You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

  Last year the subject of religion came up at school. Molly’s oldest daughter, Kate, was asked “what she was” and when she said she was nothing, the other kids insisted this was impossible. “You have to be something!” After that Molly started coaching the girls—Kate was in the fourth grade and Emma was in first—on the polite things you say when asked about religion. It was all working out fine until Simon’s book came out.

  Riding in on the same wave as Harris’s, Hitchens’s, and Dawkins’s condemnations of religion, The Great Cults: How Religion Warps Minds and Hearts received both more attention from the lay public and less respect from academia than it otherwise would have. Several reviewers called it “derivative” and now Simon has to come up with something “ground-breaking” for the next book. Under this pressure, he’s been in no mood to help Molly negotiate the social fallout from the front-page story their local paper ran quoting The Great Cults’ most inflammatory passages. Because of the article, invites to card nights and progressive dinners have dried up and the girls have been skipped over for several birthday parties and sleepovers. At school, no one gives Molly more than a perfunctory nod during pickup and dropoff.

  To smooth things over, she tried placing Simon’s criticism in light of Catholicism’s more spectacular failures. Surely some of the other mothers had been traumatized by a crucifixion movie? Questioned why billions of Chinese were eternally damned for not worshipping a God they never heard of? No dice. The word had gotten out: it wasn’t the mistakes of a few or the odd papal ruling Simon questioned. It was the basic intelligence of those who had faith.

  Last month Molly began trying out a new line. With a little wave and a grin, as if she were apologizing for an overgrown lawn or unpainted shutter, she’d say, You should pity us who have no faith. We’re lonely and anxious. A few women took her seriously and suggested she try their church. The hippest ones forced a burst of air through their noses to indicate they weren’t too old for irony. The rest gave a one-sided, closed-lip smile, as close to a sneer as forty-year-old mothers get. Molly knows it’s time for a new line, but as yet nothing’s come to her.

  Tuesday morning she picks up her grandfather for the weekly grocery trip. His house, a box at the end of a row of other postwar boxes across from a cheese-processing plant, is nearly as small as her garage, but when she pulls onto the makeshift gravel curb, the crunch under her tires sends a primordial comfort through Molly’s veins. After her parents divorced, she lived with her grandparents during the week. In the summer Grandma Alice played make-believe with Molly on the platform swing—train conductor, trapeze artist—and in the afternoon they watched soap operas. Now Grandma Alice is gone and Molly’s mother lives in North Carolina with a man she met there named Dave something. This leaves Grandpa Hank to Molly and she doesn’t mind at all. In fact, it’s the most fulfilling time of her week. For the next few hours they will go shopping for bran cereal and talk of things that can be fixed. Leaky gutters. Drooping plants. Overdue library books. Her grandfather will thank her for her trouble and try to pay for her gas, which she will laugh at and refuse.

  As Molly gets out of the car, her phone beeps to remind her of the school talent show later that afternoon. She plans to arrive late, sit in back, and slip out as soon as Kate is done with her dance. She’ll wait for school dismissal in her car, avoiding the awkward silence and forced smiles she would endure if she waited in the hall with the other mothers.

  At the back door Molly wiggles the key into the lock, pulls up on the knob, then turns. Inside, Grandpa Hank sits on the edge of the kitchen’s vinyl booth tying the neck of a plastic bag around his ankle. A hernia of blood swells the bag’s seamed corner.

  “Oh my God.” Molly trips up the two stairs into the kitchen. “What happened?”

  Beneath his heel, a dark spot bigger than a dinner plate mars the carpet. “I broke a vein and I can’t get the thing to stop bleeding.”

  “I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “No, no. You can drive me. I tied things up real good. It won’t make a mess in your car.”

  “I’m not worried about my car, Grandpa.”

  “Well, that’s a nice vehicle you got and blood’s hard to get out.” He nods at the carpet stain.

  On the way to the ER her grandfather asks how the kids and Simon are. He doesn’t know about the book, doesn’t read the Times Book Review or listen to NPR. He lives where Molly used to live.

  “Everything’s good,” she tells him, watching the blood move higher in the bag. “I should have called 911.”

