Dinah rested one small hand on Jory’s shoulder and pressed her face up next to Jory’s. She smelled like baby shampoo and graham crackers. Jory felt a small worm twist sweetly somewhere in her stomach. Dinah carefully put her mouth on Jory’s and Jory pressed down a little, turning her head slowly from side to side.
“See, that’s how they do it on TV.” Jory smiled and pushed her bangs back. “Doesn’t your mom ever kiss you like that?”
“No. Jory, I want some Quik.”
“Doesn’t she kiss your dad like that? I bet they do when you’re asleep.”
“Why can’t Pinky come in?”
“Because he pees all over everything, that’s why. C’mon, after your Quik you’re supposed to take a nap.”
Jory opened the door a little and peeked in to see if Dinah was really asleep or only pretending. She could hear the clock’s soft tick and Dinah sighing a tiny bit every once in a while. She took off her Keds and padded quietly over the thick carpet.
In the Hewetts’ bedroom the shades were down; only amber-colored light filtered through and lay in slanted bands across the floor. The bed was huge and covered by a shiny deep purple bedspread. Jory sat down on the edge of it and felt the smoothness under her bare legs. She ran her hand along the satiny bedspread and then over the knobs of the dresser beside it. In the top drawer were panties and bras and complicated-looking garter belts. Jory pinched the rubber stocking nibs in and out of their metal clips. Mrs. H had day-of-the-week panties exactly like hers! Saturday stitched in red on black nylon—obviously the most sinful day. Her Monday and Tuesday panties had faint stains in the crotch, though. Not blood, which Jory knew about in theory, but something else. She glanced back at the bedroom door and then quickly pulled her tank top off over her head. She tried on each bra in turn. The black lace one that had no straps at all but still stayed up, and the shiny red bra that had rubbery push-up pads that snapped in and out. She examined herself in the round vanity mirror. Her new nipples seemed very small and pale peeking out of the dark blue lace. She turned to the side to see. The mirror was low and she couldn’t see her head at all, only the bra and the bare skin below. She touched one of her nipples for a second and watched it pinch together at the tip. An internal string of some sort tugged tight between her nipple and her navel and Jory quickly unhooked the bra and crammed her tank top back on. She folded the bras back into the drawer, skipping entirely over the slips and nylons, with only a quick glance at the Summer’s Eve boxes and can of Gentle Spring Hygiene Spray.
The bottom two drawers evidently belonged to the detective. Boring black and brown socks in neat rolls, white jockey shorts (gross and huge!), and tons of pitted-out undershirts. And under the undershirts were magazines. Jory sat down on the floor and held one in her lap. She turned each page, a weight settling inside her that was heavy and fluttery at the same time. Miss February cupped her own impossible breasts as if testing them for ripeness. Some of the women did this to their bottoms or the inside of their thighs as well. Miss August appeared to be in pain or possibly praying. A tiny cartoon woman wearing only gloves winked as she rode a rocketlike lipstick toward a long-tongued moon.
After closely inspecting all of them, Jory felt like the time she’d gone swimming in her cousins’ pool with an ear infection. Her head and chest were tight and buzzing and she had a strong desire to run her fingertips over and into the pictures—the women were so smooth and swollen, and oddly more real than anything she had ever seen. Women like this actually lived somewhere and knew that men were turning the pages slowly and then faster to look and look and look at them. They wanted men to be looking at them. Didn’t they? Jory stood up and began shakily stuffing the magazines back into the drawer. She couldn’t remember what order they had been in, which month had been on top. It probably didn’t matter. Within seconds, she had refolded the undershirts and tried to smooth away any footprints she might have left in the carpet, then closed the bedroom door with a soft click.
