Bodies and Souls (32 page)

Now I’m learning to appreciate Mother, but still the sight of Mrs. Bennett and her family brings out a yearning in my soul, like the sight of autumn leaves or spring flowers. Mrs. Bennett just seems like such a normal mother, and she and Mr. Bennett seem to be really a couple.

I’m glad Mother and Dad are divorced. It happened a long time ago, and I think it was the right thing for both of them. When I sit very still, trying to summon up in my mind a picture of Mother and Daddy together, when they were still married, I find myself becoming nervous, because all I can remember are the times when they fought. Perhaps they always fought, were always fighting. In my memories, that’s how it was. It was like living in the middle of a penny arcade: potshots were flying everywhere, tilt lights were flashing, were ringing, it was all noise and speed and cheap danger, but never any prize. Now Dad’s remarried, and he’s nice to Irene, and they get along fine. Dad and Irene seem like a real couple. I can’t imagine why Dad and Mother ever married in the first place.

Well, yes, I can, of course. They must have fallen in love. There’s no controlling love, and it’s almost a miracle when the proper people fall in love with each other.

Just look at John Bennett and Sarah Stafford. He’s as handsome as a movie star, as charming as a prince, and she’s got the personality and beauty of a brick. What can he possibly see in her? And forget the looks, John Bennett is a good-time boy, and I don’t think Sarah Stafford knows how to
spell
the word “fun.” What he sees in her I’ll never know. They must have fallen madly in love, I can’t imagine what else could have happened.

At least he is officially engaged at last. He’s twenty-three, five years older than I am, but I’ve had a crush on him all my life. Every time I saw him at church or just walking down the street, I used to get hot all over. My knees went weak, I’d grin like a lunatic, and invariably do something gawky, simply because he was
there
. Well, I suppose half the girls in this town have been lurking around secretly hoping that the miracle would happen and gorgeous John Bennett would suddenly see one of us and fall in love. It’s funny, now, though, because John Bennett doesn’t seem very attractive to me anymore. He seems kind of slight. I think this must be because I know Michael now, and anyone compared with Michael seems pale, vague, and boring.

Still, I envy the Bennetts; I envy them, and the Wilsons, and the Moyers—all those people who live here, who have found or made a home. They’re
settled
. They have ended up in this town; I was only begun here. I feel a part of Londonton, yet I know I
must leave. It is as if Londonton were a spinning rock, more faceted than a prism, and each facet an individual; together we make a whole. I must hew my shape, my particular self, from the massive refuge of this town—but how? How will I transplant myself? I’ll probably have to teach art in a public school to support myself. It is almost certain that I won’t be able to return to Londonton for good. Do all the young people of a town leave it with the speedy free-falling ease of pebbles in a rockslide? It is an amazing thing to think of, how we are all spinning helplessly through the space of life.

Spinning. This morning I cannot keep the idea of motion from my mind. My head is full of spinning globes, and I wish I were at the studio at school because I can almost see what kind of sculpture I would produce if I could get my hands on clay. Several smooth globes protruding at various spaces from a rough rock—I can see it in my mind. What a trick it would be to capture such self-assured motion in a static form!

In some ways I wish I hadn’t come home. If I were at college, I could go to the studio right now … But if I hadn’t come home, I would not have this idea in my mind.

It was last night that brought me this idea.

It was after midnight, and Mother was asleep. I had put on my old fuzzy pajamas which I’ve worn since I was fourteen. They’re too short in the arms and legs now and would never do for college, but it was nice finding them here at home. Wearing them made me feel childlike. I opened the window to let the cool night air in, and lay snuggled under my comforter, waiting to go to sleep. Instead, I hallucinated.

When I was a little girl, I used to be both terrified and exhilarated by summer nights. My parents would leave the windows open, and kiss my forehead, and go far away downstairs, leaving me at the mercy of the summer creatures who urgently whispered their secrets to me through the open window. I would clutch my bed for fear that otherwise I would float right up and out the window into the blinking night
—they
wanted me to come, the crickets, birds, bats, and ghosts. For I was just as much a part of them as I was a part of the daylight human world, and
they
were no more frightening and mysterious than my parents and the human world they moved in.
They
wanted me,
they
needed me,
they
called to me. “Come, come come come,” or “See, see see see.”