  “We’re almost there.” A block away the brick wall of the hospital rises, its narrow, uniform windows like gravestones and morgue slabs.

  In the ER Molly flags down an attendant, then fumbles in her purse for her grandfather’s Medicare card, thinking the mothers should see her now. Now there’s no disputing how lonely and anxious an atheist can be.

  At two o’clock she skulks into the elementary school talent show, sliding into the nearest free seat next to Mrs. Gupta, a bindi between her eyebrows. On the other side of Mrs. Gupta is Elizabeth Randolph. The Randolphs have six natural children plus a boy adopted recently from South America. Molly knows only the outline of his incredible story. A member of an isolated tribe, his people went uncontacted by modern civilization until a group of illegal loggers infected them with the common cold. Only nine children survived. A Christian organization arranged for their adoptions in the U.S. and Canada.

  Elizabeth leans forward and waves at Molly. “You missed them!” Kate and Elizabeth’s daughter Sarah are best friends, which Molly assumes is the only reason Elizabeth still speaks to her.

  “My grandpa, hospital,” Molly whispers. Elizabeth frowns and Molly mouths, “He’s okay. It’s all right.”

  If she’d known she was going to miss Kate’s dance, she’d have skipped the whole damn show, two torturous hours of ten-year-old violinists and jugglers who can’t catch a ball. Last year Simon told people, “If I’m wrong and there is a God, He’s no doubt preparing a perpetual elementary school talent show for my personal hell.” This year Simon is lucky enough to be out of town.

  In the hall after the show, Kate throws her arms around Molly’s waist. “Where were you? I looked and looked and you weren’t anywhere. I thought you were dead!”

  Several people glance at Molly in shock, as if Kate isn’t supposed to know about death. Molly rubs Kate’s back, the sequins of her dance costume like sharp fish scales. “You were great up there!”

  “You saw me?”

  “Of course I did! I was just a little late. You probably couldn’t see me in the back.”

  Death became a problem last year, after Molly’s grandmother passed away. The girls couldn’t accept her disappearance. Grandma Alice was gone? Gone where? Without heaven as a destination, Molly struggled to explain. “It’s kind of like sleeping forever.”

  “Where is she sleeping?”

  “Underground.”

  “Can I see her?”

  As Molly stumbled, they stared at her like a teacher waiting for a slow student to finish Dick and Jane. Finally she had to admit death wasn’t quite like sleep. Since then her credibility has suffered, which is no doubt why Kate continues to question her about the talent show until she exposes Molly’s lie. At dinner, she is still pouting and Emma needles her.

  “Kate looks like a frog with her lip out that way.”

  “Sweetheart,” Molly pleads, “it’s not like I skipped on purpose.”

  “Kate has blood in her eyes,” Emma observes. “Does that mean she’s going to die?”

  “It means she’s a drama queen,” Simon says, then asks how Molly’s grandpa is.

  “They used a special bandage, like stitches.”

  “Is Grandpa Hank gonna die?” Kate asks miserably, but with resignation, as if he were the family cat.

  “Everybody’s going to die,” Simon says.

  Molly glares at him.

  “When?” Emma wants to know.

 
Simon lowers his voice. “We don’t know, sweetie. He’s very, very old.”

  The girls glance at one another.

  “What’s the matter?” Molly asks.

  “Sarah told Kate she’s going to hell,” Emma announces.

  Simon laughs. “How does she know that? She call God’s 1-800 line?”

  “There is no hell,” Molly insists.

  “Yes, there is. Daddy said so,” Kate says.

  “When did I say that?”

  “You said your hell was going to be a talent show.”

  Simon looks chagrined. “I was joking. Hell is illogical. If God is good, why would He have a hell?”

  Emma stabs a big piece of chicken with her fork. “Maybe,” she says, “God isn’t good.”

  At eleven o’clock Molly is pouring herself a glass of wine to toast the end of this day when Kate comes into the kitchen. “How old was Grandma Alice when she died?”

  “Why?”

  “Emma and I are trying to figure out how long we have to live.” She holds up an Audubon calendar. “I counted three hundred and sixty-five days in one year. Now I need to count how many years.”