Virgil Vail stood on the platform playing “Fill My Cup, Lord” on his trumpet while the elders passed the collection plates from row to row. Rhonda Russell snickered and nudged Jory, showing how she was missing two front teeth on top, even though she was nearly fourteen. The dentist said it was just too bad and a fluke, but Jory thought that, even without her front teeth, her best friend possessed the allure of a gypsy. She had slanted cat eyes and black bangs that hung down to her eyelashes and knew all the lyrics to “Cherry Hill Park” and everything else that was necessary to know. Everything that Jory had no thought of knowing. Rhonda had even gotten Andre, of Andre’s Hair Salon, to pierce her ears. Jory was filled with unbelievable envy. Jory’s family was so strange, and Rhonda’s whole life was so cool. Even Rhonda’s parents were cool. Even though her father was a Christian music minister, he let Rhonda and her sisters watch TV and drink Coke and straighten their hair. A few times Rhonda’s mom had even driven Rhonda and Jory to Super Thrift, where they had spent the better part of several afternoons deeply ensconced behind the makeup counter, carefully testing all the lipsticks for just the proper shade of frostiness. Jory had swiveled the beautiful pinky-white crayons up and down, inhaling their diaper rash ointment smell and picturing a tube’s gold chunkiness sliding oh so neatly into her imaginary fringed leather purse.
As Virgil Vail and his trumpet stepped down from the platform, Brother Elmore stood up from his chair and moved briskly toward the pulpit. “Tonight we have a special treat,” he said, rubbing his hands and grinning broadly at the Wednesday night crowd. “Our church’s very own science scholar, Dr. Oren Quanbeck, is going to speak to us. You all know who he is, so I don’t even have to offer up his ten-page résumé.” Brother Elmore grinned again.
Rhonda turned to Jory and widened her cat eyes. “It’s your dad,” she whispered.
“I know,” said Jory. She squinched her toes together inside her shoes.
“His distinguished record speaks for itself,” Brother Elmore continued. “And even if we don’t all understand everything he says”—Brother Elmore paused to let a murmur of laughter run through the congregation—“we know we will be the better for hearing it. So, as it says in Matthew 11:15, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Brother Elmore smiled once more and stepped away from the pulpit.
Jory stared fixedly at the wooden floor beneath the pew. She refused to lift her eyes toward the front of the church, where her father, in his good brown sports jacket and striped tie, was shuffling some three-by-five-inch note cards against the wooden top of the pulpit. She had heard him practicing this speech down in the bomb shelter earlier that afternoon and she knew exactly how it went. Even so, it gave her a strange feeling in her stomach to listen to that voice and those words coming out of the pulpit microphone. It seemed as if he were speaking into her ear alone, but through an enormous tunnel of some kind that filled all the available space in the church with his particular and achingly familiar voice. She peeped out from under her lids at the people sitting in the pews close by. They were all staring straight ahead, intent—listening to her father. Jory felt naked. And nervous. And fearfully, fearfully proud. The three things her father always made her feel.
Her father set his note cards down and paused for a moment. “There wasn’t a lot of excitement on my father’s farm in Kansas,” he said, “just mainly work, but I found that in the summer evenings I could go into my mother’s vegetable garden and lie down and look up at the stars, and it was a wonderland. It was also, I guess,” her father continued, “a form of escapism. I was captivated by the notions of infinite space, of how the planets moved and what the stars were made of. From the age of six or seven I can remember wondering about these things.” Jory knew the part that was coming next; she could feel herself anticipating the words as if she had made them up herself. How by the age of twelve her father had made a radio out of chicken wire and an old vacuum tube, and at fourteen he had built his own telescope. It was then, he said, that
he’d had his first glimpse of the real magnitude and mystery of the heavens and man’s tiny, ridiculous place in it.
