The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  “He left you there?”

  “Well . . . not exactly. Not really. I don’t know what it was. He claimed he just hadn’t noticed. But it was almost like he’d been embarrassed or ashamed or something that I’d passed out like that.”

  “Why did Dad always take us on those accreditation trips anyway? It’s not like there was anything for us to do there. All we ever got to do was sit around in motel rooms and student center lounges.”

  “It was supposed to give Mom a break,” said Grace. “You know. Just like now.”

  This silenced Jory.

  Grace turned over on the couch. “Oh,” she said, and sighed. “I just feel so tired. It’s like I’m being pulled underwater by a big hand that never lets go. Just when I think I’ll stand up and go do something, this smooth, watery feeling comes over me and all I want to do is lie down.”

  “It’s okay,” said Jory.

  “No, it’s not,” said Grace. “I promise I’ll get up in a little while.” She yawned again.

  Jory sat in the brown chair and watched dust motes playing up and down in the air above Grace’s head. The sunlight slanted in through the small window above the couch, turning Grace’s dark hair a glowing shade of chestnut red. It reminded Jory of the Shetland pony they had always ridden at their grandfather’s cabin. The pony’s name was Shorty, he had a reddish brown and white coat, and he was mean. Whenever Grace would get up her nerve to finally get on him, he would head to the nearest low-hanging tree branch and walk directly under it, scraping Grace off onto the ground. Jory was smaller—and, according to her father, braver—and whenever Shorty tried this trick with her, she simply flattened herself to Shorty’s back and held on.

  Jory watched Grace sleeping with her hands tucked under her chin. Her father was wrong, she thought. It hadn’t been a matter of bravery. It was just that Jory, even more than Grace, feared falling. And that wasn’t all. On vaccination day at Eisenhower Elementary, Jory and her second-grade classmates had had to line up in the long wood-paneled hallway with their sleeves rolled up high. At the front of the line waited two nurses, each with a hypodermic needle carefully hidden behind her back. Smallpox and diphtheria. Jory counted and recounted the number of children in line in front of her. She licked her lips. Just then the sixth graders from the top floor came down the stairs, their bare arms already bedecked with round Band-Aids—small, flesh-colored badges of bravery. They filed past and, as they did, Grace stepped out from her place in line and took Jory’s hand. For a moment the two sisters were locked together—Grace’s warm hand gripping hers—and then Grace was pulled back into line and pushed along. Even afterward, Jory could still feel the pressure of Grace’s fingers as the line in front of her grew shorter and shorter.

  Her older sister had always gone first, and she always made sure that Jory could safely follow. Even when the following was going to be frightening.

  Grace got up and washed all the dishes that they’d brought and the ones already in the cupboards, while Jory hung up her clothes and made up both of the upstairs beds with some sheets and blankets that she found in the hall closet. The sheets were white and soft as an old T-shirt, but they smelled mildewed and the blankets were like something you’d find in a teepee or a cabin: gray and scratchy, with red and black stripes in a zigzag pattern. She sat on her bed and tested the mattress spring. The metal coils beneath made a zinging sound each time she bounced. The tub in the bathroom was like one she had seen in an old John Wayne movie on TV, long and white with a cloth curtain on wire rings that pulled all the way around it like an oval drape.

  “A real claw-foot tub,” Grace said, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.

  “Look at this soap.” Jory pulled out a bar of grainy brownish stuff from the brass soap holder. “It is soap, isn’t it?”

  Grace pulled the shower curtain all the way back and stepped into the tub. She sat down in it and leaned her head back against the porcelain rim. “Look, I can stretch all the way out. It must be six feet long.” She draped her arms across either edge of the bathtub and then let her hands hang down almost to the floor. “I’m Bathsheba,” she said, “and I’m bathe-ing.” Grace turned her head toward Jory. “You, however, don’t look anything like David.”

