The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel

by Val Brelinski

  “I’m a child of God too.”

  “You’re my child.”

  “I’m both,” said Grace.

  This seemed to silence their father completely, and the lack of noise from inside the living room continued on so long that Jory began to stand up in anticipation of bolting from her hiding spot. But then her sister made a muffled statement of some kind. Jory squatted back down again, and Grace said something else that Jory couldn’t hear.

  “Well,” said their father. “What if I bought you some special scissors or something so you could sort of . . . even it out?”

  “Why? Why does this even matter, Dad?” For a second, Jory couldn’t believe this was Grace. She sounded genuinely mystified or perhaps hurt. “Do I look that strange and horrible? Do I really look terrible to you now?” Bereft was the word Jory had been searching for. Forsaken. “Dad, do you think I look ugly?”

  “No,” her father said. “Of course not. You are beautiful. You’re my beautiful girl.”

  “But you can see my birthmark now.” Jory had never heard her sister say the word birthmark out loud. Ever. To anyone.

  “That’s perfectly all right,” her father said with firm emphasis.

  “But everyone can see it now. Every part of it.” Grace’s voice still sounded as if it belonged to someone else. A young and pitiful someone whom Jory had never met. Jory could hear her sister making some sort of noise, a crying or sobbing sound deep in her throat. And then she said something else that Jory couldn’t decipher. Jory suddenly felt as if she were listening to something she shouldn’t.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Her father’s voice was pitched soft and low, as if he were speaking to a wild creature he didn’t want to alarm. “You’ll always be lovely—my very lovely girl.”

  So Handsome trotted around the corner of the house and leaped, clinging to Jory’s bare thigh. Jory gave a muffled shriek and sat solidly down in the dirt. The cat was climbing his way up her shirtfront and she was trying to detach his needlelike claws when Jory spied Mrs. Kleinfelter advancing toward their front door with a shallow cardboard box in her hand. Jory struggled up from the ground just as Mrs. K reached the door. When Jory came around the side of the house, she could hear her father opening the screen door and saying something in greeting.

  “Oh, these are just the last of my Brandywines,” Mrs. Kleinfelter said. “I have way more than I can possibly use.”

  Her father was holding the screen door open, and Jory watched as Grace now appeared next to him in the doorway.

  “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Kleinfelter, taking a small step backward and bumping into Jory.

  Grace opened the door wider. She came out onto the porch and took the box from Mrs. Kleinfelter’s hands. “Thank you so much,” said Grace, her eyes still slightly teary. “These look wonderful.”

  “My,” said Mrs. Kleinfelter again, taking covert glances at Grace’s hair and wiping her hands on the front of her housedress. “I just had way too many. So I guess . . . Oh, Jory.” Mrs. K turned her alarmed eyes on Jory. “Just look how big that kitten of yours is getting.”

  Jory gamely held So Handsome up for inspection.

  “You know, we’ve been having some pretty hot days for October,” their father said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Kleinfelter. “Cooling down at night, though.”

  “Yes,” said their father, nodding.

  “I’ll take these and put them on the kitchen counter,” said Grace, turning and going back into the house.

  “Well, I’ll just get back to my packing.” Mrs. Kleinfelter gestured toward her house and then began going down the porch stairs. Suddenly she stopped. “Oh, dear,” she said. “She didn’t get ringworm, did she? From the cat, I mean?”

  Jory glanced at her father, who studiously avoided his daughter’s gaze. “Um, no, no ringworm,” he said. “But we certainly thank you for the tomatoes.” Her father smiled. He lifted his hand as if conveying some sort of benediction.

  Mrs. Kleinfelter gave Jory a fleeting look and Jory felt a sudden tug, a strong urge to do or say something, but then the moment passed and Mrs. Kleinfelter turned away and headed back down the dirt pathway between the houses.

  “She’s a nice woman,” said her father to himself. “She reminds me of your grandma Eunice.”

  “If Grandma Eun hadn’t been completely cross and mean and horrible,” Jory said.

