The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

by Philyaw, Deesha

  You display the book prominently in your classroom library. You send Eric a text message: Thank you for the book. It’s wonderful.

  Then you respond to his last text, which was about his board approving his summer camp proposal with full funding. Congratulations on getting funding! you write. And he replies, You’re welcome! And thank you.

  That night, you read Overview cover to cover. And the next night, you start painting again. You stay up late, getting your rhythm back.

  The weekend comes, and you call him, because you’re really not a fan of texting anyway, and because maybe it’s time. He answers right away. He doesn’t ask what took you so long. He’s happy to hear from you. And you’re both breathless.

  You talk. About his summer camp proposal, about what you’re each making for dinner and what your weekend plans are. You talk about the new Toni Morrison documentary and what she meant to each of you. You talk about loss.

  You continue to talk daily, to have virtual dates, thanks to video calls. And they’re better than any real date you’ve been on. You binge-watch TV shows together, cook together, drink wine, and watch each other do laundry. You talk for days and nights, and nights that turn into mornings.

  Sometimes you wake before dawn, and he’s still there, his sleeping face filling your phone screen. Then you settle again, your breathing in sync with his, and you drift off.

  How do you make love to a physicist? Ask him if he believes in God. Ask him if he thinks it’s possible to reconcile science and religion.

  “Physics principles support the notion of God because they tell us that you can’t create something from nothing,” he says. “Something must have created all of this, unless you believe that we have always existed, that there’s no big bang, no beginning point to the universe. I don’t know what the mechanism is, but it’s some higher power. All that energy had to come from somewhere.”

  “Oh. I assumed you were an atheist.”

  “Even Einstein wasn’t an atheist,” he says. “He talked about God all the time. Now, he didn’t believe in a god that was concerned with human behavior, which is the church’s obsession and the reason it uses guilt and shame to enforce Christianity.”

  “You don’t think God cares how we treat each other and the planet?”

  “I think that’s the most important thing. But human beings are capable of doing that outside of the purview of the church. I’ve studied the Bible cover to cover. So much hinges on translation and interpretation. I grew up Catholic, and I love the ritual of it all. But I’ve come to understand that belief in a personal god is not essential. Not for me.”

  You ask, “What about heaven?” But what you really want to ask is What about hell?

  “What about it?”

  Heaven—getting into it, avoiding the alternative—is the whole point of living right, isn’t it? Your mother speaks longingly of Judgment Day and the final accounting of who’s allowed past the pearly gates, certain that God’s accounting will mirror hers. “It will be a very small number,” she’s fond of saying. “Only those who walk the straight and narrow path shall see the face of God.”

  And you realize that if God were to welcome everyone into heaven, your mother would abandon Christianity immediately.

  You don’t know how to answer Eric’s question about heaven without sounding like you’re quoting a fairy tale about good and evil, reward and punishment.

  You take a moment to soak it all in. You think of your mother and the small version of God she clings to, the only version you’ve ever known and the one you’re afraid to let go of. Then you think of how your daily calls with Eric are a kind of ritual, and how when you finally meet up again, it could be a kind of consecration. You are thrilled and terrified at the prospect. Terrified because all you’ve ever known of religion is that it demands more than you can ever give.

  “I guess a person could have heaven right here on earth,” you say.

  “I do,” Eric says. “Every time I see you smile, or hear you talk about your students. And even when you’re quiet and painting or just . . . folding towels.”

  “Heaven is me folding towels?”

  “Okay . . . maybe it’s you folding fitted sheets. Miracles abound.”

  How do you make love to a physicist? You invite him to visit in the spring for your first solo art show at a local gallery. It will be a collection of colorful abstract paintings influenced by your reading of Overview, Rumi, and the Qur’an, and your rereading of Morrison’s Song of Solomon. You title the show Whatever I Say about Love, a line from Rumi’s The Masnavi. You’re painting now more than you ever have.

  The show is still three months away, and already you’re imagining your mother wandering around the gallery muttering under her breath, “What is that supposed to be?” the way she did when you lived at home and she’d barge into your bedroom/studio unannounced. You never gave her your framed work as a gift. You stuck with perfume and jewelry.

  You ask your therapist if it would be wrong not to invite your mother to the show. She answers your question with a question: “Do you want her there?”

  “If I’m honest, the answer is no.”

  “Then don’t invite her.”

  You’re silent, and after a moment, she asks, “How do you feel when you hear me say that?”

  “Frightened.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Everything.”

  How do you make love to a physicist? You start to have sex dreams about him, very, very detailed sex dreams. For the first time in your life, you crave sex. For the first time, you are curious about a man’s body, about how you will feel above and beneath him.

  But then you remember the sex you’ve had, and how you had to disappear into yourself to endure it. How you thought about your stomach and your thighs the whole time, wishing you were someone else, imagining he was wishing the same. How sex, for you, was just a way to be touched, a means to an end. How all you ever really wanted was to be touched. But men always want more.

  Eric, like any man, would eventually want more, more than you could give. And he would be disappointed, probably disgusted, with you for leading him on.