Sometimes if I got up the courage, I’d jump out of bed, race over to the window and slam it down, shutting out the night noises. Then I’d fall asleep, although Mother would always make a fuss the next morning: why had I shut the window, did I want to suffocate? I could never explain. Other times I would burrow under my pillow and cling
tightly to my bed until at last the sounds ebbed away and I slept.

All those feelings returned to me last night, perhaps because I was back home after an absence, perhaps because I was in my childhood pajamas, perhaps because the window was open—I don’t know. I lay there, prepared to fall asleep, and instead I was in a flash wide awake, keenly aware of myself, my bed, the open window, the black October night air, which was more chilling and silent than the air of summer. Then began that sinking feeling in my stomach, a lightness in all my limbs, as if I were being lifted up in a current of air. And all at once, without warning, while I was still gripping the sheets of the bed, I was also slipping with marvelous ease out the opened window.

Once outside, the night brightened and I could see everything clearly, although the mums which leaned against the house beneath my window were drained of color. Everything was a shade of radiant gray. I had no control at all over the speed or direction in which I floated, so I lay passively, breathing quietly, while beneath me the house and its familiar boundaries slid away. I was flying, or floating, effortlessly around the curve of the world. The yards and rooftops of the neighbors passed beneath me, and I lost all fear. I was overwhelmed with love and something close to pity to see the way we humans have tried to subdue the wild world with lines. As I looked down at Londonton, I could see so many right angles in our structures, posed against the sweeping curves of the natural world: houses, churches, intersecting roads, all in such careful order, guarded, gilded with right angles and bright trim, as if our points and apexes could defend us by puncturing the spherical truths of nature that persist in descending on our lives with the regularity of rain.

At the edge of town, I saw beckoning the silver and blue flash of light advertising the Blue Moon Dance Hall. I longed to reach down and touch it, bright bauble that it is, but the moment I moved my arm I found myself propelled with even greater speed up and off into the night.

The world spun one way, I spun the other. Wind rushed by me, murmuring, gushing, until I felt like a scarf rippling out. The earth spun steadily past me. I could see grass flowing into mountains, mountains melting into oceans, oceans rising to sand beaches, marshland climbing into pastures, and all that land dappled with angular shapes built by humans—their towns and cities.

At last I rose, or fell, up even higher, so that I saw only green and blue, glittering light and black, jungle and glacier alternating as the world whirled relentlessly by, a
majestic merry-go-round.

This was far enough. I did not want to go any farther, to see any more, to know any more profoundly. I grabbed my pillow and put it over my head and bit into it as I had when I was a child trying to stop nightmares. I did not want the Dreadful Thing to happen; I did not want to run into God.

After a while, when I was sure I had settled back down safely in my own bed, I took the pillow off my head, turned on the light, looked around the room. Then I got out of bed and shut the window. I didn’t want God coming into my room, and I didn’t want to hallucinate myself out the window again.

I think people go to church for many reasons, but one of the main ones surely must be that we don’t want God to come too close—who
really
wants that? Not me. It’s frightening to think of. It’s a much more bearable arrangement for us to meet Him regularly in one accordant spot, the church, and at one time, Sunday mornings. Mother says she enjoys church because it’s the one place she feels she can really feel His presence. I can’t wait till I’m older and calmer and can feel the way she does. I get tired of shutting Him out of rooms. I’m aware of His presence everywhere. If I even
think
of doing something wrong, or if I’ve done something bad or bitchy, well of course He’s always there, like a looming shadow. But I don’t mind that as much as I mind His appearance during the good times—when I’m driving my car down the highway, singing along to the car radio, or racing around in the bathroom getting ready for a date. Suddenly there will be a brightness in my chest and in the room or car, as if someone flashed on a light, and the common stuff of life seems suddenly precious, miraculous. I want to stop the car and kiss the yellow dividing lines on the highway, I want to touch the square tiles on the bathroom walls as if they were precious gold. Then I can scarcely move for gratitude, and amazement that out of the black empty void these things were created: my warm flesh, cold white tiles, delineated roadways you can trust to go where they’ve gone before. Sometimes I’m glad for this appearance, and I say, Thanks God, I love it all. But sometimes it’s frightening. Once or twice when I’ve been driving, I’ve gotten so high just thinking about it all that before I know it, I’m going seventy-five miles an hour. That’s great; what will I say when I wreck the car someday: sorry, God got in the car?