  Jory sat down on the black-and-white tile next to the tub. Grace was still acting very strange. Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Someone on a TV show or in a play. Jory ran her hand across one of the tub’s feet. Across the eagle claw part that held a smooth white ball. “Grace,” she said, “I feel weird. I don’t feel good.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Grace.

  “What if I don’t?” Jory rested her head on the tub’s rim. “What if they have to put me on tranquilizers?”

  Grace laughed, a low drowsy sound. “Well, then, I guess you’ll be just like me,” she said. “And Mom.”

  Jory lifted her head. “Mom’s taking tranquilizers?”

  Grace ran her bare toes over the tub’s rusty faucet.

  “No way,” Jory said. “Dad says medication like that is a sin. That it interferes with God’s ability to speak with you.” Jory peered at Grace’s face more closely. “He would never let Mom take pills. It’s against church rules.”

  “She told him it was either that or she was leaving.”

  “Leaving?”

  “She said they’d have to send her to Blackfoot if he didn’t get her something.”

  Jory was struck dumb by the thought of her mother threatening to be taken to the insane asylum.

  “This tub is just like Aunt Annette’s,” Grace said in her new drifty voice. “I remember it from the time we went to San Diego.”

  “We never went to California.”

  “You weren’t born yet. But I remember that Mom and Dad went off somewhere—to some observatory, I think—and Aunt Annette gave me a bath. There was a white whale that had shampoo in it. She took off its tail and pink shampoo came out. And afterward she cut my hair—she trimmed it with little nail scissors—and she put my cut-off hair in the toilet and flushed it all down and then she said, ‘Now don’t tell your mom—it’ll just be between us girls, okay? It’ll be our little secret.’ And then she gave me some black cherry pop.” Grace had begun to cry soundlessly. She leaned forward and large solitary tears dropped slowly off the end of her nose.

  Jory tried looking at the bathroom’s peeling wallpaper, at the strange washbasin with the crooked wooden medicine cabinet hanging above it, the egg-shaped globe of a light fixture that hung down on a chain like the hall lights in her old elementary school. “Don’t cry,” she said.

  “I’m not,” said Grace, taking the tail ends of her shirt and wiping her eyes. Grace lifted her chin. “It was just like I said. He told me not to tell anyone because no one would believe it. He said I was chosen for a very special purpose and had been born for this very reason. And that God wanted it that way. That he wanted me.” Grace gripped either side of the tub and pushed herself up. “Out of all the women in the world, he wanted me,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Jory. “All right.”

  Grace stood up and stepped out of the tub. She walked unsteadily down the hall to the bedroom. Then she went inside and closed the door behind her.

  Jory sat on the floor. Late afternoon light filtered through the bathroom window and fell in warm bands across her face and neck. She thought about what Frances would be doing right now. Was she wondering where Jory was—had she even noticed that she was gone? This was her second night away from home, and tomorrow was the first day of school and her very first day of high school. At a school she’d never been to before. Jory leaned her head against the wall and felt its paint flake off against her cheek like the scales of some enormous molting reptile. How had her life become something so strange to her? So foreign and unrecognizable and terrifying? She wanted to cry, but she knew she wouldn’t, in part because there was no one there to comf
ort her if she did.

  Chapter Seven

  Her father showed up before Jory even had a chance to pick out her clothes. Jory peeked down the stairs and watched as he marched briskly about the living room picking up stray sweaters and shoes, unpacking boxes of books and winter coats. “We better get a move on,” he called up the stairs. She could hear him talking to Grace, who was in the kitchen eating cereal.

