by Rica Keenum
Last night I dreamed I was a singer approaching the stage in a cascading gown. With coiffed hair and makeup shimmering beneath the lights, I scanned the arena, noting the endless clusters of bodies like wildflowers in a field. Silence rippled through the room. Hundreds of eyes were pinned to me. Stepping toward the microphone, I wrapped my hand around it and opened my mouth to the crowd. But there was nothing. No sound. I was hollow.
***
It’s been three weeks since we left Wisconsin, and J is out of touch.
“He’s probably working a lot,” I tell the boys. “I’m sure he misses you like crazy.”
KJ nods in agreement but Sym does not buy it. He has an ultra-sensitive bullshit meter, and this lie trips his alarm. Ripping his pillow from behind him, he presses it against his face to mask his tears.
“Call him,” he growls.
“I’ve called him already and we’ll just have to wait now,” I say.
“Something is wrong. Something bad happened to him, I just know it.” His hand inches out from under his blanket and finds mine. “Pray for my dad,” he says.
I’ve run out of prayers. Out of patience, out of words.
Dear God, make the phone ring.
***
Sym is shirtless in the yard, bug-bitten and bronzed, whacking a stick at a tree.
It's getting late and I have asked him to come in three times. Finally, he heeds my fourth call, thrashing the tree once more before laboring inside.
“I think you need a shower,” I say. “Please put your clothes in the washer.”
He sneers and tramps into the garage, where the washer and dryer sit side by side on a concrete slab. I go back to chopping peppers — red, yellow and green, a festive pile of veggies the boys will drown in ranch dressing. I hear a crash, a bang, a roar. I drop my knife and rush in to find my son, red-faced and hurling a spare tire at the garage wall. His hair is sweaty and juts up like an animal in defense mode.
“Sym,” I yell.
He reloads, grabbing items from an open box. He lobs a flashlight and it cracks apart, explodes in jagged bits. I watch the contents of a toolbox skid across the room: a screwdriver, a hammer, a plastic pack of nails. One, two, three picture frames crack on the concrete, the high-pitched ting of breaking glass sounds like wind chimes in a storm. I watch my child whirl, the Tasmanian Devil.
“Sym,” I plead. “Sym…” The more I try to engage him, the angrier he gets. I can’t call his dad, but I know a man he will talk to.
Anthony is a blue-jeans-wearing, late-twenties youth pastor, father and husband. Tall, with herculean hands and a smile that glides up to his ears. We met him at the little church down the street and quickly learned we were neighbors. I’m watching Nickelodeon with KJ when he comes over to chat with Sym in the living room. I hear their muffled voices over the show I’m pretending to watch, but I can’t make out the words. I decide to just be grateful Sym is talking again.
When they finish their discussion, an hour has passed and Anthony pokes his head in the doorway and says, “Just wanted to say goodnight.”
I get up, walk him to the door and fight the urge to ask him for a play-by-play since Sym is eyeing me from the couch. He looks like my kid again. No more sweaty tufts of hair. No more frenetic motion. His face is serene and he reaches for Anthony’s hand. They shake.
“See you at youth group,” Anthony says. “And don’t forget — ice cream afterward, you and me.” He smiles and I thank him as he exits, throwing me a look I read as, It’s going to be fine.
At midnight I’d rather be sleeping, but when I close my eyes I see Sym’s fiery cheeks, him hurling the tire in the garage. I get up and amble into the other room where I flick on the light near my desk. I open a document and begin pecking out my pain and frustration. I write a letter to J, to God, to myself and to no one at all. I type and I type and I type. My fingers against the keys, striking, striking, striking. Twenty-six letters making an ocean of words. I am a swimmer, diving into word waves, fingers plunging into the deep. I pour it all onto the page, all the internal clutter, and it feels like the adult version of slinging tires.
When the page is full, I see all the messy bits — my broken dreams for a love that was doomed to fail, my impossible faith in the family we could not be, the prayers that couldn’t save us. I watch my hands tremble over the keyboard. At last, my fingers are nimble. My mind is clear.