  Both girls have their father’s Scandinavian coloring. At bedtime, the inside rims of their eyes grow as red as raw meat. “Go to sleep.”

  “I will. Tell me how old she was first.”

  “Eighty-eight,” Simon says. He’s cleaning the sink and counters. They have to be disinfected before he can fall asleep. “Now go to bed.”

  Kate goes back upstairs.

  “Why did you tell her that?” Molly asks. “They’ll be up for hours counting three hundred and sixty-five eighty-eight times.”

  “It’s like counting sheep.”

  They hear her padding down again. “What’s Emma’s birthday?”

  “Why?” Molly sighs.

  “Because we have to take away how many days we’ve been alive from the total to get how many days we have left.”

  “You can’t count how many days you’re going to live.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s late and you need some sleep and both of you could easily live longer than Grandma Alice. Look at Grandpa Hank. He’s older than Grandma Alice was and he’s healthy as a horse. Now go to bed. Dream about ice cream or something.”

  “So I don’t have to die before Emma?”

  “Not necessarily,” Simon says. “Age is only one factor…”

  Molly interrupts. “Go to bed. Go!”

  Kate runs upstairs, hollering, “I don’t have to die before you! I’m older, but Daddy says you could die first!”

  On Friday Molly takes Kate to play softball. It’s pure Americana—a miniature baseball diamond bordered by a ragged row of folding chairs and blankets. Toddlers play near the field, though in no peril as none of the fourth-grade girls can achieve better than a slow-roll grounder. At halftime Molly goes over to talk to Elizabeth Randolph, whose one-year-old sits in her lap eating cheese crackers and smearing the orange paste across Elizabeth’s pants. Adoo, the boy from South America, leans against a nearby tree. The color of red mahogany, he has a flat nose with splayed nostrils and a sharply defined, narrow bridge. Dashed, black lines bisect both of his prominent cheekbones. Molly can’t tell if the lines are tribal tattoos or the handiwork of a bored eight-year-old with access to eyeliner.

  She kneels by their blanket. “Hi, how are you?”

  “I’m good. And how are you?” Elizabeth says. The emphasis on “you” crept into her voice after the book came out. It makes Molly suspect she’s warming up to proselytizing.

  “Actually I’m wondering if you can do me a favor. Kate’s been upset since my grandmother died and I guess she talked to Sarah about it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry about your grandma.”

  “Thank you.” Molly pauses to regroup. “The thing is, Kate is a little upset because…”—she flips her palms up to indicate she might have this wrong—“…Sarah said Kate is going to h-e-l-l.”

  “Oh no!” Elizabeth gasps.

  “I was wondering if you could please ask her not to say that kind of thing to Kate. She’s pretty freaked out.”

  “Of course.” Elizabeth nods vigorously. “I will definitely talk to Sarah.” She touches Molly’s hand. “Also though, I would appreciate it if you ask Kate not to tell Sarah God doesn’t exist.”

  The game has restarted and the first batter connects. Elizabeth claps. “Way to run, way to hit, Kate!”

  Molly glances behind her. Kate’s already made base. She looks back, aware she should simply say yes, of course, and let it go. Instead she says, “I can’t stop Kate from telling people what she thinks. I’m not asking you to stop Sarah from saying she believes in God.”

  Elizabeth claps for a girl who’s tagged out. “Does Kate really not believe in God?” Her voice is sympathetic. “Or is it your husband? He’s told her not to believe?”

  Molly shrugs. “And you tell your kids to believe. That’s what parents do, they poison their children with their own convictions.”

  Elizabeth’s face goes stony and Molly attempts to recover by explaining her brain/jail theory. “Our minds are like jails without a jailer. There’s no one to let you out. Trying to believe something that strikes you as false is like asking the mouse nibbling on crumbs outside your cell to unlock the door.”

  Elizabeth scowls. “So I’m a mouse?”

  “No, no. I mean you can’t make your brain think differently just because you want it to.”

  Elizabeth continues to frown.

  “It’s like a cat,” Molly tries again. “Like asking a cat to do something.”

  Elizabeth wipes the baby’s mouth with the edge of her blankie and focuses her attention on the game. Molly looks over her shoulder. The teams are changing and on her way to the outfield Kate shouts, “Did you see my hit, Mom? Did you see it?”