  Jory had been up before it got light. She couldn’t sleep. By the time she had made it down the stairs her father was standing in the front room holding a white paper grocery sack. “Mom sent you this,” he said, holding the bag out. Jory was so glad to see her father, so achingly glad to smell the clean, familiar smell he brought in with him, that she wanted to hit him. As she stood there looking at him in his brown suit and tie, a sudden shudder ran through her head as if she really had. She blinked hard and then took the bag and ran back upstairs. She sat down on her bed holding the sack against her chest. After a moment she unfolded the sack’s top; inside were two pumpkin cream cheese muffins that her mother had not made, that her father had obviously bought at Albertsons on his way here. She pulled the paper wrapper off the bottom of one and took a bite. It was wonderful—still warm from the bakery’s oven and full of velvety cream cheese. She put the muffin back in the bag and folded it shut. She stood up and moved past the iron-framed bed and opened the window next to it. She tossed the bag out the window, watching it land on a dry patch of grass after bouncing off a rounded fuel oil tank on the back side of the house. She shut the window and went to the closet, where she pulled her yellow skirt off its hanger and then rummaged through Henry Kleinfelter’s bureau drawer until she found her striped sweater. She had no idea what people wore to Schism. She had no idea what they said or thought or did after school or if they all drove cars or rode wild ponies or what. Even though Arco Christian Academy was considered by public school kids to be too square and religious and uncool to be believed, the kids at ACA always made terrible fun of the kids who went to Schism, but if they ever saw any of them at a store downtown, they quickly looked the other way. And walked the other way. Some boy on Schism’s football team had supposedly killed another boy after a game—just because Schism lost.

  Jory had a sudden thought. She ran into Grace’s room and slid open her top drawer. Inside were panties and socks and nylons and several white bras. Jory took the bra that looked the smallest and ran back to her bedroom and closed her door. She took off her sweater and put the bra on, hooking it up as quickly as she could. In the mirror above the bureau she viewed the results. The cups of the bra pointed emptily away from her chest like small, collapsing pyramids. She ran back to her sister’s room once more. A nylon in each cup helped. Somewhat. Jory walked downstairs with inordinate care and casualness.

  Her father was now sitting at the breakfast table with Grace, tracing a pattern on the tabletop with his fork. Grace was looking at her own hands, which were folded in her lap. Neither of them was saying anything.

  Jory hugged her schoolbag to her chest.

  “There she is,” her father said, smiling and pushing back from the table with a great deal of enthusiasm. “Grace tells me that you two are getting along just fine here.”

  Jory glanced at Grace, who was now gazing out the window. Neither of them spoke.

  “Well,” he said, sighing, “I suppose we’d better get this show on the road.” Her father pulled his car keys out of his pocket. “Grace, want to come along for the ride?”

  “Really?” said Grace. “Aren’t you worried that someone might see me?” She stared steadily at her father. “I’m not tranquilized anymore. I might do something rash.”

  Her father stood silently in the kitchen. “The first day of high school,” he said finally, turning toward Jory. He shook his head. “That’s a pretty big day. I should have brought the camera.”

  “That’s okay, Dad.” Jory peered down at her knee socks and old mary janes. When she’d picked these shoes out last year, they had seemed just right, brown suede with a black button on the strap and nicely chunky heels. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  “Well, here we go,” her father said, placing a firm hand on her back and leading her to the door.

  Schism High School was located at the very northern edge of Arco, near the border of the neighboring town of Rimrock. Her father kept up a steady stream of talk as they drove past acreages and farms, sugar beets and alfalfa, pumpkins and newly harvested mint. Jory watched out the window as men in coveralls adjusted mesh baseball caps and walked slowly toward outbuildings and barns and pickups, happy dogs wagging at their heels. Jory imagined the women inside the houses—the women were always inside—making breakfast with the TV on, ham and eggs or maybe pancakes. On Jory’s and her sisters’ birthdays, they got pancakes for breakfast, apple pancakes with Granny Smiths sliced thin and tart in the batter. Jory didn’t suppose that her mother would be making her any pancakes this year.

