by Tricia Dower
Ron reappears. “Sighting a rare species?”
“Yeah, the yellow-headed, hook-billed Philly Dill.”
His laugh is easy, surprisingly so. He smells of new cologne she’d ask about if she didn’t fear it would give him ideas. “Chilly out there,” he says. “I thought you might like a fire.”
“Thanks. You moved the couch.”
“Away from the draft. Tomorrow’s the equinox already.”
“I’d like to believe we’ve got a few last warm days yet.”
“Me too.”
“Great news about the three POWs the North released.” For two years a banner reading “Bring the POWs home” has hung over the altar. It’s the one cause both those in favor of the war and those opposed to it can agree on.
“You betcha. Only five hundred thirty-nine to go.”
She nods, stares into the fire. “How’s Grace?”
“She’s good, really good.”
“Good.” She fire-gazes some more. Have they run out of conversation already?
“Tea?” he asks as he might of a parishioner dropping by.
“Sure. I’ll help.”
The smell of furniture polish hangs like a fine oily mist in the dining room. Grace’s presence is all over the kitchen too: Blue Willow canisters, an angel food cake on a milk glass pedestal dish, bananas and Winesap apples in a bowl, a plate of cookies fresh enough to leave the scent of chocolate in the air. Ron fills Grace’s whistling kettle.
“She brought a lot of stuff with her,” Lin says.
“She needs to feel at home.”
The Christmas cactus and jade plant Lin still consider hers live on the deep sill of the warped glass window. She tests the soil with her finger.
“Mom’s taking excellent care of them,” he says. She nods. Of course she is.
They carry their tea from the kitchen, stopping to check in on Tavis, his room her office once. He’s down to his underwear, loading the bed of a yellow Tonka truck with Legos, dumping them onto the floor. Tongue between his teeth, concentrating, he seems oblivious to her and Ron.
Ron says, “Grandma got that for you.”
Tavis looks up. “Groovy.”
Lin lets out a surprised laugh. “I have no idea where he learned that word.”
Tavis shoots her a surly look, says, “Anthony.”
“She baked you some cookies, too,” Ron says.
Tavis scrambles up. “I want Grandma.”
“Tomorrow, Possum.”
Tavis squints, lowers his head and, in a furious rush, rams it into her stomach. She expels an astonished oof and hits the wall with her back, knocking the mug from her hand. His face contorts in anger. “Go away so tomorrow can come,” he shouts.
Ron says, “Hey, hey.”
She slides down the wall, not comprehending what just happened. The tea spreads in wet fingers along the floor.
Ron grabs Tavis’s shoulders. “You’re out of line, young man. Tomorrow has nothing to do with Mommy. Apologize right now.” He turns Tavis around to face her.
Tavis clenches his hands and his chest heaves. His mumbled “Sorry” is so full of pain she wants to rip her heart out. She rises to her knees and wraps her arms around his rigid body. He softens and starts to cry. “I love you,” she whispers. For a long moment she hears only his sobs and the raging windstorm in her ears. She closes her eyes and hugs him tighter.
Ron breaks the silence in the boisterous voice he reserves for difficult situations. “How about a cookie and a story?” One small mercy: he doesn’t suggest they pray.
Tavis’s head bobs agreement against her chest.
“I’ll get a towel from the bathroom and mop up the tea,” Ron says. “Want to get the cookies, Mommy, while Tavis and I pick out a book we can read together on the couch?”
She wants to say, No, I don’t want to get the cookies and sit with you on that swaybacked couch. But she does want to get herself out of the way. She kisses Tavis’s neck and releases him from her embrace, wipes his tears with the bottom of her blouse.
On the way to the kitchen she steps into the room that housed scared young men on their way to Canada. She slept in it too after Ron said she couldn’t take Tavis if she left. It’s full of Grace’s scent now, woody like Lin’s Calèche but sweeter, not as aloof. Grace has changed the bedspread and replaced the dresser with her own. On it are photos of Ron’s sisters and father, their black and white faces staring out nakedly, unaware they’re dead.