  Her father sighed. “Grandma Eun had a hard life.” He sat down on the porch’s top step with a slight groan.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Her father said nothing. So Handsome tugged happily at one of his shoelaces.

  Jory lowered her voice. “She’s getting worse,” said Jory.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said her father. He plucked a pen out of his pants pocket and took its cap off and then put it back on again.

  “She’s not eating, either. She says she’s fasting.”

  Her father recapped the pen again. “There’s nothing wrong with fasting.”

  “Not even if you’re pregnant? And she never takes a shower or changes her clothes or anything. She’s been wearing the same dress for at least a month now.”

  Her father stuffed the pen back into his pocket. “What exactly do you expect me to do, Jory? Stand over her while she eats and changes her clothes? You know what she’s like. She’s been this way since she was tiny.”

  “I know.” Jory scooped So Handsome up into her arms and then just as quickly dropped him onto the porch’s wood floor. “I know,” she said again.

  “Her hair will grow back,” her father said. “In a while.”

  The two of them sat on the porch steps saying nothing. Mrs. Kleinfelter came outside and waved once as she headed into her garden. So Handsome lay down by the porch railing in a patch of October shade and began absently batting at a lone fly. The maple tree, which was turning early, dropped its fiery leaves, one at a time, onto the still green grass.

  “I spoke to a doctor.” Her father said this without looking at her.

  Jory felt a knot in her stomach tighten. “You did? What do you mean? What doctor?”

  “He’s a sort of specialist.”

  “A specialist?”

  Her father paused. “A Christian psychiatrist.”

  “You mean the one from Blackfoot?” Jory wasn’t sure why this suddenly seemed important.

  Her father still wouldn’t look at her. He plucked a long blade of grass out from a crack in the concrete step. “I spoke to him confidentially, of course.”

  Jory didn’t really know what this meant. “What did he say?”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter what he said. I just wanted you to know that I am not unaware of the problems here. And I am doing something, or as much of something as I can do.”

  Jory could feel the knot of tightness in her stomach rising up toward her throat. “But what did he think was wrong with Grace?”

  Her father paused. “As I already said, I don’t think his analysis is really worthy of discussion.”

  Jory gave him a pleading look.

  Her father stared briefly up at the sky. “He is under the belief that someone with Grace’s type of behavior would benefit from a particular sort of treatment.” Her father spread the blade of long grass out flat against his pant leg. “And medication.”

  The tightness in Jory’s throat made it hard for her to speak. “You mean like tranquilizers?”

  “Not exactly.” Her father brushed the blade of grass off his pant leg. “But this man is not an evangelical Christian, remember. He’s a Methodist and all his training was done at a large liberal university, where the empirical is the only thing that matters—so his analysis of things is somewhat shortsighted, to say the least.”

  Jory’s father had gone to Harvard for both undergrad and his PhD, but that was somehow diff
erent. “Mom’s taking tranquilizers,” she said.

  “Well, yes,” he said in a voice that betrayed his surprise, “but that’s only temporary. And I’ve already started cutting her dosage back.”

  “Dr. Henry gave Grace a shot.”

  “That was an emergency, Jory.”

  “But what if it helped her? The treatment, I mean. The one this doctor was talking about.”

  Jory’s father rearranged himself on the porch step with some difficulty. “I think we’ve discussed this topic thoroughly now, don’t you?” He started to stand.

  “But if it helped her.”

  Her father made a sudden grimace, as if he had bitten down on something sharp. “You don’t understand, Jory. She would have to be sent to . . . she would have to go to a hospital . . . and be hospitalized.”

  “At Blackfoot?”

  The screen door opened and Grace walked out onto the porch. Jory and her father grew quiet. “So,” said Grace, looking from one of them to the other. “Who’s being sent to Blackfoot?”

  “No one,” said their father, pulling himself up by the porch railing. “No one is being sent anywhere. It was just a figure of speech.”