It was that same year that his mother became ill, very ill. The doctors in town said tuberculosis, then rheumatic fever. His mother grew so thin he could see her ribs beneath her dress. She lay in bed, her breath only the smallest movement of the bedcovers. He did his chores and then tried to learn how to cook so his father would have something to eat when he came in from the cornfields. On Palm Sunday, his mother asked his father to bring the elders to their house after church. He could still remember the sight of the eight men in black suits and dusty farmers’ hats walking single file up their dirt driveway. He peeked in from the doorway as the men took their places around his mother’s bedside and prayed, the mingled rise and fall of their voices sounding like the hum of his father’s bee boxes in springtime. As they prayed, one of the men brought a small brown bottle of oil out of his pocket and placed several drops of it on his mother’s forehead, rubbing it in with his callused thumb. They moved closer to his mother then, leaning across the bed to each place their two hands on some part of her body. As he watched, he felt a sudden, hot jolt run through his throat and down his legs—he could remember the feeling still—as if he’d been plugged into a socket, as if it were his body they were touching instead of hers. Later that day, his mother sent him out to the barn to find his father, who had been pretending to trim some of the horses’ hooves while the elders were there. When they came inside, she was sitting up in bed, her hair combed and braided, and she told his father that she wanted some peach cobbler. Made with the sweet white Elbertas from the back end of the orchard. She smiled. He and his father spent the rest of the evening picking peaches in the dark.
“I knew that my mother had been healed, and that it was a miracle,” he was saying now over the congregation. He cleared his throat and readjusted his reading glasses, pushing them farther up onto the bridge of his nose.
“I am a scientist now myself,” he said, “and perhaps ironically, one of the very things that continues to convince me of the existence of God is the so-called ‘inexplicable.’ Consider the essential mystery of the birth of the cosmos. The recipe that was required for its creation is mind-boggling in both its complexity and precision.” Jory’s father spread out his hands as if to indicate the immense difficulty of the explanation he was about to give. “For example, the strength of the attractive nuclear forces in our universe is so peculiarly precise that, were it even slightly different, hydrogen would be a rare element, stars like the sun could not exist, and the emergence of life would have been impossible. Had the nuclear forces been weaker, on the other hand, hydrogen would not burn and there would be no heavy elements, and again, we would not have a universe hospitable to creatures like us. The universe, moreover, is constructed on such a scale that stars in a typical galaxy are twenty million million miles apart; were the distances between stars just two million million miles, life could not have survived on our planet.”
Jory cringed slightly at the mention of all these million-millions. It reminded her of math class and she was worried that other people were being reminded too. Sermons should have only very simple equations with small numbers in them. People couldn’t remember the huge sums. Grace had told her this.
“Consider too the careful positioning of our very own earth,” her father was saying, oblivious to Jory’s or anyone else’s mathematical dismay. “In order for any planet to produce life—complex life, such as ours did—it has to lie within what we astronomers euphemistically call the ‘Goldilocks Zone’: a distance from its star that is not too hot, not too cold, but just right. It is only in this zone that a planet would be close enough to the star to have liquid water, yet not so close that its oceans would boil away, and not so far that its oceans would freeze.
“But how exactly did all this careful exactness and minute precision come about? you may ask. How did this perfect recipe for creation occur? Was the universe with its life-giving laws and perfectly spaced galaxies a marvelous fluke, a random accident, a precipitous bit of happenstance?” Jory’s father leaned forward. “I am convinced that the enormous complexity of the cosmos together with the marvelous harmony of reality bear witness to the plausibility of a creator. Can I prove this theory? No. Can I prove the opposite? No. Nor can any other scientist. For all of science’s brave claims to the contrary, the birth of the universe still remains a mystery—an unexplainable miracle. Much like the healing of a physical body. Or the splendor of the night sky above a Kansas farm. Or an old man and a young boy picking peaches in the dark.”
Jory’s father stood holding the wooden sides of the lectern. “Many Christians seem to fear that the end result of scientific inquiry is an inevitable loss of faith. I find this notion somewhat confusing since my lifelong study has only reaffirmed my belief that a mighty hand is at work in the wonders of the world. We must remember”—Jory’s father’s voice seemed to be shaking its finger slightly—“the ability to question and search for answers is a God-given one. We were made by Him to think and to wonder and, yes, sometimes even to doubt. But the natural world is always there as a reminder of the glory and majesty and the mystery of its Maker. Even Job on his ash heap gazed around him and wondered where the light came from and how the hail was formed. We should do no less. May God bless you,” her father said. “And keep you.” He turned from the pulpit and walked back to the empty chair behind him.
