectly still, her hand resting on a can of stewed tomatoes. “I have to go look it up.” She turned and opened the kitchen door, letting it fall shut behind her.
“Where’d she go?” Frances plunked down onto the piano stool and began twirling herself around.
Jory said nothing. She gazed down at the can of fruit cocktail she had in her hand and then felt underneath the edge of its label with her fingernail. She peeled back the corner of the label. With one quick flick the can became nameless. Or nameless in Spanish anyway. Jory picked up another can.
“Grace is going to kill you,” said Frances, who had stopped her twirling to watch.
“Me vale mierda.” Jory pulled off the can’s label and tossed it onto the garage floor.
“I know what that means,” said Frances.
“Good for you, idiota,” said Jory. She wondered how long it would take Grace to notice that her hard work was being undermined—that her freakish obsession with becoming the world’s youngest evangelist was being sabotaged by a member of her own supposedly loyal camp.
Tonight the sky was covered by clouds, a long gray bank of them that spread thick and low against the Owyhees and seemed to weigh the air down so that when Jory breathed her head felt heavy as if she were balancing books on it, which of course she wasn’t. A Girl of the Limberlost was lying open on her lap to page forty-two, and she was sitting in her lawn chair in the front yard just like everyone else: her mother and father and Grace and Frances—they each had a lawn chair and a book. This is what all five of them did every night after dinner, except when it rained—then they sat indoors.
“Oh, my, will you look at that—just like ducks in a row—little to big.” Mrs. Reisenstein stood just outside their curb with Mr. Reisenstein, who was holding their ancient cocker spaniel, Penny, by a leash. They were both smiling.
Mr. Reisenstein sha
ded his eyes with one hand. “You Quanbecks sure are a reading bunch, aren’t you?” His grin widened expansively. “Must be something mighty interesting in all those books to keep you at it night after night.”
Jory didn’t need to look up to see her mother’s fierce, tight-lipped smile.
“Actually, Len and Patsy”—Grace pulled her sandaled feet out from under her and advanced with an enthusiastic spring toward their neighbors—“I’ve been reading a fascinating book called Your God Is Too Small, by J. B. Phillips. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
Grace called them Len and Patsy! Jory could not look up, she could not. She held her breath and stared unblinking at the toes of her tennis shoes.
“It attempts to answer some of the fundamental questions that people have raised over the centuries about Christ and our relationship to Him. Something I’m sure you, like I, have thought long and hard about.”
Jory dared to peek at Grace out of the corner of her eye. Grace’s head was tilted slightly to one side, and she smiled as she waited. The Reisensteins were still standing at the curb, although Mrs. Reisenstein now had her hand tightly around her husband’s upper arm.
“Well, we were just heading to Albertsons for some ice cream, actually.” Mr. Reisenstein cleared his throat. He gave Penny’s leash a hopeful jingle.
Jory’s father stood up and moved over next to Grace. “We’re glad you stopped by,” he said. He smiled his slow smile and then held his hand up in a wave as the Reisensteins walked quickly away, dragging their dog behind them.
“Really, Grace.” Their mother shook her head, and no one said anything for a minute or two.
Grace sat back down in her chair and pulled the hems of her pedal pushers carefully over her knees. “I felt compelled to witness.”
“That’s perfectly fine.” Their father moved his chair closer to Grace’s and sat down in it with a sigh. “That’s a wonderful impulse.”
“They’re Jewish, Oren.” Their mother closed her eyes and leaned back in her lawn chair.
“They’re German,” said their father. “Reisensteins . . . Rolling Stones.”
“Rolling Stones?” said Jory.
“They’re German-Jewish,” said their mother.
“What’s Jewish?” Frances glanced from one parent to the other. “What is it? You mean like Jesus-Jewish?”
“Sort of,” their mother said.
“Not just sort of,” said Grace, sitting up. “They’re Jewish exactly like Jesus. The Jews were God’s chosen people, Franny, and even though Jesus was one of them, the Jews chose not to accept his messiahship. They think that Jesus was an impostor.”
“You mean the Reisensteins are going to hell?” Frances’s eyes grew wide.
“Yes,” said Grace. “I’m afraid they are.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said their mother.
“Well,” said their father, “I don’t know about you girls, but all that talk about ice cream has made me hungry.” He tried smiling.
No one smiled back.
“Is an impostor like a magician?”
Jory could hear the Tribletts’ Pekingese from down the block beginning to bark at something. It barked over and over on a one-note scale at perfectly timed intervals until suddenly a door slammed and someone yelled, “Shut up, goddammit!” and then everything was quiet again. The Quanbecks all gazed down at their books.
Jory continued to sit very still, silently turning pages without looking at them until her mother asked if someone would please turn the porch light on before they all went completely blind.
