The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  Jory picked up a pair of silver hoop earrings with tiny stars suspended from the center. She held them next to one ear and then the other, moving the display mirror so she could see. Her mother had said no pierced ears ever—it was in the church manual. Jory sighed and put the earrings back on the display counter and then turned and headed for the lipstick case. She would have to decide between Icicle Frost and Petal Pale. What a choice. She pulled one tube out of the display case and then the other. The goldy caps slid off with the most satisfying little suctioned pops. Twisting the waxy sticks up, she rubbed a tiny bit of each of the pointed tips onto her wrist. They both appeared sufficiently silvery—maybe Icicle Frost was a little bit more glossy, though. She felt a thrill run through her. At home she would put on her bra and a little bit of the lipstick and her white T-shirt with the lace inset and before her mother could say anything she would ride Grace’s bike over to Kurtz Park to see if Rhonda was there. Her head seemed to open like a window, and she walked as fast as she could toward the front of the store. A very small man with a blue short-sleeved shirt and large armpit stains suddenly stood in front of her. He took a step closer and squeezed her elbow. Hard.

  “Come on,” he said. Jory could think of nothing except the smell of Sen-Sen on his breath. The little man walked her and her bra box quickly down the garden supply aisle and toward the back of the store. Jory could feel a kind of fistlike burning in her chest. “What’s wrong? I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said. He walked her through a set of swinging doors and then suddenly they were inside a little room marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  “Have a seat,” he said and sat down himself at a desk and began writing something on a pink notepad. Jory sat on a metal chair across from another man, this one wearing a tie.

  “Give me that,” the tie man said. Jory glanced down in surprise at the box and handed it to him. He immediately wrenched open the top of the box and pulled out the folded bra. He rooted around in its creases for a minute, shook it once, and then dumped it onto the desk, where it lay, its small white cups pointing stiffly toward the ceiling. He grabbed the golden lipstick tube from her and plunked it down next to the bra.

  The man with the tie pointed a pen at her. “Stand up and empty your pockets.”

  Jory stood and started fishing around in the front of her shorts as though expecting to find something. “But I don’t have anything.” She shoved her hands into her back pockets. “Wait. I’ve got my change purse.” She held it out almost triumphantly.

  “How much money is in there? Never mind.” He grabbed the purse, unzipped it, and started making a pile of bills next to the bra. “Over thirty bucks. So what’d you need to steal earrings for if you got thirty bucks?” He leaned back in the swivel chair and twisted the cap on his pen back and forth expectantly.

  “What? What do you mean? I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t take them. I tried some on sort of, but I didn’t take them.” She thought she was starting to cry, but instead felt herself give a strange little laugh. “I’ve never taken anything in my life.” In desperation, she tried to force him to meet her eyes. “I swear. I haven’t.”

  “Where are they, down your shirt?”

  “Okay, Al.” The small man in the blue shirt turned around from the desk and his writing. “We’ll have to get one of the gals from up front in here for that.”

  “What? Oh, yeah. Well, get Janet or Velma or whoever.”

  The blue-shirted man pushed himself out of his metal desk chair and disappeared out the door.

  Jory stared at a poster, right over the tie man’s head, of a man throwing a Frisbee to a dog. Underneath the dog it read: A HEALTHY EMPLOYEE IS A HAPPY EMPLOYEE. A time clock thwacked loudly at the minute change. She could feel her heart beating in her throat like the time the dentist gave her too much Novocain.

  “Why not hand them over? They’re worth what—three, four bucks? So your parents will ground you and you won’t be welcome here anymore. Big deal.” He sat slowly forward in the squeaky leather chair and began digging a hole in the desktop with a pushpin. He paused in his digging and fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “You smoke?”

  “I don’t have them,” Jory whispered. “Please.” Her chest was pumping now like she’d just crested the hill to their house on her bike. “You’re completely wrong.” She said it louder.

  “I got one of these ear staples, see? This doctor my wife sent me to was some kind of thera-hypnotist or whatever. Said every time I get the urge to smoke I’m supposed to twist this little deely bobber here and think pleasant thoughts.” He lit up and inhaled deeply. “I’m still twisting.”

