Baptism in Blood (6 page)

“Stupid is never harmless.” Alice shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “I’ll do what I can, Zhondra, but then it’s going to be up to you. They never listen to me, you know. They just tell me I’m blind to the feminine forces of spirituality in the universe. I keep wanting to give them all copies of
The Case Against God.
”

Then Alice was gone, and Ginny was there, starting up the steps, smiling that bouncy queen-of-the-cheerleaders smile she had—that all of them seemed to have, all the women in this place. Zhondra came from a place where women were shrill and sarcastic and nasty, but never too eager to please. All this sweetness and light made her dis­tinctly nervous.

“Hello, Ms. Meyer,” Ginny sang out. “Here I am now. Ready to get to work.”

Right, Zhondra thought. Tiffany gurgled in her carrier. All the molecules in Ginny Marsh’s body seemed to be bouncing around at random, like the balls in the demonstra­tion chamber of an old Mr. Wizard show. Zhondra turned around and headed up the steps again, saying nothing at all.

Less than five minutes later, Zhondra and Ginny were standing together in the large west wing study. Ginny was putting Tiffany in a plastic baby seat to one side of the computer on the broad oak desk. Zhondra was thinking that the big chandelier looked dirty and ought to be cleaned. All around them, velvet wall hangings fought with aggressive modern art, and both sides seemed to be losing.

“Well,” Ginny said, checking the strap on Tiffany’s baby seat one more time. “There we are. Do you have a minute to talk to me now, Ms. Meyer? There’s something I have to bring up.”

“Is there? Maybe we can talk about it later, Ginny. There’s something I have to do.”

“Well, I don’t want to hold you up any, Ms. Meyer. But this is very important. It’s about my going on working here after today.”

“Do you mean that you have to be leaving us? I’m sorry about that, Ginny.” Zhondra wasn’t really. Not ex­actly. “You’ve done a very good job.”

Ginny fiddled with the computer keys. “It’s not that I have to leave no matter what. It’s about… about our agreements here. My husband is putting his foot down.”

“About what?”

“About my not being able to put my picture of the Lord up on my desk when I work,” Ginny said. “Bobby doesn’t mind it about how you won’t let me listen to the radio. He says a lot of bosses don’t let their workers listen to the radio at work. Although why not, I’ll never know, Ms. Meyer. I mean, I type a lot faster when I’m praising the Lord with all my heart. But Bobby says that’s all right.”

“Does he.” Zhondra’s tone was dry.

Ginny wasn’t paying attention. She was fooling with the computer keys. She was squinting at the fine print on the bottom of the screen. She was touching Tiffany’s bootie-clad foot with her fingertip.

“The thing about the picture, though,” she said, “is that it wouldn’t bother anybody. It wouldn’t make any noise. Nobody would even see it unless they came in here.”

“But what if they did come in here?” Zhondra asked.

“Well, it wouldn’t be bad for them if they did. It’s a picture of the Lord I keep next to me, Ms. Meyer, not some rock star. Maybe someone would come in here and see that picture and feel called, you know, called to Christ.”

“Most of the women who are here have been Chris­tians in their time, Ginny. Most of them don’t think it was a very pleasant experience.”

“That’s just the Devil talking,” Ginny said. “The Devil does those things to people. He counterfeits. He makes you think he’s Christ, and then he ruins your life, and you think Christ has done it.”

“Maybe.”

“But once you’ve been really and truly born again, there’s no going back,” Ginny said confidently. “Once you’ve been baptized in the Holy Spirit, you’re a child of God forever. God wants us to be His children, Ms. Meyer. He wants us to be saved.”

“I don’t want that picture up on your desk, Ginny. I don’t want the PTL Club on the radio—”

“The PTL Club isn’t on the radio. It’s on TV.”

“Whatever. I don’t want that kind of thing, here. Most of these women feel they have been very damaged by patri­archal religion. They didn’t come here to be reminded of it.”

“I asked Bobby what that meant,” Ginny said.
“Pa­triarchal.
Bobby said it meant ‘of the fathers.’ There’s nothing wrong with fathers, Ms. Meyer. God is our Fa­ther.”

“I know you think so, Ginny. I think God is a fiction that men made up to keep women down.”

Ginny tapped a single finger against a single computer key. “If I can’t at least put my picture up, Ms. Meyer, I’m not going to be able to work here anymore. I have a right to freedom of religion. Just like anybody else.”