That night, as Jory lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, she listened to the sound of her father pounding around the oval-shaped track he was slowly wearing into their backyard. Pound . . . pound . . . POUND. She could hear him coming closer, running toward her window, and then suddenly past, as he curved by the plum tree and around the irrigation ditch and on toward the swing set. Their backyard was a quarter of an acre wide, and her father ran twenty times around the whole thing each night after he got home from his teaching job at Northwestern Bible College.
Jory flopped over on her mattress trying to find a softer, more comfortable spot. For someone who viewed the body merely as a temporary shelter for the soul, her father seemed to care a great deal about keeping his in good shape, whereas her mother cared not one iota. While her father did his twenty laps around the backyard, her mother lay on the couch reading historical biographies of Queen Victoria and Eleanor Roosevelt and filching Hershey’s Kisses out from between the couch cushions (which is where she kept them to “soften”). Jory was only vaguely embarrassed by her father’s running—although she was grateful he waited until dark to engage in this activity—but lately nearly everything about her mother’s body filled Jory with a certain alarm. It was so frighteningly female, with its overabundant breasts and hips, and its thighs and calves and upper arms seemingly made of floppy doll rubber. And when her mother wore culottes or skorts, which she frequently did in the summer, Jory couldn’t help thinking that her mother’s knees and thighs resembled two Beluga whales threaded with undersea veins running tight and blue beneath their milky fat.
Jory was aware that it was only her own response that had shifted. Nothing about her mother was any different than it had ever been: her heart-shaped face with its dramatic widow’s peak and slightly pinched features that seemed to expect, if not invite, disappointment, her permanently chapped lips that lent her mouth a pinkish rosy tint and made her appear to be wearing lipstick even though she hardly ever was. The few times Jory had seen old photographs of her mother she had been shocked to discover a lithe and coquettish girl seated provocatively on the car hood of a ’49 Packard, her hair a mass of golden brown curls and her tightish pants rolled up above her knees. In another photo, this same slim girl was laughing as she stood on tiptoe in a boat being rowed by a grinning young man in a navy uniform. In these pictures, her mother appeared far more confident and charming than Jory currently was, or ever might be.
“That was before I met your father,” her mother had said, sighing and sliding the black-and-white photographs back into the album. “And before I joined the church.” Jory had also seen her parents’ wedding photos, though, and she knew that her mother still looked young and almost beautiful even then. It made Jory both angry and dismayed to think that her and her sisters’ introduction into the world had effected this transformation in their mother. But she knew it was so.
Her father was rounding the patio now, she could tell, running past the irrigation siphon and the clothesline, where their Keds still hung, strung up by their knotted laces. The sad, disheartening thing that seemed to have damaged or broken her mother appeared not to have touched her father at all. Jory supposed it was one of those mysterious, usually unspoken things that came with being a capital-W woman. The obliquely shaming filmstrips from sixth grade. The machines in public restrooms that dispensed tubelike objects for a quarter. The hot water bottles that hung like red rubber nooses from the showerhead. The blood and the pads and the tubes and the fetuses and uteruses and the embryos, all fat and sloppy and squishy and liquidy. All of it inside and unknown and fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. Her father and all other men remained blithely outside of these objects and events and acted as if this were by choice: laughing and joking and shooting guns and shoving each other around. Women’s stuff! Ha ha ha!
And yet, and yet, she also longed to be as beautiful and lovely as the teeny-footed geisha on her grandmother’s paper fan, or the coconut-shell-wearing girl on the Tahitian vanilla bottle. She wanted to have people (men and boys, in particular) be awestruck and speechless at the sight of her feminine beauty. She wanted to be powerful, but with a power she could control. She didn’t even know what that meant.
Her father was still running his circuit around the yard, his endless striding growing ever closer and then slowly away. She wondered, not for the fir
st time, what she would do without the sound of his rhythmic footfalls to drag her eyelids down, how she would ever be able to fall asleep without the accompaniment of his running to carry her safely there.
This morning, Jory had seen her sister’s breast. It was quite pointed and completely purposeful looking—as if something inside of it were working very hard to get out. Plus, there were the bumps—larger than gooseflesh and kind of blistery looking all the way around her sister’s red-pink nipple. Jory stood next to Grace’s bed and said the word again in her head. Nipple. Nipple. Nipple. It made her feel nauseated and thrilled at the same time.
“Mom said to bring you these,” Jory said, laying a pile of folded T-shirts on Grace’s bedspread and keeping her eyes down so that Grace wouldn’t think she’d been peeping at her. “Sorry I didn’t knock.”
“That’s all right.” Grace didn’t seem that embarrassed. She pulled her thick swimsuit straps up over each shoulder and smoothed down the slightly drooping pleated skirt that she had sewn onto the bottom of it. She did a half turn in front of Jory. “Does this look all right—I mean, does it look modest enough?” She peered dubiously down at her bottom half.
Jory thought the bathing suit looked like something a spinster aunt from the 1920s would wear. Or maybe a grandmother during the Great Depression, if she suddenly had a yen to go swimming. Jory wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that suit. “It looks fine,” she said.
The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel Page 2