I can’t talk to most people about this. It embarrasses most people to talk about God. I can talk to Michael about God. I can talk with Michael about God, about my work, about my hallucinations, about my art. If I told him about last night and my vision, he
would not laugh at me. He would put his arms around me and pull me close to him while I talked. He takes me seriously, and takes care with his answers. He would understand that it is this sort of crazy vision that I need to have now and then in my life if I’m ever going to be a good artist. It’s the sort of thing that I can’t help happening to me, that I
want
to happen to me, because it opens up new worlds for me to work from. But I also need what Michael gives me: that special sense of being grounded in the earthly present. I could do so much, roam so far artistically, if I knew he was physically there for me to come home to, to bind me to the real.

I am in love with him. I need him. I want to be with him.

But how does Michael feel? He hasn’t called or written me these past six weeks. Maybe he’s forgotten me. Surely not, surely not
forgotten
—But maybe he doesn’t feel the same way. Even if I do manage to find him today, shall I tell him how I feel—that I
love
him? Will that embarrass him, frighten him away? Oh, God, if only I had the courage to shape my life as willfully as I shape clay.

Oh, God, where are You in all this? Are You watching? Do You care? Are You responsible for the way it is between Michael and me? Have You got a message for me here, anywhere? What shall I do?

Peter Taylor

The service was almost over, and Peter Taylor was not satisfied. He did not feel it had been a successful morning. Something was in the air.

There were Sundays when, during a sermon, he could feel the individual attention of each and every person focused so intently on his words that their combined concentration became almost a tangible thing. He often felt this—that he could stretch out his hand with a swift sure move and capture it, then hold it out as a gift to God: the fluttering and wary intelligence of these believers.

Once, when he had been speaking on the Trinity, he had announced that for him Jesus Christ was as real and actively present in his everyday life as his car or house or family. The congregation as one had been shocked at these words, and their usual colorful quietness had gone white, tense, and electric. He had had one awesome moment of feeling at the center of their fierce and hopeful regard before someone sneezed, someone else shuffled, and the tone of the room dropped back to normal. And of course almost immediately some of the more conservative members of the group began to shift uncomfortably on their pews, obviously anxious lest Peter lapse into some sort of unseemly evangelical spiel.

Those moments of unified consciousness were rare. Still, most Sundays were better than this one. Today everyone seemed to be so twittery. They sat with their heads cocked dutifully in his direction, but their eyes were glazed. Clearly they were occupied with their own thoughts. Some people stared out the windows or up at the carved moldings. Even Wilbur Wilson, who could always be counted on for almost fierce attentiveness, kept fidgeting about in his pew like a bored child. During the end of the sermon, which was supposed to have been uplifting and even cheering, Suzanna Blair’s face had slowly grown more and more woebegone, as if she had been hearing him preach about some sort of hell—and in the back of the church his own son Michael stared at him with a stony and unremittingly black stare.

The congregation rose to the opening chords of the organ music and raised their hymnals before them; they seemed to sigh and rustle with relief as they stood. They began to sing “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” and as they did, Peter let his eyes and
his thoughts rest for a moment on Michael. His greatest fear was that there really was a God who would chastise him for not ministering well enough to his congregation, or for interpreting Him and His words incorrectly. But in this fear was a kind of hope—that if he prayed, thought, read,
worked
hard enough, he could perhaps do some part of it right. So in a strange way his fear made him optimistic, energetic, eager. So much yet remained to be done and seen.