  The door opened and a fuzzy blond woman in an orange work smock stood suspiciously in the doorway. She glared at the tie man. “My till ain’t counted.”

  “Ed’ll stay at your register.”

  “I’m on break in ten.”

  “Alma, all you have to do is . . . you know, whatever.” The tie man shrugged helplessly and then coughed once and eased out of his chair. He pulled on the end of his tie and then punched Jory lightly on the shoulder on his way out the door. “You kids behave yourselves. Alma, you write up the report when you’re done. I’ve got markups.”

  The blond woman seemed slightly blurred, like someone had taken an eraser to her outer edges. She wore a silver ring on every finger, even her thumbs. “Honey.” She breathed audibly and crossed her arms. “I don’t want to do this, but you’re gonna have to take off all your things.”

  “No. NO. I didn’t do anything.” Jory could feel something flattening and then spinning in the back of her head, flattening and spinning. She was back in grade school on the crowded rushing playground listening to the other kids’ voices sounding sharp like the side of a penny and then flat like the face. “I mean, I’ve, I’ve got this skin disease. Like some kind of ringworm thing and”—her eyes darted wildly around the little room—“it’s getting worse. It’s completely contagious.”

  “I’m sorry, hon.” The woman lowered her faint cloud of hair and shook it back and forth slowly. “They told me I have to check everywhere. So if you just stand there, I’ll take a quick look-see. Okay?” She turned her smudgy eyes back up to meet Jory’s and reached a silvered hand toward the front of Jory’s blouse. Jory shrank back against the tie man’s desk. The blond woman frowned. “I know how you feel, doll, but it’s either me or some policeman.”

  Jory couldn’t seem to think; she kept watching the woman’s coral-colored lips puckering and pinching. Her lipstick seemed to have nothing to do with her lips. It was a separate thing altogether. So you just hold still and I’ll do all the work, it was saying. Jory stared down and saw the woman’s shiny fingers undoing the buttons on her sailor blouse. The shirt was open now and Jory could feel the woman running her sharp little hands up both sides of her ribs, up and down her back, and then around in front and over her cold-tightened breasts. “No earrings here,” she could hear the woman saying. “Don’t you wear a bra, hon? You’re almost grown enough. Now turn around and hold your arms out to the side, okay?” The woman turned Jory around to face the desk, sliding her hands underneath the waistband of Jory’s shorts, unsnapping and unzipping. Jory shut her eyes and kept them shut. Her cutoffs were down around her feet. “We’ll leave these underthings on.” The woman spoke quietly, as if to reassure herself. “I can just feel around and see enough this way, I think.” Her hands were quick and darting like some kind of firm little fish nosing out food from every hidden bit of coral. Jory’s eyes suddenly opened all on their own. The wall was beige, she told herself, a mushroom beige or a sort of light taupe or maybe golden brown, and something had once been tacked to the wall in four places, a bulletin board maybe, or a large picture, and now there were faint lines left, a lighter spot and four holes, one in each corner. They weren’t big enough to be nail holes, they must have used thumb tacks or pushpins, or needles, or . . . she didn’t know—she didn’t know. “I used
to have these,” the fish lady was saying, her words coming out all strangled and mixed up with her breathing. “Day-of-the-week panties—that’s right, I had them too. I remember now. And Tuesday was always blue.”

  Out in the parking lot, Jory ran toward the bike stand and pulled the ten-speed up and out of its slot with one huge jerk of her arms. She jumped on and pedaled toward the curb, nearly hitting the small white ice cream truck that was pulling in. The man in the driver’s seat yelled, “Hey, wait!” and slammed on his brakes, but she didn’t stop and once she was on the street and riding like mad she forgot to think about the man and his red-haired fingers, his tiny blue tattoos. The bike’s wheels made an incredible whizzing sound as she pumped and pushed the pedals around and around. Her tendons in her knees burned and the bushes and trees flew by and the houses’ colors melted together like old crayons left in the sun. She could feel the wind pulling her hair back tight against her head; the rubber band had worked free long ago. She kept her lips pressed close together, her teeth fitted firmly, one against the other. She breathed carefully through her nose, counting only the number of times she blinked, the number of blocks left to go, the number of houses until hers.