“There’s no such thing as having a right to freedom of religion in somebody else’s house.”

There was the sound of something hitting against the side of the house: a stray branch, a piece of lawn furniture somebody had forgotten to bring inside. Zhondra and Ginny both turned toward the noise at the same moment. Ginny turned away again almost immediately. Zhondra watched her fiddling with the keys again.

“Well,” Ginny said. “I’m very sorry about this, Ms. Meyer. But I do have to make a point of it.”

“I’m afraid I have to make a point of it, too, Ginny.”

“I’ll just finish up here today,” Ginny said. “And then I won’t come back again. I’d appreciate it if you had my check for me when it was time for me to leave.”

“I think I could manage that, Ginny, yes.”

“I don’t mean to be mean,” Ginny said, “but it’s a matter of principle. That’s what Bobby says. It’s a matter of principle and a test of my love of the Lord.”

A test of my love of the Lord,
Zhondra thought—and then she got a perfect vision, in Technicolor and three di­mensions, of a scene from one of those bondage and disci­pline magazines, complete with whips and chains and leather straps to hold the woman still. Lord and master. Ball and chain. Zhondra stepped back a little, startled.

“Ms. Meyer?” Ginny asked.

“Yes,” Zhondra said. “Never mind. I just thought of something. I have to go now, Ginny. It’s like I said before. I have something I have to do.”

“Oh, yes, Ms. Meyer. That’s all right. You’ll have my check for me today?”

“I’ll have it.”

“That’s fine, then.”

Zhondra didn’t know if it was fine or not. She just knew she wanted to get out of this room, and away, before her mind came up with any more sexist filth. Sometimes it seemed as if all there ever was in her mind was sexist filth, but that was another story.

One of the good things about being very, very rich was that Zhondra didn’t have to deal with anything she didn’t want to, and she didn’t want to deal with this.

N
AOMI BRENT BEGAN TO
have trouble with the computer at fifteen minutes to twelve. By then, the Bellerton library was as secure as it was going to get. The first-floor win­dows had been boarded over with plywood. The first-floor books had been moved to higher shelves. The first-floor computer equipment had been brought up here, to the tall-ceilinged old rooms where the Linnet family had once slept and made love and worried about sick children. Naomi liked to imagine herself back in 1925, with a picture hat and gloves that matched her shoes. She liked to think of herself romantically, in a sense too old to apply to those nasty books they sold down at the drugstore, books with names like
Passion’s Furious Flight.
She was only thirty-five years old, but she was already a cliché, and she knew it. Old-maid librarian. Repressed southern spinster. Gothic horror story waiting to happen. Every morning Naomi Brent got up and looked at herself in the mirror. She counted the lines on her face and the dark circles under her eyes. She told herself that hope was useless and there was no point in going on. Then she took a shower and made herself up and forgot entirely about the fact that she had been married three times.

Of course, she had also been divorced three times. When Naomi got to thinking about her marriages, she got to thinking about her divorces, and that made her feel worse than thinking of herself as a dried-up old virgin who had never been touched. Actually, virginity was not Naomi’s strong suit. She had slept with her first boyfriend when she was fifteen years old and had just made the Bellerton High School junior varsity cheerleading squad. She had slept with her latest boyfriend just ten days before this storm. In between there was a blur of faces and bodies, hands and lips and rough-skinned backs, all rimmed round with a glow of frustration. Naomi Brent had no idea what people were supposed to feel when they had sex. She only knew she couldn’t be feeling it, because by and large she felt nothing. She got into bed with some man and let him pump and pump away at her. She closed her eyes and counted the number of stockings she remembered hanging on her line at home, or tried to pin down a piece of dia­logue she’d heard at the movies and hadn’t quite under­stood. Her last husband had been emphatic: Naomi was a cock tease, or something worse. Naomi remembered think­ing at the time that he had hair growing out of his nostrils, and how was she supposed to be attracted to that? Men always seemed to shrivel into moldy old prunes as soon as you married them. Men always seemed to end up being men. Naomi thought of her mother, married thirty years without a break. She couldn’t understand it. She especially couldn’t understand it with her father, who smelled of beer and bellowed, who was cruel in a heavy-handed, relentless way that was really a desire to kill.