  “It was great!” Molly says. Elizabeth gives her a soft, knowing look, as if granting dispensation for the lie. This angers Molly more than anything else.

  The next week when Molly arrives to take her grandfather to the grocery store she finds him on his knees in the basement. “I was changing the furnace filter, and I couldn’t get back up.”

  Molly helps him to the sofa. “How long have you been stuck?”

  “Only about four hours.”

  “Four hours! On your knees?” She tries to keep her voice light, like Mary Poppins in distress.

  “I guess these old legs aren’t what they used to be.”

  Molly brings up subscribing to an emergency service. Her grandfather scoffs, “It’s silly to pay all that money every month, and I don’t want to be calling strangers. They’d send those ambulance folks and have my whole door busted up just getting inside.”

  “Maybe you should consider moving in with us, then.” Molly knows Simon won’t like this.

  “No, I’m fine just where I’m at. You don’t need some old fart hanging around.”

  “I don’t like the idea of you being hurt and no one there to help.”

  “People get old. You can’t worry. You just got to accept it.”

  She buys him a cell phone, tells him to carry it in his pocket, but he has trouble with the buttons, and a week later Molly finds it on his dresser. “You’re supposed to carry this all the time.”

  “Oh honey, that’s too bulky.”

  That afternoon Molly picks Kate up at the Randolphs’. The girls are making habitat dioramas for an end-of-year project. While she waits for Kate to gather her work, Molly tells Elizabeth about her grandfather.

  “You should try the thing I bought my mother after she broke her leg,” Elizabeth says. “It’s an automatic dialer your grandpa wears around his neck. If he pushes the button, the machine calls you with a recorded message to let you know he’s in trouble. No monthly fee and no strangers.”

  Before they leave Kate and Molly go out to the rear deck to get a papier-mâché tiger Kate’s left to dry in the sun. Adoo is standing at the bottom of the woode
d ravine. The sun, which has emerged following hours of rain, strikes his face, making it glow. In the moment before he turns away, she sees the dashed lines again on his cheeks, but he’s too far off to tell if they’re the same as before.

  Grandpa Hank agrees to the automatic dialer. Molly gets it wired up and helps him record a message. “Molly, it’s Grandpa. I need help.” The prefiguring of illness and injury unsettles her, but her grandfather pronounces the system “very practical,” and hangs the button on a chain around his neck.

  During summer vacation Sarah becomes a fixture in the house. Molly can’t think of a reason to object. There’s been no more talk of hell. The girls spend hours alone, Emma a tolerated arbiter, gofer, test subject, the third leg of their otherwise intense twosome, heads bent together over braids of thread or yarn, twenty fingers sorting plastic gems and letters. Molly never interrupts. Neither does the phone. No one calls to invite the girls swimming or ask Simon and her to a cookout.

  While the sun rides its reliable path through the upper leaves of a neighbor’s elm, Molly lies on a musty futon in the screened porch reading about the history of places that aren’t usually thought of as having a history. Switzerland. Canada. Zimbabwe. Before Kate was born, she’d been working on a Ph.D. in history, but no matter what subject she tried, Molly couldn’t find a beginning or an end. History just went on and on in infinite directions, a recursive, progressive web spun at a hundred trillion points of ricochet. There was no point from which to make a sensible judgment. When she got pregnant, Molly felt relieved to stop trying.

  In the porch, she just reads the facts, makes no attempt to judge them. One day she looks up from her book and sees that the elm’s ten thousand pods, which blanketed the gardens in late May, have sprouted. Somehow this mindless, unwanted propagation make being lonely okay. Even in the form of a plant, the world has violence and invasion at its core. Being lonely is the least you can expect. It’s so light a disappointment, it almost counts as a blessing.

  One Friday Simon invites two professors from his department over for dinner. Despite her supposed brilliance, Helen looks like a truck-stop waitress—bloodshot hyperthyroid eyes in a pale narrow face and a bony chest she advertises in midriff tank tops. Her husband, Dugan, twenty years older, wears his hair in big waves like a ’70s porn star. Helen was Dugan’s PhD student before they married. The rumor is he’s number four.