***
Carlo is an eccentric Chihuahua with an inflated sense of self. While he is afraid of the reflection in his stainless-steel water bowl, he makes zealous attempts to take down the larger breeds: gangly Dobermans, German shepherds and obese mastiffs. We end up with him a month after moving to Florida. I realize the boys could use a new friend to help smooth the transition. He is five pounds and in need of a new home when a college girl and her boyfriend drive him over on a Sunday night. I am sitting outside, watching the bugs thump their wings on the gleaming orb of the patio light. The street is a black stripe out front, which the occasional car illuminates as it whizzes past at 60 or higher. This excites the boys, who are eagerly watching from inside, faces pressed on the window like postage stamps. I’ll handle it, I tell them. The dog deal is a transaction after all, and anxious kids will both drive up the price and upset the dog. I have a crisp $50 in my pocket. And after that, there will be a trip to the pet store and vet bills, so this isn’t going to be cheap.
“A dog is a real commitment, kids. You get it?” They nod, eyes bright as holiday bulbs.
I spend the most time with Carlo, our cantankerous little beast. He doesn’t let me hold him. Instead, he crouches in a corner and watches me from across the room, flashing a pair of clean incisors whenever I get too close. I ignore him and instruct the boys to do the same. I understand his distrust, his need to guard his heart.
“He’ll come around,” I say, hoping I am right.
As I move through the house, I feel his eyes like little black beams boring into me while I pour my coffee, wash the morning dishes or sit at my desk and wait for the computer to blaze to life. Inch by inch, he creeps closer until he successfully pins himself to me, a scraggy dog-ribbon. An unexpected prize.
Having Carlo makes me realize how much we need him. At 3:05, I click on his leash and we amble up the street, his little tail flapping like a flag in the sunshine. He leads me through the afternoon mayhem, the backpacked kids zigzagging on bicycles and mothers pushing strollers on the sidewalk. When we spot Sym, Carlo shoots toward him, a dog-bullet in the crowd.
At night, he burrows between me and the mattress. I never invite him, but one restless evening he hops up, and though he is small, he seems to fill an awful chasm. He keeps me from flailing as the patter of his tiny heartbeat plays like a lullaby. In the morning, he paws me awake so we can start the day together. How odd that my sons’ dog, whose sole purpose in our home is to bolster their spirits, ends up bolstering mine. Carlo helps me navigate the lonely terrain of single motherhood, but he becomes attached to my mother’s dog. When I take him over for a visit, he eases his way into her household. One morning as I’m repainting the front door of our home, he slips past me and bolts across the street and through the neighbor’s yard. He finds his rust-haired partner in crime: Rudy, a long-haired Chihuahua with an overbite. This is my mother’s dog, and together the two raise hell yapping at manic squirrels. In her house, they perch on the back of the sofa near the window, the ivory tower where they watch for mail carriers and other intrusive passersby.
Carlo begins spending nights with Rudy, and these evenings stretch on indefinitely. Carlo has made his choice.
Chapter 10
My Soul is a Paper Ship
It’s getting harder to pray. Or maybe I’m getting harder, calcified. Still, I force myself into rituals, hoping to revive the faith I’ve nursed for more than a decade. The pastor asked for volunteers to help clean the church offices on Saturdays. I silently committed to the task. I need to get more involved, I tell myself. But it takes me a few weeks
to actually show up. I stand in the lobby feeling awkward because I’m sporting a paint-stained tank top and sloppy hair in church. It feels sacrilegious and I have the urge to explain my outfit to the Jesus painting in the foyer. The lights are off but the sun is bright and shadows stretch out on the tiles like sleeping dogs in the hall. It looks like no one is here, except I see soapy spots of water on the floor and I hear music coming from the sanctuary. I follow the sound and find Anthony wearing shorts and a T-shirt, swishing a broom to the beat of the stereo.
“Hey,” he says, looking up as I hop around wet spots.
“Sorry to screw up your floor,” I say.