  “Like a metaphor?” Grace cocked her head. She stared at her father.

  “Yes,” he said. “Sort of. So, you know what? I just remembered that I have some groceries out in the car. Who wants to help me bring them in?” He tried to smile at the two of them. “Any volunteers?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jory peered at herself in Henry’s old rectangular mirror. Mrs. Kleinfelter had loaned her an old eyebrow pencil and Jory had spent half an hour giving herself some very Egyptian-looking eyes. Or what she hoped were Egyptian-looking eyes. She had seen a picture in Rhea’s Seventeen magazine of this girl with amazing sort of bat-wing eyeliner extending from the corners of her eyes and, well, now Jory looked quite different. A little smudgy and strange, but hopefully exotic and possibly even much older. She was wearing a paisley-flowered drawstring blouse that Rhea had given her along with a headband she had made herself out of a strip of felt and a peacock feather. She also had on her rust-colored bell-bottoms, her moccasins, and a wide brown belt that had belonged to Mrs. Kleinfelter’s husband. Plus, she had plaited two little tiny braids in her hair on either side of her face and secured them with crochet thread strung with little beads. She was going for the Egyptian-hippie look. Or maybe the Egyptian-Indian-hippie look.

  Grace had given no thought whatsoever to her look, unless you counted looking like a pregnant concentration camp victim. Grace, in fact, was sitting downstairs in the kitchen reading her King James Bible, wearing the same old brown dress she had been wearing for the past five or six weeks.

  “What do you think?” Jory said, twirling once around for Grace’s benefit.

  Grace ran a hand up and over her bristly hair. It had apparently become a habit. “Halloween is a pagan holiday that celebrates evil behavior. And you’re wearing an awful lot of eye makeup.”

  “Oh, don’t be a poop,” said Jory, and she sat down breathlessly at the kitchen table. She was too excited to be affected by her sister’s punctiliousness. Even school had been fun today! They hadn’t been allowed to wear real costumes because of what had happened with an Indian tomahawk the year before, but there had been candy in homeroom and the school secretary had played “The Monster Mash” over the intercom and the bus driver had on a long blond wig and devil horns. Even Mrs. Cross had worn skeleton earrings. Everything had been wonderful until someone lit a smoke bomb in the girls’ lavatory and someone else smashed a pumpkin through the windshield of Mr. Mullinix’s Pontiac. Then sixth period was canceled and school was let out early. Jory tried to give Grace her most winsome look. “Oh, please! You can come too. We used to go trick-or-treating all the time when we were little.”

  “That was before.”

  “Mom and Dad always let us go.”

  “Well, maybe they shouldn’t have,” said Grace. “It probably sends the wrong message to unbelievers when they see Christians celebrating something associated so closely with Satan.”

  “Oh—argh!” said Jory, jumping up from the table. “You are a complete drag, do you know that?”

  “You know what the Tao says,” Grace said, putting her finger in her Bible. “Let the world pass as it may. Act and it is ruined, grab and it is gone.”

  “What?”

  “The Great Way is very smooth, but the people love the bypaths.”

  “Cut it out, Grace.”

  “Seriously, though, Jory. I just don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

  “Well, it’s not like you can stop me.” Jory readjusted her hair band.

  Grace appeared unmoved by this statement. “I suppose not,” she said. “Unless I called Dad.” She seemed to momentarily weigh this possibility.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” said Jory.

  “No,” said Grace. “Probably not.”

  Grace had never, ever told on Jory, not even when they were little and Jory had done a variety of supposedly bad things. The one thing Grace wasn’t was a tattletale. Jory and Frances had happily told on each other many a time, but not Grace. Not telling was evidently part of her moral code.

  “So come with me and be my chaperone. Make sure I stay out of trouble.” Jory bounced up and down on the balls of her feet. “Please?”

  “I don’t know,” said Grip. “Are you a Moonie, or someone with cancer?”