She fetches the cookie plate and deposits it on the teak coffee table that has legs like fat toothpicks. Like her, it doesn’t belong in the room. She experiences a kick of hatred so violent it makes her dizzy. Ron emerges with Tavis and a book of Bible stories she intentionally left behind. Tavis snatches a cookie from the plate and gives her a defiant look. She doesn’t allow snacking in her new living room but this detestable room can choke on crumbs for all she cares. Tavis perches between them on the worn edge of the brown paisley couch, looking ready to bolt at any moment. She has sunk so far down into it she could fall out the bottom.
Months ago she sat here as Ron, coiled up, elbows and knees folded tight, long feet tucked away from her, said in disbelief, “What can I do, what can I do?” Taking guilty pleasure in hurting him, she said, “If nothing happens without God, He must want this.”
He reads the parable of the lost sheep. His voice has always had an emotional timbre, as though he’s perpetually moved by some great truth. Tonight the intimacy of it is hard to bear. She’s like a sweater steadily unraveling. The parable is short on words but illustrated with a colorful picture of a saintly shepherd rescuing a lamb fallen down a crevice.
“Sheep have a tendency to wander,” Ron says. “If the shepherd hadn’t gone out to look for that lost creature, it wouldn’t have found its way back on its own. “
“Why did it wander?” Tavis asks.
“Maybe it was chasing a pretty butterfly. Or wanted to see a greener hill.”
“There’s a sheep on my farm,” Tavis says. “It doesn’t get losted.”
“Then you’re a good shepherd,” Ron says.
Oh, spare me.
He carries Tavis into bed. She fights her way up against the pull of the couch, wanders in moth-like circles on the warped wooden floor and the braided rug Grace vacuums now, drifts to the window and stares past her reflection into utter darkness, the moon too stingy to shine tonight. The refrigerator delivers its familiar shudder and, although she doesn’t want to live here anymore, possessiveness seizes her like a fever. She opens her purse and pulls out her keys, sets an envelope on the coffee table for the Open Door Women’s League: cancelled postage stamps they’ll send to an epileptic colony in Germany. She hears Ron leave Tavis’s room and enter the kitchen, hears the kettle whistle.
“I made you more tea,” he says when he’s back. He sets a mug on the coffee table.
She shakes her head. “I have to go. I’ve ruined his time with you.”
He spreads a hand across his chest. “Please, no. Don’t give him that much power over us. Friday nights will become routine for him if we give it a chance. Please, Lin.”
A spasm of self-loathing grips her. She talked herself into coming here tonight for fear he’d cut off her support if she didn’t and force her to return for good or lose Tavis. “I’m not a lost sheep that has to be found.”
He holds out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Your new job?”
“It’s only been a week. Not much to say.” She isn’t ready to expose her work to interrogation. She could tell him about the Wrestler on the bus or that Lenny the Leer knocks on her door every week but that might imply she needs his protection, can’t take care of herself.
“Do you like it?”
She lowers herself to the ed
ge of an armchair and sets her keys on a frou-frou lacy cloth newly covering an end table. “I think so.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose, shakes his head and sighs. Her legacy to him may be a lifetime of sighs. “I need to apologize for last week. I was hurt and acted like a jerk when you asked about time.” He pulls a stack of books from a shelf and places them beside her keys on the lace cloth. “A few of my texts at the U and seminary touched on theories of time,” he says. “I’ve marked the pages. You’re not the first great thinker to tackle the subject.”
She smirks at great thinker.
He lays a flat hand on the books as he has on the altar so many times, authoritatively, possessively. “In here you’ll find Pythagoras, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ouspensky, Parmenides, Aristotle, Kant, Heraclitus, Einstein. No surprise they don’t agree with each other.” He’s written For Lin on a piece of paper and rubber-banded it to the first book in the stack. Her throat knots up at the rubber band and the time it cost him to do this for her. He rests an elbow on the mantel. “A few played around with the idea our existence will recur an infinite number of times.”