“No problem.” He smiles. “You wanna start in the kitchen?” he asks, pointing to the tiny room behind the sanctuary where a coffee pot, refrigerator and pantry huddle in a closet-sized space.
“Sure,” I say as I tiptoe across the room. He hollers that it needs to be swept and wiped down. All the supplies are on the counter.
A few hours later, we’re sticky and achy. I hear the double doors bang shut and see Anthony’s wife approach with their toddler. She pushes a vacuum cleaner to one side of the room and kicks the cord beside it.
“The nursery is finished,” she announces.
We chat while arranging chairs for the Sunday service. I don’t mention it, but I’m surprised that no one else has shown up to help, not even the pastor who gave a nice speech about acts of service when he lobbied for help with the spring cleaning. I want to be a selfless giver, but I go home feeling angry and used. I have all these emotions that keep popping up, and trying to fight them back is like a game of Wack-A-Mole. I ask God for help, but my feelings grow bigger. My body becomes unruly and I stop attending church because my mouth won’t sing the hymns and my hands won’t fold to pray. Three months pass and I don’t leave the house except to buy groceries or take walks at night with the boys. I work from home, I tell myself. I’m working. But when the boys leave for school, I curl up on the sofa or head back to bed and pull a blanket over my face. I get up again at noon and sit in my chair near the window. I think about the way I used to pray, how prayer became a song that never left my lips. I could hum from my heart straight to heaven, and it brought me strength or peace. But there’s no music now, and I don’t trust the lyrics.
One Sunday, the doorbell rings. It takes me a moment to squint through the light. The sun is so bright it’s blinding. When my eyes adjust, I see Anthony and his wife on the stoop. They see me too and smile. I don’t want to be seen. I’m in my pajamas as usual, and it’s late afternoon. I hesitate, then open the door limply. I am a dishrag. I pull on a wobbly smile and they sit on the loveseat with faces that say, We’re concerned. I pretend not to see their parental expressions. I tell them how busy I am with work, how I keep odd hours because I like to write at night, which is partially true. I write late because it takes half the day to get motivated. Because my feelings weigh me down and it’s hard to move.
“Do you think you’ll come back to church?” they ask in unison. It’s a tag-team effort.
I want to say yes because I want to be like them: confident, beaming God-orbs. But I’m beginning to wonder if I can trust the God I thought I knew, or the church, or the woman I was on the pew — the woman who prayed and stayed in a broken marriage because she thought it was God’s plan, the woman who listened to all the voices in the room and forgot how to hear her own. Forgot she even had a voice.
“Thanks for the invitation,” I say. “But I need to spend Sundays alone.”
***
When I meet a man from Chandigarh, India, my worldview changes. Mani is a friend of a friend, whom I commissioned for website design work. We email at first, about work and the specifics of my project. And then one Friday evening he calls to ask a question. I am divvying up Chinese takeout — cartons of fried rice and paper-wrapped egg rolls. Without thinking, I ask a random question. “What do you eat in Chandigarh?”
“Naan,” Mani says. “With lentils and vegetables.” Masala, he tells me, is a blend of spices that flavors the food, mostly cumin, cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper and cloves. He is friendly and chatty, and as curious about America as I am about India. As he describes golden daals, rich gravies and curried rice dishes, I forget about my own hot plate. I kick back and listen as Chandigarh materializes in my mind: rickshaws zigzagging in the streets, food vendors manning steaming pots on roadside stands. We continue to talk, about books, television shows and the quirks and contrasts in our cultures. Soon we become each other’s tour guides, connecting via email, Skype and text messages. Mani is smart and silly. When his face appears on my screen, his beard is black and thick as fur, a teddy bear of a man who smiles, recites poems and gushes over philosophy and art. He teaches me Punjabi words and songs and sends me videos of his life: birthday celebrations with friends and cooking mishaps in his kitchen. His laughter shakes something loose in me, the walls of a woman in hiding. I feel myself being transported right out of my life, across oceans where women wear ornate saris and musicians strum the twangy sitar. I love the music so much, Mani sends me dozens of YouTube videos every day.