  “Ha ha. Very funny,” said Grace. “I am not in costume.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly done something interesting with your hair.” Grip’s widened eyes took in the ruined landscape of Grace’s scalp. He appeared more than a little startled. “What’s up with that?”

  “How about me?” Jory quickly inserted herself between them, put her hand on her hip, and turned her face so that it was in profile.

  “Wow. Hm. You are . . . I don’t know, Penelope Tree?”

  Jory’s face fell. “Who?”

  “A very groovy model person from Great Britain. At least, I think she’s from Great Britain. Maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s American. I forget.”

  “I’m supposed to be an Egyptian-Indian-hippie-princess.”

  “That’s just what I said.” Grip smiled at Jory. “You look perfect.” He tilted his head at her. “It’s kind of like looking into the future.”

  Jory had to turn around and pretend to be fixing the tie on her blouse. She could feel a huge smile rising up through her whole body.

  “Well, it’s obvious what you are,” said Grace. And it was. Grip was an ice cream man. He was The Ice Cream Man. He had slicked his hair back beneath one of those old white paper army-shaped hats. The kind that could be folded flat and put in your back pocket. And he was wearing spotlessly white creased pants and a white short-sleeved button-down shirt that had Larry written on the right breast pocket. Jory felt almost shy around him. He was Grip, but a cleaner and older and maybe richer version, like a Grip who was living an entirely different life.

  “All righty,” he said. “Ladies—Egyptian and otherwise—your chariot awaits.”

  Jory sat in the back of the truck next to the freezer. The last time she had sat back there, Frances had been in the front and they had gone swimming with Grip in the canal. Jory blushed in the darkness just thinking about it. She had been so young and naive. She had known nothing about anything! It had been four—no, almost five months ago. A lifetime.

  She leaned forward. “Grace has been reading your Tao stuff,” she said.

  “Really?” said Grip. “I’m surprised.” Jory could see him smiling, even from where she was sitting.

  “Govern a nation as you would fry a small fish,” said Grace. “That’s my favorite one.”

  Grip clucked his tongue. “Ah,” he said. “You’re making fun. I see how it is.”

  “I’m not,” said Grace.
“I think it’s actually somewhat profound.”

  “Right,” said Grip. “Okay, well, it’s a rule that whoever sits in front has to learn to copilot the craft. Jory knows how, Frances knows how, so now it’s your turn.”

  “Oh, no,” said Grace, and put her hands up to her face. “I don’t know how to drive anything.”

  “Not yet, you don’t. But the night is young.”

  “Don’t we have lots of things we’re supposed to be doing?”

  “Yes, and the first one on the agenda is teaching you how to shift.”

  “Frances knows how to drive the truck?”

  Jory leaned back and peered out the small oval rear window at the sky. Sure enough, there was the moon, big and fat and glowing, looking down at the world with its sad eyes and sorrowful mouth. She remembered the Childcraft books her father had read to them when she was little. In those stories the moon was less mournful and more scary—a half-sentient being who was slightly evil and often grinning or maliciously winking at the tiny humans below. It seemed to know things that no human would be happy to know, and it seemed to want to tell these things—to eagerly open its mouth and let the secrets spill forth in a bright spray of liquid silver that would turn to solid coins as they fell to earth, but still burned like fire if you tried to pick them up.

  And if you went up to the moon, if you rowed a green-bottomed boat through the sky or straddled a broom (like certain Childcraft creatures: cats and cows and wicked women and spoons), you came back terribly changed, or not at all. The moon exacted a heavy price for its dark knowledge. What it whispered in your ear, you could never unhear. But Jory longed to be told. And she was terrified of being told. And once you were told, well . . . who knew? Who knew?

  Owls and bats and all shades of black and midnight blue. The planet Pluto. A wizard’s pointy hat. A ball stamped with gold stars rolling into a room all by itself. A girl with one striped sock living all alone in a two-story house on the edge of nowhere. An apple so neon green it glowed, with one bite missing.

  “The clutch is the hardest part,” Grip was saying. “We’ll wait and try that on the way home.”