“Your dad’s so smart,” said Rhonda. She twirled a lank piece of black hair between her fingers. “Does he like peaches or what?”
Brother Elmore stood at the podium, smiling. “Thank you so much, Brother Quanbeck, for those truly inspiring words of wisdom.” He held up the night’s bulletin. “Now don’t forget,” he said. “After the service there will be a potluck in Franklin Hall to celebrate the Jewels’ return from Papua, New Guinea. They are only here on a short sabbatical, so I know you’ll all want to come and greet them—if not with a holy kiss, then at least a friendly handshake.”
Jory and Rhonda were waiting for Brent Sandoval to request “Sit Down, I Think I Love You” for Rhonda. They listened to Rhonda’s transistor radio clear till ten o’clock, but they couldn’t really tell because there were lots of L.’s, and even two L.R.’s, but none of them were from B.S. “I don’t like him anyway.” Rhonda was bent over in her nightgown, polishing her toenails. “He’s like half Indian or something.”
“Why doesn’t he go with Stormy Aguilar, then?”
“Maybe they’re from warring tribes or something.” Rhonda ran her tongue over her toothless spot and they screamed with laughter and ran out into the living room even though they had their shortie pajamas on.
“Girls. Really.” Rhonda’s mother glanced up mildly from the white nurse’s uniform she was hemming. “How’s your sister doing, Jory? Isn’t she in Puerto Rico now?”
“She’s in Mexico.” Jory sat down breathlessly in one of the Russells’ orange plastic chairs. “She’ll be back in a few weeks.”
“That’s right. Well, I hope she isn’t drinking the water.” Mrs. Russell tossed the white dress onto the seat of a rocking chair. “Oh, my,” she said, stretching her freckled arms above her head and bending from side to side until her back made a sudden popping sound. “You know, you wouldn’t catch any of my four heading off on a mission. Not unless it was to Bermuda and there were nothing but good-looking boys there.”
“Oh, Ma.” Rhonda gave her mother a look of disgust and then fell backward onto the couch.
Jory gazed around her. This was where she wanted to live. If only the Russells would agree, she could call her parents and tell them that this was where she would be staying from now on. She could sleep on their ratty orange couch and eat their tater tots and wear all of Rhonda’s clothes. The air here was filled with some kind of greasy warmness—like fried hamburger left overnight in a pan. The whole house was messy and sloppy and unfolded. You could eat cer
eal out of the box. There was cereal! And no one seemed to care one whit about particle physics or whether sanctification was a secondary act of grace or if lentils were the best-known source of protein and vitamin B.
Sometime later that night, Jory tried to tell Rhonda about the detective’s magazines, about how the naked women had practically emerged and sprung forth from the pictures, but Rhonda just peered at her sideways and said, “You are seriously a homo,” and went back to playing the bottom hand of “Heart and Soul” on their rickety old piano.
Jory bumped Grace’s ten-speed up into a slot in the bike rack in front of Super Thrift. She unhooked her beaded change purse from around the handlebars and counted the folded bills that were packed tightly inside. She zipped it up again and slipped the coin purse into the back pocket of her cutoffs. The automatic door whooshed open and she walked into the Listerine coolness of the store, heading straight for aisle C. She stopped in front of the display case. It was still there. The Budding Beauty by Maidenform in a 30AA. Lightly padded for extra shaping with crisscross straps for gentle support and elastic stretch cups to allow for change in the still-growing teen. The girl on the front of the box smiled tanly in her half slip and bra.
Jory held the box next to her stomach and floated toward the makeup and jewelry section. If the lipstick was still $3.99, she would definitely have enough left over for a bottle of Love’s Fresh Lemon Cologne. Anyway, Rhonda Russell wore Love’s Baby Soft Cologne, so it wouldn’t be like copying. What if she got some of that Sun In stuff you sprayed on your hair to make it blonder? Her mother would kill her—she said bleached hair was cheap with a capital C, for tramps with a capital T.
The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel Page 4