On the screen of the computer, Naomi had this:

Hello! to everyone in the BHS class of
’
79. This is your class correspondent, Naomi Brent, and boy, do I have a lot to report!

Thunder and lightning rolled across the sky outside. The screen flickered. Naomi gnawed her lip. She did have a lot to report, but for the moment it all seemed silly. Cheryl Donners Cray was having another baby. Delia Caberdon was finally getting married. Mostly, Naomi reported on the girls who had been in her high school sorority, Gamma Alpha Mu, or in one of the two other high school sororities that counted. Births. Deaths. Marriages. Graduations. The only really exciting thing that had happened to anyone in the Class of ’79 had happened to a girl named Julia Morrissey, who hadn’t counted at all. Julia Morrissey was now a United States Congresswoman from the state of Virginia.

Naomi swiveled her chair toward the window. They hadn’t boarded anything up up here, although they proba­bly should have. Naomi could see right down Main Street, past Maggie Kelleher’s bookstore, past Rose MacNeill’s Victorian-housed shop. Everything was boarded and dead-looking. The sky was absolutely black. Only the rain hadn’t started yet. Naomi didn’t think it would take long.

There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. Naomi turned her chair to look at the open door to the room. She heard Beatrix Dean say, “Oh, hell,” and relaxed a little. A moment later, Beatrix was there, all five feet eleven inches of her, looking faintly ridiculous. Beatrix always looked faintly ridiculous. She had never really accepted the fact that she was tall. She had never really stopped trying to hide it.

Thunder rolled again and Naomi’s computer screen went blank. She cursed at it, then sighed.

“I know I shouldn’t be trying to do this,” she said. “I know we’re going to lose the power.”

“I can’t believe you’re still here,” Beatrix told her. “Don’t you want to go home? Don’t you have cats to worry about?”

“I used to have cats,” Naomi said, “but they all ran away on me. Like men. Maybe they were tomcats.”

“Oh,” Beatrix said.

“I think I’m going to ride out the storm right here,” Naomi said. “My house isn’t on any higher ground. And what would happen to me if I left now? I’d probably get caught in the rain. I’d probably get electrocuted by a downed power line. With my luck, I’d probably get hit by lightning.”

“You could come with me to my church,” Beatrix suggested. “I’m meeting a van out on Main Street in fif­teen minutes. We’re driving all the way out on the Hartford Road. We won’t get any seawater out there.”

“I’m sure you won’t.”

“Besides, Naomi, I think it would do you good. To see the inside of a church for once.”

“I’ve seen the insides of churches, Beatrix. I got mar­ried in three of them.”

“Reverend Holborn says this hurricane is a judgment. Like that bombing out in Oklahoma City. Like that thing with the World Trade Center. Reverend Holborn says America has sold its soul to the Devil and now the Devil is having his way with us.”

“Reverend Holborn,” Naomi said carefully, “thinks hangnails are a judgment from God.”

“Well, Naomi, maybe they are. I know you don’t take religion seriously, but maybe you should. I mean, look at what’s happened to this place. To Bellerton, for goodness sake. Lesbians. And atheists. It’s like we’re turning into a spiritual sewer.”

Naomi had her pocketbook sitting next to her swivel chair on the floor. She picked it up, put it in her lap, and riffled through it for her cigarettes and slim gold lighter. Most of the time, Naomi didn’t smoke in the library build­ing. She had gotten used to the new rules that said even a whiff of secondhand smoke could instantaneously give old ladies terminal lung cancer. Still, she needed a cigarette now, and she thought she deserved one.

The gold lighter was from Dunhill. One of her hus­bands had given it to her on their first anniversary. If Naomi remembered right, that marriage hadn’t lasted an­other six months. She put a Virginia Slims menthol into her mouth and lit up.

“Spiritual sewer,” she said through a haze of smoke, “I presume, is a direct quote from the saintly Reverend Holborn.”

Beatrix frowned. Naomi was suddenly struck by how aggressively ugly the woman was—not just unattractive, like most of those women up at the camp, but
ugly.
It was something that went beyond Beatrix’s weight, which was monumental. It was something that had settled into her fea­tures, like indelible grime.

“I think you should think about things more care­fully,” Beatrix said. “I think you should think about the complications. Like with the school.”

“Which school?”

“All the schools. The high school. Even the elemen­tary school. They’re moving in on them, you know.”