  No one was at the dinner table even though the places were still set with milk in the glasses and a cold square of lentil loaf on each plate. Jory walked quickly through the house, running her hand along the corners and edges of each thing she passed. Table. Chair. Kitchen counter. Oven. Toaster. Light switch. Wallpaper with the green roosters on it. Her father was always home from teaching by now. “Dad?” she called. “Dad?” She found them down in the bomb shelter. Her father had his headset on and was listening to a shortwave message from Pastor Ron in Guanajuato. Grace hadn’t been feeling well and the elders thought it best if maybe she left Mexico a few days early, although Grace herself had made it clear that she didn’t want to go. No, they didn’t think it was anything serious, only some intestinal disturbance—the water perhaps, or the aftereffects from her typhoid shot maybe. Jory watched her father nodding his head as he wrote this information down on the back of one of his QSL cards. Typhoid? he had written in his clear, firm printing, and underneath that, Cholera? Hepatitis? He drew circles around each one as he listened. Jory’s mother made a little noise and left the room, brushing past Jory without even looking at her. Frances was sitting underneath her father’s homemade desk sorting some shiny round metal slugs into piles. “Look, Jory.” She held up a handful for inspection. “We’re rich!”

  Jory knocked a small knock on her mother’s bedroom door, and then pushed the door open as quietly as she could. Her mother was lying on the bed with her apron still on and a wet washcloth over her eyes. Jory leaned against the door’s edge and watched her mother breathing.

  “They’re going to fly Grace home tomorrow,” Jory said. It felt very strange to be looking at her mother while her mother couldn’t see her. Her mother could always see her. Always. Even with her eyes closed, her mother could see her. “Grace is going to be okay. She is. Dad says so.” Jory didn’t know why she was whispering. She moved over to the bed and sat on its corner. She smoothed the yellow rose design on the quilt over and over with the palm of her hand. “Mom?” she said. “Mom?”

  Her mother lay perfectly still on the bed, giving no sign of having heard anything at all.

  Later, Jory lay in her own bed and listened to her father pounding around the backyard. He had already done his twenty times; she had counted. She got out of bed and kneeled next to the window. Even though it was dark, she could see his outline moving slowly past the fence and beyond. After twenty-five times, she gave up counting. Her eyes had adjusted now and she could see a tiny bit of light glinting off the silver pen he still had in his shirt pocket. She pressed her hand against the window screen so she could see even better, and peered upward. The moon was nearly full and she was sure that if it weren’t so very bright she could see the stars that were bound to be up there. What did the stars look like to someone in Mexico? What did they look like to someone in jail for supposedly shoplifting? She wanted to ask her father when he came jogging past, but as he finally pounded right next to her window, she saw the expression on his face lit up by the moon and she let him go by. As he moved farther from her, the noise of his running melted away, and she heard something like carnival music in the distance, a tinkling kind of gypsy music as faint as a blue tattoo, growing slowly closer and closer to where she knelt waiting in her window.

  Chapter Three

  Jory and Frances weren’t allowed to go. Their father was going to go pick Grace up from the airport and drive her straight to the doctor’s all by himself. Their mother wasn’t going because she was still lying on her bed with a wet washcloth over her eyes, the shades pulled down, and the bedroom door shut. And Jory and Frances weren’t going because, as much as their father would love to have both of his favorite girls along, as much as he’d love to have their company, it was going to be a longish trip with nothing much to see or do in the way of fun. It would just be a lot of bag carrying and boring medical stuff, and they’d be glad they’d stayed home. They would. But he would be sure to tell Grace they loved her and they could see her as soon as Dr. Henry gave her a clean bill of health. As their father told them this, he glanced occasionally at the three-by-five card on which he had made notes, and then kissed the top of Frances’s head and told Jory again to call Mrs. Mangum at the church office if she had any problems, any at all, and not to bother Mom because she needed to rest. And then he was gone.