“This is enchanting, like hearing music again for the first time,” I say as we watch together on separate continents. There are hymns and wrenching ballads. I can’t understand the lyrics, but somehow they speak to me. At night, I replay the songs in my dark room, the mysterious words and undulations, rising, falling, vibrating like a rung bell.
I teach Mani Scrabble, and we play for hours over the computer. He beats me most games and we laugh, me the writer, him the foreigner, kicking my ass with the English language.
We cry together too. Mani is heartbroken over the death of his fiancée, Ruby, who’d entered the hospital with a virus two years prior. He has his grief and I have my disappointment and crumbling faith, emotions that drive us to solitude. But solitude together. We are two souls in hibernation, spanning the distance between us, and it is exactly what we need.
A follower of Sikh, Mani rises early to go to the temple and pray. I can always tell when he’s been there. His face lightens; he appears childlike as if he’s shed a decade. He talks about the presence of God, of his religion and its tenets. So spiritual, he is, and devout.
“So what do you think… am I going to hell?” he asks one day, eyebrows mocking.
Mani can recite the Bible, and he knows the precepts of Christianity: One God, one truth. There is one way to heaven — I believed that. Suddenly, I don’t anymore. When I see Mani’s face, I can’t fathom a fiery hell, and the more I examine my beliefs, the stranger they look to me, like foreign objects.
At night, I pull books off my shelf, surf the internet, stumble about for answers. I am drunk with confusion and staggering between two worlds, neither of which feels like home. Omnipotent, omnipresent, somehow it doesn’t add up. If God sees everything, how can he simply watch? What kind of father is he? Children starving. Terrorists bombing. Gunmen invading school classrooms. And God watching? If God is perfect, all powerful, the essence of love, how can he be apathetic, too? These thoughts make loops in my brain, along with the scriptures that used to comfort me: God will never leave us nor forsake us. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble. I recite these lines as if they are spells, as if I can bewitch myself back to belief. A part of me is afraid to let my faith go, so I hold on like the little girl who gripped the blankets at night and prayed against the footsteps in the bedroom, against the naked man looming near the bed. But God didn’t save. Why didn’t he? An old wound reopens, the salt of abandonment stinging me anew. Am I the girl of my youth, finding the voice to scream? Burned by fathers, the clergy, a husband, I have been set on fire. In a moment of weakness (or is it clarity?) I have the courage to say I don’t know who God really is. My quest to learn everything has shown me I know nothing. I am done with blind faith, with platitudes like God works in mysterious ways. I want a god who isn’t mysterious, an undeniable god. I lie in bed and feel the ash beneath me,
the remnants of a faith-life. I drift into sleep hoping that when I awaken, I will somehow awaken.
***
Eighty-eight books. I stack them in sturdy piles in my bedroom, tall as baby trees, and I think with a tinge of sadness: so long, old self. Each title, a plea for self-improvement. I was desperate to become a bolder believer, a powerful praying momma, the woman who fixed my family. I have always maintained the idea that if you want to know about a person, all you have to do is peek at her bookshelves. But these spiritual books no longer feel like mine, so I cram them into boxes with itchy sweaters and old heels for donation. It’s irrational, I know, but somehow I feel these books have betrayed me by not delivering the results I’d imagined. Now they are simply reminders of all my failed attempts. Clothes and shoes are things I imagined I’d outgrow. But my religion? I never thought one day I would toss it in a box.
In a sermon in the early years, when I was wide-eyed and optimistic, the pastor said sin works on our hearts like nails in a tire. Subtle pricks that deflate one’s faith over time. From the moment I heard that, I feared it was true. Now it was happening to me.
If I could name my nails, I’d call them uncertainty, disappointment, loneliness. When I felt them pierce me, I prayed God would remove their steel prongs. But he didn’t, and all I could do was be angry. It was another blow from a father who wasn’t a father. Where was he when the questions came? “Say something,” I cried when the doubt-nails punctured my faith. I can’t articulate the feeling, except to say a door had slammed shut, and I was alone in the dark.