“Like a record on endless repeat?” A teenage memory stops by, the Everly Brothers singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream” over and over until she fell asleep.
Ron laughs. “Good one.” He pulls the ugly brown ottoman over and sits at her feet. “A record will eventually wear out. But theory has it that you and I will sit exactly like this, time and time again. You’ll wear the same red blouse with the Mondrian-like squares and I the burgundy sweater you gave me two Christmases ago. You’ll be flicking your thumb with your index finger in that nervous way you have and I’ll be feeding the fire. Tavis will be in his bed, hugging his new dump truck.”
She stills her fingers. “Is he?”
“Yes. Pray he doesn’t puncture a lung. Anyway, all will be the same as it is now.” He reaches over for the tea and hands it to her. It’s still warm.
“Sounds like déjà vu on uppers.”
He coughs out a laugh. “How do you know about uppers?”
“Physio Psych.” A bolt of curiosity strikes her. “What do you believe about time?”
“Certainly not that the world began at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC. A Protestant bishop noodled that out hundreds of years ago.”
“You’re kidding.” The day before their wedding, give or take a few thousand years.
“I’m not. He traced it back, following the begats in the Bible.”
“Oh, I did not know that,” she says, exactly the way Tavis at age three used to say it each time they answered his nonstop why?
He gives her a smile full of nostalgia and says, “He’s a pretty cute kid sometimes. Just not tonight.” Her smile back is rueful. He clears his throat. “So, what do I believe? I accept the scriptural record that there was a beginning and will be an end. I also believe in the limits of physical laws. We can’t be born and die in the same moment.” He’s in preaching mode now. She used to love listening to his sermons until it struck her how his pauses, like musical rests, seemed inserted for effect, the rhythm of his words designed to manipulate emotions. “You planted strawberries our first summer here,” he says. “You knew they wouldn’t bear fruit the minute you sunk their roots into the ground.”
She leans forward, energized. “What if they did and our brains tricked our minds into believing otherwise so we didn’t miss any of it?”
He laughs. “You can drive yourself crazy trying to answer that kind of question.” He catches himself and his face goes serious. He places a hand on her knee. “I shouldn’t have said crazy. It’s just that at some point you have to decide what to believe. For me, spiritual growth can’t happen without time and there’s no life without spiritual growth.” He stands and drops a log on the fire, sits again. “Is this about death? Are you afraid of running out of time?”
She sets her mug down and traces the lace pattern with her thumb, considering what to say, decides on “Most people have a philosophy of life that makes sense to them.” She doesn’t add or softens the blow of the truth.
“If they reflect on it at all.”
“Yeah, if they do. Well, I have only vague fragments of one.”
“And all the time in the world to build one?”
She smiles at that, aching to tell him what Seth says about reality. But she doesn’t want him dismissing it as he did Transactional Analysis. She’ll take his books to be kind, yet she has no interest in becoming an expert on theories of time from books likely written with impenetrable language. She just wants to know what to believe.
He slips off the ottoman and onto his knees before her, pulls her hands from her lap and cups them in his. “Will you stay tonight?”
Her throat tightens at his hungry, hopeful smile. How warm she is by the fire, how near to Tavis. The drive home will be cold, dark and lonely. If Tavis hadn’t had his fit she wouldn’t have questioned staying. She takes a deep breath and nods in surrender.
He asks her to sit beside him on the couch. They hold hands, watch the fire until, at some bleary-eyed point, they have no excuse not to climb the tightly wound staircase past framed photos of their life together. He lags behind, hand on the small of her back, and steers her around the corner at the top. Only two weeks gone and she’s already forgotten their bedroom door is so warped they have to prop it open with a heavy iron pot. Her bag, a powder blue train case she’s had since high school, waits by the dresser. The bedside table no longer holds anything of hers. He kneels and prays while she changes into her nightgown. The citrusy scent of his new cologne stains her fingers. The mattress is as soft as she remembers, but the weight of him beside her already foreign. He turns out the light.