  It was hot outside, but there was nothing else to do, so they sat on the curb with their bare feet in the gutter and shot stones at the streetlight with Jory’s slingshot.

  “Hey, watch, Fran.” Jory lowered her sights and took careful aim at one of Mr. Garmendia’s cats. “Take that, Afro Cat.”

  “Don’t!” Frances shrieked and swatted hard at Jory’s arm.

  Jory turned and pointed the slingshot at Frances’s face and pulled the rubber band back as far as it would go. “You are so stupid sometimes.”

  Frances stared at the slingshot. “Mom will kill you if you shoot me.”

  Jory turned away from Frances and watched the furry black tomcat pick its careful way through the weeds that bloomed wildly in the empty lot across the street. She sent a rock sailing toward the portion of its backside she could still see. “Mom can’t kill me if she won’t ever get out of bed.”

  “She’ll get up. She’s not supposed to yet because of her sick headache.”

  “Oh, yeah, right—her headache.” Jory aimed at the rear wheel of Mr. Garmendia’s old blue Plymouth. The rock made a wonderful pinging, denting sound as it hit and then ricocheted off the car’s metal hubcap. Her mother’s headaches coincided unsurprisingly with anxiety-producing events or any activity she strongly disapproved of. And they always involved closed doors and wet washrags and blue pills of some sort.

  Frances swirled her big toe through the muddy trickle of water that ran down the gutter. “Dad says that animals have their own special kind of heaven—a different place or section or something—but why would they?” Frances shaded her eyes with her hand. “Jory, what’s typhoid?” She squinted against the noontime brightness. “What is it?”

  “It’s something Grace doesn’t have.” Jory tied and then retied the knots in the slingshot’s rubber band.

  “Is she going to die?”

  “Yes, and so are you—when you’re ninety-two.” Jory made a lunge for Frances, grabbing her around the waist and tickling her underneath the ribs where she was the most susceptible. “Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two!”

  Frances screamed, tossing her head back and forth—she was terribly ticklish. Suddenly she gasped and wrenched Jory’s hands away. “Wait—stop it, Jory, stop it—listen!” Frances jumped up and pointed down past the end of their block, where the little white truck could be seen coming around the corner. “I heard him before you did!”

  The truck inched to
ward them incrementally. It swerved a little and seemed about to stop every few feet even though there was no one on the street but them—its loopy music winding up and back down again like the tail on a broken, tree-caught kite.

  Today he had a hat on. Jory could see it through the windshield of the truck: a weird brownish-looking hat like the kind newsboys in old TV shows wore. His red hair crinkled out from the sides and back of it.

  “Well, Mother Mary,” the ice cream man said. He had pulled the truck to a stop right by their feet and was leaning out from the driver’s seat. “And here’s Sister Susan too.” He grinned broadly, revealing a set of beautifully white teeth. “What’ll it be today, madams?”

  “I’m not Sister Susan,” Frances said, staring at a spot near her toes, but Jory glanced directly up into his face. “We won’t be buying anything today,” Jory said, still looking at where tiny red whiskers were sprouting all along the bottom portion of his cheeks and jaw.

  “Why not? Not hungry?”

  “No,” Frances said, standing up. “We don’t have any money. Our dad went off to the airport and didn’t give us any.”

  “Hey, okay. Well, how about two of the house specials on the house? We’re having a sale, you know—anything red and carcinogenic.” He lifted his hat and turned it around, front to back. “That is, anything technically cherry or strawberry flavored is so marked down that it could for practical purposes be considered, um, actually free.” He stood up and bent partially out of sight, his large red-haired hands lifting and reaching inside the silver freezer’s door.

  Frances had moved closer to the doorway of the truck without Jory noticing. “Our sister is dying,” she said, and took the Good Humor bar the ice cream man held out to her.

  “No, she’s not.” Jory stood up, but she couldn’t figure out where her hands should go now. “She’s not.”