  So you do one of the hardest things you’ve ever had to do: you delete his number from your phone again, but this time, you also block it.

  How do you make love to a physicist? Forget your home training. Ditch the girdles your mother taught you to wear to harness your belly, your butt, your thighs, your freedom. God forbid something jiggle. God forbid you are soft and unbridled.

  Sleep naked.

  This is all your therapist’s idea. At first you’re skeptical and resistant. But when she asks you to just humor her, because what’s the downside, you can’t think of one.

  You take long, hot, soapy showers, catching the water in your mouth until it spills out the corners. You rinse, step out, and rub lavender oil into your still-damp skin, from your scalp to the bottoms of your feet. It’s winter, so you bundle up beneath blankets and explore. Use your hands to study the contours and curves of your body, your topography. To study them as fact, without judgment. Pleasure yourself, but slowly, to savor and discover. Every morning and every night.

  On the weekends, you sleep in, then wake up and cook hearty comfort meals from scratch—no boxes, no cans, no fast food. Crab and kale omelets, roasted red potatoes, seafood linguini, ginger turmeric butternut squash soup, caramelized Brussels sprouts, roasted beet salad with goat cheese, coconut curries, beef Wellington.

  You cook and paint and nap and stroke yourself to sleep at night.

  And as your body begins to feel like a home, your courage grows. It grows bigger than your mother’s chastisement in the parking lot after service the first time you go to church unbound. She asks why you aren’t wearing a girdle, why you aren’t sucking in the way she taught you thirty years ago, and how dare you come into the house of the Lord that way. Your mother, who complains of women in the church nowadays committing the sin of visible panty lines, remi
nds you that she raised you better than this.

  And you say, “I’m tired of holding my breath.” Then you promise you won’t come to church that way again. And you keep your word because you won’t go to church again at all.

  How do you make love to a physicist? You send him an apology in the form of one of the many sketches of him you have made, in a silver frame. He doesn’t respond right away. And you’re okay with that; you knew the risk you ran, disappearing the way you did. But when he does reach out, you’re both quiet on the phone for a long time before you say, “It’s just something I had to do. For me. I didn’t have the words for it then, and I’m not entirely sure I do now.”

  “I need you to use your words, though,” he says. “If we’re going to do this, I need you to try. And I promise I won’t ever do anything to make you regret trying.”

  You try to remember the last time a man made you a promise. You decide it doesn’t even matter. This man is making you one now. That’s what matters.

  How do you make love to a physicist? On March 13, the night before he comes to town, you stay up late, taking turns playing old-school hip hop and R&B music videos, talking smack about who’s going to get served at your dance-off, Googling your astrological compatibility—your Virgo to his Aquarius—laughing, giddy.

  Then Pi Day arrives and you shower while he’s en route to the airport. Once he’s in the air, his six-hour flight (including layover) feels to you like an eternity. His walk from the plane to your car at curbside takes as long as a pilgrimage. You imagine him kissing the western wall of Sbarro, weeping at the Cinnabon, leaving an offering at the feet of Auntie Anne.

  After he drops his luggage into your trunk and closes it, he turns to you and says, “Finally.” And you say, “Finally.” And he draws you into his arms and kisses you. His lips are as soft as you thought they would be.

  At your place, you make omelets and home fries, which he devours. His appetite is magnificent. Then, even though you’re both exhausted and sleep deprived, adrenaline kicks in and you win the dance-off by a mile. This man cannot dance to save his life, despite talking much shit.

  “What’s my prize?” you ask.

  Eric pulls you down to the couch and kisses you again. “Oh, so we both win,” you say. “Here’s a participation trophy.” You go in for more kisses, and you think, God, let him be forever.

  You both begin to doze. At some point you wake up, with your head in his lap and your mind in overdrive. You think about your art show opening tomorrow. You imagine looking at him from across the gallery floor as he looks at your work; introducing him to your girlfriends, your colleagues, your students. And your mother. You think that even if today and tomorrow were all there was, that would be okay. But then you hear your therapist’s voice asking what you feel, not think, right now. And you struggle at first to find the words before settling on warm, hopeful, joyous, full.

  Eric strokes your furrowed brows until your face relaxes. You say, “Rumi said, ‘Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.’ Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, then yawns. “Sounds like a mystic’s take on fated love, and I don’t believe in fate.”

  You deflate a little. You want him to be the one you’ve been waiting for, and you want him to feel the inevitability of you as well. You want to be his default, not an option. You want the promises of a new religion.

  You chide yourself for walking too far ahead—for regressing into eighties song lyrics territory so soon.

  But then he says, “The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way recently sparked seventy-five times brighter over the course of a two-hour period, and twice as bright as it’s ever been in the twenty years astronomers have been monitoring it.”

  By now, you’re used to him talking science, but you’re not sure where he’s going with this.

  “One theory,” he continues, “is that the event was caused by a star about fifteen times bigger than the Sun getting close to the edge of the black hole, disturbing some gases, heating things up, increasing the infrared radiation coming from the edge. But get this: we observed that star getting close to the black hole about a year before we observed the effects on the black hole.”