  The road outside became more narrow and then finally unpaved. The farmhouses grew smaller and more dingy and then gave way to long fields of alfalfa and corn and finally to scrub brush and weeds and lone cottonwood trees. They bounced along the dirt road in silence, her father finally having run out of things to say. The road curved over a brown hill, then turned left past a small grocery store called the Day ’N’ Nite and then, much too soon, they were there. Jory gazed out the car window at the two-story cement block buildings that made up the school. The main building had been painted a bright yellow gold reminiscent in Jory’s mind of egg yolks and Donald Duck’s feet. SCHISM HIGH SCHOOL, it read in brown block letters above the double glass doors. HOME OF THE SCHISM SKULLCATS. “Skullcats?” Jory turned her eyes toward her father’s. “Dad,” she said, “please. Please don’t make me go.”

  “Look,” he said, turning and laying a large hand on top of her cold one. “If it’s really that bad, we’ll figure something else out. But today I need you to try it. Just try it for me. Okay?” He squeezed both of her hands in his and then opened the car door and stepped out.

  Jory watched as other cars pulled into the dirt parking lot, a horrible tight, sick feeling in her stomach. They were mostly muscle cars, Firebirds and Camaros and GTOs painted in bright metallic colors, with an expectedly large number of pickup trucks as well. Students were already gathering into groups, slamming car doors and yelling happy insults at each other and pulling cigarettes and tins of chewing tobacco out of back pockets. Jory’s head felt full of something thick and humming. She held her schoolbag close and got out of the car without looking around her. She kept her head down as she and her father walked up the wide cement steps and through the front door of the school.

  The air inside was a revelation: warm and fluorescent and awash in smells of warm sauerkraut and floor polish and old linoleum. The upstairs hall was a hive of activity: teachers and students all rushing past, their talking a buzz of mostly indecipherable words. Jory tried to memorize which way she and her father were going and what door was what, but there were too many—too many smells and sights and too much information. She was already lost. Her father was explaining to a frazzled-looking woman behind a tall wood-paneled counter that Jory was a new student and that he would be bringing all her records tomorrow or the next day, but that for now she just needed to sit in on classes and get a class schedule and a locker—things like that. Her father was wearing his professor clothes and using his professor voice and the woman was smiling and pulling out forms from beneath the wooden counter. Jory tried to take deep breaths and she suddenly realized how very, very hungry she was and how very long it would be until lunch. “Dad,” she said. “Dad.” She pulled on his coat sleeve. “I need some lunch money.”

  “Oh, and what bus route will she need to take to get home?” Her father had borrowed a pen and was filling in one of the forms. “We . . . she lives on . . . Deer Flat Road—the north end.”

  Jory turned and watched more students jostling each
other as they clattered up and down the hall stairs. The girls were all wearing pants, jeans mainly, tight, low-hanging, leather-belted Levis that had denim inserts sewn in the bottom part of the legs so that they flared out over the wearer’s shoes. And colorful snug-fitting T-shirts and leather vests and wide-collared suede jackets. Their hair was nearly always long and straight and parted in the middle and two of the girls that walked past her now were wearing fringed moccasins (!) with tiny bells attached to the laces. They jingled and laughed as they passed, flipping their sheaths of dark hair behind their shoulders. They wore peace sign earrings and black eyeliner and carried notebooks covered in stickers that said KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ and THE LIZARD KING LIVES and I WAS A DRAFT DODGER IN THE WAR ON DRUGS. None of them were wearing skirts. Or mary janes.

  “Dad,” Jory said again. “Dad.” But her father was now discussing the merits of physics I versus earth science. “To my mind,” he was saying, “it makes much more sense to have them take physics their freshman year and chemistry their sophomore year and save the biological sciences for the very end.” The woman behind the counter listened and smiled even though students were lining up behind Jory. “They need that grounding in the cellular sciences before they try to tackle the larger physical concepts. Little to big, atoms before molecules and so on, you know?” The woman behind the counter seemed to know.

  By sixth period, Jory was beyond feeling. She had given up the notion of looking for bright spots—a philosophy she had clung to during first period—and was now merely interested in survival. It mattered not one bit that she had had to eat lunch by herself or that the only person who had talked to her all day was a boy in cowboy boots who had asked her if she was a foreign exchange student. She was living for the moment when she could board the bus home—every bit of her being was intent on that goal.