“If you believe in eternal life,” she says in the dark, “how can you say there’s an end?”
“I meant the end of earth, not heaven, and the end of the physical body, not the soul.”
“What if heaven and earth are different aspects of the same reality? Why should the only perfect place be above us somewhere?”
He pulls her to him, says, “Let’s talk about that another time.”
36
Mon, Dec 27/71
We had a moment on Christmas Eve. Grace stayed for dinner after the pageant. We were sipping hot chocolate by the fire when T got hysterical, crying that Santa would get burned when he came down the chimney. Grace said oh, you brilliant, thoughtful boy. Ronnie, don’t add any more logs, Tavis & I will take care of this. Off they trotted to the kitchen & back, ruined a perfectly good fire w/a pan of water. Then Grace went thru the whole cookies & milk for Santa bit. R got into it too. After T went to bed listening in vain for jingle bells, I asked if they honestly believe there’s a merry old elf that travels around the globe in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, delivering toys to kids. They laughed & said of course not. I said so why try to get Tavis to believe in it? Grace said life is devoid of joy w/out some magic. R said Santa helps children understand love & generosity. I said aren’t you worried he’ll wonder if what you tell him about God is true when he finds out you lied to him about Santa? Grace said: I’ll be off so you two can work this out. We haven’t worked it out.
A week after that journal entry, she can no longer deny she’s estranged from the bowed heads in church, moving their lips like fish, composing their entreaties to God. Ron’s sermons pass through her without touching. Hymns that filled her with a rapturous longing seem leaden and insipid. She feels robotic, coated with a hard substance, dull and insensate.
She arranges time with Grace after prayer breakfast on a snowy Tuesday. Tavis is down with sniffles and home with Ron. As cold, milky light spills through the living room windows, Grace kneels at the hearth and blows on the fire she’s trying to get going, sending a deep whisper up the flue. Lin curls up on the soft white couch and attempts to describe this new distance she’s experiencing in church, this sense of intru
ding. She stops short of saying she no longer senses the presence of God because maybe she never did.
“You’re tired, that’s all,” Grace says into the fireplace. “I was always exhausted after the holidays. The extra services, the baking and decorating, the pressure to be perfect.” She twists to face Lin, shakes her head slowly and speaks of the sadness, of folks getting depressed and dying, not that they don’t at other times but it wounds more deeply at Christmas. “Suicides and dead babies are the worst. Howard and I had only two suicides over thirty-eight years in the ministry, thank God, because we took them into ourselves like poison.” She pushes herself up stiffly from the hearth, eases her body into one of two love seats bookending the fireplace and shrugs a yellow knitted throw over her shoulders.
Lin and Ron haven’t had a suicide but the death in Vietnam of a parishioner’s son hit them hard, especially after Peter Hemstad said Ron must have thought it divine justice given his objection to the war. Eighty-one-year-old Peter died from an aneurism two months later and Lin felt more relief than sorrow. As for the holidays wearing her out, in fact they swelled her heart with generosity, particularly towards Ron. He only wants the best for her. She knows of men who shout their wives into silence with drunk, angry voices. She has no good reason to be dissatisfied. “I’m not tired,” she tells Grace, “just numb.”
“A sure sign of fatigue,” Grace says. She closes her eyes for a moment. “I know how it is to live and breathe the church. We couldn’t get away from it, even at meals or on vacation. I didn’t have the phone calls and visitors you do weekdays because I was teaching. But people found me evenings and Saturdays, Sundays too, of course. Buying groceries took forever because I’d run into people from church and have to chat.” She laughs. “They must’ve thought I had ESP. Expected me to know who was in the hospital at any given moment, who was pregnant, what time the youth group was meeting and so on. And let’s face it. Some people are just plain mean. When anyone criticized Howard, that sapped me too.” She leans over and stabs a log with the poker. “This isn’t drawing. Howard could always make a better fire.”