  “That shows just how vast the universe is, how enormous the distance,” you say.

  “Exactly. Distances, plural. The distance between the star and the edge of the black hole, and the distance between the black hole and Earth. So . . . I say all of this to say that sometimes wheels are set in motion long before the spark is manifest. Is that the same thing as fate? I don’t know, but I do know that rare, brilliant events take time.”

  He sighs. “Which is why I didn’t trip when you didn’t respond to my messages at first. I figured if you’d wanted me to leave you alone you would’ve said so. But you didn’t. Now I did trip a little when you ghosted me, but”—he shrugs and pulls you closer—“I figured you had your reasons.”

  How do you make love to a physicist? When he unbuttons your blouse and asks, “Are we going to be the type of people who sit around talking about Rumi and black holes, or are we going to get naked?” you answer, “Both.”

  You stand up and pull down your skirt and panties. “Rumi wrote of an intuitive love of God, and he was a Muslim,” you say. “But people like to strip away the Islam from his work.”

  He runs his hands over your thighs, your breasts, your free stomach.

  How do you make love to a physicist? With your whole self, quivering, lush, unafraid.

  JAEL

  I THINK the pastor’s wife was a freak before she got into the church. She real dark-skin with long, thick hair that she wear in a bun under a black church hat, the wide kind with the feathers. Sometimes the hat is dark blue, or white on Easter. But I bet when she was 14 like me, she used to have a big Afro and wear tight bellbottoms, like Thelma on Good Times. It’s something about the way her eyes sparkle and dance, instead of trying to look all holy. Like she’s remembering something fun from a long time ago. And that half-smile of hers. Like her secrets got secrets. And she got them big dick-sucking lips. Twan said that I got them too. But fuck him. Anyway. Everyone calls the preacher’s wife “Sister Sadie.” In my head, I call her “Sweet Sadie,” like that song Kachelle’s mama used to play all the time when we were little. But there ain’t nothing sweet about that lady. She dress all proper in a buttoned-up suit when she standing up there with the old as dirt Reverend collecting that love offering. Sweet Sadie ain’t old-old. Her husband probably 105. She probably 40. Her body reminds me of the album covers Kachelle uncle have in his room. Ohio Players, Lakeside, The Gap Band, Parliament-Funkadelic. They got all these ladies, some real, some cartoons, with big titties, big booties, and dick-sucking lips. Sweet Sadie try to hide all that under them churchy suits. But I bet she used to wear coochie-cutter shorts before she met Old Reverend. She might be fooling the church people, but she ain’t fooling me. I know her body is beautiful underneath them suits. I wish I could see it.

  MY MAMA used to say, “Careful you go looking for something. You just might find it.” But I wasn’t looking for anything when I went into my great-grandbaby’s room not too long ago to change her bed linens and flip her mattress. I really wasn’t. I just wanted to air her room out and whatnot, and I always flip the mattresses twice a year, at the same time we turn the clocks forward or back and change the batteries in the smoke detector like they tell you to do. So I flipped the mattress and found her diary. It wasn’t too much in the beginning. Just who she didn’t like at school, and who didn’t like her. Which teachers was mean, and which ones she could charm. I didn’t approve of some of her language. But that ain’t nothing compared to things I saw about midway through it. Unnatural things. Things that just break my heart. God ain’t in this child, even though I trained her up in the way that she should go in hopes that she would not depart from it when she is old. But from the looks of things in that diary, she done departed a long time ago.
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br />   KACHELLE TOLD him we’re 16. That’s a bigger lie for me than it is for her. She just turned 15 last week. I still have to wait 6 more months. But he probably don’t care how old we really are. He claim he want us to come over to his house for a crab boil in his backyard. Just the 3 of us. Kachelle said she kind of scared. Cause he 35. But she gonna go because he cute. She say he look like Morris Day from The Time who she been in love with ever since “Purple Rain.” She dragged me to that movie four times since it came out. I like Prince, but Kachelle is IN LOVE with him and Morris Day too. She say she horny for light-skin niggas. Don’t matter either way to me. Niggas is niggas. Light-skin, dark-skin. Fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five. All the same and none of ’em worth a damn. But Kachelle the type that have to learn the hard way. She all excited about this nigga and a crab boil. And he say he gon take us to the beach, and she all excited about that too, knowing good and well I don’t like the beach. I just want to see the inside of that big house of his. See what he got in there.

  I wish I could go to Sweet Sadie’s house . . . without Old Rev there, of course.

  I DON’T know how to talk to this child. These kids today . . . they is different than how we was, coming up. What do I say to her that won’t get her face all crumpled up out of shape? Littlest thing I say set her off. I tell her to pick up behind herself, put her dishes in the sink at least, make up her bed, put her dirty clothes in the hamper. And she get mad. Just get all bent out of shape if I say anything to her. Sucking her teeth, or acting like she don’t even hear me half the time.